'A new chapter in an old story': what the Atlanta shootings reveal about the US
At 4.54pm on Tuesday, a Hyundai SUV pulled up outside Young’s Asian Massage parlor in the Atlanta suburb of Acworth. Earlier that day the driver, a white man, had popped into Big Woods Goods, a gun store that prides itself on being “fast and friendly”.
Service in the shop was so fast, in fact, that with the benefit of Georgia’s loose gun laws the man was able to buy a 9mm firearm on the spot.
Surveillance camera footage captured the man entering Young’s at 4.54pm. There is no film to record what followed inside the parlor or what the man did next. For that, police will have to rely on the scorched memories of the few survivors.
A key survivor and potential witness for investigators will be the husband of Delaina Ashley Yaun, a 33-yearold employee of a local Waffle House. The couple had gone to Young’s together on Tuesday night – it was to be a special treat, their first time at the spa, as a relaxing break from caring for their much loved but hectic two young children.
The pair had been assigned separate rooms for their massages. When the shooting started Yaun’s husband managed to barricade himself behind the locked door. But there was no way he could escape the sound of the bullets that ended Yaun’s life.
“He’s taking it hard,” Yaun’s sister told the Associated Press after the shooting. “When you’re in a room and gunshots are flying, what do you do?”
Four people died inside Young’s, including two other women, both of Asian descent – Xiaojie Tan, 49, and Daoyou Feng, 44.
An hour later, at 5.47pm, emergency dispatch received a distressed call from the Gold Spa, a massage parlor in the north-eastern part of Atlanta about 30 miles away. A woman inside the premises said in an urgent, hushed voice: “They have a gun. I’m hiding right now. Please just come, OK?”
By the time police arrived, three more women lay dead. As officers investigated the crime scene at the Gold Spa, shots rang out in a third massage parlor, Aromatherapy Spa, across the street. Another woman had been shot and killed.
On Friday, police released the names of the Atlanta victims: Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; and Yong Yue, 63.
The Atlanta-area mass shootings were a tragic but all too commonplace event, given the country’s long history of elevating the second amendment right to bear arms above the needs of public safety. By AP’s count, the Atlanta spa shootings were the sixth such gun rampages in the US this year alone.
What has made this moment exceptional was the profile of the eight victims – all but one of them were women, six were of Asian descent – combined with the deteriorating national climate in which the killings took place. The brutal murders came at the end of a pandemic year in which open displays of hatred towards Asian Americans, especially Asian American women, have escalated to a level that renders them part of the national landscape.
And it has happened with the active encouragement of the former occupant of the White House. Donald Trump propagated the lie that Asians were responsible for the global health crisis, making frequent reference to the “China virus” and “Kung flu” in his tweets and at his campaign rallies.
All of which in the eyes of many Asian Americans transformed the events inside the massage parlors on Tuesday night into a tragedy waiting to happen. The question they posed was not why had the shootings occurred, but why had no one heeded the warnings?
Like the warning that was issued just a day earlier by Michelle Au, a Chinese-American physician serving her first term as a state senator in Georgia. She stood in the wood-panelled splendor of the state senate chamber in Atlanta on Monday afternoon to deliver a sobering message.
She told her peers that she wanted to speak to them about something that had received insufficient attention in the year of the pandemic. “It’s a new chapter in a very old story,” she said. “And it is horrifying.”
Then Au, the first East Asian ever to be elected to the Georgia senate, began to recount a litany of real-life experiences, each one more shocking than the last. She highlighted the middleschool kid punched in the face by his classmates who told him that “people like you” brought the “China virus” and “Kung flu” to the US – the exact phrases championed by Trump.
She recalled the Asian customer in a pharmacy in Georgia who was sprayed with disinfectant and told to “go home” because “you’re the infection”. She reminded senators of the small, intricately-crafted bronze plaques that were pinned to the walls of several Atlanta businesses last April, depicting Winnie the Pooh eating a bat with chopsticks beneath the words: “Wuhan Plague”.
Au wasn’t telling these stories for cheap kicks. She was relating them to her peers because she desperately wanted them to act.
“All I’m asking right now is simply to fully consider us as part of our communities,” she said. “Recognize that we need help, we need protection, and we need people in power to stand up for us against hate.”
But by then, it was too late.
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America’s Asian population of more than 20 million people comes from richly diverse backgrounds, with Chinese Americans; Indian Americans; Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and many other communities in the mix. Though each has its distinct qualities, they share a unifying bond – their common experience of discrimination and racism in the US stretching back to the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment.
They also share the common feeling that when they speak out about the harassment they face, so often nobody is listening. There have been plenty of red lights flashing in the past year.
Last month the group Stop AAPI Hate released a nationwide survey that recorded almost 4,000 incidents of verbal harassment and physical assault against Asian Americans since the pandemic began. That was a tiny fraction of the actual number, the authors said, but it still amounted to a 30-fold increase over the year before.
Another stern warning was provided by Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California, last July. He wrote to the then Trump-appointed attorney general, Bill Barr, pleading with him to “forcefully condemn antiAsian bias”.
The letter stated that “the dangers faced by the Asian American community are very real and deserve a strong and specific response by our government”. It called on the Trump administration to engage in outreach of the sort that had been successfully used to counter rising xenophobic animosity in the wake of previous outbreaks of infectious disease as well as 9/11.
Lieu did not receive a reply.
Similar sentiments were expressed by Au, the state senator who had sounded that chillingly-prescient alarm just the day before the outrages. On Wednesday she spoke out again, mournfully reflecting that when she made her remarks on the senate floor she did not expect the alarm she sounded to materialize in such a horrendous fashion and so soon.
But, then, she told the non-profit news outlet The 19th, “it has been building over the past year and there’s no reason to think that Georgia would be immune”.
In Au’s analysis, the shootings mark a critical turning point for America as a whole and for the country’s communities of Asian descent. For the nation, this is the moment where everyone finally gets to see that Asian Americans do not live in a privileged bubble.
They are not the “lucky ones” encapsulated in the toxic stereotype of the “model minority”. On the contrary, they are prone to racism and hatred just like any other disadvantaged US population.
For Americans of Asian descent, Au said, this is the point at which they have to accept that they are on their own, with only the power of their own voices to depend upon. “We’re starting to realize that no one’s coming to save us, no one’s going to notice until we start making some noise.”
That sense of a national and communal reckoning was widely articulated this week. Sung Yeon Choimorrow, the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, told the Guardian that “this is our worse fears realized. Many of us have lived this reality for a very long time.”
The cry went up in Congress too, where a hearing on anti-Asian American prejudice and violence was held two days after the shooting. In an indication of how invisible Asian Americans and their troubles have been within the national consciousness, this was the first congressional debate on the subject in more than 30 years.
Several Asian American political leaders seized the opportunity to bring the plight of their communities into the light. “We know that this day was coming,” said Judy Chu, who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”
Even then, 36 hours after a deadly attack on Asian American women, in the midst of a hearing on racism to