Feeling Invisible
Reflecting on Atlanta and my ‘Asian American’ experience
It’s 10pm on Wednesday — I’m about to go to bed when I load a news notification on my phone and see the giant headline:
“8 killed in shootings at 3 metro Atlanta spas. Police have 1 suspect in custody” (CNN)
I didn’t want to read the article but innately, I already knew that this felt personal. The next morning, I felt weird logging onto work thinking I just read another news article about a mass shooting. As the pings from teammates started to roll in and the phrases of “Are you OK?” appeared, my heart sank even deeper as the weight of the news blew past my mental block — this was definitely hate crime. One of the worst parts of the whole tragedy was how much it actualized all my worst fears about living in America as an Asian American and as a child of immigrants.
You are an immigrant Chinese kid in Boston.
When my family immigrated to the country, we located to Boston in the 90s. We lived in our economical Section 8 apartment in the working-class section of Charlestown. At home, we stuck to using our Taishanese, ate steamed fish, and laughed to TVB dramas. On the playground, I would play tag with the other Asian immigrant kids as we bumped to 50 Cent’s latest tracks. Beyond our familial bubble, we coexisted with our Black, Dominican, and Eastern European neighbors, exchanging friendly faces, but rarely a sentence.
Things weren’t perfect — I did not have a lot growing up so our father worked 12 hours a day hopping around different Chinese Restaurants in the city. We had our apartment broken into and our van stolen twice. We filed police reports in both instances and weren’t able to recoup any of the items. But as my parents put it, we didn’t really have the time to grieve because we were focused on how to stretch our next paycheck to survive. That was a similar story for some of the other kids in school who’s families were trying to get by. This is the America I knew growing up and it was the lowest common denominator through the 4th grade.
Get Rich or Lose Your Identity Tryin’
The earliest memory I can remember feeling alienated came from moving out to Canton in the 2000s. My father wanted to be his own employer and opened his own American Chinese Restaurant in the suburbs of Boston with my uncle. He promised better things to come as we escaped some of the crime in the city. But as I walked into that fourth grade class, it felt as if someone had dropped me onto an entirely different planet.
Being the new kid at school is hard, but being the one of few Asian kids integrating into a predominantly middle class white community is harder. Ain’t anybody ever heard of G-Unit here? Why’s everyone here so into hockey? Why are all the cars here nicer? Is everyone already friends here? Some of the students would ask me things like:
“Where are your parents from?”
“What do your parents do? How did they get into restaurants?”
“What’s Chinese Food like? I love Crab Rangoons”
Eventually, the comments got more snyde.
“Why do your parents work so long hours?”
“I guess you should be smart at math anyway”
“What’s my name in Chinese?”
“Hey, you are in America, not China. So speak English”
Whether it was ill intended or not, as I reexplained my story for the tenth time, they had no real intention to get to know me or my family’s struggles up until that point. My mother would pick me up and bring me to the restaurant to sit by the front counter the entire day while she worked her second shift. Alone by the cash register, I thought to myself “is this what it is like to be an American?”
Over the years, our lives revolved around running the restaurant business. As I got older, I worked the front desk and packed orders of take out food after school because my parents could not leave me alone at home. I answered phone calls where pranksters would ask if we served “dog.” I got screamed at by customers who complained about our wait times and how we could not afford to hire one more kitchen staffer.
On one News Years Eve, I checked in with my dad one night after an intense shift close to midnight. The sweat had dried up around his bootleg Red Sox hat and the smell of vegetable oil fused within his clothes. He never openly complained but always smiled saying “we are doing this for you.” I have never talked about life purpose with my family but to my dad, purpose meant pulling out of poverty to your last tiring breath.
At school, I stopped getting invited to hang out with potential friends because my default responsibility was to work the front desk. I lost touch with my Asian friends from the city as they thought we joined the white community. Non-Asian people who knew about my situation would make comments like “your parents must be so proud to run a successful business.” But to work long hours and never have a chance to enjoy the fruits of your labor, are we really thriving? What other choice did we really have?
Representation Matters.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be from Boston. I can get behind our championship winning sports teams, our world class universities, or even Dunkin Donuts! But when I tell people I’m from there, they never think about my family’s restaurant — they think about Wahlburgers instead. America touts itself as a city on a hill for the rest of the world, but never humanizes those from around the world who built it.
Anti-Asian sentiment is not new in America; but it’s taken on an aggressive form during the pandemic that is akin to when some of the first Chinese immigrants landed in the 1800s. When I think about the victims in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women, I think about how their feelings compared to my family’s fears of how racists in this country sees us: disposable.
The pandemic has dragged on but this social invisibility has dragged on longer. As our community comes together in the wake of a horrific tragedy, I hope we can continue to share more of these stories, educate our allies, and demand our representatives to chase accountability to stop anti-Asian hate.
For a long time, Asians have been virtually erased from the history books about who we are in America — today, I am ready to take back control of that narrative.
#StopAsianHate
Groups to support:
More on Boston:
- How Racist is Boston? (The Daily Show)
- Who Gets to Be Bostonian Onscreen? (Boston Magazine)
