Suni Lee and Honoring Her Gold Medal: Celebration or Commodification?

Yesterday, Sunisa “Suni” Lee won the Olympic Women’s Artistic Individual All-Around gold medal. It was a victory that reverberated through the United States, as Suni had already cemented her place in history as the first Hmong American to represent the country in the Olympics. Her gold medal finish was a landmark win as she then became the first Asian American to take home the All-Around Gymnastics gold.

I love this win for Suni Lee and her community. Seriously, just look at this video capturing the reaction of her family and friends. We all need communities like this in our lives — people who support us in our journey and are right there with us as we aim high, people who celebrate our accomplishments, people who understand the significance of our efforts.

This last piece may be especially true for Suni, her loved ones, and the broader Hmong community in Minnesota. As Phillipe Thao writes in this Washington Post op-ed, Suni’s win is contextualized against the backdrop of Hmong history, encompassing stories of war, violence, displacement, loss, and resilience. Central to this history is the role of the United States, its destructive war efforts that impacted communities across Southeast Asia, and its exit from those communities after the damage was done.

Suni’s win is also contextualized against the backdrop of attempts to once again pit Black and Asian communities against each other after Simone Biles withdrew herself from the Olympics to care for her mental health. Suni seems to be well aware of this backdrop, as Thao writes of Suni’s comments to NBC:

‘We don’t owe anybody anything. We don’t owe you a gold medal.’ And she’s right. Lee’s win is a gift to an America that hasn’t always helped — and sometimes has actively harmed — her community, not a down payment on a debt.

To the Hmong community, Lee’s victory isn’t a means to mend a broken country, nor to gain acceptance from a nation that once abandoned us. Her success has replaced tears of trauma with tears of joy. Our elders have always yearned that one day we will have a country to unify our people. Suni Lee proved that our love for one another is enough.

Given this context then, I have to wonder about Suni’s instant popularity and support from others who are not necessarily in her community. Seeing the United States rally around her gold medal is jarring after also watching so much of the national dialogue from this past year question whether anti-Asian racism is even real. The sudden national celebration for Suni rings hollow in a country that has yet to fully grapple with its central role in global imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy — both past and present.

This thought is not to take away from Suni or her win. There is so much to celebrate in this historical occasion, and the representation is certainly newsworthy for the Hmong and Asian American community. However, if we ever truly do want to #StopAsianHate and #EndWhiteSupremacy, this thought is to call attention to the ways in which we as a country continue to commodify Asian communities and people of the global majority.

The dynamics playing out in the US right now mirrors an all-too common cycle: The United States 1) inflicts harm upon a community, 2) ignores the resulting impacts, and then 3) claims the victories and cultural enjoyments of that community. I recognize the “United States” is a broad term and implicates many of us in this cycle. When I use the term, I am talking specifically about the individuals, institutions, and systems that align to perpetuate harm for people of the global majority.

How does this alignment play out within the cycle exactly?

• It happened with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, where Chinese migrant workers were exploited to work dangerous conditions for little pay and no rights. In contrast, railroad company owners, such as Leland Stanford, Collis Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker — commonly known as “The Big Four” — of Central Pacific Railroad amassed their wealth from the railroad and are widely credited with the creation of the railroad today.
• It happened during World War II and the Vietnam War, in which the US military helped propagate a sex work industry that led to the coercion and abuse of many women and girls across Asian countries without also ensuring their protections. US troops, who are said to have been aware of the mistreatment of the women at the time, still sought out sex workers until they were no longer allowed to do so, leaving the entire industry to collapse and an estimated hundreds of thousands of women vulnerable in its wake.

It also happens across other communities — our economic foundations are rooted in the enslavement of Black people, our claim to a country stems from the dispossession of Indigenous lands, our ideas of American exceptionalism and freedoms are a product of the Chicano Movement and other movements created in advocating for labor, social, and political rights.

If these examples seem like a part of the past and disconnected from present day, we only have to look to the way in which:

• Paying less for Asian restaurants and businesses is so normalized when white-owned businesses like The Mahjong Line and Breakfast Cure can charge much higher prices
• Tourists continue to flock to Hawaiian Islands despite residents, including the Mayor of Maui, desperately seeking to stem the flow of tourists
• The United States and other western countries are perceived as countries with superior medical systems for their vaccine access, relative to countries with vaccine shortages — a narrative that ignores the reality of wealth disparities across countries and the history of western imperialism in Asia

Time and time again, the United States has laid claim to the resources of the Asian diaspora and ignored the ugly underbelly of inequity while reaping the benefits. I wonder if the same continues to be the case in a country celebrating Suni Lee for her first place finish while anti-Asian racism continues despite waning media attention, a recent NAPAWF study finds that long-term unemployment has disproportionately impacted Asian American & Pacific Islander women during COVID-19, and those in lawmaking positions of power still hold racist and misogynistic ideas of Asian women and sex workers. The dissonance reminds me of the limits of representation, a dynamic that a friend shared with me once as a reminder that representation does not necessarily lead to inclusion or dismantle structural inequity. All those elements are necessary for true liberation though; anything less is simply commodification.