There’s only so much pain the Asian community can swallow before we realise we’re drowning
On a quiet Sunday during the height of Sydney’s Covid lockdown last year, I went to deliver groceries to a friend’s mother, a Chinese woman in her late 60s who lived alone. While I was there, we went outside to speak with a neighbour about a noise issue. What transpired next was fairly predictable. Her neighbour demanded to know where she was from, accused her of being “un-Australian”, spat at her feet and told her to go back to where she came from. After the encounter, I asked if she wanted to go to the police. She said no, only: “I’m lucky it wasn’t something worse.”
”Something worse” certainly happened to Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels on 16 March. The overwhelming response within the global Asian community to news that a 21-year-old white man had targeted three Asian owned businesses in Atlanta and massacred eight people was, “not again”. We saw this coming because we had been living it. It was inevitable.
The narratives we choose to fixate on in the fog of tragedy speak volumes about whose experiences we prioritise as a society. In the immediate aftermath of the killings, we knew the shooter was a devout Christian before we knew that Hyun Jung Grant loved to dance and take her two sons to the aquarium. We learned what the shooter wrote in his yearbook before we knew that Xiaojie Tan’s friends called her Emily and she had planned to celebrate her 50th birthday with her daughter, two days after she was killed.
When faced with bodies of six Asian women, police chose to timidly manoeuvre away from acknowledging their deaths as hate crimes because the shooter had denied anti-Asian racism as a motive. He was just “fed up”, “had a bad day” and was at “the end of his rope”. Left unsaid was the notion that it takes an incomprehensibly deplorable person to reach the end of their rope and decide to hang others with it. What is then inscribed on the trauma of the victims’ families, when authorities commandeering their justice feel the need to seek validation of their loved ones’ deaths from a man who couldn’t even muster empathy for their existence?
For years before and since the pandemic, the global Asian community has been bearing the weight of a disheartening realisation that there are many in this world who grow steadily resentful of our presence. The statistics haunt us like an unrelenting chant: 3,800 anti-Asian incidents in the US since the start of the pandemic; a 300% rise in anti-Chinese hate crimes in the
UK during the first quarter of 2020; nearly one in five Chinese-Australians physically threatened or attacked last year; xenophobia and discrimination rising in Canada, Europe and New Zealand.
Despite the tangible lives marked by those numbers, the past year has also proven how easily pain can be eclipsed by political whims. It’s become increasingly convenient to repackage Asian identities and brand them with palatable stereotypes to feed already thriving prejudices. We are virus spreaders, foreign spies, CCP sympathisers; and now a depraved man’s ostensible “sex addiction” threatens to condemn the legacies of the women he murdered to historically fetishised caricatures.
The calls for this massacre to be recognised as a hate crime is not a bartering of semantics. It is the least we can do to not only reclaim a measure of dignity for those we lost, but to deter the copycats waiting in the shadows to test how much the system can bend to their will.
For many, what happened in Atlanta won’t be enough to sway them towards a cause which they feel doesn’t serve their interests, and that’s to be expected, with the deluge of crises currently straining our emotional resources. But human suffering should not be gauged on a perverse scale of who has it worse. When multiple cultural reckonings bleed into each other – misogyny, racism, exploitation, gun violence – every voice adds to the poignancy of our collective stories without monopolising attention away from others.
Culturally, most of us in the Asian community have been raised to swallow the social injustices we encounter, to keep our heads down and not draw attention to ourselves. It’s the unspoken price our parents and the generations of immigrants before them agreed to pay in exchange for a piece of the western dream. But there’s only so much pain we can swallow before we realise that we’re actually drowning.
On that suburban Sydney street last year, when a white person felt unjustly inconvenienced by an elderly Asian woman asking for some peace, there were many in the neighbourhood who walked by and gazed at the spectacle of his rage, but none of them stopped. In many ways, it’s symbolic of how the Asian community has been feeling this past year. More and more people are looking in our direction, but none of them really see us.
So now that we have your attention again, for however briefly the news cycle will allow, here are some stories worth listening to: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels – and the countless others brave enough to lift their heads up after years of being told to keep them down.