Contradictions and Throughlines: A Response to Atlanta and the Week that Followed, Love Letters to Myself
Content warnings: gun violence, sexual violence, structural racism, white supremacy, toxic masculinity
I.
Before all else, I invite you to read the statement recently released by Red Canary Song: a grassroots collective of Asian & migrant sex workers based in Flushing, NY, organizing transnationally. Radical Healing from State and Community Violence: Mourning with Asian Massage Workers in the Americas.
II.
The haircut I was gifted during the pandemic was the first time in my life that my hair was not cut by Asian hands. Since I was 13, my mom has taken me to Flushing, Queens, NY to see Alan, a quirky man from Hong Kong who has never been afraid to take one look at my bangs and lovingly scold me for having obviously made an in-between-formal-haircuts-remedial-attempt in my own bathroom mirror. When combing through my waist long hair, he would always joke, 「太久沒有回來。不像話了。」You waited too long to come back. Look at this mess now. Alan always asked me how my sister was doing. (He, too, had been her sole hair cutter until she moved to the West Coast 10 years ago). Alan was the one who did my hair for my senior prom.
I always looked forward to the extremely pleasurable pre-haircut scalp wash/massage from one of the parlor assistants. As I would climb into the reclining chair and lift my hair for the plastic cloth to be draped around my neck, my habit had always been to bow my head and to try to find the right words to thank my「阿姨 auntie」 or「小姊 young big sister」.
I always loved closing my eyes and feeling my aunties run their fingers through my hair. More times than not, they would exclaim, 「哇！這麼多頭髮！」Wow, so much hair! and in the back of the parlor, with my eyes closed, I consistently attempted smalltalk in broken Mandarin, wanting desperately to have a sense of humor in my mother’s tongue.
The rituals to Flushing always ended by accompanying my mom to the market, where she would buy discounted vegetables in bulk for herself and her friends. I loved being enveloped by the crowded aisles of infinite dried noodle selections, the cardboard on the floor covered in ice from the fish counter, the yelling of orders in Mandarin, Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Hokkien, Shanghainese, Mongolian, threads of Korean. For the briefest of moments, I could touch what it was to look like everyone around me. And it wasn’t until I opened my mouth to speak that I would give myself away.
After the market, my mom and I would drive over the Whitestone Bridge and return home to the quiet suburbs to unload our groceries.
Before Alan and my parlor aunties, the only hands that touched my hair belonged to my mother.
III.
Last Tuesday night, I briefly scrolled through my inbox before going to bed. I skimmed the subject line of an email received at 9:14PM and gathered that too many lives had been lost in multiple massage parlors. Unable to emotionally process the details at that exact moment, I turned my phone off and fell asleep.
The next morning, I woke to the first string of texts sending love, shared rage and offers of support. Initially confused, it took me a few moments to piece together my hunches: “Oh god, we lost aunties last night, didn’t we?”
IV.
My rage against white supremacy haunts me in its fragmentedness, unable to land in any one clear place
I’m angry that yet another white man with a gun is afforded the privilege of being an individual person, able to represent no one else but himself
I’m angry that this country’s mediocre condolences fail to hold its wars accountable for playing such a catalytic role in the history of white sexual imperialism of the Asian femme body
I’m angry that the body I inhabit is seen only through a lens of labor, sex, and profit by the constructors of this country - that the white, male, sexual gaze has always been the sole determinant of whether or not Asian women were/are worthy or useful enough to enter the country
I’m angry that I believed for so. many. years. that my body inherently deserved to be disrespected, objectified, fetishized, hypersexualized, harmed
I’m angry that the media strategy - of centering Anti-Asian hate in this moment as a distraction from condemnation of all the manifestations of white supremacy- will fuel this country’s systematically-constructed myth that racial groups need to compete with one another for resources, airtime, and power within America. But we know the truth. The root of the violence last week in Atlanta is just another head of the same beast
This past week, white supremacy has made me feel anger and resentment towards myself, my own family and my most intimate relationships. It is toxically inescapable and infiltrates every aspect of how I think, speak, sing, play, joke, love, weep, work, exist.
This past week, I felt violated by white supremacy, at every layer of its pervasiveness.
V.
Flushing, NY has been considered “the Ellis Island” of migrant workers. Survivor Shandra Woworuntu, who founded the organization Mentari, theorized that a number of the massage workers killed in Atlanta might have started their professions in Flushing.
This morning, my Taiwanese mother taught me that while 「小姊 young big sister」is a form of familial endearment and respect in Taiwan, it has derogatory connotations in China, as it insinuates “a young woman who does sex work.”
VI.
Each day since last Tuesday has been a journey of contradictions and throughlines. I’ve needed to challenge myself to practice the seemingly impossible act of living multiple truths.
I feel affirmed in my visceral experiences of intersectional (gender- and race-based) violence for the first time in my entire life. YES, AND I know that media usages of the words “Asian,” “Asian-American” and “Woman” have violently erased the experiences and histories of so many of us who do not fit neatly into those conveniently oversimplified categories.
How can the media speak truth to gender violence without erasing our Trans, non-binary, gender-expansive siblings?
How can the media talk about US imperialism and honor the nuanced histories of our multi-racial, South Asian, South East Asian, Native Hawaiian, Middle Eastern/ South West Asian North African, Pacific Islander, East Asian siblings?
How can we (people of Asian descent) fight for ourselves without absolving ourselves from the very real manifestations of colorism, anti-blackness, anti-immigrant sentiment, classism, and gender violence within our own families?
This past week, I felt so deeply seen and cared for when receiving check-in texts from my beloved community. YES, AND I notice an urgency to say what I need to say within the next three days before my white friends move on to the next trendy social justice issue of the week.
I want to work towards a reclamation of my body and of my sexuality as an Asian femme by learning my histories. YES, AND I have a lot of work to do in acknowledging how my family’s upwardly-mobile migration story has afforded me the privilege of being able to choose when I do or do not want to engage with struggles of bodily autonomy, human trafficking, the nuance of choice, and sex work decriminalization for Asian migrant workers.
I want to believe that immigrants “are welcome here.” YES, AND I recognize that I am a transplant from New York who lives in a city that is being rapidly and violently gentrified by people from New York.
I feel many years of intergenerational trauma acknowledged in the dominant consciousness for the first time in my life. YES, AND I feel so angry that it took “going viral on social media” and being written about by (white, male-led) NPR and NYTimes for me and my loved ones to finally believe the authenticity of our accumulated pain.
VII.
Have I ever told you that my mother found out that she was pregnant with me at the same time she found out her father was dying? I asked her once how she had the strength to birth a child and usher her father through safe passage at the same time. Her response: “It was a lot like trying to build a roof over another person’s head while the roof above you is disintegrating.”
After I was born, my parents gave me two names. One of them familiar, palatable, easily digestible for the American tongue. The other, a sacred story that speaks to my family’s transcendent capacity for grace. In Chinese, my name is: 許以芃 (Xǔ Yǐ Péng), which roughly translated, means:
life energy will continue and flow through the seasons
I’ve spent my whole life thinking about the fact that I was created inside of a grieving body. In the way that pregnant mothers are taught to eat certain proteins so that their child’s bones become stronger, my very first cells were nourished by my mother’s experiences of deep loss.
How do we mourn our aunties and siblings with every corner of our rage
and still keep believing in the possibility of a different world?
Yes. And.
VIII.
I bow my head to my beloveds, who so lovingly challenged me to write and rewrite and rewrite again until I remembered my own story. Bz Zhāng 张迪, Zaneta Sykes, Alexander Nicolas, Yin Q, Cat Ramirez, Alexis Cannard, Candy Johnson, Sam Rise, Shelli Branscomb, Gabe Gordon, Claire Randall, the entire PAPA Organizing Committee, Amadee Braxton, Romana Lee-Akiyama, Jingyao Yu, and of course, my Mom, my Dad and my Big Sister.
Thank you.
我非常感謝
Photo by: Johanna Austin
taken during a performance of xoxo moongirl