AFTERMATH OF SPA SHOOTINGS
THE MURDER OF EIGHT PEOPLE – SIX OF THEM ASIAN WOMEN – RAISES PAINFUL QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INCREASE IN RACIST VIOLENCE
Xiaojie Tan – or Emily, as some friends and customers called her – was a nail tech when she and her new American husband and tween daughter arrived in the United States from China in 2006. Just 15 years later Tan, 49, was a naturalised citizen, licensed massage therapist and Atlanta-area business owner, bursting with pride over her daughter’s college degree from the University of Georgia. And she cared about the clients who came to Young’s Asian Massage, the spa she owned in Acworth, Georgia. “She was generous and unselfish,” says Greg Hynson, a former weightlifter and regular at Young’s for Tan’s therapeutic treatment of his neck and back issues. “She mastered the craft” and became a friend, he adds, recalling the birthday cake – complete with candles – and flowers that she surprised him with last fall. “She was just the sweetest person.”
On March 16 Tan was among the first of eight victims – six of them women of Asian descent – shot dead as a white man rampaged through three Asian spas across two counties in Georgia. Aided by shopfront security-camera footage, social media and the suspect’s own parents, police arrested Robert Aaron Long, 21, that evening and charged him with eight counts of murder, plus one aggravated assault charge for allegedly shooting a male passer-by outside Young’s who survived. (Long has not yet entered a plea on the charges.) The appalling crime, which Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff ’s Office described at a press conference the next day as a consequence of Long’s self-described “sex addiction … that he wanted to eliminate” and his being “pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope”, was not, at press time, being investigated as a hate crime. But the idea that these killings did not meet the definition of a hate crime – an offence in which perpetrators act based on bias against the victim’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, per the FBI – in the eyes of Georgia authorities sparked an emotional reckoning with anti-Asian hate in the United States, and thousands joined protests and vigils nationwide.
Days before the murders in Georgia, a new analysis by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that hate crimes against Asian Americans skyrocketed by nearly 150 per cent in 2020, fuelled by then-President Trump and others falsely blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic. While President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first person of South Asian descent to serve in that role, travelled to Atlanta’s Emory University to decry xenophobic violence (“We have to speak out, we have to act,” said Biden), thousands of people attended #StopAsianHate rallies around the country. On Capitol Hill, actor Daniel
Dae Kim detailed how his Korean American sister suffered a hate crime in 2015 only to have the prosecutor charge her attacker with a lesser crime of reckless driving. Addressing a House Judiciary subcommittee, he said Asian Americans are looking for proof from America’s leaders “as to whether we matter, whether the country we call home chooses to erase or include us, dismiss or respect us, invisibilise or see us.”
Activists pointed out the shooter’s claim of a sex addiction only underscored the harmful fetishisation of Asian women and insisted that hate is hate – period. “We like to blame victims. But we have a culture that has sexualised Asian women. We can’t pretend that doesn’t play a role,” says Camila Zolfaghari of Atlanta’s Street Grace, a community group. “We need to recognise the humanity of these women who were gunned down.”
To civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen the murders felt personal. “As someone who is Asian American, who has lived in this skin and been subjected to ‘yellow fever’ – the stereotype of Asian women as submissive, the objectification of Asian female bodies
– I can say that the constant objectification of our bodies dehumanises us. This massacre isn’t random. It’s built off entrenched racism and sexism … and it feels like an assault on all Asian Americans.”
As for Captain Baker of the sheriff ’s department telling reporters that the day of the murders “was a really bad day” for the shooter, US representative Marilyn Strickland, a Democrat from Washington State, counters, “Call it out for what it was – racially motivated violence against women of colour.” Half Black and half Korean, the congresswoman sees the killings in Atlanta as part of the shameful continuum of America’s history of violence against people of colour. “From slavery to the internment of Japanese to people blaming Mexicans when there’s an economic downturn, and police brutality – it feels like everything is just brewing in this giant cauldron of poison.”
For the family of Sun Cha Kim, 69, who was killed at Gold Spa, the tragedy is a failure of the American dream. In a letter written in their mother’s voice and read to Biden in Atlanta, one of Kim’s two children wrote about the halmoni’s (grandmother’s) love for her adopted country: “The only thing that would have made me the happiest was to grow old with my husband and watch my children and grandchildren live the fruitful life I worked so hard to give them.”