I cannot begin to say
In the late morning yesterday, steeped in the news and furiously scrolling through Twitter in bed, sleep deprived and vacillating between anger, frustration and hopelessness I thought about dads. My dad, who never had the emotional vocabulary in any language to describe the specific identity crisis that would plague him all his life. The dad I interviewed last week, who works with political asylum seekers from Hong Kong and who feels conflicted about how he encouraged his daughter to fully assimilate in Canadian culture - as if she had any choice otherwise.
These were just thoughts. I’m not trying to uphold the patriarchy here. I’m just saying that in many families, mine and others, it’s the father who claims responsibility for the decisions that end up shaping the lives of their family members, and that these decisions always lead to sacrificing a part of yourself when you live in a society that values you solely for your proximity to whiteness.
Of course, we don’t know what kind of relationships these women had with their fathers, or who they were and what led them to America. We don’t actually know anything about them. We can postulate with some confidence that they were sex workers. We can speculate that by privileged standards, their lives were not ideal, made difficult every day because of the work that they do.
Beyond that, we simply don’t know, because theirs are the kinds of stories that nobody gives a shit about until they become part of a headline that sets off a tumult across the Western world - a headline that will not even be about them. But we’ll know soon enough. Their stories will be mined for what they signify in relation to a country and a moment in history in which these events are constantly happening, and thus have always been inevitable.
This is the point that I’ve felt like the expression “It could happen to anyone” has become “It will happen to you”. It is already happening, with varying degrees of violence. Someone has thought about killing you. The you is irrelevant to the equation. The man who walked into those salons was not thinking about anyone specific.
I don’t know what it’s like to be any of those women. There are intersectional complexities here that I could not possibly know how to begin to process. The work they did left them more vulnerable in a system already designed to oppress them.
But I know what it’s like to be an object of fetishization. I know what it’s like to be hoisted on a drunk middle-aged man’s shoulder for a photo op and have my ass squeezed through my shorts in front of my smiling colleagues and friends, and to laugh it off and keep my mouth shut about it. I know how to spot an Asian fetishist from across a crowded bar by the chill down my spine from their gaze. I know the cold stare of someone who is looking at me but does not see me as their eyes scan for the next white person in the room. I know what it’s like to be invisible, to lean into that invisibility, and giggle at the tired jokes, pass uncomfortable glances to a friend after a shady comment but stay quiet, not even out of fear or anything tangible but out of habit. I know this better than anyone.
And what the fuck is all of this for anyway? What is the point when someone can go on a killing spree and murder eight people, six Asian women, and walk out alive, not say anything about the people who were shot and have the police and the media on his side? What is the point of working so hard every day, getting your pronunciations right, eating your scent-free sandwiches, getting into good schools, staying quiet until asked a question directly, satisfying your bosses, getting along with your coworkers, sipping your bougie cocktails silently, swallowing your crappy paycheck? What’s the point of writing all those personal essays, sharing those music videos, giving people your Asian seal of approval on a bowl of noodles? What is the point of breaking a so-called bamboo ceiling? Maybe there is no fucking ceiling at all, just a floor running red with the blood of our sisters and elders like lava. Don’t touch it; that’s how you lose the game.
What’s the point when at the end of the day, someone who looks like you can be assaulted on the street or spat at or shot dead in their workplace just because they look like you?
I don’t speak up. Maybe I should more. People think I’m shy, or that I’m submissive, that’s fine. Often I’m quiet because I’m bored. What’s the point of speaking? I simply have no words. I will not be convinced that things can change. These days I’m quiet because my rage is not always coherent.