Asian Americans at a Crossroads
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
By Scott Yi
“Hey baby, you looking good!” the man said to Amber, as we were about to turn the corner. We were less than a block away from our house, but it wasn’t too much of a surprise that we heard catcalling on our street, which was known throughout the city to be filled with such colorful characters.
Amber wasn’t having any of it. She turned toward the man. “Hey! HEY!! Say that again to me, mother******! Say that again!!”
The man was taken aback by the audacity of this small Asian woman. He put up both of his hands in a gesture of surrender, as if to communicate a meek apology, that he didn’t mean to offend her. “Yeah, that’s what I thought!” As we walked away, her heart was pounding and her body was shaking. She had gotten up the nerve to face her frustrations, but a part of her knew it was almost pointless, because it was bound to happen again sooner or later.
I had believed that as an Asian American man, I knew intimately what it meant to be marginalized and stereotyped—an unjust reality that has shaped every stage of my life with an ever-present bitterness. I knew I had to work harder than my counterparts. I knew I couldn’t trust the systems founded by white supremacy. And I knew that I would never be understood.
But it wasn’t until I had gotten married, vowing to bind and dedicate my life to another human being, that I realized that even my own struggles were privileged in ways I had never appreciated before. I’ve never had to deal with the anxieties of sexual predation. I’ve never worried about how others might interpret my appearance the wrong way. I’ve never had to experience the constant fears of being objectified and dehumanized and overpowered and violated. Those thoughts have never once crossed my mind as a cis-gendered heterosexual male. [1] But through my wife’s daily routines and concerns, I began to understand what it felt like to live with such a relentless sense of vulnerability. Always on alert, always planning ahead for when the next incident inevitably takes place. We even took self-defense classes together and added some security measures around the house.
That feeling of helplessness jolted back into our lives like never before when a 21-year-old white gunman attacked three Asian spas in the Atlanta area. He killed eight people, six of them Asian American women. Four of the women were Korean (my own ethnicity), and two of them were Chinese (my wife’s ethnicity). This mass shooting was the culmination of a long, long year of increased acts of hatred and violence against the Asian American community. Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 150% in major cities in America, [2] which is a remarkable tide of hatred when you also consider that people were in lockdown and spent more time confined at home than they ever had before; indeed, the totality of hate crimes actually went down in 2020, with anti-Asian crimes as the lone exception. And just like the attack in Atlanta illustrated, Asian women have been the primary targets of racist Americans. Almost 70% of anti-Asian hate crimes were reported by females. [3] No doubt many of these racist incidents were steeped in sexism as well, as the stereotype of the “quiet, delicate lotus flower” has created an othering of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) women. In the minds of these depraved individuals, Asian women are not human, but rather defenseless objects suited for punishment and wrath.
But just as infuriating has been the treatment of the elderly within the AAPI community. Social media is rife with footage of Asian senior citizens being assaulted in random acts of callous violence—assaults that have even resulted in death, including those of 75-year-old Pak Ho and 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee. This epidemic of hate is at a point where some of my Asian friends’ parents are now afraid to go outside. Would you have ever imagined that the life story of our immigrant parents could end up like this? Across thousands of miles of ocean, decades of building family assets from almost nothing, the mental strain of learning to navigate a culture that rarely bothered to learn your own, the physical toil, the emotional exertion, the American dream, the promise of freedom—and after all that, our parents and our grandparents don’t even have the same basic right to safety that they had at the very beginning of their journey.
Sadly, Asians in America have never been a very united community. We’ve never had a Civil Rights Movement to rally around (although AAPI activists have been fighting since the very beginning of our time in America). We have no common language. We have no common history. What does it even mean to be Asian American? There is in fact no such thing as an “Asian American culture.” The stories of where we all came from are distinct and many. On the West Coast, there are fourth- and fifth-generation Chinese Americans whose ancestors built the American railroad system. On the other hand, there are refugees, recently arrived from Burma, who have lived in the States for barely a decade by this point. They are trying their best to make a living in an economy that has no place for their unskilled labor—Burmese families are actually the poorest Asian population group in our country. [4] From Filipino to Tamil to Laotian to Sri Lankan to Nepali and beyond, the sheer range of our peoples’ histories and experiences is overwhelming. But it’s also an invitation, to learn and to be enriched and to participate in something bigger.
When you consider all those differences, it’s no wonder that the AAPI communities have gone their separate ways for so long. But now we do have a common thread that we can all stand behind: justice. Justice not only for the generations that have paved the way for the rest of us, justice not only for AAPI women, but justice for everyone who has been ignored, oppressed, and abused by the systems of white supremacy. The ones in power have attempted to drive a wedge among minority groups by artificially lifting up Asian Americans as “the model minority,” and for too much of American history, people of color have devolved into infighting with one another. If there’s ever been a time for solidarity, now is that time. 1 Corinthians 12:26 says “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (ESV). No member of the AAPI community is safe as long as Black people are still being brutalized by law enforcement; as long as Hispanic women make 55 cents for every dollar that white men make [5]; as long as Muslims in America continue to be treated as hostile foreigners. The Bible that calls us to justice is the same Bible that calls us to become a multicultural family made up of every nation, tribe, and tongue. Not only can Asian Americans learn much from those who have fought longer and organized better, but we have so much to contribute in the giftings and insights that God has endowed us with.
Unfortunately, some of the factors that have kept us from standing up for each other come from our very own eastern cultures. Confucian values like deference and quietude have trained many of us to keep our heads down and to suppress our emotions. But one of the beautiful things about the Gospel is that it redeems not only people, but systems and cultures as well. I know that the calling on my life to follow Christ, to carry my cross, and to lay down my life for my brothers and sisters means that justice must take precedence over self-preservation. Inner harmony can never be achieved without speaking up for “the least of these.” Dedication to family must now mean a family beyond my own DNA. Through the lens of the Gospel, I don’t despair for my people. Through the Gospel, I can see my people for what we could be together.
References
1 Cis-gendered comes from the Latin derived cis meaning “on this side of”, as opposed to trans. Cisgender means identifying with the sex assigned at birth.
2 Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino
3 Stop AAPI Hate
4 Pew Research Center
5 Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Scott Yi lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he writes and teaches literacy to underserved populations. Scott is also the director of the Youth Collaborative, a nonprofit that equips urban teens for success through entrepreneurial training and mentoring.