Minor Feelings, and this Asian American's reckoning

It's been a month, y'all.

I have struggled with this particular blog post for some time. I hesitate to post it because it feels so deeply personal. My words keep getting stuck and tangled. But it doesn't feel right to gloss over the conversations happening on a national level.

News has been exhausting. My heart doesn't know how to absorb all this grief and anger at once. Every day we are confronted with another life lost too early. Every day my heart aches for the shine of a brilliant life, snuffed out too soon at the hands of cruelty and racism. The exhaustion and grief, though, settled in a new, disturbingly close way this month.

Over the past year, I've been aware of anti-Asian sentiment in America. It's been hard to ignore. With the Trump-fueled rhetoric of "China virus" and "Kung-flu", the inception of the global pandemic has been squarely blamed on a single nation.

I don't think I'll soon forget when I went to get lunch with my family over the summer. We were in San Jose and chose to sit outside, away from crowds, to eat our lunch. A man holding his bicycle passed us and, immediately after making eye contact with me, loudly called us "coronavirus motherfuckers" and told us to "go back to China" in his next breath.

For reference, my family is Korean.

Over the past few months, anti-Asian sentiment has been increasingly publicized on the national news. We all know the videos I'm talking about: elderly people, mainly of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent, being targeted as victims of violence. In every video I've seen, the victim was attacked without provocation.

Then, the shootings in Atlanta happened, and my awareness of who I was and how I lived in America came crumbling down on top of me.

I was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. Other than the brief year I lived in Korea to teach English overseas, I have never lived anywhere other than my home state of California. America is my home. But it never occurred to me how strongly some people could disagree.

The shootings in Atlanta grabbed me by my shoulders, twisted me around, and sat me down in front of a very painful picture. The Asian American experience suddenly felt like a fight that I didn't realize I was supposed to be fighting. The racial traumas of my youth bubbled up from hidden memory. Perhaps most surprisingly, memories of the sexual objectification of my own body reared their ugly heads, reminding me that fetishization is not some kind of sick "soft power" used for self-validation on dating apps. It's a disease that has given men—white men in particular—a sense of entitlement over my body.

Coming to terms with all of this in the span of an afternoon stripped me and left me with nothing but grief. I kept trying to find small, actionable items that felt like they might be able to move the needle, but the problems felt so systemic that they felt insurmountable. The helplessness was perhaps even more difficult to stomach. How do you fight against a world that was built to keep you out of a seat of influence and power? But of course, the world left me with little time to process.

Soon after, Duante Wright was killed by the police. Derek Chauvin went on trial for the murder of George Floyd. Ma'Khia Bryant was killed by the police.

The cruelty our Black and brown communities face is, sadly, not news at all. The emerging stories of people being killed at the hands of an institution that claims to "protect and serve" has been an ugly reminder that this nation was built on xenophobia and white supremacy, and the institutions in power will hold on to their power as long as they can. Make no mistake, they've done an exceedingly good job at putting themselves in a place where they may be able to accomplish this indefinitely. I was only surprised that it took me thirty years to realize just how deep and insidious it really was.

As I've gone through this journey of unlearning, relearning, and discovery, what I've come to find is that it's never about one particular issue. Everything in the world is complicated, but everything revolving around the systemic oppression of those who are not white and not male is a knotted mess in the fabric of society. Everything intersects, and the more you dig, the more you discover how inextricably tangled all these issues are.

At first, this realization was paralyzing and disheartening. If it's not really about a single issue, but a thousand others piled and woven through one another, how do you make any change at all?

But I have also come to realize that every fight does not need to be mine. What's more important is that I can ready myself for a lifetime of fighting. Because that's what's needed more than people dropping in as tourists when the collective anguish is the loudest.

A refrain that has been playing in my head is one that many who drive the campaign for zero waste on social media and other news outlets have said over and over: "We don't need a few people doing zero waste perfectly. We need many people doing zero waste imperfectly." Much in the same way, I think there is a pressure to get activism "right" and do the most, all the time—especially in the age of social media. It becomes the avenue by which many determine how much you're doing for the world. If you're not being vocal enough, it's easy to feel like you're not doing enough.

That's when a new refrain got stuck in my head: "We don't need a few people doing activism perfectly. We need many people doing activism imperfectly."

This is not to demean the importance of the movement or encourage people to drag their feet. It is absolutely imperative that we drive meaningful change now. But we should also remember that everyone has their own way of contributing to a movement. It may not look the same as ours, but that's okay. Everyone's journey will be a little different.

I think perhaps that has been the most comforting thought to me throughout all of this. It is a journey. The more steps you take, the more of the scenery you understand. The further you walk, the more you've explored and the more that understanding lends itself to meaningful action. All you have to do is take that first step.

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Oh and if, by chance, you have not yet read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, please do so. Hong spoke things I didn't even realize I was feeling into existence in a way I have never quite experienced before. I have never put down a novel without feeling more seen.