Following the Atlanta tragedy, so many stronger writers than me took on the exhausting task of making visible some of the previously invisible traumas of living as an Asian woman in America. But I wanted to do something, contribute something useful to help better explain this moment.
Since I’m in LA, I did a Hollywood-related story for VICE News Tonight, about how the makers and shapers of pop culture have perpetuated dangerous tropes about Asian ladies.
We are at a moment in our national reckoning over race in which racism against Asians is finally in the spotlight, despite having existed for ages. I am so devastated by the thousands of racist attacks on Asians in the past year and grief-stricken over the killings of eight people at spas in Atlanta on Tuesday, six of them Asian women.
We have since learned they were former elementary school teachers, US Army brides, mothers and sisters and friends, just like so many of us.
“I cried all day,” my friend Lucy texted me. “They could have been my mom, they could have been my sister.” We Asian Americans and especially Asian women have been reaching out and supporting one another always, but never more obviously and visibly than this week.
These past week was fear, anxiety and hangover symptoms all mixed into one feeling. I was intermittently hyperactive and adrenaline-fueled, despairing and exhausted and fried and scattered in-between. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but some scholars and writers have managed to put the complicated racial dynamics for Asians and Asian women into important historical and socio-economic context. Here are the readings I recommend:
The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings, by May Jeong in the New York Times“Anti-Asian violence is also anti-women violence, anti-poor violence, and anti-sex-work violence, our fates are entwined.”
Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different, by Cathy Park Hong in The Atlantic
“The act of violence itself is wrong. You cannot excuse it. I think many Asian Americans have never talked about it, and so white people still don’t believe that Asian Americans face racism. Because we’re invisible, the racism against us has also been invisible.”
Racism, sexism must be considered in Atlanta case, by Kimmy Yam for NBC News
“Killing Asian American women to eliminate a man’s temptation speaks to the history of the objectification of Asian women, whose value is only in relation to men’s fantasies… akin to ‘I raped her bc her skirt was too short.'”
A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking, by R.O. Kwon in Vanity Fair
“Still and always, hypersexualized, ignored, gaslit, marginalized, and disrespected as we’ve been, I am so fortified, so alive, when I’m with us.”
My Son Is Bullying His Asian Classmate About the Pandemic, How Should We Punish His Racism? Advice column from Nicole Chung, in Slate
“Resisting racist scapegoating of the type we’ve seen directed at Asians requires more than the passive hope or assumption that your kid won’t hear such hateful things or believe them.”
I covered MERS, which was killing some 10 percent of people who got it, when it spread to South Korea in 2015. The scare led to a run on medical products and face masks, hospitals became overtaxed and the government took a big credibility hit for not reporting numbers transparently over the first few days. But life as we knew it continued apace. For some reason the fact I had a new baby that MERS summer doesn’t register at all; I guess we were completely unconcerned that random strangers were touching and holding newborn Isa all the time? Weird, now that I’m looking back on it with a different perspective.
In late January, when my ancestral home region of Wuhan became the epicenter of what’s now called SARS2 or COVID-19, it became clear to those of us who cover China that this outbreak could be not only deadly but widespread; that life as we knew it in Asia would slow or change dramatically. I didn’t know the seemingly logarithmic spread of this new, still mysterious virus would affect the entire globe as it has.
In a time of globalism (and as is always true for epidemics), nation-state borders mean nothing. Following its initial bungling of this outbreak, China’s unprecedented lockdowns of entire cities bought time for the rest of the world to prepare. The US appeared to have done nothing with the extra weeks and now it’s too late. By the end of last year, ennui about how digital life disconnected us IRL set in collectively. Now coronavirus is forcing life in 2020 to become one of further and deeper social isolation. I imagine this will be the case for another few months, at least.
I flew to New York yesterday on a plane where everyone had his or her own row. Surprisingly few people wear masks around the Western world, so the only reason I wore one was to protect others from my nagging cough. Coughing-while-Asian is quite problematic and even scary in the swirl of COVID19 xenophobia.
By the time I landed, a British health minister was infected. New York announced its first “containment area,” and the National Guard moved in to help. We made a point last night to eat at Chinese storefronts, where foot traffic has so slowed that restaurants have had to close.
My workplace and so many others implemented work-from-home plans, a dreaded situation in a period in my life that’s been chock full of dreaded situations. I fear it’s only going to exacerbate my existing feeling of alienation and sadness. I want my mom … but she won’t get on a plane, for obvious reasons.
For the past six or seven years, our colleagues have regularly confused me and fellow female Asian-American NPR reporter Ailsa for one another.
We would receive the other’s emails and compliments for the other’s stories. I would come into work and people would ask me where my little dog was (Ailsa’s). She got a lot of congrats on my Seoul posting a few years ago. These nagging microaggressions happened so often that in 2013, Matty made a desk sign for me that featured side-by-side photos of me and Ailsa so that people could have a handy visual reminder of who’s who. (You don’t have to point out we don’t really look alike, we are aware.)
Now, I’m one foot out the door at NPR and Ailsa has moved here to LA to start hosting All Things Considered from the best coast. You could say we are … interchanging. So we hosted a little “revolving Asians” party to welcome her, do another bday gorgefest for me and most importantly, to poke fun of our long running plight and the friendship we forged as a result.
I love LA because it takes all comers, people are always here for random reasons and it’s full of friends from so many walks of life. To illustrate, here are people who made it out for boozeday Tuesday, an incomplete list:
— The regular drinking buddies
— My college dorm mate
— The dad I take turns doing carpool with
— My across the street neighbor
— A Defense Department friend who lived in Seoul the same time as us
— A pair of reporters I hired in 2011; one who had just landed from DC
— People who CAME ALL THE WAY FROM PASADENA to VENICE, so they may have started driving last week
— Mari, my Japanese interpreter in Tokyo who is also a working actress now doing a bunch of pilot season auditions in LA
— A civil libertarian I met a party & shared an Uber with two weeks ago
— Husband, armed with cake
— A guy named Bob who I met at a 7 year old’s pool party last summer and confessed he had a big crush on Ailsa Chang. Somehow I remembered this and made sure to track him down to invite him out. This delighted him and and Ailsa both, but especially him.
Welcome, Ailsa! It’s an honor just to be Asian, but also not bad accidentally receiving all the love that’s meant for you. 😉
The disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov is a technology implementation story in a big way, so I’ve basically been under water at work ever since Oct 1. Since it’s a huge story that encompasses many of our beats, it means that I’m working more closely with the Washington desk, which is where my fellow Asian NPR reporter, Ailsa Chang works.
Ever since Ailsa started covering Capitol Hill, my co-workers began complimenting me for HER great reporting. Whoops. Part of the problem is our names — Ailsa is pronounced “EL-sa” and Elise, well, has the same sounds. The other issue is likely that we’re the two Chinese-American gals who cover sometimes overlapping topics.
here at @nprnews, people always congratulate @elisewho whenever Ailsa Chang does a good story. "Nice piece today!"
— Gene Demby (@GeeDee215) August 7, 2013
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Matty created a poster for my desk as a guide. And yesterday when we were both on the Hill we took a pic together to help people out on social media:
Fellow Asian reporter Ailsa Chang & I get confused for one another a lot. Today both of us are on the Hill. Ruh roh pic.twitter.com/MhZ9GdvP1Y
— Elise Hu (@elisewho) November 13, 2013
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But after all my public service announcing, I came back from the Hill only to get an email from an admin guy saying “You have an interoffice mail on Beth’s desk.” I rushed over to Beth’s desk, since I love getting mail, only to find it was addressed to Ailsa, not me.
/facepalm.
