Still processing...

The act of stringing words together into cogent thoughts can be difficult— let alone when you're still processing, and let alone in a public forum.?

I have emotions.

But it's important to shed light on what it means to be Asian American today and break the idea that we are a stoic, model minority willing to stand silently and take the blows. I have emotions.?

Hearing the news out of Atlanta, GA — the targeted killing of six Asian women at several Atlanta-area spas— opens me up to raw emotions despite a perception that Asians don't feel. To be fair, I learned early from my family to fear my emotions; to keep them at bay lest they sabotage me or unwittingly expose me as weak.?Over time, I've had to unlearn this unsaid rule. I now see emotions and my body as helpful guide posts to process the world around me and make me fully human. Here's what my emotions convey.?

Outrage is my first emotion. This is yet another example of anti-Asian hate crime and violent racism, yes, but it also represents other deep elements at play. These elements haven’t been named as explicitly in corporate statements or by media, but include the fetishization of Asian women, misogyny, and white supremacy that deem a white perpetrator’s motive of having a “sex addition” as palatable.

Then I go numb. This has been an engrained “emotion” that I’ve been taught to go to living under the myth of the model minority. I disassociate. I stop living in my body. I got back to my hard-wiring. But my body does hold the pain, the anger, and frustration so it leeches out. I grieve alongside my family, friends, AAPI community and allies. Thank you for your outreaches and texts— and for the added clauses “you don’t need to respond” that gave me space to process. I’m grateful for spaces to go off-camera without question, spaces to be with others in silence and our own individual processing, and spaces of faith that anchor me.?

I grieve alongside AAPI in essential worker and customer service roles who don’t have the luxury of working remotely, but instead have to face the harsh realities that they too could be targeted. I lament being part of and complicit in these very systems that have not condemned xenophobic messages (“China Virus” or “the “Kung Flu”) and distill an entire race and diverse people groups into single monolithic stereotypes cloaked in martial arts, an “exotic” temptress, an obedient side character, a math genius, etc.?I also lament that we have pitted racial groups against each other when our fights for a just and equitable society are the same and intersectional. I am thankful for Black and Brown communities who stand in solidarity; and also lament how we also have failed each other with the myth that one group gaining ground means another has lost ground. What I won’t do is remain silent.?

Standing in solidarity and pride.

The numbers are staggering. Per Stop AAPI Hate, nearly 3,800 incidents were reported between March 2020 and February 2021, higher than the previous year’s tally of 2,800. Moreover, women made up 68 percent of reports. And unfortunately, these numbers grossly undercount the reality of so many more unreported incidents. So we let our voices emerge and rise.?

On Sunday, I joined other hurting AAPI siblings who were standing tall and proud, alongside our allies, to raise awareness, grieve, and act in Washington, D.C.'s McPherson Square. While there's still a nagging feeling that the very need to explain why I exist, where I'm really from, or why my reality is distinct from another is even necessary, pride swells for these voices that have long been suppressed and even erased.?

What may be different from others’ plights is that for the Asian American this suppression doesn't just come from others, it comes from myself. But now that muzzle comes off. And in its place pride condemns the dark history of ancestors tucked away in the recesses of photo albums or memories. Of the coolies who replaced slaves in the plantation fields, or the Chinese laborers who died building railroads to the Manifest Destiny of the American West, or the 1875 Page Act that restricted immigration of Asian women, painting them as sexual objects and a threat to white America. And later the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that laid the groundwork for immigration restrictions in the U.S. Of the poor conditions I imagine that my great grandparents faced coming to pick pineapples in Hawaii.?

And still pride that confronts and breaks the myth of the model minority, a myth created and rooted in the US government’s lifting of the 1965 immigration ban to only allow the most educated and highly trained Asians into the country. A myth that is perpetuated around kitchen tables as proclamations by Tiger Moms to coax their children into deemed acceptable professions. A myth that has elevated few experiences of wealthy and highly-educated East Asians while masking the reality that many Asian groups experience wide wealth disparities (the most of any racial group!). A myth that has been used to create a "caste" system and hierarchy even within the AAPI community and pitted racial groups against each other, instead of fighting for justice together.?

Wading into lament.

We are humans. And instead I see the vast diversity that exists in what it even means to be Asian. Frankly the vast diversity of what it means to be human. Know that I see you too.?Let’s wade into the deep waters of lament with which empathy, education, and true sustained action are birthed. Let’s do it together. Wherever we are in our journeys of understanding. Without judgment.