Racialized Misogyny: Personal Reflections on Enduring in Everyday Violence as an Asian Woman

Note: This essay is a personal reflection on racialized misogyny in the wake of anti-Asian violence in recent weeks and the shootings of Atlanta massage parlors and spas that took the lives of eight people, six of whom were Asian women, and injured at least one other. At the time of writing, it is unclear which families have consented to release the names of their loved ones, so names have not been included out of respect for victims and their families. This piece is written through my personal lens as an Asian women. I am just one perspective and do not write from the intersections of being part of the Atlanta community, working class, service professions, sex work industry, or survivor community of gun violence. Please continue to support and amplify local organizations and mutual aid efforts, such as Randy Park’s GoFundMe in Memory of Hyun Jung Kim, NAPAWF-Georgia Chapter, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, Asian American Advocacy Fund, and Red Canary Song.

I woke up to a string of texts, Instagram messages, work chats and pings on Wednesday from friends and colleagues. As I fumbled for a response to “how are you?” in each of my conversations, I tested a few different answers — hoping that one of them would ring true for me once I said it aloud. It was as if I were trying on an outfit to present to my world, not necessarily sure of what I was looking for but searching for something that fit. Was I okay? Was I angry? Numb? Horrified? Unsurprised?

As I searched for adequate words, I allowed myself to be pulled into the chaos of my workday. Project meetings, proposal writing, racial equity work, processing spaces facilitation, checking in on my own communities. Checking social media in what might have been down time to amplify critical messages and search for resonant thoughts that would bring me some sense of healing. Perhaps I thought that leaning into productivity and focusing on others would bring clarity. Perhaps it was the easier, more familiar course of action, less daunting than actually trying to disentangle the mess of emotions I was feeling. Perhaps it was also a reflection of the ways I have learned to take up (or not take up) space.

As grateful as I am to have had my community, I also knew as I finished my day that I still had not found the words for how I was feeling — and that, without those words, I personally knew I would not arrive at a satisfying understanding for what I need. I wrapped up my last chat with friends, ate dinner, showered, and finally sat still. And all that I was left with was a quiet rage and an even more quiet sadness.

In all of the action and organizing, in all of the news and the noise, I have connected with the recounts of trauma that others have so generously shared with the world, all the while holding delicately to my own. I firmly believe that the privacy of trauma belongs to its holder, whoever they choose to share with, however much they choose to share, whenever they choose to share. My trauma is my own, deeply personal, a truth that I protect carefully so that no one else can take it away from me. I share it with my most trusted circles with the calculus that those loved ones will not ingest my trauma for self-serving consumption.

In these last few weeks though, I have periodically returned to two ideas floating in my visceral consciousness. The first — writing has long been my outlet for emotional processing, even as a child without the language breadth or syntactical complexity to fully articulate trauma at a young age. The second — in recounting the January 6th Capitol insurrection, Representative Ocasio-Cortez talks about the importance of naming trauma and telling your story to heal, even if it is not central to the story. And part of this processing over the past few weeks has been living in between spaces of wanting to write, wanting to tell some semblance of a cohesive truth, and simultaneously — a desire to minimize how much space I occupy as a result of years of internalized erasure.

But while navigating these tensions, something finally broke in me, as videos and news articles began circulating — reports stating that the shootings at Asian massage parlors and spas that left eight people dead, including six Asian women, were not racially motivated. The idea that “eliminating sexual temptation” was the motivating factor, led to the violent death of six Asian women, and somehow still assumes no connection to racist stereotypes of hypersexualized and submissive Asian women not-so-subtly reads as the age-old game of mental gymnastics casting light away from the ugliness of the white supremacist patriarchy that it is. The denial and doubt is gaslighting. It is violence. It is what enables the continued oppression that centers the truth of the perpetrator over the truth of the victims and survivors, a denial and doubt that results in taking lives and harming communities.

It is all so…crushing? Trifling? Disappointing? Unsurprising? Ridiculous that it would be laughable if it were not so terrifying? For so many Asian women, we did not need a confession of explicit anti-Asian racism to know. Asian women know this truth. Asian women know this violence. I know this violence.

I know this violence from the feeling of the gaze that lingers a few seconds too long, telling me that I neither belong in this country or have full humanity, in non-Asian spaces. I know this violence from more than enough lifetimes of having to answer where I am really from, when I moved to this country, how I learned to speak English, where I “got” such a “normal” name, why I could not translate sentences into Chinese at the whim of others, whether I can see fully with my eyes the shape that they are, whether I eat dog, whether I can solve a math problem, why I do not smell like fried rice, why I do smell like fried rice, why I just smell like rice, whether I can take non-Asian friends to the “most sketch, hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant” to experience.

I know this violence from the nonverbal slanty-eyed gestures from non-Asian friends right in front of me, a gesture so normalized in our society that I watched as friends acted first and perhaps only realized how racist it was due to my presence afterwards. I know this violence from “big white man energy,” like the time my Asian roommate and I were crossing a NYC street in Lower Manhattan and startled by a white supremacist aggressively pushing his car into the crosswalk as we approached, as if he were going to run us over with his car, yelling “slanty-eyed” slurs at us as he sped through the sidewalk within inches of us passing him. I know this violence from walking around NYC Chinatown with friends late one night and being splashed with a stranger’s open water bottle, chucked from a car of white men laughing at “that group of Chinese people in Chinatown.”

I know this violence from catcalls by strangers on the street, unwarranted and unwanted physical touches by men in dark bars who have no problem touching me from behind first and challenging my right to consent after. I know this violence from men who have pulled me away from the middle of a conversation and abruptly dragged me into the center of an all-white group of strangers at a bar, simply expecting me to dance for him and his friends for entertainment with no thought to my own humanity. I know this violence from men who have sat altogether too close to me in subway cars with no one else in them, who have sat right next to me and stared directly at me with their noses just a subway jolt away from touching my face. I know this violence from strange men on the street who have touched my hair, snuck up behind me and whispered in my ear, and used physical proximity to intimidate me and watch me flinch — all the while calling me “beautiful” or “China doll.” I know this violence from assessing my response in those moments, calculating between my dignity and my safety. I know this violence from choosing safety over dignity and smiling through my teeth while my heart pounds full of rage.

I know this violence from dating apps where non-Asian men tell me they like Asian women before they tell me they liked something about me specifically. I know this violence from men delivering “you’re so exotic” comments masqueraded as compliments. I know this violence from refusing to swoon over men using pick-up lines that are verbatim “you’re not bad for an Asian woman” and “can you love me long time” as if dehumanization is the ultimate form of flattery.

I know this violence from men who think “no” isn’t a good enough answer because I should have really been able to push away the acquaintance who cornered me and pinned my arms against a cold building in a dark night if I really did not want it. I know this violence from seeing said man invited to my birthday party through word-of-mouth the following year, confronting him about how uncomfortable I had been about that encounter, watching him meet my assuredness with surprise and confusion — whether real of feigned, I will never know because he insisted he wanted to talk to me about it the next day and that he cared and that resolving this was important to him and then never followed up. So probably feigned.

I know this violence from high school boys, who later became grown men in my life, who threw around comments like “you’re so Asian” and “what a girl” at the first sighting of anything remotely connected to a derogatory stereotype, who praised me when I did anything “whitewashed” or “tough like a boy” because there apparently was not enough space for me to be a complex and nuanced human and still be an Asian girl. I know this violence from men insisting that I should be a better ally for Asian men and the emasculation issues they face by acknowledging the “privilege” of hypersexualization because it gives me an air of desirability, as if I have not been expected to care for and prioritize space for Asian boys and men first my entire life by minimizing myself. I know this violence from being told that calling attention to the harm against Asian women as a result of these stereotypes lacked perspective and was insensitive to the experiences of Asian men, who must have it worse, as if challenging the dehumanization of our community meant I should be grateful for mine.

I know this violence from challenging the submissive, hypersexualized Asian woman stereotype by calling out the racism and patriarchy directly to non-Asian men whose faces register shock, then the faintest traces of guilt before it is replaced by defensiveness, anger, and rage. I know this violence from staring directly into the eyes of non-Asian men as they calculate how far they can go in responding to my refusal to back down. I know this violence from watching white men crumble into white fragile toxic masculinity with increasingly less restraint when I do not apologize, when I do not submit. I know this violence from watching other men, friends of these men, turn away in awkward embarrassment and avoid the confrontation altogether because it is too uncomfortable to challenge their own friends in this violence.

I know this violence in the invalidations — “you’re just too sensitive” and “it’s just a joke” and “Asians are practically white, they don’t experience racism” and “you probably wanted it.” I know this violence in the utter denial of any accountability — “I’m not racist” and “I have Asian friends” and “my girlfriend is Asian.” So yeah, I know this violence when the standard of normalcy is to be constantly harassed, demeaned, and dismissed while being told that my race and gender have nothing to do with it.

Watching non-Asian people across the country react to the Atlanta shootings and anti-Asian attacks is a surreal experience. So many people are aghast at how someone could commit such senseless violence, trying to make sense of the attacks through coronavirus and inciteful hate speech from government offices. There may have been an increase in hate incidents, but the truth is also that racialized misogyny against Asian women was in place long before COVID-19 came to the United States. I did not need a pandemic to know. I don’t need an admission of guilt from the attacker to know. The fact that this white man externalized the blame of his own sex addiction on Asian women and found his adjudication of Asian women’s responsibility over his own problems damning enough to end their lives says it all. That presumption — of the right to ownership over others and the police and media institutions that preserve the right to define the truth — is the true playbook of white supremacy and patriarchy.

And I know the world will never be ready for the anger of Asian women, who are confined to spaces of docility and submissiveness. That is all this stream-of-consciousness story is about. There is no analysis. There is no attempt to use an explanatory comma or advocate for validation. Just the truths that I know are grounded in my own lived experiences as an Asian woman. Damned if I’ll let anyone else tell me otherwise.