It’s 5:03 a.m. and I can’t sleep.

NOTE:?Welcome to 1st Wednesday Wisdom. Each first Wednesday of the month, we bring short reads--usually 3-5 minutes--to inform, stretch and prod readers to embrace our increasingly racially diverse world.

January 25, 2023

It’s 5:03 a.m. and I can’t sleep.?

Walk with me, will you??

The Monterey Park shooter was 72. The Half Moon Bay shooter was 67. I’m an Asian American man squarely in that demographic.

I’m trying to make sense of the emotions running through my veins. The main emotion I feel is absolute horror. Eighteen lives gone in an instant, leaving families and communities in unspeakable pain.?

But it doesn’t stop there. Our culture is shame-based. When one does wrong, we’ve all done wrong. When one is treated horrifically, we all feel it deep in our souls. The two gunmen and 16 of the 18 killed were Asian. Overwhelming shame, gut-wrenching pain.?

I was born, raised and educated in California, a third-generation Japanese American. Now I live 2,000 miles away. Still I wonder, when those who are not Asian see me now, are they afraid??

“Is he a killer, too?” “He looks pretty harmless, but…?”

Will someone somehow hold me responsible--guilt by association--for these killings and take it out on me? Our world is spinning weirdly and wildly on its axis right now. Who knows what’s possible?

5:33 a.m. Coffee now finally doing its magic, my mind drifts from my personal fears to the families and communities directly impacted by these killings. I go online to get details.

Monterey Park, 65% Asian. Known as “the first suburban Chinatown.”

U.S. House Rep. Judy Chu, whose district includes Monterey Park, where she previously served as mayor, said, “This is a community that is very tight-knit. It's a community that is a great place to raise kids. There's a high quality of life. There is a park within every mile of a home.”?

Monterey Park resident Johnathan Luc, 27, described his city, “It's the kind of place where you walk home and you smell people cooking their dinner right at 6:00. They're cooking dinner for their family.”

Much of the city’s character and culture is shaped by Asian immigrants. The Asian values of community, honoring its elders, each generation sacrificing so the next generation can prosper--these values and more are the warp and woof of Asian enclaves.?

Luc continues, “What does something like this do to a community? It's very quiet. That's a big reason why I love this neighborhood. And I was scared that everything was going to change. And it might. I don't know yet, right?”?

Rep. Chu spoke with PBS’s Amna Nawaz, “Well, the feelings of Asian Americans are very raw right now because we've just come from three years of anti-Asian hate due to COVID and there have been 11,500 anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents. There were so many incidents that we heard about at one point that every AAPI who walked out on the sidewalk wondered, will I be next?"

It’s now 6:16 a.m. I’m fully awake. What concerns me as the sun soon rises on another day in America?

What was unimaginable--two elderly Asian men going on shooting rampages--is now history. And history rewrites itself every day. What will happen today? Next week?

"Something is radicalizing our elders and leading them to procure guns to enact deadly violence," wrote Raymond Chang, president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative. He told Newsweek, "They are often also navigating a type of helplessness and even at times, neglect and elder neglect, where they are living in isolation and loneliness…when they haven't had space to process, get cared for, get the support they need to be in community, they go to darker and darker places.”

Chang continued, "Once they see one person getting access to a gun, and using that gun to wreak havoc out of that desperation or in the midst of being in such a dark place, they see that as a viable option."

Manjusha Kulkarni, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, has said that a report by the group co-written with AARP in 2022 found that “98 percent of Asian elders said the U.S. was a more dangerous place for them. When we are looking at 18 people who have lost their lives, the conversation needs to be about gun violence prevention, because we don't know the motives of the Asian shooters and we may never know them," she told Newsweek.

This is a call to our Asian American communities: pay attention to your elders. We often get used to their few words. Let’s be sure not to let silence pass for “don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”??

This is also a call to pay attention to mental health in our Asian American communities.?

“About 2.7 million AAPIs struggle with a mental illness or substance use disorder, according to a report by the American Psychiatric Association. Compared to other populations, Asian people are less likely to seek out or receive mental health treatment, data from the National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association shows – and even then, they’ll often seek help only when in crisis” in a recent article in the Orange County Register.

Those of us who have sought and received help for our struggles with mental health need to encourage our communities to lose the stigma that it is a sign of weakness to seek help.?

And lastly, this is a call to those not Asians, whom we know as co-workers, neighbors, family and friends. The Apostle Paul, writing to those in Corinth,?

“He [God the Father] comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.” (2 Corinthians 1:4, The Message)?

We are going through hard times. Walk with us, will you?

Paul Tokunaga is a third-generation Japanese American, raised in the Bay Area. He is the Founder/President of MELD: Multi-Ethnic Leadership Development.