It took me three weeks to begin writing this post.
I don’t usually take that long to start; this sort of timeframe is reserved for editing and mulling, refining and shifting, blocking and trashing, and undo-ing the trashing.
Three weeks just to begin.
Because where to begin?
As a visual artist, I break things in my mind’s eye into simpler shapes: to define them, reshape them, give them new forms, new (-ish) representations. And maybe reach a new, personal understanding by doing so, a sort of meditation reliable enough to calm my anxiety for a few precious moments. And with words, I do the same, but the methods feel harsher, more unforgiving, relentless and stark, filled with rules that are mostly required in order to convey and clarify thought. Obfuscation was never quite as sexy, and its bluster the realm of gruesome, grasping brutes.
But recent events, particularly the massacre in Atlanta, compounded the difficulties of the past year, and challenged my ability to express in pictures and words just what I felt. Rage was foremost among them, sadness next. But the latter is an old companion: the ever-familiar, silent, weighted air permanently buddy-paired from childhood. Rage (Hysteria in youth, historically assigned to women in the lightest throes of it) was the intermittent visitor, come-as-she-pleases, because her agile, diligent sibling, Anger, was her steadfast sentinel and herald all at once. What I have, instead, are checkboxes: Asian/Pacific Islander, immigrant, woman. Those things circumscribe my experience of America, and Americans. Have circumscribed, and continues to be the vast, circumscribing ocean I, and many others like me, have to navigate, negotiate, survive.
So where do I begin? Why even start? Others have said so much more, in far more eloquent, articulate ways.
In a Guardian essay published this week, Viet Thanh Nguyen relates his experiences with racism within brief cultural and historical contexts of three countries in which he lived. Spoiler alert: the racism was the same.
Dan Hon expresses with an uncomfortable uncanniness what it feels like when the sense of community dies under the arrogance of ignorant individualism in these pandemic times.
Charlotte Yun reminds us what’s at work, and what some of us get distracted into doing and believing instead of unifying for the common good. (Language warning.)
National Geographic provides some US-specific historical context and a brief timeline of anti-Asian racism, and how it is perpetuated today.
But my Asian immigrant female voice, that voice so praised for its startling fluency in English, that primary language so impossibly inconsistent with the shape of my eyes, the shade of my skin, the curves of my body — what could that voice add to the discourse around what has long been known by aggressors and victims alike, in that strange space I struggled through girlhood and adolescence to find, define, and break? I wonder at my own stupidity for trusting that my efforts at assimilation—my English proficiency, my literacy in American history and government, my taxes, the laminated proof of my legal residency, all the things on the checklist for the Great American Citizenship—would bring me that much closer to becoming more fully American, and glory at the revelation that I would always be Other, when all that can be seen is my inescapable difference.
To learn more and find ways to report and combat anti-Asian hate in your communities and local legislatures, please visit Stop AAPI Hate.