How we contextualize the Monterey Park shooting shapes our response to it

In the past week, people across the country have learned the name of Monterey Park as a city marked by horrific tragedy. On the eve of Lunar New Year, a man entered Star Ballroom Dance Studio and opened fire, killing 11 people and injuring nine others. He then traveled to Alhambra and attempted to open fire at a second location, Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio, before he was disarmed by Brandon Tsay, one of the ballroom operators. News outlets are reporting the event as the largest mass shooting to impact California in recent history.

The motive remains unknown, and updates continue to trickle in slowly. As we follow the reporting and media coverage, I wonder if anyone else feels the flattening of the story surrounding Monterey Park and its impact upon the Asian communities who have grown up in and around the area. As news travels that Monterey Park is home to one of the largest Asian communities in the United States, I cannot help but wonder, do people truly understand that places like Monterey Park and Alhambra are at the heart of the Chinese and Taiwanese community in Los Angeles? When articles mention that the attack took place on the eve of Lunar New Year, does that communicate just how painful it has been to wrestle with the grief of loss and violence during what should have been such a joyful occasion?

The coverage all feels so reductive, and I know no single article or news update can capture a lifetime of context or experiences, including this reflection piece. As I search for some way to make sense of the shooting, I want to scream — there is so much more to the story of Monterey Park, the San Gabriel Valley it sits within, and the Asians who grew up loving and being loved in these communities. This nuance is the story that deserves so much more than it will likely ever see in quick sound bites and time-blocked news segments. It is grief in so many waves — grief over the loss and violence itself, grief over the trauma that has spread across the community on top of everything it has already endured, and grief over the thought that so many people will now associate Monterey Park with a place of pain and sorrow without ever knowing the complexity it holds. To many, the people and community are simply a series of live updates and body counts. But there is additional grief: the grief of wondering how many layers of grief need to accumulate before we begin to fully understand this violence and build true solutions, to create places where all of our Asian elders and community members can be safe. These layers are what compel me to write, however imperfectly and incompletely, about the significance of Monterey Park and the shooting that fell on Lunar New Year weekend.

The shooting fell on the eve of Lunar New Year, one of the most important holidays across the diaspora for those who celebrate. Lunar New Year signifies a time of reunion, celebration, joy, and anticipation for the year ahead. How we enter the new year matters, which is why many of our traditions center around warding off bad luck and preparing for a prosperous year. For those in the Chinese community, Lunar New Year often means that we clean our homes and ensure the garbage bins are empty as we go into the new year to remove bad luck. We fill our fridges to ensure we enter the new year with abundance. We gather with family, honor and remember our elders, give thanks for what we have, and look ahead to the coming year with eagerness.

I was raised within an immigrant family who relocated from Taiwan. We observe Lunar New Year perhaps more than any other holiday from Taiwan or the United States. The generation above mine was part of the waves of immigration from Asia in the 1980s. Less than two decades before, the 1965 Immigration Act passed, a significant piece of legislation that established a preference system based on family structure, “skills’’-based labor, and refugee status. It dramatically shifted the United States’ immigration policies of that time — policies that had previously restricted immigration from Asia and could be traced back to the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese women; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which built upon the Page Act to extend these restrictions to all Chinese laborers; the 1917 Immigration Act, which established an “Asiatic barred zone”; and more. When the 1965 Immigration Act was passed, waves of Asian immigration swelled in ways that had been previously prohibited.

During the new waves of Asian immigration, many immigrants, especially those from Taiwan, arrived in Monterey Park. While the United States boasted as a place of wealth and opportunity, the reality was that many Asian immigrants often found themselves rejected from and exploited by places of employment. Simultaneously, xenophobia and the recently-constructed model minority myth, which falsely positioned Chinese and Japanese Americans as passive, hardworking “model minorities” in contrast to Black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, compounded to sow a public sentiment that Asian immigrants were “stealing” jobs and a threat to the economic security of those born in the United States. Combating these exclusionary dynamics elsewhere, Monterey Park became an ethnic enclave for this community. Advertised as a “Chinese Beverly Hills” in Taiwan and Hong Kong newspapers, many flocked to Monterey Park as a place of refuge. Small businesses, restaurants, and critical services and programs serving the Chinese community proliferated. Monterey Park became a community known for its openness to Chinese and, more broadly, Asian immigrants. As the city grew, it led to the rise of other nearby Chinese suburban ethnic enclaves across San Gabriel Valley, lovingly known as the SGV — Alhambra, Arcadia, Rosemead, San Marino, San Gabriel, and Temple City to name just a few. Today, the Monterey Park community consists of roughly 60,000 people, about 65% of which are Asian. Immigrants make up roughly 53% of the population, and roughly 74% of residents over the age of five speak a language other than English at home. Monterey Park and the broader SGV area set the stage for countless immigrant families, including my own.

Beyond the historical sequence of immigration patterns and demographic data, I know Monterey Park to be a beautiful community, marked simultaneously by resilience and ease. Sociologist and scholar-activist Bianca Mabute-Louie so poignantly describes Monterey Park:

“It is the 1st Asian ethnoburb: an ethnic enclave in the ‘burbs that thrives b/c it refuses to assimilate, instead unapologetically catering to its own immigrant community. Formerly an exclusive white middle class suburb, MP became ‘the first suburban Chinatown’ by the 80s, when ‘highly skilled’ Asians, [Southeast Asian] refugees, and working class undocumented immigrants started settling in MP and its surrounding areas now known as San Gabriel Valley (SGV). They transformed San Gabriel Valley into an Asian-majority ecosystem with a conspicuous and diverse first-generation, unassimilated immigrant presence. My grandparents never learned english yet thrived because of the ethnoburb. #Monterey Park as an ethnoburb troubles the American imagination of an immigrant, assimilation, and integration. Ethnoburbs are not a ‘staging ground’ (Zhou 2008) for somewhere better or whiter. The ethnoburb is the final desired destination where our communities thrive.”

As a daughter of immigrant parents from Taiwan, I grew up reaping the benefits of Monterey Park and the SGV as simply a way of life, an unchallenged existence that connected me to my cultural roots. Even as a child, not understanding the political history of Asian existence in the United States nor the history of Monterey Park itself, I knew it was THE special place, an area where most of my Chinese and Taiwanese American peers and I lived, played, worked, and thrived in some capacity. My family built roots within and adjacent to San Gabriel Valley — Arcadia, Rowland Heights, Hacienda Heights, Walnut, Diamond Bar — places that were shaped by Monterey Park. Among my childhood friends, discovering common connections to the city was inevitable. It was where places like Garfield Medical Center helped immigrant parents give birth to their children, where Mama Lu’s Dumpling House and Northern Cafe nourished us with food that you would have to travel to Asia to find otherwise, where our elders peeled oranges and cut fruit for us in their homes, where someone in the community likely offered the thing that you needed in the language you spoke. It was where we gathered with friends and family for holidays, birthdays, dinners just because, and catch-ups with old friends over the best boba in between college sessions. It was a place where I learned about Chinese culture and did so unashamedly, despite an outside world telling me that my Asian American identity was anything but a source of pride. In Monterey Park and the SGV, the stereotypes and tropes felt just a bit more distant. It was a place where being Chinese meant you belonged. There was no expectation to be anything else; it was just normal.

These reflections are not to ignore the very present and real issues of the city. Class divides, threats of erasure, and internalizations of the model minority myth are all part of backdrop Monterey Park, especially in conversations around the city’s continued planning and development. Immigrants who thrive in Monterey Park still carry the scars of racial and class trauma, and the struggle to survive in the United States is a common unifying experience. Monterey Park, for all its glory, is by no means a perfect utopia. It is, however, a place where many Asian immigrants find community and support through those struggles — and build a network that extends throughout SGV and the Los Angeles region. In many ways, the mass shooting at Star Ballroom Dance Studio ripples through the Southern California Asian community for that very reason. Monterey Park is home, it is care, it is survival, it is possibility, it is new beginnings and continuation and ultimate destinations. It is where our loved ones reside. And the attack came on the eve of Lunar New Year, a night when our families put aside the struggle of what has been for just a brief part of the year to welcome the hope of what could be.

What could be is a concept that grips my consciousness, especially when I think about all that the Asian community across SGV and the broader LA region has endured and what I wish for all of us in terms of safety, healing, ease, and joy. When people outside of Los Angeles learn that LA is home to me, they will sometimes offer their personal experiences of having visited or lived here for a brief window. They will often tell me that LA, with all its Hollywood glitz and glamor, was simply too superficial for them. To that, I often wonder “what version of LA do you know?” I look at places like Monterey Park and the SGV, and my version of LA is a world full of Asian immigrants, resilient communities who find ways to give to one another with abundance in a world that pushes a never-ending threat of scarcity and disconnection.

What could be is likely a story that will never make it onto platforms whose function is to report on past or current events, but it is a story that is ingrained into what I know of the Asian American consciousness. A tale as old as time, what could be is a story of hopes and dreams, however disappointed, in what should have been the “[stolen] land of opportunity.” Amidst a history of western imperialism and settler colonialism, immigration in pursuit of the “American dream” is wrapped up in the belief of possibilities for a new life and aspirations for future generations, whether propelled by the destruction of war or the allure of wealth under the global influences of capitalism. Despite a country of promises unfulfilled, Monterey Park still becomes a window into the life of opportunity, the result of decades of intentional advocacy, grassroots organizing, policy-making, and coalition-building across the community. For that reason, Monterey Park is dreams, it is hopes, it is what could be, and I am reminded of Grace Lee Boggs’ call to visionary organizing, in which she tells us that “the time has come for us to reimagine everything.” Imagining what dismantling systems of oppression would look like and how we would replace it with something new is a difficult charge, but it is one made easier when I consider that communities like Monterey Park and the SGV have given me a glimpse into a world where people in my community thrive. They are my grounding anchor; I am that much closer to imagining what it could look like because I have seen it, felt it, even if on a local level.

If communities like Monterey Park are one of my guideposts for imagining liberation, there is so much to be learned from it as news anchors and political pundits ask how we move forward from this tragedy. As our collective discourse turns to gun legislation and mental health support, I want these tangible solutions, yet something in the depths of my consciousness tells me there is more lying beneath those issues. Gun violence and mental health conversations are important, and policy change in these areas can be incredibly impactful. As Monterey Park teaches me though, our sociopolitical context matters; the history of this community is what gives rise to its collective beauty and shared struggles. Those shared struggles, the ones that pull me back to the sociopolitical, haunt me, and I wonder how many other forms of violence are left unnoticed in these moments. The more I sift through those experiences, the more that gun violence and mental health struggles begin to feel like not only a catalyst for pain but also a symptom and manifestation of it.

There are many who will say that the sociopolitical is irrelevant: The shooting was carried out by an Asian man within this largely Asian community, so it could not have been about race. What can we make of it all? Of this individual act of violence?

Once again, I am left to wonder — if this act is individualized, then why is the grief so layered for so many across the Asian community right now? I am called back to those collective experiences that shape our understanding in this moment, the dots that we begin to connect when we ask ourselves questions like –

Why do Asian-majority ethnoburbs like Monterey Park exist in the first place, as places of necessity and cherished desire?

Why did the Monterey Park location send ripple effects of fear throughout the Asian community across LA, as many of us waited with baited breath to learn who we or our loved ones might know in the shooting?

Why did the location shatter a perception of safety for so many Asians who saw the city and the broader SGV area as a place of refuge and stability?

Why, after three years of increased attacks on the Asian community and centuries of anti-Asian racism, does this moment in time re-traumatize so many Asian people across the country?

Why does learning that the deceased victims are Asian immigrant elders affect us in such sharp and gut-wrenching ways?

But it could not have been a hate crime because the person who did it was Asian, they say, his motive was not about targeting Asian people. Maybe the thought process on the surface was not about race. I am not sure we will ever know for certain, given that he is no longer alive. I would never deny others the peace of mind that comes with uncovering motive, especially for the victims and their loved ones, as everyone processes and heals differently. Simultaneously, a part of me also wonders if the predisposition towards this search effort will leave us without real answers and closure indefinitely. As I watch updates trickle in that fixate on motive, I wonder — how will motive address the grief over the conditions that created this moment?

I zoom out beyond motive to those conditions and shared struggles, the ones that many in our community know all too well, and the grief magnifies along with it. I wonder if the man who wreaked havoc in those Monterey Park and Alhambra dance studios — An Asian elder himself — experienced those struggles too — the forms of violence that beget violence. To dismiss race as an element of this shooting, solely based on the race of the individuals involved, seems far too simplistic when it has so forcefully impacted many throughout the Asian community. If it is not a “hate crime” in the traditional sense, then I wonder if the use of this terminology even serves us in this moment. Colloquially, “hate” is a feeling, which must be embodied by people; thus, “hate” continues to live on an interpersonal plane. Why do I feel the weight of hate in my existence as an Asian American woman in this country then, even when no one is actively spewing animosity in front of me? In my consciousness, hate lives on a different plane of connected experiences and shared struggles, the ones that surface more and more questions as I try to process within the confines of our language:

Is the lasting legacy of militarization throughout Asia — the legacy that made many countries throughout Asia familiar with this form of violence — considered hate?

Is a century’s worth of exclusionary immigration policy — complete with its xenophobic, Sinophobic rationale and rhetoric — considered hate?

Is the derision that Asian immigrant families had to endure once they arrived in the United States — the slurs, the stereotypes, the “jokes,” the denial of jobs and housing on the basis of race by businesses and landlords — considered hate?

Is the systematic underinvestment of community resources — for housing stability, food security, economic development, language access, culturally-relevant services — considered hate?

Is the historical erasure of Asian communities from critical issues — like gender-based violence and mental health — considered hate?

Is the societal emasculation of Asian immigrant men — who are expected to lead families to survival, yet simultaneously mocked as weak objects of ridicule that will never shake their perpetual outsider status — considered hate?

Is the resurgence of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic — that one that contributed to heightened stress and paranoia among Asian communities, the one that fed a narrative encouraging Asian communities to arm themselves with guns — considered hate?

Is leaving communities to grapple with the weight of these traumatic experiences in silence and isolation, without nearly enough resources to process and heal, considered hate?

What happens when you overlay these conditions onto one another and maintain them as a constant way of life through decades of dehumanization? What happens to the trauma that stems from that violence? Where does it go?

If we are going to talk about gun control and mental health, let’s truly talk about these histories and contexts too instead of flattening the narrative. Perhaps this shooting was not explicitly motivated by this person’s hatred for Asian people, but you cannot tell me that a history of hate and violence did not play a role. That is the systemic, structural side of hate — the lingering effects of racist, classist, and patriarchal violence that crushes us from the outside until and while it rips us apart from the inside.

I ask these and countless other questions until they threaten to swallow me whole, and I know that truly digging into these questions would require much more space to cover. The waves of grief overwhelm, yet I am buoyed by a community that has and continues to probe these areas of exploration. I hope we all engage with these questions. Until we do, I fear that little will change, while mainstream reporting of these events will continue to offer hollow and incomplete analysis for those who are simultaneously navigating historical trauma, present-day grief, and the urgent need for safety and healing. This moment calls us to interrogate this violence with the criticality of our context and re-imagine with the unbridled possibilities that our Asian communities deserve. For many of us, in our processing of this grief, this moment in time and the future safety we imagine for our elders and ourselves depend on it.

In the meantime, if anyone is looking for me, I will be in community, where I continue to place my hope and healing because I know this is a community of resilience and determination. A community that will continue to build, even if the broader society-at-large refuses to dig into those questions, even if the news cycle moves on to the next mass shooting, the next trauma cycle, the next sound bite. A community that will continue to take care of each other and build and move forward, whether that looks like peeling an orange or packing food or sharing resources for collective care — because that is who this community always has been and will continue to be.

GoFundMes:

• In Memory of Diana Tom
• LiLan Li, Monterey Park Shooting Victim
• Monterey Park Lunar New Year Victims Fund
• Monterey Park Shooting Victim Yu Kao Andy Funeral
• Monterey Park Shooting Victim’s Family Funds
• Monterey Park Victim -Muoi Ung Memorial Fund
• Monterey Park Victim Mymy Nhan Funeral Fund
• Valentino Marcos Alvero
• Xiujuan Yu Funeral Fund

Community Resources:

• AAPI Equity Alliance: Resources for Monterey Park Victims and Community Members

Acknowledgements

Writing is so often viewed as an individual act, unless co-authors are explicitly named. However, this piece was brought to life within community, both near and afar. In my immediate circles is a community who processed with me: Jonathan Lee, my partner and childhood friend who was raised by the SGV alongside me; Amber Edwards, writer and author who never fails to work her editing skills as she sifts through my rambles; Richard Leong, DEI consultant and facilitator who enters the macro spaces with me when I barely dare say these thoughts aloud; Royal Morris, who dissects and pushes the boundaries of grammar with me to make sure I am communicating ideas with intention; Philana Ho, who checks in and reminds me of the power of community. In digital spaces, a community of leaders have shared analysis and thoughts informing my own dissections and expanding my language capacity as I process — for this and many other issues on justice over the years. Among these leaders: Bianca Mabute-Louie, sociologist and scholar-activist; Terisa Siagatonu, poet, educator, and community leader; Michelle MiJung Kim, speaker and author of The Wake Up; Dr. Connie Wun, researcher, author, trainer & educator, speaker & facilitator; and the AAPI Women Lead team.

This piece reflects on the significance of the Monterey Park and the broader San Gabriel Valley, places and communities that have been built upon stolen and unceded land belonging to the indigenous Gabrieliño/Tongva people. As this piece grapples with the lasting effects of the United States’ history of imperialism and militarization throughout Asia, including its impact on the experiences of Asian immigrants, this story consequently sits against the backdrop of the relationship among white supremacy, settler colonialism, and Asian immigration to and within the United States — a relationship that is important to acknowledge and address as we continue to seek solutions that bring healing and liberation for all.

Additionally, while this piece is written largely through the personal narrative of my experiences as a second-generation Chinese/Taiwanese American, the city of Monterey Park and the surrounding Asian enclaves within San Gabriel Valley is also home to many other ethnic groups across the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. According to Census data, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese communities also form some of the largest Asian ethnic groups within the San Gabriel Valley, although many other groups call the SGV home. Alhambra, for example, holds one of the largest concentrations of Burmese Americans across the country outside of the city of Los Angeles.

Finally, worth noting is that the San Gabriel Valley population includes a large Hispanic and Latine community, whose experiences and presence within SGV are just as multifaceted and nuanced. Alongside Asian communities, Hispanic and Latine communities also form a sizeable population of the immigrant community within SGV. Recognizing that the Asian experience is not the only SGV immigrant and community experience is important, especially as we confront issues of erasure and invisibilization.

About the author:

Joyce Chiao is a daughter of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants. Born in Monterey Park, Joyce grew up within and around the San Gabriel Valley and calls this community her home. In her professional sphere, Joyce is a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant and facilitator. Her work focuses on exploring the ways in which social identity shows up in the workplace and how organizations create culture and systems change to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Her writing explores these junctures through a personal lens, moving across personal narrative, collective experiences, and systemic forces in her dissections.