Editor’s Note: Adeline Chen is a features producer for CNN International. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinion at CNN.
On Tuesday night, a good friend and fellow journalist texted me as reports were coming out of a string of spa shootings across the metro Atlanta area. My first thought was, I really hope this isn’t targeting Asian-run spas.
To some, it might seem to be a knee-jerk assessment. For me, given the way tension, suspicion and hate have unfolded for Asian Americans like me and those of Asian descent across the globe during this pandemic, it was instinct.
As information about the spa shooting trickled out, it was clear my gut was right. Six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. The Atlanta police have said that it’s too early in the investigation to determine that the shootings were a hate crime, but given the rise in anti-Asian American violence, it’s difficult not to draw a correlation.
This horrific violence is not the first nor sadly the last time I will have this foreboding gut reaction. Certainly not as the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic continue to rip through American life. While America has collectively suffered trauma from the coronavirus and can largely identify with the fear of contracting this invisible and deadly virus, Asian Americans have also shouldered a different worry as we continue to be scapegoated for the virus.
Knowing that hate is on the rise, with ignorance as its partner, it has become second nature to wonder if any of my labels – Asian American, journalist, woman, mother – will lead to someone directing verbal abuse or physical violence at me.
But in the last few years, the notable rise in racial tensions across America and anti-Asian attacks, has forced me to think more about the safety of my family.
The stabbing attack on a young Asian American family last summer in a Texas Sam’s Club hit home: my young mixed race daughter looks more like me than her White father. That could’ve been my story.
My dreams this past year of quarantine road tripping to meet my California-based parents in the middle of the country were put off for fear that something awful could happen to them while traveling through areas with smaller Asian American populations.
Instead, I road tripped through the American South in an RV with my husband, daughter and White mother-in-law, as the George Floyd protests erupted around the country.
And while on the surface, it might have seemed like a safe and socially distant trip, it felt anything but during this period of racial reckoning and a pandemic. I noticed my daughter and I were often the sole minorities in RV parks surrounded by flags and signs supporting then-President Donald Trump, who routinely called Covid-19 the “China Virus” or “Kung Flu.”
I don’t have to go far to face harsh truths. I’ve seen the dirty looks and felt visible hostility traversing Atlanta where I live. Close friends have heard me describe the challenges that can arise from being married into a family where some members still accept the tired excuses of, “well, this person didn’t mean it,” “that’s just political jargon” and “these words won’t have real repercussions.”
Many people can afford to excuse the “crazy uncle” who says racist things, but in doing so, they allow unacceptable rhetoric that has real life harmful implications for those like myself, who cannot shed their skin – nor would want to.
The sting doesn’t fade when those extended relatives scream “cancel culture” over the publisher’s decision to stop distributing a few Dr. Seuss books with awful depictions of Asian and African Americans. To see and hear these comments is an erasure of who I am and my identity in this country, and I know I’m not alone in feeling this way.
And I’ll be the first to admit the mass media, my chosen career, still has a long way to go in resolving how Asian Americans and their respective cultures are represented or how racist acts and hate crimes are reported. While we have to report what officials say about an ongoing investigation, the media has a responsibility to ask challenging questions and not solely rely on police reporting to lead the news coverage.
We have seen officials being unreliable, not giving the entire story and using language that paints a different picture of suspects depending on their race and ethnicity.
On Wednesday, during a press conference, a police captain said that the Atlanta shooting suspect, who is White, “was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope,” and “Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.”
It was dismissive and dehumanized the community victimized by this awful act.
For far too long, the media industry has skirted around honest truths, failing to provide space for those with lived experiences to contribute to the storytelling. We need to see and hear more of the stories that represent the deep diversity of life in the AAPI community – only in doing so will we influence how our society views Asian Americans.
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Anti-Asian sentiments and attacks are far from new in the US; incidents like the Page Act of 1875, Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII are parts of an evergrowing undercurrent running through America’s ocean of history. The erasure of this history must end. Now, there has been a new collective effort to push back against the hate instead of quietly accepting the harmful “model minority” myth that has made us sweep microaggressions, discrimination and violence under the rug.
As the mom of a daughter who will inevitably have to navigate through this world as a woman of Asian heritage, I am not going to stop fighting to use the voice I have as a journalist to make sure this world is ready to see her and treat her and all other Asian Americans with respect and dignity.
My hope is that she will one day live in a world that demands nothing less – and that she never has to experience the same gut instinct worry I had after hearing of the shootings.