Asian-American Strength + Love
I opened my eyes and saw the cream-colored wafer moon greeting me, perfectly centered through a paned glass window. As if waiting for me to finally wake up, to speak up. An illuminated hazy disc pasted in the indigo sky like a diorama. Another restless, sleepless night – what time was it? I blinked a few times and felt the cool spring currents curl beneath the cracked open bedroom window, encircling me, summoning me to rise, to write. It was 4:41 a.m. I had been having a hard time sleeping, finding the words and way forward lately. I guess like many in the Asian-American community. What happened in Atlanta is hard to process. An invisible blunt force and emotional tide that’s gaining ground, swirling water rushing in from all sides. Panic. Invisible hate. You sense there’s something insidious lurking and simmering in the water, a toxic circular ecosystem tainting the soil, air, everything.
Another boiling point and red line crossed, another news cycle where I have to stop watching, cover my eyes or look away, wiping tears of quiet terror. Another unspeakable, unbearable tragedy and mass murder spree steeped in gun, racist, sexist violence in America. This time targeting Asian-Americans. Seeing the innocent victims’ names who just went to work that day – the six Asian women – their broken families left behind, and the swift tremors of Asian-American assaults that ensued. With 3,795 attacks at last count (from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021) at least the ones that were reported according to Stop AAPI Hate, all have been chilling and hard to un-see or understand. Maybe it was the video footage of the elderly Asian women sobbing with a swollen, bloody eggplant-tinged black eye that shook me the most, leaning against a street light post-attack, finding a board to beat back a stranger twice her size who blindsided and punched her on a busy street corner in broad daylight.
I immediately called my feisty, five-foot, 79 year-old Filipino mom who still walks to her own corner library outside of San Francisco. “Oh Jing, it’s safe, I am safe! There are lots of people on the street. It’s sad, but they’re only attacking Chinese people in Chinatowns in San Francisco.” Oh mom, my innocent, re-assuring, unassuming mom…my eyes welled as I tried to muffle my worry and fight back tears through my crackling voice over my iPhone speaker. I talked to my half-brown kid about it. “I feel sorry for the guy who tries to take Lola out!” he said sweetly. I tried to explain to him that Lola, Filipino for grandma, may feel safe, but in the end, the bigger loss is that a shared, sacred peace of mind and basic unspoken trust in kindness, the golden rule, in humanity, has been broken with more racial brutality. That simply minding your own business and living a quiet life is no longer enough.
“My tiny, trusting masked mom was making her way to her corner library armed only with geriatric sunglasses, a grin, and her recycable tote bag to check out her latest must-read books and People magazines.
Oblivious to dangerous forces in a daily darkening world…”
After months of waiting for her library to finally re-open – the one safe place where my mom found community, independence, joy, and a brief trek back to “normal” after being lost in a bleak, year-long pandemic isolation – her most basic right to safety and freedom was threatened and taken away. On her daily walks on the sidewalk outside of my aunt’s home where she lives, she’s no longer safe stepping out of their door.
“My elderly mom has become an easy, innocent, direct target based on racist rhetoric. Planted as lethal seeds of veiled ‘us vs. them’ hate disguised as patriotism, which continues to bear poisonous fruit for generations of Asian-American families, including mine.”
It will never be the same for elderly Asians like my mom. And for their worried, first-generation daughters like me calling halfway across the country trying to gently explain to their optimistic and sheltered elderly parents that the world is very different today – for her, for families that look like us.
“My mom’s generation may have experienced racism and passively accepted, even normalized it, in order to integrate and blend into the background culturally.
I hope my generation will be different. And my half-brown kid’s, too.”
I hope we do something and say something. To call it and stop it when we see it and experience it in any form. The compounding, exponential dangers of racism may have been overlooked in the name of ignorant bliss. Or not understood due to language barriers. Or downplayed in exchange for innocent, obedient, yielding immigrant gratitude after hard-won U.S. citizenship. It doesn’t matter that my family and other Asian-American families have lived here since the early ‘70s, paid taxes, built businesses as entrepreneurs and employers who contributed and deeply believed in the American Dream. That my aunt waited twenty-three years for her U.S. citizenship after my mom petitioned for her, patiently and painstakingly following all the legal protocols of two homelands. That we are kind and caring people representing a modern, multicultural, global future and blended American, human family.
Maybe it was the video footage of the 61-year old Filipino man who looked like my uncle, face ruthlessly slashed by a passing stranger from ear to ear with a box cutter while on his non-descript 8 a.m. daily work commute to Harlem. Hearing his familiar Filipino accent as he described his sinister attack which required 100 stitches was like hearing a family member sharing what it was like to be hunted down for just being Filipino on a crowded NYC subway platform.
"I asked for help, but nobody helped," he said. "Nobody moved."
I weep every time I see his photo and hear his trembling voice re-living the trauma. Or the elderly man quietly doing his laundry, violently pulled from his chair then thrown to the ground and beaten by a gang for his wallet. Or the countless white-haired, petite Asian elders abused while slowly walking doing errands. Frail, moving gently, dressed modestly like my mom and dad on the playback video footage. Then shoved to the ground from behind with brute force, knocked unconscious by unstable strangers who happened to cross their path that day, at that moment.
@richiekeo : Choichun Leung
It reminds me of personal experiences when I was in college. Mine ranged from subtle slights to emotionally scarring on the spectrum. Not as tragic as the recent AAPI hate crimes and those of so many others sadly in the black and brown communities – but still deeply disturbing and random. I never shared these experiences with my parents or close friends, though these memories still haunt me. I often wonder what the outcome would have been if they happened today. My senior year, my blonde girlfriend and I were chatting with a group of charming blonde German boys with thick accents, ironically in a bar in German Village at Ohio State. (They looked like a picture-perfect J. Crew ad.)
“When I turned around, I overheard one of them say matter-of-factly to his friends behind my back, thinking the loud bar music would keep me from hearing him, ‘I don’t really like dark girls…’”
Wait, wait?! It was the first time I had experienced anything like this within five minutes of meeting a complete stranger who appeared on the surface completely different when he thought no one was listening to what he was really thinking or saying under his breath to his beer-drinking German buddies. You didn’t seem to have that impression five minutes ago when you met me and bought me and my blonde friend drinks? Were you only talking to me to talk to my blonde friend? I’m not dark – whatever that means – I’m Filipino! I turned around and pretended I didn’t hear what he just said and he smiled like he never said a word about “dark girls” like me. I wish I would have said something. But what do you say, what is left to say?
@colorsofhoney : Hanifa Abdul Hameed
Or the time my boyfriend worked at Wexner Center in Columbus. We were walking home on High Street after a lovely dinner and art show when a man with an oversized black duffle bag suddenly appeared yelling racial slurs from across the busy street. (Was he talking to us?) He charged towards us and began taunting us – well, mainly me – walking way too close and wedging me and my white boyfriend who instinctively squared his shoulders trying to shield me as I covered my tear-stained face with my right hand. I turned away seeing my own crying, terrified reflection in the bar and restaurant glass street windows. The stranger repeatedly and aggressively hissed, “Don’t procreate with her. She’s a genetic deficiency, man, a genetic deficiency!” Did he have a gun in his gym bag? Would he follow us, gather his friends, and hide in the bushes or behind garbage cans in the dark alley by my boyfriend’s apartment where we would be arriving in exactly fifteen minutes?
“Where did he go? I couldn’t stop sobbing and shaking. I wish I would have said something. But what might have happened to us if I had?”
Or the time I went to a Woolworth’s on Court Street during college to buy cleaning supplies for our apartment and was followed through the aisles, accused of having intent to shoplift by the store manager for simply putting an item back in the wrong spot. “I knew what you were going to do...” he seethed and snarled with his enraged beet red face. (He did? But how?) Now I guess you might call it racial profiling today. At the time I was horrified and left bawling, humiliated, and stunned again, not questioning his white male manager authority and not telling a soul, internalizing this white stranger’s judgment and my undeserved brown girl shaming. I wish I would have said something. But who would have listened or believed me over him anyway?
Or the time I left the college art store after filling my art tackle box with new art supplies. Back then, you carried a huge black pleather portfolio case to transport your oversized life-drawing pads. I had turned the corner to walk down the brick-lined side street when I heard gruff voices, laughing, and sadly familiar taunting, “Hey, John, looky here, we’ve got ourselves a Gook. Look at her – that there’s a real live Gook!” I didn’t turn around and didn’t have to.
“I saw the four white men leaving the townie bar moments ago, all in matching camouflage jackets, aviator sunglasses, and bandanas tied tightly around their heads when I slithered down the side street, hoping to evade them.
But no, they followed me.”
It was them. In my mind, I tried to think of rapid response self-defense moves. Would I sprint down the alley to escape? Would I whip my art tackle box and over-sized portfolio in a radius swing like an artistic ninja and bravely confront them, yelling, “Back off! I’m Filipino! AND on a scholarship with a 4.0 GPA – thank you very much!” I could feel sweat trickle down the back of my neck as I heard their heavy combat boots clomp in unison inches behind me, like a white army drawing closer and bolder with each step. I never turned around. I never talked to them. I never saw them again. Four white males saw my brown skin, black bobbed hair, and felt entitled after a few drinks of liquid courage foaming with hate to intimidate a 19-year-old Asian-American female college student walking by herself down a side alley at dusk. I always felt nervous getting my art supplies after that, walking down that same side street, breaking a sweat scanning the intersection for them. What could I have done to stand up for myself and still stay safe? I wish I would have said something. Outnumbered, alone, afraid. I couldn’t. So I didn’t.
But now I am. Now I’m here. At this moment to try and make sense of it. Sharing untold stories to be seen and heard for the first time ever. To heal through words and truthful, painful storytelling – even if this is hard and not what I’m used to doing. To use our voices and platforms for social change and the greater good. It seems ironic to be writing this during Women’s History Month. To be feeling this and sharing this after all of the love and kind support from Cleveland for OTHER BROWN GIRL on International Women’s Day.
“I’m grateful to my city, community, and my friends, Asian and non-Asian, who are finding ways to speak up and speak out. To be a different example, to take a stand in our own way, however loudly or quietly, in large and small steps forward.”
It breaks my heart hearing OBG friends talk about wearing sunglasses to hide their “Asian” features. Or donning running shoes in case they have to run away suddenly to avoid being spit on or harassed simply walking to work. And what about our mixed, multicultural kids, coming of age through this, through ALL of this?
alonglastname.com : Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya : @alonglastname
“So many Other Brown Girls like me and my generation grew up with a culturally unspoken extra pressure to be kind, obedient, passive, and silent peace-keepers in the name of family honor, to assimilate to Western culture.”
My hope in writing and sharing this for the first time? I want to shine a light on unspoken, unseen experiences like mine – like ours. To show how OTHER BROWN GIRLS and Asian-American families might be feeling right about now, too. No longer able to stay silent, to sleep, to get out of bed. Not quite knowing how to talk about or process our abstract collective fear, pain, and anger at the invisible forces at play, based on who gets to decide and judge how “American” we are as immigrant children, adults, elders, and families. Thanks for listening, for checking in, for empathizing – for seeing and hearing the untold stories behind the stories on the news. And for doing something and saying something, too.
For more ways to support the Asian-American + Pacific Islander communities, visit:
alonglastname.com : Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya : @alonglastname