#StopAsianHate

Illustration by mailinhstudio

Last Tuesday, a white gunman in Atlanta, Georgia targeted Asian-owned businesses and killed 8 victims, 6 of whom were Asian women. The sadness of this tragedy has been sitting heavy in my body throughout the week, especially after months of reporting (mostly in Asian-centred media and resources, rarely in mainstream media) about anti-Asian racism during the pandemic. I've been retweeting and sharing information in between bouts of crying on the couch since the shooting. At the same time, I've been reluctant to speak about my own experiences until now. The instinct to always be the model minority, to brush things off and keep my head down and quietly succeed, runs strong.

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Before I begin, I need to lay out some context. My parents immigrated from Guangdong, China to Canada in the early 1980s. Like many immigrants, they didn't know English upon arrival and they immediately threw themselves into working as hard as possible to make a living in a strange land. Over the years, my dad worked 7 days a week as a contractor (he "cut back" to 6 when he got older), while my mom struggled with debilitating health problems as she raised 2 young children. The opportunity to learn English dwindled in the face of everyday life. That's why when I started kindergarten, I didn't speak a word of English and I spent the next 3 years in ESL.

Once I emerged from ESL though, something clicked. The English language became easy. I still have a vivid memory of my teacher in grades 3 and 4 lending me her daughter's old Baby-Sitters Club novels and how they became English textbooks, in a way. I studied the simple sentences on a meta level, deducing the rules of punctuation and basic grammar and storytelling, looking closely at how words were spelled. I began to write my own stories. By the time I was in grades 5, 6, and 7, my teachers declared that I was a gifted writer. I continued to excel in high school; my best subject was English and my teachers were encouraging, sensitive, and kind. I earned a full scholarship to UBC where I double-majored in English literature and international relations. These days, I work in software and I make a comfortable living distilling complex concepts and procedures into simple, easy-to-consume content.

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I'm giving you all these details because I realize that, compared to the victims in Atlanta, I come from a lot of privilege. My parents' story is the typical model minority immigrant success story. ("They came here with nothing, and now they have a house and cars, and their kids are college graduates, all because they worked hard.") I was educated here. I have a better-than-average command of the English language. I grew up in a multicultural city with a large Asian population, surrounded by people who lived similar experiences. I have a white-collar job. I live in a comfortable bubble. I've never had racial slurs yelled at me. And even then, I've had my brushes with anti-Asian racism and "Did that just really happen?" moments of microaggression. Many of these experiences are rooted in the fact that I excel in an area not stereotypically regarded as "Asian."

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The most common microaggressions I get are of the "You speak English so well!" and "Where are you REALLY from?" variety. The last time "You speak English so well!" happened was 4 years ago, when my husband and I were traveling in Italy. We were on a train going from Cinque Terre to Rome and we'd struck up a conversation with a white couple from Port Coquitlam of all places. We immediately bonded over our shared Vancouver roots and the fact that it was also their first time in Italy. The wife thought she was paying me a compliment when she said, "If I close my eyes, you sound like you could be a California blonde." Not knowing how to respond in the moment, I smiled awkwardly.

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In grade 9, I was inexplicably placed in remedial English classes. My teacher at the time said, "I don't know why you were selected." Details gradually emerged from the rumour mill. The school administration had allegedly over-reported the number of ESL students to get more funding. When called upon to prove the money was being used for its intended purpose, they pulled up old student records and stuck anyone who had ever been in ESL in a one-time series of 3 remedial English classes. The fact that I was literally at the top of my class didn't mean anything—I couldn't get an exemption. It was humiliating and a complete waste of time.

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The mother of an ex-boyfriend once said to my face that being a "double minority" (Asian and a woman) helped give me an edge in getting my scholarship. I remember at the time being completely frozen and thinking "Did she really say that?"—especially since she had always been very warm towards me. Now I think about this incident and contrast it with the grade 9 memory, and I want to laugh at the absurdity of it all. None of my excellent work counted because I was ESL...but somehow I had it easier because I was Asian and a woman. That's some model minority bullshit right there.

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In my last year of university, I took a Canadian Lit class with a tenured white male professor, Richard Cavell. I'd put my hand up to contribute something to an in-class discussion—I can't remember the exact text we were discussing, but I used the word "fossilized." This man didn't know who I was, or that I was on full scholarship and had been nominated for English department awards several times (and won once), or that I had placed in a campus-wide poetry contest in my freshman year. He eyed me coldly in a way he never did with the white students and said, "'Fossilized' is a good word. Is it yours?" God forbid someone who looked like me could possibly have smart, insightful things to say on a subject like English literature. All of my accomplishments and excellent work were for naught. This felt like grade 9 all over again.

Later in the term, he withheld my grade on an assignment (after forgetting that he'd agreed I could do an alternate assignment I felt more passionate about), and insinuated that I had plagiarized. I had submitted original work and had not plagiarized at all. The whole experience was deeply distressful. I remember being in tears for several weeks and speaking with instructors whose classes I'd aced and asking if they'd be character references if worse came to worst. I learned through speaking with others in the English department that my experience was not isolated (he had a history of incidents with POC). At the same time, his tenure meant nothing would happen to him, and as a scholarship student with limited resources, I didn't feel like I had any recourse. Besides, I was this close to graduating and I had a job lined up. So I did the model minority thing and kept my head down and got on with it, jumping through his stupid face- and ego-saving hoops.

The incident tainted what was otherwise an amazing undergrad experience at UBC and put me off academia for a long time. Ironically, the paper I turned in was on Disappearing Moon Cafe by Sky Lee, which Cavell had excerpted for our syllabus. This white man had essentially bullied an Asian-Canadian student while teaching an Asian-Canadian text. How fucked up is that? [EDITED TO ADD: I Googled the guy out of curiosity while writing this post, and yep, he's still a jerk.]

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At the beginning of the pandemic, I was speaking with a white woman and saying how I was nervous about going out by myself and taking the SkyTrain on my own because of the increasing frequency of anti-Asian racist incidents in Vancouver. She was quick to reassure me that she herself had never seen anything and always felt safe on the SkyTrain, and the cars were practically empty when she took it. This is someone who has always been kind to me, and I think she meant well and wanted to reassure me, but the comment felt dismissive of my (sadly valid) fears at the same time. A while after that, I found out someone I was close to had been the victim of an anti-Asian assault.

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As hurtful as these experiences could be, at least I have the privilege of being fluent in English. I have the comfort of knowing I can bend this language to my will, wield it like a sword or a scalpel when I need my words to cut deeply. I can't imagine what my parents had to go through, the number of times they've had "Speak English" or "Learn English, you're in Canada" comments lobbed at them.

I used to feel shame and embarassment when I'd have to translate for my parents as a young kid: letters from the government, interactions at the passport office, getting a refund from the store. They, in turn, were impatient with my shyness. "Why would you be shy?" my mom demanded. "You can speak English and you have a voice. Use it."

Then there were the times I wished I could be there to translate and defend but I wasn't. When I was a teenager, my dad got into a fender bender with a white guy who was in the wrong. Rather than admit he was at fault, he yelled at my dad and bullied his way into looking at my dad's insurance papers so he could get his version of the story in first. My dad was tongue-tied with rage and his lack of fluency—all he could do was auto-dial me on his phone and I listened to the whole exchange, powerless to do anything.

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I've noticed a tendency in white rhetoric to recoil from the word "racist," as though that is the most hurtful and offensive thing you can accuse a person of being. The immediate, almost Pavlovian response is "I'm not racist." And that's it, the discussion is shut down. Well, alright then. What if I didn't use the word "racist" and used other words instead? Words like thoughtless, careless, rude, insensitive, discriminatory, biased, reckless, violent? Would you listen then? Because these words apply too. I've spent my life keeping my head down and not causing trouble, swallowing my feelings. These things all happened to me, and as I keep reiterating in this post, I am a relatively privileged Asian-Canadian living in a multicultural city. I can guarantee that if you talk to your Asian friends, they will have similar stories, if not more painful. Please listen. Don't shut down. Reflect on how you can do better.