In my frustration, my writing devolved into ranting lists that ran the gamut of instances of microaggressions to harassment, to assault, to my own paranoia. I worried I sounded petty or dramatic— indulgent, for taking up space. I was followed home once by a man in Berkeley who tittered at me in broken Mandarin, told me he had a knife, then coolly asked for my number. In moments like these, I am not only terrified, I am seething with rage.
I want to cuss and scream. But this is not what they expect of me, and I know that to shatter their image of a nice Asian girl is to risk a price I cannot pay. Pop culture has perpetuated the view of the subservient yet sexually accommodating Asian woman, often as a metaphor for the fantasy of a Western, patriarchal, white colonizing force.
In Miss Saigon, Kim, the Vietnamese prostitute whom the American soldier Chris falls in love with, willingly obliterates herself, ceding to the American wife, Ellen, enabling the creation of the American nuclear family. Even the way Asian women have historically been spoken about—from Dragon Ladies to Tiger Moms—casts them as animals first, humans second. In this light, the Atlanta shootings and the targeting of Asian women feel like a tragic inevitability.
The pesky sex objects to be done away with are indeed Asian women—their Asianness implicit and not worthy of remark. The coldness of this reporting is chilling: These locations were temptations for him , which were to be eliminated. Not women who were murdered. It is as if the bodies have disappeared into the space that names them for their use value: massage parlor, brothel, and so on. Already excuses are being made for him. This way of viewing Asian women is acute and explosive, but also chronic, pervasive, invisible, rhetorical—fatal.
Seeing Asian women as corrupting vamps and vixens in America dates back to at least the Page Act of , preceding the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese women from entering the United States, on the assumption that they were immoral prostitutes. But the plight of the Yellow Woman is not unique to her being in the West. To understand her position requires an intersectional understanding of a subject that is under the heel of both racism and misogyny.
When an Australian backpacker pinned me to my hostel bed in Warsaw, livid, because I had declined to join him at the bar, what hurt more was the laughter of my male Singaporean friends when I told them about it the next day. The global Asian community is now struggling to find a way to unify itself for solidarity, and all attempts feel unwieldy. In America, the rhetoric calls for Asian Americans to band together.
But this erases large groups of Asian diasporic populations. After all, much attention has been brought to the fact that many of the recent attacks have been on elderly Asian people, many of whom were not born in the US. What about Asian people who are non-citizens? How does this movement seek to address anti-Asian hate crimes in other parts of the world? I used to wake up before dawn to practice the comments I wanted to make in class in an American accent so that, without the garb of my foreign accent, I could simply be heard.
Now, as then, my tonal passing has become a protective covering. All of this is tied up too with class and citizenship, intra-Asian violence, East Asian imperialism, American exceptionalism, colonial violence, and anti-Blackness. Or from Western imperialism that tells us Yellow is dirty. But he told jurors Monday that after reviewing the record of radio transmissions, he realized he had radioed about finding her license before officers realized Welch was alive and started treating him.
After Morris produced a photograph showing items at the crime scene had been moved, Rogers said he picked a corkboard off the floor and put it on top of his medical bag on a table because it was on the ground underfoot when emergency responders were trying to carry Welch out on a backboard.
Morris asked him why he did not tell anyone that he had moved something at the crime scene or put that detail in his report. He did not specify the results of those fingerprints and shoe prints. Among the items he tested were three kitchen knives.
Boelcskevy said he and Pripstein were trying to set a date for him to help her with her computer and then have dinner together. But he also said he did not want to date her and the two were not romantically involved. He said he was at his former apartment in Holyoke with two roommates and another co-worker when Pripstein was killed. He told Morris that he did not have direct access to the communal basement from his apartment, but had to go outside the building and through an unlocked bulkhead.
According to testimony presented Friday, police mistook the basement door in her apartment for a closet and so did not search the basement until about 24 hours later. Also on Monday, while jurors were not in the courtroom, Ford ruled that they will not be allowed to hear a recording of a phone conversation Welch had with his father, Daniel Welch, about the possibility that he might use an insanity defense. Rebecca Everett can be reached at reverett gazettenet. Share on Facebook.
Share on Twitter. Share via E-Mail. More News.
0コメント