As an Asian woman who came to America in my 20’s, the first cultural shock I received, was how this country has been treating women and how gender difference remains a hot and debated topic. Growing up in China, girls like myself didn’t even have this question in our mind. We took for granted that women and men are equal, with the notion that “women can hold half of the sky” (a popular saying by Chairman Mao in China in the 1950s, meaning girls can do just the same great things as men).
However, I felt I stepped back in history after living in the US for nearly 30 years, hearing arguments for women’s rights such as abortion, seeing how few women are in STEM and in leadership positions, and school-aged kids’ comments of “STEM is a boys’ thing.” In the last few years, immigrants like myself have been wondering if we made the right choices to come here — the country with “liberty and justice for all.”
America seems to continuously suffer from a free fall, not only in the number of COVID deaths and disasters one after another, but a country that is going backward while the rest of the world is moving forward. Minorities, especially women of color have been under attack and no longer feel safe. We are struggling to meet our ends, to have a fair salary and the rights to live and survive, even the rights to be treated like a normal human being, with some sense of DIGNITY. Is this the America that we have all worked so hard to come to?
When you have a former US president who openly bragged himself on the national stage of grabbing women, without any hesitation and shame, when you have American men who cheered him up without any hesitation and shame, when you have even American women, who openly supported such a president and such men without the conscience to stand up for their friends and next-door neighbors, you got a problem! America, we have a problem!
Worse than this, the then US president refused to wear a simple mask and take any responsibility for the fiasco of dealing with the COVID pandemics. Instead, he blamed everything on the “Chinese virus.” Immediately afterward, the anger towards a failed government was been shifted towards instead to “a foreign invasion” and “enemy of America”.
I have never felt the same again and safe afterward. I have spoken about the Atlanta shooting and how we as Asian Americans have been targeted as a result of such rhetorics. I have seen Asian women friends, from moms at home to working professionals, started to cloak themselves in disguise. Some resort to stay home and rarely come out. Many tried to keep quiet and hoped things would go away. Overall, this is what we have been told as Asians, “Don’t make any noise, just do your work.”
Yet some of our Asian neighbors and women friends are not so lucky. They have to go out to take jobs highly risky and dangerous, cutting hair and giving massages. They have to keep restaurants open that nobody wants to enter, but with ‘Kung Flu” spray-painted by the door. They have to face aggression and violence that could come anywhere, anytime, online or on the streets. To the degree that some man could just pull the guns, if they “have a bad day”!
For Asian stores, even mentioning this word in the business names can bring a threat. For Asian women, even using this term implies we are sex objects or could be treated derogatorily. If you do an internet search of this keyword and look at what kind of “images” pops up for “Asian women”, you will see for your own eyes the kind of fetishization and hypersexuality of our identity, and how this has aggravated how we have been treated in the COVID time.
I am not only shocked but furious at what has happened in Atlanta, during the exact time of “Women’s History Month”. Yet, although it is shocking, it also comes as no surprise. Given what this country is going through, it is not a matter of whether it will happen, but WHEN. This is the America we have gotten used to, and this is the reality we have been facing. For too long, nobody wanted to talk about it — the hidden stories of Asian women.
As brutal as the shooting itself, what came afterward as the response to the shooting was even more lethal. It showed that Asian women, somehow sinful and “tempting white men”, are the cause of the “sex addict,” which can be used as a convenient excuse to blame the killing upon ourselves!
I am not only angry at the men who opened fire on innocent people and claimed himself to “love God and guns” (What kind of belief did he follow? Excuse me!), but the leaders and system that have encouraged such behaviors, continued to be his defense, and made weapons widely available for easy access. In some sense, he is a victim too of the violence and distraught in America.
We have heard political leaders repeatedly telling us, “An armed man is a citizen. A disarmed man is a subject.” They have openly promoted such rhetorics as if guns are a “solution” rather than a problem. I want to tell such men sitting in the position of power, that the way you treat Asian women and American citizens is not only a problem to America, but also a threat to the entire world. Why?
Because some very powerful men and some very powerful machines in this country regard other people, other traditions, other belief systems, and other countries including the land, the forest, rivers and oceans, aka, Mother Earth, as the same way they see “Asian women” — subjects to be bullied and killed, objects to be exploited and discarded.
Can we remain silent as if what happened will be quickly forgotten, replaced by just another atrocity, another tragic death, another gunshot, another brutal assault on our conscience, as what has happened in America in the last few years?
At the spring equinox when half of the Earth is being warmed up by the Sun, the ice is melting and the creeks are flowing. The water, the flowers, the sprouts, the land, and Mother Earth are the feminine or the “Ying” side in each of us. Without the tender love of mothers, without the water and soil of the planet, no human, no species will survive. A society that has lost its way of living and balance of the Ying-Yang (the feminine-masculine), will not survive, as what we have seen in the thousands of years of Chinese history and in the modern science classes.
Although water is soft and gentle, it can also turn into waves and tsunamis, it can also freeze into ice and glaciers. It can become the formidable power of nature, drip through rocks, shake and move the mountains. Although forests and oceans cannot speak for themselves, they can turn into wildfires and rise up as hurricanes to show us how small we are under Mother Nature.
America, wake up! It is the time to shake the past, move to the future. It is time we break the silence of Asian women and help the nation move towards truly “liberty and justice for all”. It is time, for the leaders of this nation, to deeply reflect upon the Pledge of Allegiance they have been preaching to the rest of the world, the way how America has treated Asian women and the way how society is treating Mother Earth. It is time that all of us can come out of the dark shadow of the past and create a better America for all of our children.
I see the Statue of Liberty as a mother of all people, all colors, and all races, just as Mother Earth nurtures people living everywhere on this planet.
Atlanta spa shootings: Suspect 'frequented' spas; victims range from mom of 2 to Army veteran www.usatoday.com/…
Business owner, Army veteran, woman on a date: The victims of the deadly rampage through 3 spas in Georgia www.usatoday.com/...
History of racist fetishizing of Asian women a factor in Atlanta shootings, experts say… https://news.yahoo.com/racism-sexism-must-considered-atlanta-230202856.html
Fetishized, sexualized and marginalized, Asian women are uniquely vulnerable to violence… https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/us/asian-women-misogyny-spa-shootings-trnd/index.html