For a year now, my siblings and I have kept our elderly mother home because of the Coronavirus. After her second vaccine dose, we told her to stay home because of the “Asian Flu” hate crimes. Then six Asian women were murdered in Atlanta, and two Hmong women were killed by domestic violence in St. Paul. What next? I write not as a victim, but as an Asian woman, a mom, and someone who has lived the experience that creates a society where the objectification of Asian women results in the justification for the killing of Asian women.
We attribute the devaluation and abuse of Asian American bodies to Covid and the previous president’s role in inciting Asian hate. But just as that president opened a floodgate to the latent xenophobia and racism of America; the hatred of Asian Americans has always existed. Study our history. Similarly, the misogyny directed at Asian American women has always existed. Patriarchy, sadly, is real.
Asians are regularly viewed as the model minority — privileged, even honorary Whites, whose success in education allows us to occupy high-paying jobs, like medicine and engineering, where we are non-controversial and won’t march to the capitol demanding equal rights. We are often denigrated for our success by our PoC brethren in the contest of who is the most oppressed; while still being “too other” to be considered fully American. We rebel against our lack of social value by excelling in school and monetary success at the loss of our cultural identity as we assimilate, appropriate and code switch in order to gain respect in a nation obsessed with money. But our financial success becomes our burden. If we keep our heads down, stay in our place, don’t seek promotion into policy-making leadership positions; we can enjoy a level of economic success. But the cost? Our “honorary whiteness” will be used to argue that racism doesn’t exist. This, during peacetime. During crisis, we become scapegoats. Study history, past and present.
Asian women’s oppression is intersectional. If Asian men are emasculated in a white male-dominated culture, Asian women are non-human under patriarchy. My culture expects filial piety favoring men and relegating women to the role of passive, servile, domestic objects who are obedient to our fathers in childhood, our husbands in marriage, and our sons in our old age. Asian cultures’ dispossession of women has led to female infanticide, arranged marriages, polygamy, domestic violence, abandonment, and abusive, international marriages that are often age mis-balanced. With this backdrop, are we surprised when men kill Asian women with impunity?
The traditional bride price practice entitles a man to ownership of “his” woman, the bride’s birth family imposing on her the importance of serving her husband’s family and never returning to her birth family. Her virtues to be measured by her obedience to this new family and her ability to bear male heirs. I grew up witnessing women trying to escape abusive husbands only to be returned to save her family’s honor. It is no wonder that when a woman leaves or has a dispute with her man, he may feel that he has the right to kill her and then himself — only to escape the law.
Asian women’s bodies have been glorified, commodified and colonized. The Page Act of 1875 viewed East Asian women as prostitutes to be banned from entering the country. During the U.S. military campaigns to dominate Asian countries, American soldiers participated in the sex industry, furthering the idea that the bodies of Asian women are for the pleasure of White men. The American entertainment industry perpetuates this idea through works like “Full Metal Jacket,” where the Asian female is not only an object of White male lust, but the economic profit of Asian male pimps. The scene, where the Vietnamese soldier prostitutes a Vietnamese woman to a group of American GIs who haggle her price down to $5 and a “dropped once” ARVN sidearm, is an apt metaphor for the state of Asian women in our communities. This selling of the Asian woman’s body began at home, where girls are guest daughters, groomed to be good future daughter-in-laws, who render a high bride price. The importing of underaged girls with falsified paperwork to be married to grown, even elderly, often recently divorced men, is an open secret in my community.
But — this was in the past, some say. Asian women have come a long way as educated professionals and entrepreneurs who are now quickly outnumbering their male counterparts. Which is true, to a degree. Until, there is a crisis. The tables turn. Perhaps, we are in a perpetual crisis, as men have been killing women and then turning the gun on themselves to escape the law since at least the 1990s. Back then what I mistakenly believed to be a crime of generational trauma and sexism that would die with the elders, turned out to be murder sanctioned by culture. I am calling for a cultural examination and overhaul. Calling for our culture to value and humanize women, even if other cultures continue to objectify and dispose of us.
But this is not all that ails me right now. I am angry, because in my youth I could not rid my culture and country of this hate, and now my daughters have inherited it. They are brilliant, strong, vocal women demoralized by the Asian hate crimes in the news and complicity of government, corporations and organizations in their refusal to condemn it. Instead of encouraging my children to fight for safety and visibility, I want to hold them back to protect them, knowing that their reticence will mean their children will inherit the problem. I tell them to do what they can, let others share the burden so that they don’t break. I want their efforts to stop Asian hate and to see Asian women’s humanity shared. How about it, elected leaders, White allies, PoC, Asian men?
And I want my mom to be safe.
Chong Yang (formerly Chong Yang Thao) is an English Language Arts teacher at Como Park Senior High School in St. Paul and the mother of three daughters.
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April 04, 2021 at 12:46PM
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Chong Yang: Let’s share the humanity of Asian women — against misogyny from without and within - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
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