I’ll be honest, the only reason I paid attention to the recent spate of violence against Asian Americans is because I had to for work. It’s not because I don’t care about violence against the elderly or about the Asian American community at large — it’s because I’m so tired. It’s the same reason I don’t watch the videos of violence against Black folks (or what I consider to be snuff films).
I don’t need to watch people get hurt to care and know that it’s wrong. If your morality only kicks in when violence is caught on video, that’s a problem.
Here’s the thing: As soon as COVID-19 hit the news in late 2019 and early 2020, I was already mentally preparing for violence against the Asian American community. Especially since then President Trump blamed the coronavirus on China and Chinese people. I was able to tune most of it out — after all, violence has been occurring against members of the Asian community for hundreds of years. It’s not new.
But two incidents stand out to me
One was almost exactly a year ago, when a 19-year-old man stabbed three members of an Asian American family — including their 2-year-old daughter in a Midland, Texas, Sam’s Club. The incident was eventually ruled a hate crime by the FBI because the assailant purposely tried to kill the family because he thought they were Chinese.
They were not.
I remember weeping when I read the headline, one of the few times fear genuinely coursed through my body. I had somehow accepted that violence against me was a possibility (however slim), but to hate me and people who looked like me so much that a grown person would try to kill a 2-year-old and her 6-year-old brother, I am ashamed to say that this was beyond my imagination.
All I could wonder was how someone could hate me so much that they would try to murder a toddler — and I feared for my children. I was afraid to take my four kids with me to Costco — one of whom was a 3-year-old. I hated how I was afraid in the country of my birth. I hated how this threat of violence against my children changed my behavior.
I hated how this was the reality for Black women, children, and families in America for hundreds of years — and I’d only had a taste of it for a few months and I was ready to throw in the towel.
I blocked it out of my mind
The second incident was also in Texas. At the end of February 2021, in the midst of freezing temperatures and power outages in Sugar Land, 41-year-old Jackie Pham Nguyen was the sole survivor of a house fire where her three kids, Olivia, 11, Edison, 8, and Colette, 5, and her mother perished.
When I read the article, I dissolved into a panic. I cried on and off all day. Nguyen is my age. Her three children are the same age as my children. My mother watches my children every week. All I could think was that if this had happened to me, I would have to be put on around-the-clock suicide watch.
What did this tragedy have to do with the spike in anti-Asian violence we’ve experienced these last months? Nothing. Everything. I don’t know.
All I know is that they are all of a piece
A swirling maelstrom of Sinophobia translating to anti-Asian hate, the Model Minority myth pitting us against Black and Brown communities, and climate change and the systemic failure of the Texas power grid disproportionately affecting low-income and non-white communities — they are all connected.
These acts of violence are linked to the Sinophobia of the Yellow Peril in the 1870s, when America imported cheap Chinese labor to avoid paying wages to newly emancipated Black people. It is all interwoven in the evil of white supremacy — one of the founding tenets of the United States.
I want my kids to know this Asian American history — and how our history in our country and our countries of origin tie in with Black history and American history. I want my kids to see and fight the injustice under which we are all oppressed — to ally with Black and Brown and other marginalized communities — and rip that obscenity out by its roots. I aim to remake the world into one where all BIPOC — and thus, my children — feel safe and celebrated.
