SHOOTINGS LATEST ASSAULT ON ASIAN AMERICAN PEOPLE
During the first week of Lunar New Year, mass shootings ravaged two Asian communities in California. Considering our state’s complex history of exclusion and inclusion, the trauma is reverberating throughout time and space in Asian America.
Asian American and Pacific Islanders as a group have one of the lowest gun-ownership rates and the highest support for gun control among ethnic groups. It is in this context that these cold-blooded acts are so maddening and perplexing for us.
The settings of these tragedies also remind Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that no matter where we are in the journey of belonging as settlers to this land, our safety and prosperity cannot be taken for granted. The mass shootings at a dance hall in Monterey Park on Jan. 21 and a workplace in Half Moon Bay on Jan. 23 should also awaken this nation from a deep amnesia about racialized violence as it intersects with the uniquely American phenomenon that civilian arms outnumber people.
Monterey Park represents the epitome of collective “arrival” for some Asians in the long journey of integration into American society. The Star Ballroom Dance Studio, especially, is an expression of triumph in the Asian American experience, making the shooting there particularly devastating. The ability to inhabit a space where our heritage languages, music and rituals are the norm and which is also inclusive and infused with other dance styles and cultures is something to behold.
Known as America’s first suburban Chinatown, Monterey Park is a majority Asian town with culturally abundant and authentic stores, restaurants and civic institutions. It is home to proud daughters and sons who have achieved economic, cultural and political heights unimaginable to earlier generations. This is why the pain inflicted there echoes throughout the rest of Asian America.
In this new Year of the Rabbit, the community hosted joyous celebrations that attracted tens of thousands from the region — much anticipated after years of social distancing and a resurgence of anti-Asian hate. While the specter of a racist motive was lessened when the Asian identity of the alleged perpetrator was revealed, the fact that so many of us were reflexively dreadful on Jan. 21 illustrates the cumulative distress of being targeted in recent years, with profound historical throughlines.
It took over a century for Asians to escape American terrorism and overcome racist laws. Monterey Park’s success as an ethnoburb cannot be appreciated apart from the past struggles of another neighborhood a few miles west: Chinatown in Los Angeles.
Like many Chinatowns around the country, it arose both as a necessity for immigrant survival and a ghetto by municipal design rooted in White supremacy. Unspeakable violence punctuated those early periods of Asian exclusion, such as when one of the largest lynchings in American history was carried out by a White mob in 1871 in Chinatown in Los Angeles. Chinese workers, so vital to the expansion of the West, were scapegoated because of stereotype-driven fears of communicable disease and economic anxieties and political insecurities. They were forcibly displaced from their neighborhoods, and some buildings were even set ablaze.
This xenophobia and assault on the dignity of Asian people led to the nationwide Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and similar immigration restrictions that lasted for decades, to the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, to discriminatory housing covenants throughout the 20th century, to White flight out of communities like Monterey Park, and to antiAsian hate leading up to and during the 21st century, as competition with Japan, China and other Pacific economies intensified.
To pile on the collective pain, another shooting, also allegedly by an older Asian male, killed and injured Chinese and Mexican farmworkers in Half Moon Bay.
That city and its agricultural sector symbolize the “arriving” of newcomers to the American Dream migrant workers from Asia and Latin America whose honest, backbreaking work will someday bear fruit for the next generation.
The rural setting was a reminder of the everyday aspirations and essential roles many immigrants still play in providing sustenance for all Americans. In less than 48 hours, the hope that beckoned both the “arriving” American dreamers and those closer to “arrival” was shattered by the perpetual American malady of gun violence.
It is clearer now that assimilation has limits and dangers. The pursuit of the American Dream cannot save us, and is leaving many people behind and isolated. I believe someday, in the aftermath of these violent acts, we will toil in the land, reap its fruits and dance together without looking over our shoulders.
Going forward, Asians in America have an opportunity to build a system of community-centered safety that is resilient and culturally responsive enough to heal these scars and prevent further harm, especially among our elders. It is time to ally more closely with other communities impacted by structural injustices, police brutality and senseless violence. We must deepen our practice of nonviolent resistance that reimagines the promise of America — one that disarms the ubiquitous threat of gun violence and fights for a virtuous cycle of intergenerational wellness, collective care and holistic flourishing.
Tragedies remind us no matter where we are in the journey of belonging as settlers to this land, our safety and prosperity cannot be taken for granted.