An American flag sits on my home’s driveway, and red lanterns hang in my home’s living room. I eat BLT subs at the school cafeteria, and mantou with hongshao rou at the dinner table. While a lot of my life is steeped in Chinese culture, I’m also an American: born and raised here. Yet, while I’m fortunate to never have experienced a hate crime myself, I know that a frightening number of people in this country want me—and people who look like me—out of it.
Throughout 2020, the United States saw a 150% surge in anti-Asian hate crimes across major cities as Donald Trump spouted racist terms like “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, a year after the initial pandemic shutdowns in the United States, anti-Asian hate manifested itself hideously on March 16th in Atlanta, Georgia. In Cherokee County and Fulton County, an armed man gunned down eight victims—including six Asian-American women—in Gold Spa, Aromatherapy Spa, and Youngs Asian Spa.
Perhaps this bloodbath should have shocked me. This was the first instance in my life that I saw a mass shooting targeted towards Asian Americans. But when I learned of the horrid news of Atlanta, I only felt numbness. The repeated remarks of “go back to China,” the unwarranted stabbing of an Asian man in New York’s Chinatown, the slamming of an elderly Thai man to the ground in Northern California, and too many more acts of violence all but foretold the inevitability of what happened in Atlanta.
What shocked me much more was everyone’s apathetic response. Leading up to the Atlanta shootings, the federal government had been largely aloof to a year of anti-Asian hate crimes. Despite the rise of anti-Asian incidents since March 2020, only in January 2021 did the Biden Administration issue a “Presidential Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.” Moreover, the Department of Justice met only as recently as March 5th, 2021, to publicize its first readout of its “Efforts to Combat Hate Crimes Against Asian American and Pacific Island Communities.” The apathy of the federal government also extends to public officials. When Asian Americans asked police across the United States to take stronger measures to prevent hate crime, law enforcement simply responded, “This happens all the time and there’s nothing we can do.” Most repulsive of all, at the scene of the crime in Atlanta, the police reported that the White shooter was just having “a really bad day” while eight people lay drenched in their own blood.
Unfortunately, the general American public is guilty of the same apathy. When I brought up the shootings for the first time in majority-White Mountain Lakes High School, none of my non-Asian classmates knew about it, not to even mention the violent anti-Asian hate that broiled in months past. There is no doubt that poor media coverage on these topics plays a role in this sad reality. After the Tuesday shootings, CNN reporters focused its initial video report on the two non-Asian victims of the shootings and their family members instead of Asian-American victims, despite the shootings clearly being a heinous anti-Asian crime. The Washington Post then neglected to include all the names of those who succumbed to the shooter’s hate-filled gunshots. Asian Americans are invisible, even if they are subjected to graphic violence—the type of violence that stabs Asian men in the back, pushes Asian elders to the ground, and puts bullets through Asian women. You can’t say their names because you don’t even know who they are.
I noticed the apathy all around me—an apathy that is very telling of larger structural issues affecting Asian Americans. Accordingly, I was forced to look at the issue of anti-Asian hate crimes beyond the scope of just hate. Then, the numbness I felt at first inflated to visceral pain. I hurt not only for the victims harmed by perpetrators outside the Asian-American community, but also for those harmed by malicious constructions of the community itself.
It is an undeniable fact of American society that Asian Americans are relegated to the status of faceless mannequins, a societal manifestation of the long-running racist joke that “all Asians look alike.” Specifically, America has always viewed Asian Americans (East Asian Americans in particular) to be model minorities. This construction is as injurious as it is unfounded. Indian Americans and Chinese Americans may be top salary earners in the United States, but Burmese Americans and Bhutanese Americans have household incomes on the very lower end of the American earnings scale. Meanwhile, mainstream American politics uses the model minority myth to justify racism against Black and Latinx Americans while inoculating Asian Americans with conformity.
From the western side of the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s to white-collar workplaces in the present day, Asian Americans throughout American history have assimilated to the model minority myth in the name of one pursuit: the pursuit of the American Dream. And in this pursuit, we are pitted against each other as we compete for top schools, apply for top internships, drive each other out of business, and do truly anything to become as adjacent as possible to White America in a capitalist society. After American society robs us of our identities, we weed each other out, ultimately allowing our most elite to progress towards a dream that capitalizes on the marginalized while leaving our most vulnerable—for instance, the six blue collar Asian-American women who were shot in Atlanta—to fall victims to financial hardship and brutality.
When the American Dream fails, Asian Americans lose the assimilation game. Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad faced lynchings and were included in an Exclusion Act when White workers blamed them for taking jobs. Japanese Americans across the United States lost their status as dignified citizens when the American World War II machine locked them in internment camps. And today, Asian Americans are facing threats, from verbal attacks to gunshots, as what Trump touted as the “Chinese Virus” destroys lives and livelihoods.
When the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes caught my family’s attention, family and society gave me different messages. One was that I should continue to embrace my Chinese identity in spite of the rise of anti-Asian sentiment. Another, which has been heeded much more throughout history, was to reject my otherness and assimilate to American society. In instances where Asian Americans are blamed for American failures, targeted Asian Americans retaliate by proving their “American-ness.” Perhaps the best image of this phenomenon showcases itself in a photo taken by Dorothea Lang in March 1942, during the Japanese internment of World War II. It shows a little Japanese-American-owned shop in the middle of an urban block in San Francisco. The most prominent detail of the photograph is a large sign at the shop’s entrance that reads, “I AM AN AMERICAN” in bolded letters.
The Japanese-American shopkeepers of the mid-1900s were American citizens, and it was a horrendous injustice to incarcerate an ethnic group of people who gave their lives to the United States. There was nothing inherently wrong about that Japanese-American shopkeeper’s desire to prove his loyalty to America. But I find something very unsettling about how some people choose to interpret the message on that sign. To some, it reads, “I Am An American, Unlike Those Other Disloyal Asians You See.” Just look at a statement from Andrew Yang, a previous Asian American 2020 presidential candidate and once one of the Asian-American community’s most celebrated spokespersons. In The Washington Post, he wrote: “I felt self-conscious—even a bit ashamed—of being Asian … We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before.”
I, along with many other Asian Americans, strongly disagree. As Asian Americans ourselves, our “American-ness” needs not to be proven. Yes, people like my parents immigrated to the United States so that their children could have better lives, and I am forever indebted to the United States for my privileged existence. But to fully assimilate to American society and be ashamed of my “Asian-ness” is to blatantly ignore my dual identity and suppress an integral part of my humanity.
Additionally, not all American residents of Asian descent are equally capable of assimilating to America. My Chinese-American family, an upper-class family of English-speaking individuals who live in a majority-White suburb, has assimilated almost perfectly to the American expectation of the model minority. But what about non-English-speaking Asian Americans who face major barriers to communicating with American society at large? What about low-income Asian Americans who have neither the resources nor the connections to blend in with the majority of Americans? Assimilating to American expectations and believing that we all have to be “model minorities” alienates these vulnerable Asian Americans from the Asian-American community and from everywhere else in American society. And it is precisely these vulnerable Asian Americans who are most harmed by hate crimes.
The Atlanta tragedy is connected not only to the anti-Asian hate that lies behind it, but also to the rise of the Asian-American elite at the expense of the less privileged and the invisibility of the Asian-American community. I will not sacrifice my Asian identity for my American identity, hide from America’s anti-Asian climate, or ignore the cries of our community’s most vulnerable members.
But there is an opportunity for hope in every crisis. The incredibly diverse Asian-American community is not one that comes together often, but now, we can rally collectively under the cause of stopping anti-Asian hate and forging community bonds. We now recognize our assimilated status in American society and can elevate ourselves by celebrating our cultures. And most importantly, we reckon with the intersections between class, race, and gender; we can stand in solidarity with all oppressed people of color.
Maybe there will be more dreadful things to come. And maybe, in spite of it, America will still not see us. But we will remember. We are not silent.
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