hsu-liangyu - Tumblr blog

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Text

“Orientalia”: White Fascination and Nostalgia for China and the Orient

4/11/2021

Denver, CO

CW: Racism, anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment, violence/sexual assault

Preface:

Today was certainly a day. I’ve been on a cross country trek, which I’ve come to call “The Great Journey East”, where I’m driving from my home in the Seattle area to Portland, Maine to ply my usual trade, working aboard some traditionally rigged sailing vessels that operate from the Maine State Pier. I’ve most recently arrived in Denver, CO, after a tumultuous night of camping in un-ideal circumstances on the shores of Great Salt Lake in Utah. I decided to treat myself to a middling hotel downtown to try to affect an aura of urban tranquility before I head out for Wichita in the morning, and then on to see my mother’s family in Oklahoma. The drive thus far has been marked by astounding natural beauty, kind people, and a long series of audio books that I’ve only just begun to make a dent in. I began this journey listening to “Tribe” by Sebastian Junger, which I found to be extremely interesting and helped some of my own understanding of how society today does not serve the community, and how we may one day return to a society where the people come first, as opposed to the individual. After finishing Mr Junger’s audiobook, I turned my ears to a tome that I have put off reading for a long time: “The Chinese in America: A Narrative History” by Iris Chang.

Listening to this audiobook over the last few days, which begins in Qing dynasty China and ends in the modern day, I can say a great many things. I can say that I deeply feel the experiences that were collected by the author and compiled into this book, not only on an intellectual and emotional level, but on a spiritual level. I can say that, despite years of my own research into my familial experiences and the experiences of contemporary Chinese Americans, my level of knowledge was severely lacking, even though I considered myself to be a relatively robust lay-scholar on the topic. I can say that the experience of we Chinese Americans, foreign and natural born, has changed very little in our time here. While circumstances change from person to person, family to family, and era to era, we are all bound together in trends that have haunted our communities, not unlike the tigers that have stalked southeast Asia for time immemorial, striking out when least expected.

All of that, however, is a surface level understanding. Those realities are the first few layers of a complicated and long history of horrific, violent, brutal, and inhuman oppression in the United States.

I began this audiobook believing that I knew most of what I needed, enough to enlighten the odd person in online discourse, or conversation over dinner. Enough to tell-off the casual bigot that accused me and other Chinese people of overblowing our racial, social, and economic anxieties while making them look a fool. I realized very quickly that while I was not wrong in my knowledge, my staunchly anti-racist rhetoric, or my suspicious attitudes towards the US government and law enforcement, I was missing so much of the story. I was not missing the statistics or the legislative history: I was missing word-to-paper stories of my ancestors -- our ancestors -- and the cold, hard, and hellacious reality that they faced when they got here. These realities may have differed from generation to generation (the Chinese washer-man and washer-woman, miner, and restaurateur of the 19th century was faced with markedly different circumstances from the Chinese who fled WWII, the PRC, or settled in other areas of the world during the diaspora), but they are cold and hard, none-the-less.

I have cried more in the last three days than I think I have in the last three years. My heart hurts for our ancestors, our elders, our parents, our siblings, our uncles, our aunties, and our future children as we exist in a country that has committed nearly every atrocity it could think of to rid us from their stolen land.

This was the state of being I’ve come to Denver with. Finally in the privacy of a hotel room, I showered and talked with my partner. She found a book today, written by the child of white missionaries who fled China just before WWII, that was a compilation of “Oriental” inspired needle-work patterns. She shared the preface of this book with me, which I found to be incredibly alarming, and has prompted me to write on the subject of “Orientalism”, the exotic, and how the experience of white Europeans and Americans in China was vastly different from the Chinese people. Out of respect for the author and their work, which I believe was written as an honest tribute to Chinese culture and its influence on them, I am choosing to omit the author’s name and the title of the book in question. While some may see this as underhanded, I am choosing to do so because I do not wish to wage a war of rhetoric with an author who I have very little personal knowledge of, because I believe it is unethical of me to do so.

However, I will be addressing some problematic concepts that are present in the preface of this book, as they are worth speaking about as we attempt to further society’s collective understanding of differential experiences between people and people groups.

Thank you for reading on, as well as for reading my preface. The following issues are things that I have struggled with for a long time, and I hope that my words bring you additional perspective on Chinese American issues.

“The Orient, the Oriental, and Orientalia: A Curious Lens of Exoticism Riddled with Racism”

Today, I saw a word that I had not seen in a very, very long time.

As most any Asian person will tell you, the words “orient” and “oriental” are generally unwelcome descriptors of Asian people and culture. These two descriptors are applied to clothing, architecture, pottery, art, furniture, cookware -- the list keeps going. I often joke to those who use these words, “what am I, a rug to you?”, which normally drives the point home in a friendly way They are both hangers-on from an era that we’d best leave in the past. An era where the Occident and the Orient were opposites of one another, incompatible, and fundamentally in conflict. The two terms saw relatively common usage in the 19th century, and many Euro-Americans considered “the orient” to be interchangeable with “the far east” while the occident was a catch-all word for Euro-American civilizations ranging from western Europe to the New World. It could be said that the Occident and the Orient began as harmless descriptor words that only communicated a vague notion of differences between cultures, they were rapidly weaponized as anti-Asian, especially anti-Chinese, sentiments began to flare in the western world. Imperial Germany used the two terms to great affect, framing the differences between the Occident and the Orient to be far more than cultural and societal. It was a matter of life and death.

The Occident was the pinnacle of industrialized civilization. It was moral and upright, beholden to the Christian god, supported by the titans of industry, government, and cutting-edge military technology. The Orient was backwards, overrun with dirty Chinese heathens who constantly lied, cheated, and stole from the superior whites. The Chinese were looking to enslave white women, turning them into sex slaves or take them as wives so that they could propagate a wretched half-breed race that would overrun the world and mark the end of all Occidental civilization.

This rhetoric was incredibly powerful, and one only needs to look at early anti-Chinese political cartoons and articles to see these words used in incredibly derogatory ways. The other side of the Orient/Oriental dichotomy was steeped in foreign luxury and exoticism, which served to peak the interest of wealthy whites that bought up all kinds of Asian furniture, clothing, fabrics, cookware, and art from unscrupulous dealers and certifiable importers alike. Affluent white women of the 19th century are well-documented as being deeply invested in luxurious goods imported from “the Orient” and marketed as “Oriental” or “Orientalia” to garner societal notoriety, whereas their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons would have dressing gowns, cravats, and handkerchiefs created out of fine imported silk. All of these goods were considered exotic and other-worldly, which is not a debased outlook for the time, considering that so few westerners had actually managed to travel in the vicinity of China, let alone disembark in one of the few official trading ports open to European traders. This fascination with all things Chinese, entirely divorced from the reality that many Europeans and Americans viewed the Chinese as grave existential threats to white civilization, is not without irony.

While Chinese peasants and workers died in droves from starvation, disease, localized conflict, or at the hands of white Europeans and Americans acting with impunity in a country that was barred from holding them legally accountable for their actions, cargo hold upon cargo hold of Chinese goods were exported for consumption by westerners. These westerners had military and diplomatic presence in China, especially in the mid to late 19th century, often seizing prime real estate in Chinese port cities for international settlements where it was the westerners, not the Chinese, in charge. These ostentatious settlements, coupled with missions run by Christian organizations from all over the western world, exercised great influence with local Qing dynasty officials, and western nationals all throughout the southern coast of China were free to use and abuse the Chinese around them as they please. These prosperous settlements, a highly visible and permanent show of colonization and foreign aggression, were made so by the labor of Chinese workers and peasants. The same workers who were forced into horrific working conditions in and around the settlements while western nationals were free to treat them as they please with no repercussions, ever for outright murder. Any fascination with the Chinese lifestyle, manner of dress, and other items that could be quickly imported to the west as exotic tokens of the Orient was inherently divorced from the horrific reality of daily life within China, and was nearly always a fascination that arose from social tiers that could afford to be ignorant of those realities while directly benefiting from them.

“Orientalia and the Noble Savage”

The westerners’ fascination with all things Orientalia outlines another phenomenon present in the west’s view of China in the 19th and 20th centuries, an phenomenon that Americans are familiar with as it is applied to Indigenous peoples in North America: the Noble Savage.

The Noble Savage idea and stereotype found quick traction with American colonists as they fought to drive out Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands all over North America. These Indigenous groups, savage as they were perceived to be, were often regarded as principled and noble in their way of life, whether that was seen in their treatment of the lands, natural resources, their art and craftwork, their societal structure, or in how they treated white settlers when they were taken prisoner. While all of this talk of nobility betrayed the slimmest undercurrents of admiration from white settlers towards Indigenous peoples, the second word of the phrase was integral to its application: Savage. Despite these noble ideas and practices, a savage is a savage is a savage. This two-faced admiration served only one purpose -- to communicate the slightest inkling of fake remorse in widespread acts of genocide against people that white settlers hated and chose not to understand.

For the Chinese and Chinese Americans, the idea of the noble savage is easily translated. While Indigenous peoples in North America had a comparatively low level of technology to Americans, the same could not be said of the Chinese. Despite lacking robust gunpowder arms and other advanced forms of military technology, the technological prowess of the Chinese people was without doubt. Massive cities, sprawling agriculture, advanced irrigation, roads, palaces, and so much more was plainly evident to any westerner who arrived on Chinese shores (the same can be said of Indigenous populations throughout the Americas despite the prevailing myth of "primordial wilderness" perpetuated by white settlers) . Despite the different perspectives that westerns had between the two groups, westerners applied the Noble Savage ideal to the Chinese just as quickly and easily as they did to the Indigenous peoples across the oceans.

While the Chinese were obviously proficient in architecture, engineering, and in art, many westerners were quick to follow up any admiration of their eastern counterparts with staunch, racial criticism, highlighting their savagery in their daily lives such as gambling, long fingernails, or their seemingly archaic dress. Much of the criticism leveled on the basis of savagery had to deal with the assumption that Chinese men would, without hesitation, steal from white men and kill them, while selling white women into slavery. And while this was based in very loose reality (the triad societies of Canton did, indeed, participate in the sex trafficking of Chinese women to California and the Coolie trade that sent enslaved Chinese men to work on plantations in South America), the fears were stoked by ferocious anti-Chinese rhetoric in Europe and America.

The Chinese who emigrated to America were seen no different, and while public opinion waxed and waned, it was always understood that the Chinaman was a noble savage at best, and the earthly embodiment of evil at his worst. While modern Chinese and Chinese Americans may not be subject to the Noble Savage ideas from two centuries ago, it is not uncommon for Americans, especially white American youths, to take this idea as gospel, tormenting their Asian classmates throughout their formative years.

“China’s Sorrow: Nostalgia for a China that did not exist”

(As a forewarning, this the section where I may become quite emotional.)

Something that I encountered today was nostalgia. Not my own nostalgia, but the nostalgia of an author who grew up in a mission or international settlement in pre-WWII China, and fled from the country just before Pearl Harbor. This author, who shall remain nameless for the reason I stated in the preface of this essay, spoke highly of China’s sights and sounds, the people, the food, the craftwork, and of their pleasant life as the child of white missionaries in China. They spoke on how the pace of life in China was different than America, and that they much preferred the comforts of life in the Orient, surrounded by Oriental people and objects, enamored with Orientialia well into their adult life.

I found this passage to be absolutely appalling. I understand that I may be picking the wrong fight here, but this is my emotional response to an issue that I have found difficult to articulate that managed to, somehow, someway, manifest succinctly in the preface of a book that I randomly encountered. I lay my thoughts here:

White missionaries in China lived privileged lives, much like the other westerners that inhabited international settlements all throughout the major cities of the country. Missionaries, like the other westerners, were an extremely privileged class, living privileged lives in a country that was being torn apart by colonization, internal strife, famine, disease, and violence. While the average Chinese peasant in late Qing, early republic-era China had to contend with the daily realities of starvation, material scarcity, and the reality that a western could beat them or kill them and face no legal consequences for that action. Merchants were forced to deal with countless one-sided trade and land treaties, while government officials struggled to keep the country together, if they weren’t themselves contributing to the horrendous reality. Life in international settlements for western nationals is often reminisced upon as idyllic, quaint, and prosperous, which paints a stark contrast to their Chinese neighbors’ experiences. The westerners were off-limits, exempt from legal prosecution, and largely able to conduct themselves as they saw fit, even when their conduct directly endangered Chinese lives.

Meanwhile, outside of these international settlements, war ravaged the country. When the Qing dynasty fell and the Republic of China was established, the country fractured. The nationalist government was constantly at war, sometimes with itself, sometimes with bandits and warlords, sometimes with organized crime, and most of all with the Chinese Communist Party. The Koumintang government, in the wake of Sun Yat-sen’s death, saw Chiang Kai-shek seize power. The Japanese began to aggressively push their borders into China, fighting with superior military technology and training while the national army faltered from unwilling conscripts led into disastrous battles by inept, corrupt, and tyrannical officers. The CCP fought a guerilla campaign against the KMT that further muddied the conflict, with innocents caught between two radical and violent sides while Japan tightened the noose. Communist and Nationalist fought together against the Japanese one day, and may have fought against each other the next.

While the country was torn apart, the westerners in international settlements were unconcerned with the wars raging across the land. They continued to live their idyllic lives until the war was literally at their doorstop -- only then did they become concerned with the plight of the Chinese people.

Only then did the westerners in international settlements care for the circumstances of the average Chinese peasant in the countryside or worker in the city. They could bear no concern while they benefited from cheap Chinese labor, horrific working conditions, or while some of them got away with murder. They could bear no concern while Europe and America colonized China and ransacked the economy. And they could bear no concern for the Chinese being tortured, beaten, raped, and murdered in the countryside, far from their gates, until it was on their doorstep.

The nostalgia that some westerners feel for China, a China that existed before the chaos of the 1920s onwards, is propped up by lives of privilege and white-washed memories that ignore the struggle of the Chinese people right under their noses.

They feel nostalgia for a China that did not exist, because the one that existed was destroyed in part by their international settlements and the colonization efforts of their home countries.

This nostalgia for a China that was at least slightly better than the chaos of the 1920s through the 1940s, or better than the Cultural Revolution, or better before Tiananmen Square exists also within the Chinese immigrant community. But this nostalgia strikes in a way that the other does not.

While the westerner who lived in an international settlement may be able to intellectually sympathize with the Chinese experience during this tumultuous time, it is the Chinese themselves who bear the actual scars. Many of our elders long for a prosperous China as well, but there is a key difference in this: our elders, our family, sometimes we ourselves, bear the scars of the past. Our nostalgia is momentary, continuously shattered by the very real heartbreak that the Chinese and Chinese American community has been subject to over the last century. While circumstances and perspectives differed, the China that some of us long for is just as much a painful sore on our souls as it is a pleasant memory. The pain, the loss, the grief, anxiety, and struggle.

It is a nostalgia for our ancestral land that cannot be found anywhere else, as precious as it is painful.

Hsu Liang Yu

#aapi #end aapi hate #aapi history #aapi authors #chinese american #history #white allyship #white allies

12 notes · View notes

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Photo

Period photograph aboard the USS Mohican ca 1880s.

David Freund and John King are sitting on their ditty boxes, Gilbert H. Purdy has his foot on a barrel- tube while his companion is sitting on it. - Funny thing, they used the spone/rammer as a washing line.

175 notes · View notes

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Text

Chinese helmet, 19th century

from Czerny's International Auction House

122 notes · View notes

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Photo

Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov | THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017)

12K notes · View notes

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Text

STOP AAPI HATE

17 notes · View notes

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Text

"We Contain Multitudes: Self-Determination, Minority Autonomy, and the Dichotomy of White Allies"

An edited post taken from my Facebook account, 3/24/2021

Have you ever had someone in your life that consistently gives you life advice on issues that they've never personally been affected by? Sure, there's levels of empathy and sympathy in what they say, but the fact that there is an arm's length distance between them and the issue -- distance inherent to their position, life style, life circumstances, or however else it can be put -- makes that advice absolutely grating to your ears? It invokes a feeling of not being understood or listened to while that person continues to speak from a position of societal privilege or inherent distance that means they'll never truly understand the issue at hand, despite well-meaning attempts to be a friend or ally?

That's what most of my adult life has felt like, and it's an experience that is not uncommon in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community that I'm apart of.

I don't know why I'm bringing it up now, but it seems pertinent. When a white person wants to speak on issues that directly affect minorities, issues that they themselves won't ever truly experience in the same way or with the same frequency as minorities, and the message is handed down as a lesson or edict, it drives me up the wall.

What do people think minorities do when they encounter very real violence and prejudice in our daily lives? It's not like we haven't considered lots of options, like who to vote for, how to defend ourselves and our communities (whether it's with neighborhood watch groups, community organizing, arming ourselves, or covering it up, all approaches with positive and negative consequences). And it's not like we aren't fully aware of how volatile certain community decisions can be, both in regards to what happens in the event of racially motivated violence or in how we interact with other communities, because we are. Or, we at least try to be, which is all anyone can expect, since everyone is human.

The most blunt way of putting it is this:

If you are a white person, especially someone who identifies as a liberal, leftist, or anyone who has an expressed commitment to support us in our struggles, and is invested in creating change, you really need to understand that most attempts to explain to us who we should vote for or how we should protect ourselves and our families will almost always come off as "white-splaining". Whether it's who you say we should vote for, who you say has the best intentions but the worst follow through, or telling us that we should not seek out physical means of protection against white violence, there is astonishingly little that can be said that isn't already a topic of hot debate in our communities.

White-splaining is the act of telling minorities how to think or act from a position that is inherently one of privilege. White-splaining, whether it is intended this way or not, generally makes us feel unheard, invalid, and like we are expected to listen to white voices as if they are authority figures doling out rulings on issues that affect us because we, for some reason, can't have possibly already thought about this stuff from as many angles as we can or we are somehow unqualified to make our own decisions.

My current pet peeve in relation to this phenomenon is predominantly white voices talking down to minorities who believe that arming ourselves is our most immediate defense against violence, especially in the wake of people being straight up murdered. These voices tell us to trust in the police, to trust in our white neighbors, to trust in our government or the system, which is a horrifying prospect for us because we live in a system that chews us up, spits us out, throws us into prisons, and actively assaults and murders us, as it has been designed to do.

Gun violence will never be effectively addressed in this country until we realize that it is perpetuated in part by racism, white supremacy, and a culture of violence that directly targets the AAPI, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities, along with many others.

What exactly do I mean when I say "White-splaining?"

There is absolutely space for white folks to ask questions, learn, and engage in constructive , inter-personal dialogue with minorities about the reality of our day to day lives. I'm not saying that, at least not intentionally. White allies need to be aware of our personal experiences and perspectives if they truly wish to help us. This goes hand in hand with understanding that minority groups have the right to self-determination and autonomy, even when those decisions may contrary or counter-intuitive when seen from a white perspective. White allies show their support materially and personally in many different ways, but attempting to apply a white perspective to issues of voting, self-defense, community defense, and mutual aid actively contradicts and works against the self-determination of minority communities. The issues that are present are complicated and multi-faceted. The AAPI community alone is comprised of so many different ethnic groups and cultures that there is always dialogue to be had amongst AAPI people about what's going on and how these issues affect them on an individual and community level. We do not need white voices in these spaces telling us how to think, vote, feel, or act. We will ask if we want the direct input of white allies.

We have the right to self-determination and autonomy, independent of our white peers, in matters that directly affect us in ways that our white peers will never fully experience.

We have the right to decide on a community, familial, and individual level what our politics are, how we preserve ourselves, and how we carry on in the face of white supremacy and violence.

We are people, all of us, and while I am an Chinese American and part of the AAPI community, this community is made up of multitudes of different people and distinct ethnic groups that have the right to determine themselves as well, independent from others.

These are decisions that WE will make, that WE will choose, that WE will determine for ourselves, because we have been denied that ability for centuries.

We are not a monolith.

We contain multitudes, and so does our community.

Not just Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Latinx Americans, African Americans, and all of the other minority communities that I do not have the wherewithal to name specifically.

We have the right to self-determination and autonomy, as much as anyone else does, and until all of our white allies realize that, the alliance offered is not an alliance at all.

#aapi #stop aapi hate #stop asian hate #racisim #white allies #white allyship #self determination #minority autonomy #autonomy

14 notes · View notes

hsu-liangyu · 3 years

Text

"They Are Killing Us: Rage and Trauma in the Wake of the Atlanta Shootings"

A lightly edited post from my Facebook account, 3/19/2021

CW: Anti-Asian racism and violence, racist cartoons, images of racially motivated violence.

"I'm going to put this out there:

If you've known me [Hsu Liang Yu] for any length of time, you'll know that I am extremely vocal about the anti-Asian racism that is present in the US, the racism that has been present in this country since day one.

With the tragic deaths of 8 people, 6 of them Asian women, in Atlanta, perpetrated by a white domestic terrorist (let's call it what it is, folks), I'm going to consolidate all of my feelings on this mess in this post, as best as I can.

This is raw, unfiltered, and unapologetic, straight from the heart.

Anti-Asian sentiments have been in present in America for the better part of 200 years. It has taken many forms, whether it was embodied by municipal, state, or federal legislation, outright violence, stereotyping, enforced ghettoization, portrayals in popular media, or the subtle interactions that Asian people have on a daily basis. The body of evidence is staggering, and if you want me to go on for hours about the Chinese Exclusion Act alone, send me a message and I'll be happy to rant. But the fact of the matter is that Asian Americans live in a country that, historically, does not want us, and has resorted to institutionalized and systemic violence to make that known.

This isn't up for debate.

It's happened, and it continues to happen today. The most horrifying thing is that nowadays, elderly Asian Americans are the ones who are taking the worst of the day-to-day racism and violence in this country, much to the horror of their children and grandchildren.

The racism present here looks like this:

-Limiting the ability of Chinese people to work, unless it was in laundromats, restaurants, hotels, or drug dens (Chinese Exclusion Act)

-Forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes and the forfeiture of their businesses and possessions and their subsequent internment during World War II

-The horrific waves of violence targeting Chinatowns in the 19th and 20th century in Hawai'i, San Francisco, Bellingham, and all throughout the American West Coast, resulting in the lynching deaths of men, women, and children

-The Asiatic Exclusion League that sought to expel Asian Americans from the workforce on the west coast through legislation and violence in the 19th and 20th century

-The fetishization of Asian women as play-things for white men

-The 'model minority' stereotype that sees countless young Asian Americans pursue prestigious careers at the expense of their mental and physical health and to the detriment of their families

-The 'model minority' stereotype that denies help to Asian Americans struggling in school or to find work because they're seen as deviants within their own community and by the white majority

-The fracturing of Asian American and Black solidarity by the FBI during the Civil Rights movement

-Targeting elderly Asian Americans as easy targets for racially motivated violence

-Asian Americans unable to feel at home in their native born country due to anti-Asian sentiments or failure to adhere to the 'model minority' stereotype

-Asian American communities closing themselves off from other ethnic groups for fear of violence

-Asian American communities actively ignoring police brutality and racially motivated violence for fear of violent reprisal from the police or right wing groups

-Asian Americans aligning themselves with racist, right wing movements to try and shield themselves and their families from violence

-White women losing their US citizenship for marrying Chinese men (the Cable Act)

-Keeping Asian American communities in large cities limited to Chinatowns, Japantowns, Koreatowns, etc. due to racially motivated housing and economic attitudes

-Asians being consistently used as antagonists against white protagonists, or, as the "magical Asian" that solves problems through unexplained means

-The continued use of anti-Chinese Communist Party rhetoric as a vehicle for anti-Chinese sentiment (which, surprise!, you can criticize the CCP without criticizing Chinese people themselves, assholes)

-Blaming Asians and Asian Americans for Covid-19 and its spread

-The pillaging of China and other Asian countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries by European powers and the United States

-Police saying that the racially motivated murder of 8 innocent people was the result of a white guy having a 'bad day'

The list keeps going.

It's always been here, and while I appreciate some of the lip-service being paid to the issue, I'm saddened that it's taken the senseless deaths of 8 innocent people at the hands of a white supremacist for people to listen to what the Asian American community has been saying for decades.

If you want to fight this out in the comments, go screw yourself. I'm sick of seeing minorities murdered and be subject to systemic, institutional violence and oppression while random white folks swoop in to gaslight me.

They are attacking our elders. Terrorizing our children. Assaulting our parents, our partners, out family and our friends. They are destroying our businesses and our communities. They are tearing apart our families.

They are killing us.

I'm proud of my heritage and my Asian American identity, and I believe that other Asian Americans should be empowered to feel the same way. The second anyone tries to gaslight this issue is the second that person get's ejected from this post."

#aapi #stop asian hate #asian american #anti racist #first hand experience #yellow peril #yellow peril racism #chinese american #taiwanese american #seattle #west coast #history

11 notes · View notes