Seeing Anti-Asian Violence
Photo/Meredith Oda.
By Meredith Oda
As reports of anti-Asian violence filled the news this past spring, my dad urged caution as I set out on daily walks. “Hold your keys through your fingers.” Or, “Should you walk with headphones? You want to know what’s going on around you.” Or, “Maybe you should get some pepper spray.” Or my favorite, mostly serious: “Why don’t you take a baseball bat with you?” These were suggestions he hadn’t bothered with when I set off to college, lived on my own for the first time, regularly walked miles through San Francisco for my first post-college job, or moved to Chicago for grad school. My parents, perhaps more guarded, gave me less opportunity for concern as they mostly stayed inside.
It was late March, and my parents were visiting for the first time since January 2020, fully vaccinated and making up for lost time with my first-grader. The joy of the family reunion was fogged by a blur of events, though. My daughter had just broken her leg, and we all struggled to figure out how to adapt (she has four left feet – having inherited two each from her parents – so her crutch outlook appeared grim). The global COVID-19 death toll approached a horrific three million even as vaccine availability expanded (in the United States, at least). And close to my heart if not my actual home, eight people had just been murdered, including six Asian women – Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, and Yong Ae Yue – and two others – Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels; there was one survivor, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz.
My phone was abuzz for days after the shootings from friends checking in: “Are you okay?” “How are you holding up?” “Let me know if you need anything.” “Love you friend.” Little expressions of care and allyship, similar to ones I had sent to loved ones in the wake of other violent deaths (so many).
I was initially startled to find myself on the business end of such communication. The infrastructure of care quickly set into motion had been routinized after endless episodes of violent deaths, and now turned its attention to me and my friends, kin, and brethren. Of course, as a historian I’ve studied and taught Asian American history, which includes campaigns of anti-Asian violence and animus that have shaped who we are as Asian Americans, how we’re positioned in the complex calculus of racial thinking and racism in this country, and our very nation itself. I’ve had to explain through the fall and winter how the rising anti-Asian hate in the San Francisco Bay Area in particular makes a lot of tragic sense; despite the region’s progressive, woke identity, it had been the nucleus of anti-Asian organizing in the country and its current, grotesque inequalities easily reanimated past hatreds in the present.
It was disconcerting to see the knowledge of my professional life become so urgently present in the world around me; I knew it was there intellectually, but it was frightening to see IRL. This is what I know as a professor of Asian American history: the term “Asian American” is a product of activists in the 1960s and 1970s who were part of Third World liberation movements here and abroad, and who sought a meaningful platform for political mobilization. It was a carefully constructed identity (there are no “Asians” in Asia, but Filipinos and Koreans and Thais and so on), which resonated because it built on a shared set of experiences with racism and colonialism that helped to bridge differences in nation of origin, language, generation, class, and legal status. These shared experiences stemmed from a history of imperialism in Asia and Native Pacific Islander homelands, which marked us as foreign, unAmerican, unassimilable, and dangerous. Legal and juridical exclusions from migration, naturalization, certain jobs, forms of marriage, and other institutions reflected and extended the stereotype. Such ideas lived on even through the rise of the “Model Minority” stereotype after WWII (Asians are smart if not creative, quiet, successful through education and hard work, but not political or brash). As the stereotype goes, Asian Americans got ahead because of intrinsic, unique cultural attributes, ones they shared with our allies in Asia during the Cold War (we’re still foreign, get it?). While the “dangerous” part of the stereotype may have lain dormant for a while, the past year of bloviating about the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus,” and “Kung Flu” brought this painfully pointed edge to the surface. Hence, so many anti-Asian acts during the pandemic.
But by this point, history had done its work. As I told a friend, it felt like the media, politicians, even well-wishers were taken aback by the reminder that Asian Americans were in fact, people of color with all the racism that the status brings. The Model Minority stereotype, of course, projects the idea that we’re “model:” that we made it, we’ve “outwhited the whites” (in the words of a 1971 article), we overcame the racism that is now distinctly in our past and we’re not going to harp on about it anyway. But this stereotype didn’t signal the end of anti-Asian racism. It expressed a particular form of white supremacy, one that sought to keep us in our place and to discipline other people of color (quit it with your civil rights movements – see how far they got with just their hard work? Racism isn’t a barrier in this country!).
The whole point of the Model Minority stereotype is that it makes anti-Asian racism hard to see, because it takes such a different form than that experienced by Black and Brown folks. As I waited for institutions like my university to respond to the Atlanta murders, that stereotype seemed to block anti-Asian animus from view. The Black Lives Matter movement has made enormous strides in educating the public about structural racism (yes, it’s a thing!) and its nearly invisible workings. And so the dismissal of the racism and misogyny at the root of the murders, at least in my bubble of social media and networks, was reassuringly limited. But upper-level administration in my university needed days to grind into gear, and the most difficult, draining, and risky work of remembrance and reflection was done by students, especially the sisters of the University of Nevada, Reno, chapter of Kappa Phi Lambda, our Asian American sorority.
It’s been hard and sad, and, like all of us, I’m still processing a year that’s been calamitous and exhausting in any number of ways. There’s been and is a lot of work to do, and all of my friends and colleagues who work in Asian American studies or activism agree that we’ve had to work harder this past spring than at any other point in our careers. But I’m grateful that allies have been eager to hear about Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) histories and experiences (or, as one event moderator noted, “that group we’ve been hearing so much about in the news recently”). I’m grateful people are open to understanding those histories and experiences in complicated and challenging ways. I’m grateful for my many friends and colleagues whose work has deepened my understanding of the past (way too many to list here, but if you’re interested, I’d especially recommend the books of Ellen Wu, Arissa Oh, Mae Ngai, Lon Kurashige, Charlotte Brooks, Kornel Chang, Beth Lew-Williams, Jason Chang, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Noenoe K. Silva, and Madeline Hsu). I’m grateful we haven’t had to deal with too much pushback. I’m grateful that my family and I haven’t faced direct violence (although the point of racist violence is that you live with a constant threat).
I’m not grateful that anti-Asian animus has been recognized in law with the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, because anti-Asian animus doesn’t exist solely in law and cannot be solved through policing, the courts, and the carceral system. God knows that criminalizing and over-policing would be a horrible way to address anti-Asian racism. AAPI folks are victimized by such institutions, too: rest in power Angelo Quinto, Christian Hall, Yang Song, and others. And, as we’ve seen, the root problem is white supremacy. Therefore, we AAPI have to work together with Black, Latinx, and Indigenous folks to fight racism and resist laws and stereotypes that might divide us.
Now, it’s the start of June. The semester is over and so is AAPI Heritage Month (welcome, Pride Month!). Things have been a little quieter. My dad has mostly stopped badgering me with frankly weird methods of self-protection. But the quiet doesn’t mean the end of anti-Asian animus or white supremacy. So, hopefully, it won’t mean the end of our attention, either.
Meredith Oda is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research and teaching focus on Asian American history, urban history, US-East Asian relations, and the United States in the world. Her first book, The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (Chicago, 2018), was a transpacific urban history of San Francisco. Currently, she is working on a book on migration and alienage in Japanese American WWII incarceration and resettlement.
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