On Tuesday night, while eating at a restaurant in Harlem with a friend—my first social dinner in months—I received a text: “Just holding you close in my heart tonight.” It was from a Taiwanese-American friend and New York State Assembly member, Yuh-Line Niou. The last time we texted was in the spring, to organize a virtual town hall addressing the repercussions of racism during the pandemic. When I received Yuh-Line’s message, I thought she was referring to an alarming uptick in anti-Asian crimes in recent days, and I wanted to tell her how strange I’d felt, hours earlier, when I’d requested that my friend drive from the southern tip of Manhattan, where he lived, all the way up to Harlem to meet me for dinner, rather than meeting each other midway. I’d texted him apologetically, explaining that I no longer felt safe travelling alone after dark. “The anti-Asian hate is real,” I wrote. My friend was gracious and accommodating, but in texting those words I’d felt anxious, and anxious about my anxiety: Was I surrendering to an ill-founded paranoia? I knew Yuh-Line would understand how I was feeling. What I would not know for hours was that her loving text was a response to the deadliest crime against Asians in the United States in recent memory: a killing spree in Atlanta that took the lives of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.
Earlier that day, as I was weighing the risks of going out after dark to see my friend, a twenty-one-year-old gunman named Robert Aaron Long drove to a strip mall in the northern Atlanta suburbs and entered Young’s Asian Massage parlor, where he killed four people, two of them Asian women. After leaving the massage parlor, Long shot a bystander multiple times before heading south, to the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Once there, he shot and killed four more Asian women, at a pair of spas situated across the street from each other. When he was apprehended, Long was en route to Florida, where he had planned to continue his shooting rampage.
The only thing worse than the feeling of paranoia is the sickening realization that it’s not paranoia after all. This past January, in San Francisco, an eighty-four-year-old Thai man died after being assaulted while on a walk; across the bay, in Oakland’s Chinatown, a seventy-five-year-old Asian man died after being assaulted and robbed. In both cases, law enforcement has been hesitant to connect the killings to racial bias, instead labelling them as incidents of “elder abuse.” Anti-Asian hate incidents—and hate crimes, more generally—have historically been underreported, but they appear to be on the rise in the U.S.: since last March, Stop A.A.P.I. Hate, a nonprofit organization that formed near the beginning of the pandemic to track discrimination against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, has received nearly thirty-eight hundred reports of incidents ranging from verbal harassment to physical assault. In a survey of several police departments, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, at California State University, San Bernardino, tallied a hundred and twenty-two anti-Asian hate crimes across sixteen American cities in 2020, up from forty-nine in 2019. This increase in anti-Asian violence leading up to the Atlanta killings is not an aberration but, rather, a culmination of systemic and cultural inequities exacerbated by the pandemic—a global calamity for which Asians throughout the world have been maligned as the culprits.
So far, police have been reluctant to label Long’s mass murder a hate crime, even though six of his victims were Asian. After Long was charged with eight counts of murder, on Wednesday, he told investigators that he did not have a racial motive. Captain Jay Baker, the spokesman for the sheriff’s office in Cherokee County, where the first round of shootings took place, described Long’s actions as the result of “a really bad day”—the kind of “fed up” acting out that one might use to characterize a blowup at a soccer practice. “He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction,” Baker said, adding that Long viewed the massage parlors “as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” It seems to escape Baker’s notice that a person willing to kill multiple people might not be the most perceptive authority about his own prejudices. (On Thursday night, it was announced that Baker had been removed as a spokesman on the case.)
A senseless massacre can be painfully clarifying about the state of a country. As the killing of George Floyd and countless other African-Americans have made clear, structural racism has become simultaneously mundane and pathological. The incendiary rhetoric of a racist former President combined with the desperation stoked by an unprecedented pandemic has underscored the precariousness of a minority’s provisional existence in the U.S. To live through this period as an Asian-American is to feel defenseless against a virus as well as a virulent strain of scapegoating. It is to feel trapped in an American tragedy while being denied the legitimacy of being an American.
Shortly after Donald Trump referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus” and the “kung flu,” I tweeted about the experience of being called “a Chinese bitch” outside my apartment while taking out the trash. These kinds of racialized incidents—of men mocking me while I spoke Chinese on the phone, of strangers making bets about my ethnicity on the subway—began occurring with such regularity that I no longer wanted to record them. But here’s one that’s been hard to forget: One day, last July, when I was walking home from the grocery store, a man accosted me. At first, I couldn’t hear him—I had headphones on, and was listening to a podcast on my phone—but his voice grew louder until I was forced to turn in his direction. He had a babyish face and undefined cheeks. In white sneakers, and with a backpack slung casually over one shoulder, he looked young, perhaps no older than Robert Aaron Long. For a second, I thought he was flagging me down to ask for directions. (Perhaps this was stupid of me, in the age of smartphones, but when a stranger insists on being acknowledged that is what I reflexively think.) Then he made a gesture with his hands in front of his chest, and grinned, licking his lips. I was wearing a brown tank top—it was a hot day—and I was carrying heavy bags of groceries, filled with fruits and vegetables and jugs of juice. Despite the man’s gesturing, I did not allow myself to slow my step or to dial down the volume on my phone. I refused to meet his eye again, though I did self-consciously adjust my outfit, as if it was the sweat-damped clothing on my body that had committed the wrong. The only thing I ever heard him say—he raised his voice, to make sure I heard—was “chin chong kung flu!” At this, I stopped and turned around. Strangers hurried past us on the wide city pavement. I raised my phone to take a photo of the man, and he posed for it, raising his hand in a thumbs-up sign, the self-satisfied grin never leaving his face. In the background of the picture, the early evening sun is still gleaming.
In the weeks and months since that moment, I’ve looked at the photo again, and the sidewalk scene has returned to me, overpowering me with reproach. I initially thought I’d snapped the picture to record the incident—to document the harassment as something real, and not my paranoid overreaction to an encounter—but now I can’t help but think that I was also determined to capture something else: the split second in which a smidgen of sexual interest transmutes into racist scorn. I want to locate that moment, rewind the clock and preëmpt its poison. I think about how I might have been able to appease the man in some way—to deflect or to sidestep him more expertly—so that his advance did not have a chance to turn malignant. But the exercise is a useless one. Misogyny and racism have never lived neatly in their separate categories; they ravage by mutually reinforcing a narrative of a dehumanized “other.” The bodies of Asian women, in particular, have long been objectified and abhorred, fetishized and exoticized. From the Page Act of 1875, which effectively prohibited Chinese women from immigrating to the U.S. (under the pretense that they could only be prostitutes), to the depictions onscreen and in pop culture of the deviant dragon lady, Asian women have been hypersexualized and then demonized for their projected hypersexuality. It is one of the perversities of powerlessness that those in power will pin their failings on you because you lack the power even to object.
In the days since the killings in Atlanta, we have begun to learn more about the shooter. A former roommate of Long’s, Tyler Bayless, has described Long’s deep religious faith (he grew up in a Southern Baptist church) as well as his inability to control his sexual desires, despite time spent at a treatment center and halfway house. Once, after Long had relapsed by visiting a spa parlor to have sex, Bayless recalled that his roommate had asked him to take a knife from him so that he wouldn’t hurt himself. “I’ll never forget him looking at me and saying, ‘I’m falling out of God’s grace,’ ” Bayless told the Times, adding that guilt and shame seemed to consume his roommate.
It is an unbearable irony how acquainted I am with the feeling of shame. Every time I am called a “chink” or hear a part of my body appraised by a stranger, I feel a familiar heat rising within me. In group texts, my Asian-American friends and I have expressed gratitude for masks and hats and bulky winter coats, which shield us from COVID-19 and the Northeast winter but also from our own Asian faces. We agonize about how best to protect our older, more vulnerable loved ones. We wonder if we should make contingency plans to evacuate elsewhere if the violence gets much worse. We worry if too steely a show of solidarity will slide into tribalism. We worry that our worry might make us weak.
The women Long killed may have been familiar with shame, too. One of his victims, Hyun Jung Grant, was a single parent who for years told her son that she worked at a “makeup parlor.” Grant might even have sympathized with Long, who is only two years younger than her son. What’s shameful is that Long could not bring himself to show any sympathy for her.
