Re-Imagining Beyond the Anti-Asian Hate of COVID-19

When I was younger, Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM) held little significance in my life. Actually, I do not think AAPIHM was even in my periphery until my early 20’s. Prior to that, I had no idea a month dedicated to celebrating my heritage existed.

Since then, AAPIHM has taken an increasingly personal role in my life — paralleled by my own racial identity journey over the years. In a country where the AAPI community has often been erased, overlooked, and othered, I will take a month of visibility (at a minimum). And after the painful months and year(s) of anti-Asian racism that many Asians in the United States have been experiencing recently, I am desperate for a celebration and centering of joy and community this month. These elements are always necessary, but in this moment where the spotlight shines on the trauma of the Asian community, it feels especially vital for rejuvenation. Worth noting that this emphasis on joy and community need not overshadow the very real and pressing issues that continue all around us, including India’s current COVID crisis and the continued violence against the Asian community. We can be intentional about both.

I like to devote particular energy to reflection each AAPIHM — reflections on personal learnings and limitations surrounding my own racial identity consciousness of that past year, reflections on current social consciousness as I experience it in my context, and reflections on what I hope to be true for the year ahead.

As I began engaging in reflections this month, I thought it would be a reflection steeped in a month unlike any other. In some ways, this is very true. We are now more than one year into a global pandemic, and this month follows a number of social and political movements that have shaken this country. For that reason, I was also surprised to find that the reflection I kept returning to was how much this month still held similarities to last year. Does anyone remember reading Cathy Park Hong’s widely-circulated article, The Racial Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020, published April of last year? I know I am not alone in remembering that piece, against a backdrop of many other articles written during that time highlighting the racism against Asians. And of course, who could forget Andrew Yang’s cringeworthy op-ed, titled We Asian Americans are not the virus, but we can be part of the cure, in which he encourages Asian Americans to “show our patriotism” as a means to fight a deeply entrenched culture of xenophobia and racism?

I feel like I am living in an endless time loop, which I am sure is partly exacerbated by the daily mundanity of staying distanced at home for d̶a̶y̶s̶ w̶e̶e̶k̶s̶ months on end. Further compounding this déjà vu effect for me is having had opportunities to listen to previous generations recently recount the tensions between Black and Korean communities during the LA Uprising in the 1990s and, a decade before that, the killing of Vincent Chin in the 1980s. Before COVID-19 anti-Asian hate, there was the LA Uprising. Before the LA Uprising, there was Vincent Chin’s murder. Before Vincent Chin’s murder, there was Japanese internment. Before Japanese internment, there was Chinese Exclusion, the Page Act, the Chinese Massacre of Los Angeles. This is obviously a very incomplete history and a very East-Asian centric one at that. There was also the 2012 Oak Park Shooting, post-9/11 anti-Muslim violence, Joseph Ileto’s murder in 1999, and so many more events that stretch back centuries.

Xenophobia. Scapegoating in times of crisis. A reckoning around Asian identity and the model minority myth. Rallying cries for a disciplined focus on dismantling white supremacy, while common rhetoric circulates pitting Black and Asian communities against each other. And, as in the events of more recent decades, renewed struggles around the benefits and limitations of the AAPI label — a label constructed to support coalition-building but that often ends up centering East Asian narratives and erasing Southeast Asians, South Asians, Central Asians, West Asians, and Pacific Islander communities.

Yes…this moment in time seems very familiar, I think to myself. These are the moments that stitched together some of my foundational learning about Asian American oppression and activism. Are we all living through an endless time loop?

This reflection brings me to a question that continues to surface in my mind: who will we be after this moment? Who, even, is “we?”

In other words, when all is said and done, when the news cycle fades and those of us who have been privileged enough to work remotely return to the offices, when the pandemic and memories of the anti-Asian rhetoric during this time fades — who will we be? How will the world we inhabit have been changed by this moment? Who will be included and centered in this community?

In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes:

I wish I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them. But I feared the weight of my experiences — as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian — tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.

I do not hold all the answers, nor would it be right to believe that any one person can define a cohesive response. I can only offer a single perspective, among these including experiences as a cishet, second-generation East Asian woman, raised in a household by Chinese/Taiwanese immigrants, located solidly in the middle class.

Through those and other identities, I can offer only personal truths about who I envision we will be and the world and communities we will inhabit after this moment in time — an effort to emulate the late activist and author Grace Lee Boggs’ calls for reimagining:

• I imagine living in a world where we can move through different spheres of our lives seamlessly. W̶e̶ I̶ We can be whoever we individually want to be and have the power to shape this definition of ourselves. Our whole selves are embraced and welcomed — to the point where we no longer even have to reckon with pieces of our identities that we hide away or bring forward. I can be whoever I want to be at home, at work, in other public spheres. There is no more being forced to confine Chinese culture to home or limited settings with trusted friends and switching to white dominant culture outside of those spaces. There is no more sifting through racialized feedback to navigate and excel in professional spaces. In this re-imagined world, my identity as an East Asian is no longer too inferior or foreign in white-dominated spaces and yet a white-supremacist tool to be used to perpetuate Black oppression.
• I imagine living in a world where we and our loved ones can thrive. I want to go to bed at night with the comfort that family, friends, people who look like they could be family to my friends and/or me have the resources and supports they need. They are cared for in the physical, social, emotional, mental, and political ways that bring contentedness and joy. This re-imagined world no longer leaves those with trauma to process and heal on their own. This world no longer leaves so many Asian families to struggle through the fear of physical or verbal violence; the anxiety of eviction; the shame of being dismissed for limited English language proficiency; the frustration of attempting to navigate non-intuitive, language-exclusionary social, political, and legal systems; the desperation of poverty wages. This world is one without that trauma passing on to the children of those families — the children who no longer need to grow up to carry the weight of their parents’ sacrifices and endured pain in their own career and life endeavors.
• I imagine living in a world where we recognize, humanize, and embrace our global community. While experiences may differ in local geographies, we acknowledge our shared humanity and intricate connections across land masses. The narrative of other regions are no longer used to advance political agendas — such as that of China, North Korea, or the Middle East — that feed further violence for people of those shared ethnic identities here and abroad.

I fully recognize that these imaginations are lofty. Even as I type, I cringe at wondering if I sound utterly disconnected from our current day. If these ideas are long-term visions, what about this particular moment? What happens in the next minute, day, week, month?

To move us towards this re-imagined world in the immediate term, I want our collective story to be one of:

• Incorporating AAPI history, including this moment of reckoning and all the ones that have come before, into school curriculum
• Advocating for greater visibility of the AAPI community and its stories in all its complexities
• Disaggregating data to better understand experiences and needs within the full spectrum of the AAPI community
• Working in cross-community solidarity and coalitions
• Investing in language-accessible, culturally responsive, LGBTQIA+-inclusive, and disabled-accessible social resources for immigrant, low-income, elderly, and undocumented communities
• Building sustained community-driven healing, restoration, and economic development efforts
• Instituting equitable benefits and protections/decriminalization for essential service workers
• Supporting AAPI-owned businesses, especially those in service industries
• Reassessing current day US involvement, dominance, and imperialism in other countries with a critical lens
• Providing aid to countries overseas in their times of need
• Develop a more nuanced understanding of racial oppression and, in its inverse form, racial liberation by interrogating the historical sociopolitical relationship among US imperialism, AAPI communities in the United States, anti-Blackness, Indigenous displacement, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racialized capitalism
• Embracing the unique roles and spheres of impact that each one of us as individuals and institutions can play in building this world

This list is already ambitious, yet largely incomplete. A re-imagined world requires community, and I know I am not the only one wondering where we go next. I also know there is a plethora of organizers and organizations who have been doing this work for decades, many who are still recent to these discussions, and everyone in between. Wherever you are in your journey, I welcome other thoughts and perspectives to expand on this discussion. I also invite you to engage with your communities, whoever they are, to re-imagine:

• Who will we be after this moment?
• What will the world we inhabit look like?
• Who is your “we?”

As Grace Lee Boggs challenged us in her 2012 speech during On Revolution: A Conversation Between Grace Lee Boggs and Angela Davis:

The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves. We are at the stage where the people in charge of the government and industry are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s up to us to reimagine the alternatives and not just protest against them and expect them to do better…

We reimagine by combining activism with philosophy. We have to do what I call visionary organizing. We have to see every crisis as both a danger and an opportunity. It’s a danger because it does so much damage to our lives, to our institutions, to all that we have expected. But it’s also an opportunity for us to become creative; to become the new kind of people that are needed at such a huge period of transition. That’s why it’s so wonderful to be here today — that we dare to talk about revolution in such fundamental terms.