CONTRIBUTION: Remembering lives lost in the recent tragedy in Atlanta

REMEMBERING LIVES LOST IN THE RECENT TRAGEDY IN ATLANTA

Shreerekha Subramanian

Department Chair of Liberal Arts

Hyun Jung Grant made the best Kim Chi stew according to her son. Xiaojie Emily Tan lived for her children and worked 12-hour days to provide for them. Delaina Ashley Yaun leaves behind a teenage son, infant daughter and brand-new spouse, Mario Gonzalez, who has survived with some injuries. Paul Andre Michels, a handyman at one of the spas, served in the army and grew up in Detroit in a large family. Yong Ae Yue, 63, who immigrated from Korea in the 1970s, was really glad to be getting back to work in the spa after pandemic-related shutdowns. Suncha Kim, 69, another Korean expatriate, loved to line dance. Soon Chung Park, 74, who spent most of her life in the New York metro area, was so healthy her family betted on her waltzing happily to one hundred. Daoyou Feng was quiet and kind. Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, who immigrated from Guatemala and brought his wife and child a few years back, was shot in the forehead, lungs, and stomach as he stopped in at a business next door to send money home.

In the Atlanta tragedy that wrought infinite sorrow and loss in the lives of workers at three spas on March 16, we have the sudden annihilation of human beings with dreams, desires, and visions, human beings who are most often left in the shadows of American mainstream. These are working class and working poor Americans, nearly all migrants, mostly all women, and absolutely all, first and foremost, human beings. In coming to America but shunted to the hidden economy of massage parlors that have come to stand as shorthand for sex work, these Asian American women continued a narrative that began in the nineteenth century when Chinese women were first brought over to provide company for the Chinese migrants working the railroads and mines. In the past year of pandemic-related pressures faced by global shutdowns, Asian American community, especially women in the Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese diasporas suffered over 3800 cases of harassment, assault, and race-based vitriol. In the light of important work brought forth by the activists, scholars, and people leading Black Lives Matter, we are perhaps now more than ever before primed to see the vagaries of injustice and the costs of marginalization suffered by the black, brown, the indigenous and othered people in the Americas. The violence is long standing and historically entrenched but each time a new tragedy unfolds, it cuts us anew, and leaves us scrambling for words, or more simply, an escape out of the darkness.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us in the African American Policy Forum, “For Asian Americans, and Asian-American women in particular, the bullets that ended the lives of so many in Georgia were the endpoint of a cultural frame that makes them vulnerable to racist, sexualized violence. An intersectional frame allows us to surface Asian massage workers’ distinct vulnerability to violence and exploitation from non-state perpetrators as well as their criminalization at the hands of repressive laws and policing.” Asian American woman, long subjected to stereotypes as the passive abject figure who swallows patriarchy without complaint or the painted fetishized geisha figure, a distorted sign of female desire, every iteration of her is an essentialist subjection to silence. While one might list the categorical erasures of Asian Americans through the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) or Japanese Internment camps (1942-45) or the Vincent Chin Case (1983), what is often omitted is the nature of gendered violence practiced specifically upon the bodies left out of American dreaming. We need to read and absorb the ruminations of Asian American writers and thinkers like Jiayang Fan, Gish Jen, Mari Matsuda, Jennifer Hope Choi, Claudine Ko, just to name a short list of those mourning publicly, or follow Assemblywoman You-Line Niou in NYC on social media, or listen to the stories of students, friends, and colleagues who are at the receiving end of so much recent race-based vitriol. We need to attend to the violence endemic in our culture, public sphere, and imaginaries, in the damage left by monikers of model minority attributed to entire people whose stories of class, race, nationality, language, and migrant narratives should coalesce around their humanity rather than a collective amnesia that condemns many to a permanent exile, disposable lives that are ready to labor but otherwise left forgotten or better yet, invisible, illegible, inscrutable.

Nothing can suffice. We grapple and try to make sense of Sandy Hook and Santa Fe or Orlando and El Paso and when we fail to do so, we look away or try to stop taking in the media buzz around so much horror, grief, loss. However, as faculty who take some pride in doing the heavy lifting of helping form the well-rounded twenty-first century thinkers, those who will lead the way in empathy and kindness, and reaching across borders to halt ideological and material projects of violence, perhaps we are the ones who need to engage in discussions on how a society grapples with loss? Who is mourned? For how long? Whose bodies count. And who is forgotten? And in the event of cataclysms like the one in Boulder, Colorado, how not to amp up the hatred of the other that is deeply structured into the American discursive order of white supremacy.

It is all right to be still in grief; it is all right to move forward into the light; as one of the sons of the women who were murdered shared, he no longer has the privilege to remain locked in grief; for the sake of his younger sibling and the mother who sacrificed it all for them, he has to stay positive and continue her dedicated path towards joy. For the rest of us, who can afford to mull and meditate, it is a good time to stand in solidarity, to critically interrogate these spates of violence, and alongside, the violent systems and ideologies that work in tandem to produce a loop of loss for us all.

Also published on Medium.