On being an Asian American Woman in 2021

Bowl of Bitter Memories by Grace Hoover @hapahoover Artist Statement at the end of Blog - Used With Permission

It’s hard to explain what it felt like to be an Asian American woman in 2021. TLDR- It fucked me up and I don’t feel the same.

Vichar Ratanapakdee

There was the constant trauma and inundation of violence being done to Asian elders. The video of 84 year old Vichar Ratanapakdee shoved so violently he died. A bloodied 74 year old Xiao Zhen Xie, who fought back after being violently and randomly punched in San Francisco. Videos of verbal assault on subway trains, Asians being targeted around Chinese New Years. It felt non-stop, and my body felt in a constant state of trauma. Many of us were raised by our grandparents and it felt uniquely traumatizing to see them handled with such hate. It was also perplexing, watching these attacks happen in cities with some of the longest history of Asian Americans, San Francisco? Oakland? This wasn’t happening in the midwest, or places with very few Asian Americans. It was happening in places where Asian American communities have existed for the longest.

No matter how I tried to wrap my brain around it, it didn’t make sense. And there was trying to address the anti-Black narratives that the media and public were spinning while trying to process by own grief and trauma. I could feel so much unprocessed trauma and grief surfacing around me, but there was hardly a moment to process before something else happened.

In my cohorts for Asian American women and non-binary folks we talked about the jarring awakening that many were experiencing. A lot of folks were realizing that the model minority myth was a tool of white supremacy and whiteness could just as suddenly move us from model minority to threat on a whim. It was a painful year of awakening for many. 

Xiao Zhen Xie

 Anti-Asian hate was everywhere. Women/folks in the cohorts shared about being chased by cars and yelled at in parks while with their children. I was shocked at how many women shared about being spit on in public places. Take a moment to process that. Being spit on as you go about your day.

2020 to 2021 was like a long collective scream that peaked on March 17th when a white man entered multiple Spas in the Atlanta area and murdered 8 people, mostly women of Asian descent. 

I read the headline on my phone while standing in my kitchen. I remember some sort of draining feeling running through my body, the strength left my legs and I dropped to the ground. It felt so deeply personal. This was about us. I sat on the kitchen floor stunned.  Soon after, texts poured in from other Asian women and from Black women friends.

Checking in.

Processing shock and grief.

Offers of food and support.

Victims of the Atlanta Shooting

I don’t really know how I had the presence of mind to jump on IG that night. But I knew with my whole body that this was violence against us, and I needed to reach out to my community so they would know that they weren’t making it up. And to protect them from the bullshit I knew was coming. I know how the media works.  I’ve watched whiteness white every time violence is done to Black folks. I knew that the media, police, and church would gaslight the fuck out of us. So I wanted to confirm that what we knew in our bodies was true. 

And sure enough the police, the media, and the church did another round of violence in their handling of the situation and gaslit the fuck out of us. 

When the shooter’s upbringing in conservative Christian spaces was made public, it felt like another ripping open and ripping apart. Because Christianity has made a safe space for all forms of violence against Asian American women. But we haven’t had a collective space to name it, grieve it, call it out, hold it accountable, and liberate each other. 

 I work with Asian American women a lot, and after listening to hundreds of us share story and experiences, here’s the common thread. Nobody listens to us and nobody asks for our opinion.  Not really. Nobody is interested in our stories, our trauma, our lived experience, our wisdom. White spaces love a competent, dutiful, obedient Asian woman. Racial justice spaces barely acknowledge we exist and often don’t know what to do with us. White church spaces tokenize, silence, and erase. But oh, spaces led by Asian men, whether that be the immigrant church, Asian American churches, or Asian American men leading white Christian spaces- nobody enacts patriarchal violence onto us like our brothers.

March 17th felt like a brutal reckoning. There is no place that is FOR us, no space that sees us and holds us. In fact, the church has been one of the greatest perpetrators of violence against us. And we knew that come Sunday, there would be no consolation for us from white pastors or Asian pastors. The grief, the disruption, the confusion was overwhelming. In my cohorts all we did was hold space for each other and grieve. I felt grateful to be surrounded by Asian folks in that moment, and exhausted, and sad.

The Sunday after the shooting I and several other women hosted a gathering called Collective Witness- a space for Asian American women/folks to grief and process and feel seen. It was holy ground. We didn’t post anything publicly, because it didn’t feel safe. But the invitation was passed from woman to woman, person to person. Somehow we ended up with hundreds of women gathered together online. Truly sacred. Full of so much grief, but also the hope of having a place for us.

This spa shooting also distilled the never ending violence of being hyper sexualized as Asian American women. The overlap with Christianity created a breaking point.  I kept coming back to the feeling of a collective scream.

No place is for us.

No place is safe for us.

And nobody, including us, is listening to us.

Christian Asian American women are so attune to others wants, desires, expectations, and needs, we hardly know how to listen to ourselves and our own voices , even when we are screaming. 

February 2021- Vigil Against Asian Elder Violence at Oakland’s Madison Square Park

I found solidarity in women deeply committed to the work of liberation. I met several women I had only known online at a rally protesting violence against our elders in Oakland’s Chinatown. For the rest of the year we would check on one another and send messages of love and care. Bonded by the shared experience of violence and holding one another’s hearts with tenderness and understanding. 

At some point during 2021 my husband and I had to have a heart to heart. I remember taking a walk together and trying to explain. “I don’t think you’re hearing me. It’s not that I’m tired. It’s that I’m not the same. I can’t do the things I used to do and be in the spaces I used to be in. I can not put my body in white spaces the same way that I used to.” 

More and more women in my cohorts were trying to articulate the tension they were having with white husbands who were unsure what to do with wives who were changing their relationship with whiteness. 

It was a year of non stop grief, trauma, and disruption.

And yet, at the same time I saw the brilliance and beauty of Asian American women in a way I feel few people get to see. 

Melanie- a queer Asian American woman teacher in Texas, read that again, Queer Asian American woman in freaking Texas, has become a safe haven for the queer kids in her school. She has put so much of her resources towards buying books and creating resources that are healing and liberative to her gaybies. 

I’ve lost count of the Asian American and Asian Canadian moms who are standing up for their queer and trans kids. Mother’s cutting off ties to churches who would do violence to their children, attending and creating support groups for parents of trans kids, joining my cohorts to try and get more language to support their children. Asian American Christian moms who didn’t think twice about loving and embracing their queer and trans children.  Meet one of those moms in this conversation.

Hearing the tender confession of Asian American women in their thirties and forties feeling safe enough to name that they are queer and bring the fullness of who they are into community. 

Women choosing divorce over staying in marriages with men who can not hold their queerness or their Asianess or both. 

Marcia, a doctor who was talking about the power of working mom’s and then casually mentioned that she had helped oversee all the contact tracing in New York City. All of us on the zoom stopped talking for a while as we processed that data point. And then we made a lot of jokes about how there was no way a white guy would have let us go weeks without letting us know that. They would have humble bragged that into their introduction.

From @Letters_From_Rahab IG page

I was following the @Letters_From_Rahab IG page and being so moved by the stories of the victims sharing their experience of church trauma in a Korean church. And then meeting Sarah in one of my cohorts and realizing that she was part of the team of women helping run the page. She was holding space for so many others, while pursuing her own healing and liberation.

I feel like I have such an amazing front row seat to the diversity, brilliance, and creativity of us. While the culture at large still barely registers our existence. I have a front row seat to the exhaustion and fatigue of Asian women, and their desire for a place where they can deeply rest without being judged, meeting the needs of others, or serving. I have a front row seat to the grief and trauma that so many of us are holding, with so few places to process.

Over the course of 2021 i have come to love us more than I ever have. I love myself as a Korean American woman more than I ever have. And I love Asian American women more than I ever have. But I feel that our collective trajectory is unclear. I see some women slipping back, being swallowed up into family expectations, patriarchal trauma, duty to everyone. I see some women letting their rage and grief transform them into something else, transform us into something else. To be an Asian American woman is to be part of a collective. But my hope is that we aren’t going to accept the collective as it has been dictated to us. That we, together, will liberate each other, ourselves, our communities, and imagine a way towards deeper wholeness for all of us. 

I’m learning. 

I’m watching. 

Maybe most importantly I am trying to listen to us. 

I know my experience and reflections are just a tiny piece of who we are. But I speak, so that my sisters will hear me, hear themselves, hear what’s missing, and add to the collective witness. 

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Artist Statement By Grace Hoover

“Bowl of Bitter Memories”is a painting I worked on upon coming back from sabbatical last fall. It’s a deeply personal reflection of what it felt for me to be an Asian American woman/mother/daughter during 2020-2021, during which we bore witness to much pain and grief as our elders were subjected to violent attacks, as our people were told to “go the f@$k back to where we came from,” as my sisters were slaughtered, my siblings worked to exhaustion in the ICU and ER caring for the dying, as my children were separated from their friends and family and teachers and support systems, as our restaurants shut down, as our viewpoints became more worthy than our personhood, and as we collectively forgot what it is to love and be loved. Sometimes, the only thing that helps us heal and move past pain is beauty. I’m grateful for yet another year and ever hopeful humanity will run towards restoration. But every now and then, I just need to sit with the grief. And beauty helps.