69-year-old Atlanta resident Suncha Kim’s biggest dream in life was to grow old with her husband and see her children and grandchildren live out the life she never got the chance to. On March 16th, this dream was tragically shattered when a shooter murdered 8 people at three spas in the Atlanta area, including 6 Asian women—one being Kim. Suddenly, mainstream media and the world’s attention zeroed in on the alarming rise of anti-Asian hate exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, AAPI (Asian-American and Pacific Islander) individuals were never afforded the privilege of being able to turn a blind eye. To a majority of the AAPI community, and anyone who has been paying attention, the devastating Atlanta shootings came as anything but a surprise.
Asian-American history began largely in the mid 1800’s when East-Asian immigrants attracted by the West Coast Gold Rush flocked to the US in order to escape economic hardships in their home countries. After the Gold Rush ended, these Asian immigrants were considered a source of cheap labour—thus sowing the seeds of animosity towards Asian labourers, as white citizens held the belief that their jobs were being stolen. This eventually led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese workers from gaining citizenship or immigrating to the US. Countless other acts of systemic anti-Asian discrimination mar US and Canadian history, including the Japanese internment camps of WWII, the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, the Pacific Coast race riots of 1907, and rampant yellowface in Hollywood beginning in the early to mid-1900s. In recent years, the blatant caricature of Asians has diminished, only to be replaced by intense stereotypes including the fetishization of Asian women in popular media that depicts Asian women as submissive and docile. Across history and still today, Asians have been mocked, excluded, and antagonized—condemned to a cultural limbo where success is leveraged through the model minority myth that disregards the diversity of Asian-American experiences in favour of a monolithic East-Asian success story. Asian strife is ignored and invalidated, such as when a Washington school district excluded Asian students from a category denoting people of colour, instead electing to group them in with white students. As of as recent as 2015, anti-Black and anti-Asian racist language still remained in land titles of homes in the British Properties—a sobering reminder of the enforceable discrimination that barred individuals of African and Asian descent from purchasing property in the West Vancouver area in the early 1900s. Evidently, anti-Asian sentiments are anything but a new phenomenon; anti-Asian racism is as woven into the fabric of American and Canadian history as Asian individuals are themselves.
With the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, furthering the scapegoating of Asians with terms such as the Chinese Virus and the Kung Flu, the rate of anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed in both Canada and the US. Per capita, Canada has witnessed a higher number of anti-Asian racism reports than the US, with BC having the most reported incidents per Asian capita of any sub-national region in North America and 44% of reported incidents of anti-Asian racism in Canada since the beginning of COVID-19(the largest proportion of any single province). Similarly, Vancouver has seen 28% of these Canadian incidents since COVID-19 began. Consequently, an alarming pattern has emerged: the targeting of Asian elders. What is already a devastating and cowardly threat towards a community’s weakest and most vulnerable is amplified beyond words by the idea of “filial piety"—the Confucian value of absolute respect and reverence for elders in society held by a large majority of Asian, especially East-Asian, communities.
A large majority of the individuals that comprise the elderly Asian population immigrated to North America for their own taste of the so-called “American Dream” and to escape poverty, war, famine, and more. There exists a common sentiment among this population: that sacrifices of not only money or comfort, but of humanity and respect must be made in order to achieve these dreams; that racism is inevitable and easier to bear than the circumstances from which they came. It is for cultural rifts such as these that make the elderly vulnerable to attacks and make it essential for younger generations to fight back, for we possess what television personality Hasan Minhaj has coined the “Audacity of Equality”—a combination of the cultural and emotional drive to protect our own, the possibility of righteousness and justice we have witnessed in our youth, and the audacity to chase it down for ourselves.
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