Becoming Big Red Pandas

Pixar’s latest movie, Turning Red, came out this weekend and it’s been on continuous rotation in the Lee-Morrow household ever since. My girls and I have watched the movie at least 5 times. Without giving away too much, the movie’s 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian protagonist, Mei-Mei, discovers she transforms into a giant, red panda whenever she is overcome with emotion, especially of fear and anger. The movie follows Mei-Mei as she learns to love her inner red panda and coexist with it rather than try to suppress it. A movie about Asian girls and women learning to embrace our emotional complexity, especially our rage? What a concept.

Today, March 16, marks one year since a young, white, man having a very bad day decided to take his family’s guns and kill Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; Soon Chung Park, 74; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33: Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Tan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44. There was anger, rage, and frustration when the shootings first took place. Vigils were held. Calls for change and commitments to action were made. #StopAsianHate trended for a while. People began talking about the racism experienced by people of Asian descent, and there were even discussions about the specific racialized sexism that all Asian women experience on a daily basis. As a DEI professional, I was hopeful that maybe we’d turned a corner. Finally, people would realize that being Asian in America meant constant navigation of erasure, othering, and racialized aggression, both big and small.

Unfortunately, very little has changed over the past year except for a new string of violence and aggression against people of Asian descent, especially women. In New York City, the police recorded 131 bias incidents against Asians in 2021, up from 28 in 2020, and just three in 2019. Of course, these numbers may not tell the whole story as many in the Asian community are hesitant to report bias incidents except the most egregious.

Four Asian New Yorkers have died in recent months after being attacked. This includes 61-year-old Yao Pan Ma, who was collecting bottles and cans in East Harlem, 40-year-old Michelle Go who was pushed onto the subway tracks in Times Square, 35-year-old Christina Yuna Lee who was brutally stabbed to death in her building in Chinatown, and 61-year-old GuiYing Ma who was attacked while sweeping the sidewalk in Corona, Queens. Earlier this month, a 28-year-old man went on an hours-long violent spree, attacking seven Asian women in downtown Manhattan. And this weekend, a 67-year-old Asian woman was brutally attacked, punched over 125 times, and stomped on in the vestibule of her building in Yonkers. The brutality was caught on a security camera. The assailant yelled racist and misogynistic slurs at the victim.

Oh, how I wish we Asian women could transform into giant, angry, red pandas when provoked. How I wish we could grow teeth and claws and develop super strength so we could pick up and toss our would-be assailants down the block. I am ANGRY AS FUCK right now. I’m also terrified. Terrified for my safety and the safety of my 78-year-old mother and my two sisters. I’m terrified for my 11-year-old daughter who began walking to school on her own this year. I want to hand out cans of pepper spray and other self-defense devices to every Asian person I know. If I had a time machine, I’d use it to go back and stop all these attacks. Show up with a big baseball bat and a legion of other Asian women and push back the assailant in Yonkers, stand with Christina Yuna Lee, and warn her about the man lurking in her building, tell Yao Pan Ma not to go out to collect cans on that fateful November day. I’d go back to March 16, 2021, and report the Atlanta gunman’s car as stolen so he’d get detained by police officers before getting a chance to kill all those people.

And when I’ve stopped all these attacks, I’d use that time machine to travel back to March 16, 1991 in Los Angeles. I’d walk into the small convenience store owned by Korean American immigrant Soon Ja Du and tell her to put her gun away unless she wanted to become a murderer.?

In addition to March 16th being the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings, it is the 31st anniversary of the murder of Latasha Harlins, a young, Black girl who lived in South Central Los Angeles. I still vividly remember the news of Latasha’s murder. Latasha and I were the same age. We were both 15 and HS students at the time—not fully kids but certainly not adults. I am also the daughter of Korean-American immigrant business owners who ran a shop in a predominantly Black/African-American community. I remember the sickening feeling upon hearing about Latasha being shot by a Korean American immigrant over accusations of a stolen bottle of orange juice. How could someone so callously take a life over some juice? And what would drive a human to shoot a young girl in her back as she was leaving the store? To further extend the injustice, Soon Ja Du never spent a day in prison though she was convicted of manslaughter.??

Why am I sharing Latasha’s story? I don’t want her to be forgotten. She is a victim of racism. And if March 16 is to become a day when we remember victims of racism, Latasha’s name deserves to be spoken. But it’s more than simply saying her name. It’s drawing a connection between Latasha’s murder and that of the Atlanta spa victims. All of these individuals were victims of racial hierarchy and supremacy. This supremacy teaches us to hate certain groups and to believe falsehoods. Soon Ja Du believed Black people were violent thieves and criminals because she was taught to believe this. The assailant in Atlanta and all the others who have harmed and murdered Asians over the last year have been taught to hate Asian people and to view us all as foreigners, outsiders, and undeserving of our place in American society. The same hate binds Latasha and Christina and Michelle and Yao Pan and Suncha and Hyun Jung.

I wish I had a time machine and I wish I had the ability to transform into a giant beast. I still don’t have any answers for our community. I don’t know how to end this string of racialized violence. What I do know is there is power in sharing our American stories. There is comfort in knowing you are not alone in your struggle this past year. And since we can’t all become giant, red pandas, maybe shouting as loud as we can becomes our way of fighting and defending ourselves. So shout. SHOUT LOUD. SHOUT UNTIL YOUR VOICE GOES HOARSE. SHOUT UNTIL YOU ARE HEARD.