“Not me”
That’s the first thing I thought when I heard that 8 people had been killed by a gunman attacking massage spas in Atlanta.
6 Asian-American females were murdered.
I am an Asian-American female.
But still, I thought “not me'.”
They’re all the way over there, in Atlanta.
They’re probably Chinese or Vietnamese… whoever owns those cheap, tacky massage parlors. They probably don’t speak English. They probably weren’t born here.
And then I started to read more about the Asian-American women who had been murdered.
Xiaojie Tan, 49
Daoyou Feng, 44
Julie Park
Hyeon Jeong Park
Pak Ho
Cam-Thanh Tat
Four of the women were Korean. Maybe they were around my age…
And it slowly sunk in, that thought that I had been pushing away.
“Yes, me. It could have been me.”
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My name is Shinah Chang. I am 39 years old. I am Korean-American.
And I am about the modeliest of all the model minority myths that exist here in the U.S.
My parents came from Korea with almost nothing, and built up a prosperous business. They put their heads down and worked, hired employees, quietly paid their taxes, voted but never spoke out about racism or anti-Asian sentiments, even when Los Angeles’ Koreatown went up in flames during the Rodney King riots.
They raised their children to be model students: quiet, diligent, always knowing the answer but never bragging about it. Obedient, rule-abiding, and above all, never causing trouble.
I grew up in a neighborhood filled with other Korean-Americans. We went to Korean grocery stores, hair salons, and banks. We hired Korean-American plumbers, contractors, and gardeners.
I went to school surrounded by other Asian Americans.
Yes, I was good at math. I was good at everything else, too. I went to Harvard University and surrounded myself with Asian-American friends. After college, I moved to Japan and blended in there as well. Then, NYU for law school.
When I started working in a big corporate law firm in Manhattan, I shared an office with another Korean-American woman. Petite like me, with the same haircut and quiet, hardworking demeanor. Her name was Eunice Chang. People in the law firm kept confusing us for each other.
Even after I quit law in 2013 and started a calligraphy business, I saw plenty of other Asian-American women around me in the calligraphy community.
What’s the point of all this? I’ve gone my entire life never really feeling like a downtrodden minority.
In fact, my petite Asian woman-ness has been an advantage. People assume I’m harmless. I rarely get traffic tickets. I can approach strangers without putting them on edge. I am non-threatening and inoffensive.
But, deep down, I knew that all those perks came with weights attached. You can’t accept the “model” part of the model minority myth without also taking the “minority”.
So I brushed it off when people would ask me, “No, where are you REALLY from?”
…When I heard “love me long time” used in pop songs.
….When Gwen Stefani paraded around with a pack of “Harajuku Girls” in the early 2000s.
….When Trang Pak was a joke in Mean Girls, not because she was a funny character, but because she was an easy, hyper-sexualized, “me so horny” Asian woman stereotype.
…Whenever I heard jokes about small Asian vaginas, or slanty Asian eyes, or our “ching chong ding dong” language.
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When I was in law school, I was asked to be the co-president of the Asian American Pacific Islanders Law Students Association (APALSA). No one else wanted the job, so I did it, but I honestly didn’t even know why this group had to exist. I was content to just ignore our Asian-ness and focus on how we fit in.
One time, a miniature scandal erupted when a law student accidentally sent a private email to the entire student body: “Too bad we don’t have more Asians here. Then they could hack into the website for us.”
It seemed pretty harmless to me. Sure, someone was making a gross generalization about Asian-Americans and how we were good at math and math-adjacent things like computer programming.
But APALSA wanted to put out a statement calling out the casual stereotyping and underlying racism… so I crafted a letter and posted it to the student body.
A lot of our fellow students thought we were over-reacting.
“It’s just a harmless stereotype…”
“She didn’t mean anything bad…”
“Haven’t you heard that Avenue Q song, ‘Everyone’s a little bit racist’?….”
But here’s what’s insidious about “harmless” stereotypes like that.
Inside your head, deep in the part of your brain that creates shortcuts to get you through life, it turns a group of human beings into a “THEM.”
THEY are good at math…
THEY are hard-working, well-behaved model minorities…
THEY are better at school than us…
THEY are not quite like us…
THEY eat the craziest foods…
THEY are a bit exotic…
THEY are not US
THEY are NOT ME
And turning a group of human beings into a “THEM”, well that’s the first step needed before you can start doing terrible things to them.
Once someone is in an “out-group” (as opposed to your “in-group”), they automatically become less human. They are seen as “others”. They are more easily seen as a threat.
It’s something we do naturally as humans. We identify “in-groups” and “out-groups” all the time. Sometimes it’s me and my family against everyone else. Sometimes, it’s me and my sister against our parents. Sometimes it’s me and my country against the world.
Sometimes it’s me and people who look like me against those Asians that speak a funny language and eat weird foods and operate shady massage parlors and maybe brought coronavirus into the world…
Telling me I have beautiful Asian eyes may not seem like the same problem as a 21-year-old man walking into an Asian spa and shooting all the people inside.
But it is.
——————
"He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate," said Capt Jay Baker, "…yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."
A lot of people criticized Capt Baker for this. For appearing to humanize the murderer more than his victims. For implying that the murders were a crime based on a sex addiction, and not a hate crime based on race.
But I also saw plenty of comments like this:
“This has very little to do with race and more to do with the fact the kid became addicted to getting jerked off and then took it out on the people who helped him obtain this addiction.” - Commenter on an IGTV posted by Trevor Noah of @thedailyshow.
Why are people like this so quick to erase race from the picture?
My true life experience is that, for Asian-American women in this country, sex and race are inextricably intertwined.
I am under 5’ tall. I have tiny feet and dark eyes and high cheekbones and shiny black hair.
And, as Amy Schumer put it in one of her comedy specials, we Asian chicks have “the smallest vaginas in the game.”
There’s a whole history in this country of Asian women being portrayed as either strong, deceitful, domineering “Dragon Ladies” or demure, submissive, delicate “Madame Butterflies” (or “China dolls” or “Geishas”).
I cannot think about my own sexuality and attractiveness without that stereotype bleeding in. It’s like I’m trying to paint on a canvas that has already been primed with a dark color… I try to establish my own identity as a sexual being, but whatever I paint goes over that dark layer underneath. Sometimes the color I paint on top doesn’t show. Sometimes it blends with the layer beneath. Sometimes it clashes in a startling way. But it’s never SEPARATE from the pop-culture stereotype of Asian women that I grew up with.
So when people insist that this fetishized image of Asian women had “very little to do” with why a 21-year-old man chose to shoot up three Asian-owned spas, in different areas of Atlanta…. I find it very hard to believe them.
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I’ve never considered myself an activist, or even particularly political. All I know is my own experience, what I’ve studied about human psychology and sociology in college, and the stories I’ve heard from the many Asian and Asian-American women I’ve encountered in my life.
I’m not asking you to become an activist either.
I’m just asking that, next time you hear something that makes you react with, “Not me”… stop.
Catch yourself.
Question whether that’s really true.
Because what we all want more of in this world is to be loved and accepted for exactly who we are. And that only comes from understanding that we’re more alike than we are different. We’re all made of the same stuff - the more I understand how you ARE me, the more understanding, love, and acceptance there is.
So, fight the “not me” mentality, even though it’s hard.
Because if that could have been ME, shot dead at my place of work by someone who saw me as “not them”… then one day, it could be you too.