tiger kings and tiger mothers

It took me a while to find the words for this, but here it is. It was difficult to find something to say that hadn’t already been said, mostly because we keep saying the same things over and over. And that’s exactly the point. I’d planned to write something for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this year, but we deserve recognition beyond just one month, especially after what happened in Atlanta.

This is the second time a mass shooting has felt personal to me. But this time, instead of being relieved that it wasn’t me, I felt guilt because there’s almost no way it could’ve been me. I struggled with whether or not to even write this, because the truth is that I will likely never understand what it’s like to live in imminent danger every day of my life, because after witnessing the collective grief and rage of last summer it felt insensitive to advocate for our own protection. But that’s also the reason I felt compelled to write this—because while I’m hesitant to speak on behalf of the Asian community, I am viewed as its unwitting representative almost every time I walk into a room.

We are always waiting for permission to be upset, always waiting for it to be the “right time,” after crises and wars and protests and scandals and insurrections. We’re told that “Asian Lives Matter” and “Asians for Black Lives” are insensitive because it centers us too much, co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement without acknowledging that it is rooted in an ongoing struggle as old as this country itself (which is not wrong). We’re told to protest the “right” way, not to take up too much space. We are always waiting for our turn to be important.

AAPI Rally Against Hate in Manhattan’s Columbus Park (photo from my friend Chidimma)

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I recently stumbled upon a discussion about the movie Gummo on Reddit; I had never heard of it, so I Googled it. From Wikipedia:

Gummo is a 1997 American experimental drama film written and directed by Harmony Korine, starring Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Jacob Sewell, and Chloë Sevigny. The film is set but was not filmed in Xenia, Ohio, a Midwestern American town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other inhabitants of the town.

I was shocked by how boring it sounded, how utterly and infuriatingly ordinary and nondescript the characters and story were. I don’t necessarily mean this as an insult—in fact, it’s a testament to the filmmaker’s abilities to turn ordinary stories into something so reverentially regarded as art. But it’s also an indictment of Hollywood studios, which would never greenlight a movie that centered Asian Americans in the same way, and if against all odds they would, Minari is proof that these stories are still not considered “American” enough.

Asian American movies are always expected to explore a central theme of grappling with personal identity—The Joy Luck Club, Minari, even Crazy Rich Asians—the heart of which is the conflict of: “What does it mean to be Asian and American?” But we would never have an Asian American Gummo, because we are not seen as whole people whose stories are worth telling.

Instead, we are consumed through the lens of other people’s experiences, unwillingly compressed into tokens that vaguely resemble things people are vaguely familiar with: “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Japan,” “Oh, my last girlfriend was Asian,” “Oh, I love Vietnamese food.” Treated as symbols of cultures 3,000 miles away that many of us are still trying to fully understand, that in a lot of ways we don’t really know. Blamed for a virus that began in place many of us have never visited. We are never given the grace or freedom to explore our own history, to contend with complex and messy and unresolved feelings, always overshadowed by a larger American history, a brutally revisionist story of colonialism, by greater tragedies, by the next mass shooting, the next headline. It feels disorienting to be praised as an an integral part of the American narrative but somehow remain invisible all the same. We are Dragon Ladies and tiger mothers and Oriental flowers awaiting rescue, perpetual foreigners and punchlines and best friends, but never quite beautiful or interesting or relatable enough to be the main characters (Nikita starring Maggie Q, a half-Vietnamese, half-Irish-Polish actress, was the first show with an Asian female lead on broadcast television. It premiered in 2010). The boxes are crudely drawn for us by people who do not know us and we are punished for not fitting neatly into them, as if we are paper dolls to be posed, silent and lily-white and perpetually smiling, complacent to be folded by strong, assertive hands and tucked away when we are no longer fun or useful.

I read two pieces about Asian American identity recently, a profile of Steven Yeun in The New York Times and a piece from Byrdie entitled “I’ve Never Been Prouder—or More Heartbroken—to Be Asian American,” which delivered a double gut punch I was not expecting. Yeun remarks on the Asian American experience: “[It’s] what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you.” Faith Xue writes that it is “being taught to constantly be grateful for having a seat at the far end of the table when other minorities are still fighting for a seat at all. As it turns out, our seat was actually a high chair, and the adults’ table was somewhere else completely.”

We have the luxury—or is it misfortune?—of forgetting the ways in which we are marginalized on a daily basis, but it often veers uncomfortably close to gaslighting. I’ve been told, more times than I care to count, not to complain about being catcalled on the street, because it’s a compliment to be desirable. I don’t mention that being told “konnichiwa” with a leering smile by strange men sends an involuntary shiver up my spine, or the time I was groped at 13 years old in Times Square while walking with my family, by a man who disappeared into the crowd and whose face I still don’t know to this day, a man who decided that even as a literal child I was not entitled to ownership of my body. Every time I’m catcalled, I have to weigh my instinct for aggression against my desire to live. That is something that men—especially straight white men—will never understand, and I’m sick of pretending that they experience anything comparable. It is impossible to relate to you how it feels to be so thoroughly dehumanized, to be a full and complex person reduced to the shape of your eyes and tropes that have weathered wars and invasions and generations, unless you have experienced it too.

This is not about me, but about us. We deserve to feel safe in public spaces, in high schools and movie theaters and grocery stores and churches and nightclubs and elementary schools and sorority houses. We should not have to make the case for our humanity every time something like this happens. If all life mattered to you, you would stop making it so easy to kill us.

But suddenly when six Asian women are shot dead at Asian establishments, we’re “making everything about race.” And it becomes abundantly clear that being “destructive” or too loud or too radical—everything the Black community was criticized for last year—was never really the problem. It was about the validity of their pain; it was about the callous refusal to see them as equal humans.

This time it was not me. It likely will never be me. But they could be me.

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And yet, it should not need to be personal to be worthy of your attention. The limits of your empathy should not end at the distance of your proximity to someone; it is the price you pay to coexist with other humans. At some point, it is not a fundamental misunderstanding but a fundamental difference in compassion.

Friends and coworkers have asked me how I’m feeling, “checking in” to see if I’m okay. And I love them for this, but it is difficult for me to articulate any kind of concise, constructive narrative from this grief or any reasonable path forward, difficult to accept the gentle reassurances offered to me because all I am capable of holding in my heart right now is a blinding, white-hot rage. I am angry that we are forced to plumb the depths of our emotional trauma to be considered valid and worthy of protection, angry that these things are debatable in the first place, reduced to a plea offered up for casual ruling by the court of public opinion as if they are inconsequential decisions like whether a movie is good or bad, rather than the evaluation of human life. I am angry that even though I’m not in danger, I am still bonded to other Asian women by repeated trauma forged over a lifetime, forced into this association by the very people that inflict it. I recently expressed to my therapist that I sometimes feared I didn’t have the “right” to feel traumatized given my relative privilege, and she pointed out that it’s not just immediate, blunt-force trauma that hits you like a brick or a blow to the face. It’s the small moments too, the ones that compound over time and permeate deep into your subconscious, that infect our collective lexicon—lyrics and jokes and headlines—that condition you a little bit every day to just be okay with it, those things that don’t sit quite right with you but you decide are not worth the discomfort of calling out.

All mass shootings are bad, but what happened in Atlanta cannot be divorced from racism and misogyny. This was an intentional attack targeting Asian American women because they were a “temptation.” Not even five days later, there was another mass shooting, and we were told, “See? It wasn’t about race.” But violence is inherently about power. It’s about white male rage and the people who feel entitled to sexualize us, fetishize us, violate us, kill us. It’s not all men and it’s not all white men, but even the Isla Vista shooter desired the kind of entitlement that white men possess. He killed those people, as we all huddled in our homes glued to our phones and each other, because he craved that power. And now we watch as our own government officials not only tacitly condone but encourage this violence, because white male rage is “understandable” and Asian women are collateral damage.

As Anne Anlin Cheng writes in The Atlantic, “it is a grave mistake not to understand that “mild” and “violent” racist sexism are on the same continuum. Here’s the thing that many people find hard to accept: Hatred does not preclude desire. Hatred legitimizes the violent expression of desire.”

There isn’t even a record that accurately depicts the scale of anti-Asian violence in America; the history is long and bloody but poorly documented and in fact, it is an indelible part of American history itself. We were the first people to be banned from this country on the basis of ethnicity, and subsequently used as pawns of white supremacy in the U.S. government’s crusade against civil rights with its creation of the “model minority” myth. And in the midst of deciding who does and does not deserve to be traumatized, we forget that these are real people, real women who loved things like strawberry cake and their sons. Women who become faceless victims and whose whole lives and rich stories are methodically filed away under “tragedy,” like Jane Doe Ponytail.

I’ve been relatively lucky to have lived my life mostly in the upper echelon of racism. That is, I’ve never been spat on or told to go back to my country; instead I am given “compliments” like “Asian women are so beautiful!” and “You’re so assertive!”, remarks that aren’t quite racist but carry with them the sting of microaggression. Growing up, I never experienced any direct racism but in retrospect I was too young to discern the edge in the way adults spoke to me. Now, I jokingly describe my childhood as “filled with the white people from Get Out,” the ones that will lean in conspiratorially to tell you they would have voted for Obama a third time. Or “I backpacked through Southeast Asia the summer after college” or “my family grew up eating Chinese food.”

And that’s the quintessential Asian American experience, isn’t it? Being “relatively lucky.” Being told to make yourself as small as possible, to keep your head down so as not to appear ungrateful. To be content with being “happy to be here.” But we deserve to take up as much space as anyone else. I don’t like the hashtag #StopAsianHate, because to me, that’s the absolute bare minimum. We just want the right to exist freely. I’m tired of being told that it’s too much to ask.

I saw a TikTok recently that made me unexpectedly emotional. A man is describing the characters inscribed on the wooden gates of every Chinatown. My family loves exploring different Chinatowns, so we’ve been to a lot of them—Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Vancouver. He explains that for a long time, Chinatowns were the only places that Chinese immigrants could live and feel welcomed. The characters read as 公為下天, or literally translated, “sky below belong public.” In other words, “everything under the sky belongs to the people.”

To me, it mirrors the lyrics of a familiar American song, one we used to sing together in my kindergarten class: “This land was made for you and me.”