S2:E27: Hyphenated identity
Thursday, April 1, 2021
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Episode description: What's in a name?
We reflect on some timely questions: where do I belong? And what does it mean to be American? Melissa shares snapshots from her multi-cultural upbringing, and how recently learning her Chinese name helped her begin to reclaim a piece of her hyphenated identity.
Trigger warning: anti-Asian hate crimes and gender violence.
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Laura: Here at Shelter in Place, we always do our best to make these episodes family- friendly, even if we're talking about hard stuff. But if you have children listening, I did want to mention that this episode mentions anti-Asian hate crimes.
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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Melissa: My dad gave me the paper. It felt like this slip of paper was the key to a part of my identity I didn’t even know I had.
And I lost it.
Laura: The other day my son Gabe came up to me and said, “I wonder why God gave me this feeling like I can predict the future.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, struggling to keep a straight face.
“I just have this feeling like I’m going to be famous someday.”
Gabe is not the sort of kid who enjoys being in the limelight, which made his divine prediction all the more surprising. But there was also something familiar in his words. When I was his age, I’d felt the same way. It wasn’t so much a fixation on fame as it was a conviction that there was more to me than what others could see—more than what even I could see. That if only I could follow that sense of possibility, a whole other life would open up to me.
It was a longing I couldn’t yet name, that I would learn to shush and ignore in pursuit of more grown up ideals like security and responsibility. But every now and then that feeling would come back, that part of me that still believed in possibility.
We’ve been calling this season of Shelter in Place Pandemic Odyssey because the backdrop to these episodes has been a long and winding voyage into the unknown. We didn’t know it when COVID-19 shut our world down in March of 2020, but this pandemic would revive that forgotten longing, daring us to chase it. In that pursuit, we’ve lost jobs and found them, traveled from one coast to the other, and rewritten life along the way. It’s not fame that lures us, but that old dream of a life that's bigger than the one we’re in.
Today, I’m talking with someone who knows that longing well, because from early on, it took a very specific shape.
Melissa: My name is Melissa Lent. I’m a journalist, a native New Yorker, and an apprentice for Shelter in Place. I’m also half-Chinese from my dad’s side, and half-Dominican from my mom’s side.
Laura: I was an adult before I understood that my dream of a bigger life was just another way of understanding who I was and how I fit into the world. But for Melissa, that connection was obvious. Her longing was intrinsically tied to the mixture of cultures that made her.
Melissa was born and raised in New York, but because she was surrounded by her mom’s Dominican family and her Chinese dad grew up in Peru, she grew up speaking Spanish as much as English.
Melissa: Every Sunday I’d wake up early to the merengue, salsa, and reggaeton my mom put on as soon as she started cleaning. I’d come out into the hallway and she’d grab my hand and spin me around. When my mom is on the phone in her bedroom, I can hear her from the other side of the apartment, even with the doors closed. When the TV was on in my grandma’s house, it was El Gordo y La Flaca or La Rosa de Guadalupe. If you got to a party on time, you were way too early. When we speak about the future, we always say, “si Dios quiere,” if God wills it.
Laura: Melissa’s Dominican culture was the dominant force in her upbringing. It was everywhere. But now, looking back, she can see that there were also more subtle pieces of culture at play.
Melissa: When anyone came into our apartment, they would take their shoes off and leave them on the stairs. If I got a 96 on my test, my dad would ask me what happened to the four other points. There was a cabinet in our kitchen so full of plastic bags stuffed with other plastic bags, you could barely close it. I had to learn how to talk about my achievements in interviews because I wasn’t used to showcasing them. My dad’s the cook of the family, so my childhood was full of lo mein, fried rice, and soy sauce chicken. We’d put all the dishes in the middle of the table and serve ourselves, family-style.
We weren’t speaking Cantonese around the house, and my dad rarely spoke about our Chinese ancestry, but I can see now that, in certain ways, our family was very Chinese.
But because my mom is Dominican and my Chinese dad grew up in Peru, we also ate arroz con pollo, paella, ceviche, lomo saltado, arepas, pescado con coco. When we visited the Domincan Republic every few years, my relatives would call me a gringa. It was obvious to them that I wasn’t 100% Dominican—but at least I felt Dominican. I didn’t really feel Chinese.
Laura: Melisssa’s dad didn’t talk much about his Chinese heritage. She doesn’t think he was trying to hide anything; he just didn’t have a lot to pass on. He’d never been to the country of his ancestors. Melissa’s grandparents were both Chinese, but they’d raised her dad in Peru. They wanted him to assimilate, so other than a few words of Cantonese, they didn’t pass on their language. Melissa knew it should mean something that she was half-Chinese, but that part of her identity felt mostly theoretical.
Melissa: Being Chinese-American is its own third culture. You’re born here. Maybe you’ve never even been to China. You’re an American citizen. But when people see you, they don’t immediately see you as American. They probably don’t even see you as Chinese. They see you as Asian—a term that encompasses a whole continent of cultures. That intersection of being American and at the same time being in another cultural group is what we call a hyphenated identity—like Asian-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American, Indian-American. But just because the hyphen is there doesn’t mean we automatically feel attached to it.
Do I get to call myself Chinese-American even though I’m pretty disconnected from that culture? I didn’t play an instrument. I didn’t have to go to Chinese school on Saturdays. I’m not fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese. I’m generalizing here a little, but am I any less Chinese because I don’t fit into that? Is there a master checklist somewhere? Like, rice cooker, check. Red envelopes on Lunar New Year, check. Shoes off at the door, check. Respect for elders, hot water at restaurants, giant extended family: check, check, check.
Who decides what the Chinese-American experience is? Is identity biological, or is it about how convincingly you can slip into that identity?
And then add to that that I’m not just Chinese-American, but Chinese-Dominican-American. It’s a whole lot of hyphens.
Laura: For a long time Melissa felt disconnected from that Chinese side of the hyphen. She realizes now that her dad probably felt that too. He couldn’t pass on much of his Chinese identity because not much had been passed along to him. But what must have made that even more frustrating is that he didn’t feel connected to his American identity, either.
Melissa: I learned recently that my dad doesn’t call himself American, even though he’s been living in this country for longer than I have. He never asked his parents about their history; maybe that was part of his Chinese culture not to ask. Maybe it’s part of my American identity that I feel like I have to ask, because I’m so afraid of losing what little ties I do have to that history.
Laura: Melissa told me that it’s a common practice in Asian American immigrant families to christen a child with a name that traces back to their ancestry. Often the family will end up using an Americanized version of that name, and only use the Asian name in the company of those who can pronounce it.
Melissa’s parents had always just called her Melissa. But when she was 19, she asked her dad if she’d ever had a Chinese name. He said that his mother—Melissa’s grandmother—had given her one when she was born, but he didn’t remember it now.
Melissa: I was surprised to learn that I had a Chinese name, and disappointed that he didn’t keep a record of something that felt so significant.
But then a month later when I came home from college for the weekend, out of the blue, my dad told me that he remembered my name. He didn’t know how to write the Chinese characters, but my grandmother’s pronunciation of my name had suddenly come back to him. He’d spoken the name to a friend who knew Chinese characters, and his friend had written the name on a slip of paper.
My dad held out his hand and put a tiny scrap of paper in my palm. When I opened my hand there it was: my Chinese name written on a strip of looseleaf ripped off the bottom of a page. It seemed like a miracle, that this piece of my identity that I thought was lost was now found. I just sat there and stared, too excited to say anything. My dad looked at me, nodded, and walked out of the room like his job was done.
And then a few weeks later, I went to look for the paper and it was gone. I searched every inch of my dorm, my room at home, every place I could remember being, even places I knew I wouldn’t find it. Maybe I’d stuck it in my pocket, or put it in a notebook or folder where I assumed it would be safe. Maybe it flew out when I’d pulled out my Metrocard. Maybe someone else found it and threw it out, thinking that it didn’t look like anything special.
I tried to write down the bits I remembered, but I could only recall about half of the characters. I asked my dad if he could ask his friend about the name again. He said that his friend was away on a trip to Taiwan. And that was just sort of the end of the discussion. I wasn’t sure if my dad was uncomfortable pursuing it further, or just wasn’t interested, but it felt like I just had to leave it. All I knew is that for one brief moment I had a window into my Chinese history—and when I lost that slip of paper, it slammed shut.
Maybe because I felt disconnected from my Chinese heritage, I felt shy about asking anyone for help. I had a few Chinese acquaintances, but they weren’t close friends. The irony is that here I was in a city with 700,000 Chinese people— more than any other city in the country—but without a personal relationship, I had no easy way in.
Laura: Life went on. Melissa would think about that name every now and then, but she figured it would just be one of those mysteries that would never be solved, a piece of herself that would always be missing.
Melissa: That half-written name was symbolic for me. I felt like I wouldn’t feel whole until I found the entire thing. That name tied to my grandmother, to my ancestry, to a history I desperately wanted to learn.
Who was I, really? Where did I belong? Who were “my” people? How Chinese was I if I didn’t know the language—if I didn’t even know my own name? My friend Su suggested I just pick out my own Chinese name, but that didn’t feel right either. I wasn’t sure what the rules were for identity, but for it to be genuine, I felt like it had to also be something I was given.
Laura: Eight months later, Melissa was poking around the Internet late one night, still trying to recover those lost characters. On a whim she sent a text to her friend Andrew, who was Chinese and a native speaker. It was 1 a.m., but this was college, so Andrew sent a text right back. He asked her to show him the bits of her name that she remembered. Two hours later they were still chatting, little by little filling in the gaps with character websites and apps.
Melissa: I still remember that shaky feeling when we finally found it. It was three in the morning but I was wide awake. I wanted to run through the hallways of my dorm and shout out that we’d found it.
The name we found that night was 陳美玲. ChénMěiLíng in Mandarin; Chang4Mei5Ling4 in Cantonese. Mei means beautiful and Ling means tinkling, like the clinking of jade pieces.
My entire life, I’d been trying to connect myself to my Chinese identity. For so long I’d felt like I was getting closer and closer, like putting pieces of a puzzle together, and now seeing it there in front of me I was sure that this was the name my grandmother had given me. That night Andrew and I learned that the spelling of my last name is also a popular surname in Peru, which made me even more sure that this name was the one written on that lost slip of paper.
But there was also this tiny part of myself that doubted. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wanted this to be my name so badly that I was convincing myself that this had to be it. I realized that ultimately I was choosing this name for myself, convincing myself that it was mine to take.
Laura: When I was nine years old, my mom gave me a little wooden plaque with my name on it: Laura. Underneath that name were the words “crown of glory” and below that in tiny script, a verse from the book of 1 Peter in the Bible: “you will receive a crown of glory that will never fade away.” The name Laura—and that idea of a crown of glory—originates from the Laurel wreaths that emperors and Olympic champions wore in ancient Greece.
I was Gabe’s age when my mom gave me that wooden plaque, and I loved looking at it whenever I lapsed into feeling like Laura was a boring name. It was nice to remember that my name was tied to something beautiful, a crown of glory that had to be gifted or won, that would never fade away no matter how faded I might sometimes feel.
Only when I was naming my own children did I begin to understand just how much my name had shaped me. The point of a crown isn’t to call attention to itself; it’s to highlight the person who wears it. However subtle that directive might have been, my name had guided me into believing that glory was possible—not as fame—but as the ability to glorify all that was good around me, be that friendships or stories or the faith tied to that tiny verse on the plaque. It was that old feeling that I was destined for something bigger—bigger even than myself.
For Melissa—and for me—understanding what’s in a name was a coming-of-age story. Our names helped us to understand who we are and how we fit into this world—and also how big that world could be.
There’s a coming-of-age story in Homer’s Odyssey, too. The larger story of the Odyssey is about Odysseus, a king who has left his home and has to outwit monsters and seek help from both mortals and deities before he’s able to get back home. But the lesser known story within a story follows Telemechus, Odysseus’s son.
Telemachus is born a prince, but since his dad has been away from home for more than a decade, Telemechus has grown up largely disconnected from his father—and his royal identity. He doesn’t feel empowered to step into that role, and as a result his house is overrun by suitors trying to take over the kingdom and convince Telemachus’s mom to ditch Odysseus and marry one of them.
Telemechus spends a long time sitting at home, trying to piece together the puzzle of what happened to his dad. As is often the case in the Odyssey, it takes a little divine intervention to make things happen. The goddess Athena shows up and gives Telemachus a bit of what my son Gabe was feeling—that message from the gods that he was made for something bigger than this, that maybe he was destined to be famous. Given that we’re still talking about Telemachus more than 2000 years later, I’d say he got his wish.
Telemachus’s name means “far from battle” or “fighting from afar.” But Telemechus has to leave the security of what he knows before he’s able to claim that name. His journey is a story of a boy leaving home to search for his father, learning to embrace his royal identity through the guidance of strangers who knew his father better than he did. It’s through those relationships that Telemachus finally understands who he was meant to be. His father beats him home, and Telemechus realizes that though he grew up disconnected from his father, the resemblance between them is strong—not just in appearance, but in their courage to regain the kingdom they nearly lost.
When Melissa first learned about her name, she was young, just nineteen. When she was given a second chance to claim that name, she also got a new vision of what life could be. Suddenly life was not a fixed frame, but a vast landscape that stretched on and on, changing with the light and the seasons. The Chinese culture she’d felt closed off from became something she could step into. It turned out that embracing that culture looked a lot like her name: not something big and obvious, but the soft clinking of jade pieces that could be tucked in a pocket or held up to the light—or written on a scrap of paper.
Her junior year of college—the same year she finally found her Chinese name—Melissa signed up for Mandarin classes.
Melissa: They were the hardest classes I’ve ever taken. Those first few weeks, I felt totally out of my depth. Most of the students in my Chinese class were native speakers taking the class to boost their GPA. The exchanges between my teacher and the native speakers whizzed past my head without me catching a word they were saying. During midterms and finals season, I would put aside studying for the classes I actually needed to graduate and just focus, day and night, on studying Chinese. How I did in those classes felt personal. When I got A’s, I was proving to myself that I could do it. That I could finally claim this identity that had felt out of my reach for so long. It was one of the hardest—and most gratifying—experiences of my life.
I learned 我 (wo3) which means I or me.
学校 (xue2xiao4) which means school.
飞机 (fei1ji1) which means airplane.
And:
经济发展一方面提高了人们的生活水平，另一方面却使生活环境变得一天不如一天。
Jīngjì fāzhǎn yī fāngmiàn tígāole rénmen2 de shēnghuó shuǐpíng, lìng yī fāngmiàn què shǐ shēnghuó huánjìng biàn dé yītiān bùrú yītiān.
Which of course means “on the one hand, economic development has improved people's living standards, but on the other hand, it has made the environment worse.”
When I was able to pick out some of the characters on the street signs in Elmhurst, Flushing, or Chinatown or understand bits of conversations when Chinese speakers passed by, it was small, but it felt like I was finally stepping into the life I’d always hoped for, but didn’t know how to reach. I finally had a tangible way to step into this culture that was supposed to be my own.
But there was also something else that happened when I took those classes—something that has shaped me even more than learning the language.
There was another student in my honors program with me named Angela. One day between my classes she asked me if I wanted to help out with the Eco Fashion Expo, or EFE, a sustainable fashion initiative she had gotten funded through our college’s green fund.
Angela was a native Mandarin speaker, and so were most of the people she worked with at EFE. They’d help each other with Chinese homework, argue over the best Chinese takeout, and effortlessly switch back and forth between English and Mandarin, sometimes in the same sentence.
Growing up, I’d had a few other Asian friends, but it wasn’t until Angela and her friends welcomed me into their circle that I finally felt like I was part of the Chinese-American community. Those relationships made me feel safe to learn and grow. It was humbling to realize how much I had to learn, but it was also so exciting. I wasn’t just learning a language; I was learning to embrace my culture, and it was incredible.
Laura: I never understood the magic of learning another language until I got a Fulbright scholarship that allowed Nate and me to spend a year in Manila. The non-profit we were volunteering with required us to take a month of intensive language and culture classes before we could start working, so our early days in Manila were spent studying Tagalog while we learned to ride jeepneys and haggle over eggs and produce at the palengke, the open-air market.
I’d taken Spanish, Italian, and French in high school and college. Tagalog was harder than all of those combined—and I loved it. Our teachers were native Tagalog speakers who were born and raised in the Philippines, so when they taught us grammar and vocabulary, they also taught us about the more subtle nuances of culture that only a native speaker would know.
When our intensive was over, we didn’t want to stop. A friend told us about a Tagalog tutor and we started meeting with her every week. We learned Tagalog slang, like naks naman and astig, to make jokes in another language. We studied flashcards on the jeepney, quizzed each other while we were walking to work. It was clear that no matter how hard we worked, we would never be fluent, but we kept at it anyway, because even with our kindergarten-level Tagalog, that connection through language made all the difference.
We were volunteering with a non-profit called Samaritana, that helped sex trafficking survivors get back on their feet. It was a beautiful place, run by Filipinos and steeped in Filipino culture. Many of the women who came there didn’t speak English, but when we stumbled through our Tagalog verb tenses and they teased us playfully, something wonderful happened: those women became our friends. We became students of the life they had created, one they graciously invited us into. It would never be our culture—and no amount of fluency would make us Filipino—but getting to experience that culture made our world bigger and more beautiful.
Even out on the streets our interactions changed. Shopkeepers and streetvenders brightened when they heard their language spoken. In a country that prizes relationships and connection above individuality, we learned to prize those things, too. We learned to never go anywhere without a kasama, a companion, and found that it was a better way to travel. We learned to listen first and only then decide if speaking was necessary. We learned that sometimes what was good for the group was more important than what was good for us. More than a decade later, those Filipino habits and ideas are still with me. Tagalog phrases still bubble up without warning. My identity will never be hyphenated the way Melissa’s is, but that year in Manila shaped me profoundly. In almost every area of my life, I can trace the decisions I’ve made back to my relationships with those women and the things I learned that year.
What I experienced in the Philippines—what Melissa experienced in those college Mandarin classes—is what can happen when we see our cultural identity not as rigid and fixed, but expansive. Paradoxically, those experiences stepping into another culture made me feel more American, because my American identity had shifted to include that experience. I felt more hopeful about that identity, because it ceased to just be one thing.
In our second episode of this season titled “The Hidden Ship,” scarcity researchers Caroline Roux and Kelly Goldsmith talked about our tendency to subjective scarcity — when we have what we need but we feel like we don’t have enough.
If we see our American culture as a finite resource that we’re running out of, then we’ll see anyone who tries to change it as a threat. But culture isn’t something we run out of. It isn’t scarce.
I have sometimes struggled to say what it means to be an American. The freedoms I’m afforded are ones that I often take for granted because I’ve known them all my life. I know in theory that my ancestry traces back to England and Ireland, but even after visiting my English relatives a few times as a child, those connections feel theoretical. Even as I’m grateful for the freedoms passed down to me from those early settlers who drafted our constitution, I’m also aware of the harm they did to the Native populations whose land they stole, and how many other harms would come out of this nation. I am proud to be an American—and I lament that my country has not always acted in ways I can be proud of. I am proud that this country was founded as one that took in immigrants—and troubled that in 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly removed from its mission statement the description of the United States as “a nation of immigrants.”
It was a change that reflected our nation’s policy changes on immigration, changes that have made it next to impossible for asylum seekers to become citizens or even to find shelter and escape certain death in their home country.
In his 1980 publication, American Identity and Americanization, historian Philip Gleason wrote, “To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit to himself the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism.” He went on to say that the character of American nationality was one of being “open to anyone who willed to become an American.”
As I read those words, I wonder . . . are we still defined by our commitment to embrace shared ideals? Are we still open to anyone willing to become an American—or is belonging here really about shared skin tone, culture, and language?
Despite changes that make it harder for people to come here, our immigrant population continues to grow. Whole industries like hospitality and agriculture are dependent on those populations; many of them are undocumented because citizenship has becone an almost impossible goal.
As the main character in Charles Yu ’s novel Interior Chinatown says, "W ho gets to be American? What does an American look like? We're trapped as guest stars . . . minor characters locked into a story that doesn't quite know what to do with us. After two centuries here, why are we still not American? Why do we keep falling out of the story?"
Melissa: All my life I’ve felt this unspoken longing, this sense of a separation. That mix of Chinese culture, Dominican culture, American culture, immigrant culture . . . that hyphenated identity has been a big part of my ide ntity as an American.
The United States is my home. I love living here, and I take great pride in being a New Yorker. But whenever someone asks me about how I identify, there’s an assumption there that I’m not really American—or at least not the way white people are. So I say I’m half-Dominican, half-Chinese. It’s like my identity isn’t complete without explaining my roots.
And I’m proud of those roots. I’m grateful for what those cultures have given me. But I’ve never lived in either of these places. And as much as I love visiting the Dominican Republic, I don’t feel like I belong there either. People there see me as American. So where is home?
Laura: For many, the immigrant experience is the American experience. Unless our ancestors came over on a land bridge or were already here, we’re all immigrants. That blend of cultures is what has made us who we are today. American culture is a hyphenated identity.
The hidden challenge that comes with that hyphenated identity is to what extent we assimilate into mainstream culture for the sake of bridge-building without losing the beauty and traditions of our ancestry. This tension—and the enduring assumption that Americanness is synonymous with whiteness—has brought us to where we are today, with everyone from Melissa to me not feeling sure whatAmerican identity really is.
Melissa: Every major city has a Chinatown. Even small towns often have at least one Chinese restaurant. And yet Chinese-Americans and Asian Americans in general are still sometimes seen as not belonging, as perpetual foreigners.
Laura: In his book The Idea of America, historian Gordon Wood writes, “precisely because we are not a people held together by blood, no one knows what an American is except by what they believe. It's important that we do know our history, because our history is the source of our Americanness.”
Melissa: One of the things I’ve had to come to terms with for myself is that the history of Asians in the United States is a painful one. They haven’t always felt safe or been protected under the law like other Americans.
Laura: The first Chinese immigrants came here in the early 1800s. Some of them helped build the Transcontinental Railroad. But nearly 100 years later they still weren’t welcome. One Los Angeles newspaper labeled Chinese people as “barbarians taking jobs away from whites.”
That kind of language set the stage for the 1871 Chinese Massacre, what some historians call the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. After a dispute between two Chinese men led to the death of a bystander and the wounding of a police officer, a 500-person mob descended on the Old Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. Nineteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and hanged; among those murdered was the town’s only Chinese doctor and a young Chinese boy. All but one of those murdered had nothing to do with the original dispute. Thirty-seven rioters were indicted, 15 tried, and eight convicted of manslaughter—but a year later, the California Supreme Court reversed the convictions on the grounds that the original indictment had failed to establish that the Chinese doctor had been murdered. The U.S. government paid imperial China an indemnity to settle the whole affair.
A decade later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped all immigration of Chinese laborers. During World War II, Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes and put in detention camps, where they were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. In 1942 the federal War Relocation Authority was established, whose stated mission was to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.”
Unfortunately, racially motivated violence against Asian-Americans didn’t end with the war. If you have young children listening, you may want to pause this story and finish listening later. What I’m about to say is hard to hear.
In 1982, a white man and his step-son were at a Detroit strip club after the father had lost his job as a foreman at Chrysler. A 27-year-old Chinese man named Vincent Chin was there too, celebrating his upcoming wedding. The two white men blamed Japanese manufacturers for the Chrysler job loss, and beat Vincent Chin with a baseball bat because they believed that he was Japanese. He died from those injuries four days later. His killers were tried in March of 1983, but the judge ruled that the murder was just a barroom brawl and said that the men were guilty not of first-degree murder, but manslaughter—the same conviction pronounced on the rioters from the 1871 Chinese Massacre from a century earlier. The men who killed Vincent Chin were fined $3000. But they never had to serve any time in prison for their crime.
Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that tracks hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, reported almost 3,800 cases since the pandemic began. One academic study found that anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities had increased by 150 percent, compared to an overall hate crime decrease of 7 percent. New York City, where Melissa lives, has had a 38 percent decrease in the total number of hate crimes—but a staggering 833 percent increase in Anti-Asian hate crimes.
Melissa: Some of that may be due to phrases used by former President Trump, like “the Chinese virus” or “the Kungflu,” which scapegoated Asia n Americans.
And of course now we’re facing another dark moment in our history: on March 16th, 2021, a 21-year old white male shot eight people at three massage parlors in the Atlanta region. Six of them were Asian women.
We now know the names of these victims: Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Yaun, Paul Andre Michels.
Most of the victims were hard working, caring mothers who worked tirelessly to provide the best life for their kids. Many leave behind friends, partners, and young children who describe the victims as being “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
At one time phrases like, “No Irish need apply” were commonplace in store windows; today America’s intolerance often takes more subtle forms—until something like the Atlanta shooting happens.
When I heard about the shooting, I just sunk . . . mentally and physically. My mind felt clouded and I could barely think. I immediately felt so tired. I had a huge headache. I had all of this work to do, but I just went into my room and fell asleep in the middle of the day.
That night after I woke up I finally let myself cry—really cry. That people like me were seen as objects to this man’s violence, a way to give a tangible expression to his racism and misogyny. I realized that the fear and dread I was feeling had been there long before this shooting. My dad is a doorman, and ever since the pandemic started, I felt scared for him. He’s the kind of person who keeps his head down and won’t speak up if something happens to him. Sometimes he won’t even tell my mom and me. For months I’ve stayed awake every night, waiting for him to come home. I can’t fall asleep until he does.
Laura: In her story for the Christian publication World Magazine, Sophia Lee wrote, “With the Atlanta tragedy, we have a white perpetrator. He’s not just white, but a professed Christian who attended a conservative evangelical church. For some, he is the perfect villain—he hits the trifecta of race, sex, and religion . . . people debating whether or not alleged killer Robert Aaron Long’s motives were racist are missing the point, though. Whatever his heart’s intent, there’s no escaping the fact that the conversations, the grief, the memories pouring out due to the Atlanta shootings are about race.”
Sophia goes on to say, “Some people want to flush away any talk about race, dismissing it as identity politics. Well, we didn’t get to choose our own identity—our identity was chosen for us by the way people view us, by the way history shaped us, by an infinite number of random, individual actions and perceptions over which we had no control or knowledge.”
Melissa: We can’t deny that this was a hate crime against Asians. The police say the shooter had a “sex addiction.” The shooter claims he targeted these businesses because he saw them as a source of “temptation.” Whether or not these women were sex workers is besides the point; even if they were sex workers, they didn’t deserve to be murdered.
Laura: There’s a history behind sexualizing Asian women, too. The 1875 Page Act prohibited the entry of laborers from Asian countries who were brought for “lewd and immoral purposes.” This law was used to justify invasive and discriminatory investigations at immigration centers as well as to deny entrance to Asian women who had no ties to prostitution. Since most west coast states at that time prohibited interracial marriages, there was a surplus of Chinese men who weren’t able to marry or start families, which of course meant that they couldn’t find their way into the fabric of dominant family-centered American culture.
Melissa: Sex workers are often dehumanized in our culture. Instead of criminalizing vulnerable women, we could be protecting them. But also we need to listen to that community and ask them what they need—not just what we think is best.
Laura: Until that year in Manila, I didn’t understand just how loaded that phrase was: “sex worker.” It was a label imposed on the women we worked with—the women who became our friends. Some of them had been trafficked or sold into that label. Others turned to prostitution because they felt like they had no other option. Police often made the situation worse because they’d arrest the women for prostitution instead of recognizing that these women were victims of a system that was exploiting them. We learned that sex trafficking and pornography were often closely linked, and that the high demand for that industry made it a lucrative one—though the people profiting usually weren’t the women whose faces and bodies were recorded on camera. And then we visited a pro-sex work NGO in Hong Kong. The head of that organization defended prostitution. She was a Westerner who had relocated to Hong Kong, and she said work was work. That the women she worked with wanted to be sex workers.
What I learned in all of those interactions is just how inadequate that phrase is: “sex worker.” No one is just a sex worker. They’re a person with a story—often a complicated one.
On the Statue of Liberty’s bronze plaque is Emma Lazurus’s poem “The New Colossus.” The most famous line of that poem is the last one, but it’s not often that we hear it in its context.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I’ve been wondering lately how many of my fellow Americans still stand by that poetry. Can we recall a time in our own history when we were tired and wretched, Do we know the story of when our ancestors came here chasing that dream of possibility? Are we willing to extend that welcome to others or will we follow the natural human impulse to pull up the ladder behind us?
Melissa: At Shelter in Place, we always talk about how important it is to hold onto hope. Because without hope, we don’t really have anything.
In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that we’re all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality and tied in a single garment of destiny. “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
I know that hope won’t solve racism. Not for Asian, Latinx, Black or Native peoples, or for me. One sentiment I heard often during the renewed Black Lives Matter protests is that our success is its own form of protest. Freedom, justice, and liberty for all hasn’t always been extended to everyone in this country; it’s something we’re still working towards. But even if we haven’t always lived up to those values, I still believe in them. Holding people accountable for their actions, putting people in power that represent our values, and putting forth legislation that will curb hatred and uphold people’s rights can help us get closer to them.
Because of my hyphenated identity I’ve sometimes felt like an “other,” especially because I’m mixed race.
I actually usually have to check “other” on surveys if there’s no option to select more than one category. But now I’m trying to approach it as an opportunity to feel more connected, rather than less. I have so many beautiful communities that I can learn from, that I can be a part of, on my own terms. We all do, even if it’s not a cultural community.
As much as I’ve grieved over the hate toward my community that is still so evident, I’ve also felt a lot of love from that community.
The week of the Atlanta shootings, I was really struggling, and I reached out to our team at Shelter in Place. That Friday at our team meeting I teamed up with Winnie Shi, who is Chinese-Canadian, to lead a discussion about what had happened.
We had no idea when we started writing this episode that it would coincide with the Atlanta shootings.
Every single one of us working with Laura on this episode is part of the Asian community—even Nate, who is a quarter Chinese, but doesn’t talk about it because like me, he grew up disconnected from that part of his hyphenated identity. It’s been so grounding to work through those complications with the support of people who understand. They helped convince me that I had a story worth sharing. Sharing my story now, in this time when I’m so aware of just how complicated that hyphenated identity can be, gave me a chance to reflect, learn, and heal.
It meant so much to have my fellow Asian-identifying apprentices grieve with me. But they weren’t the only ones to reach out. I also heard from fellow apprentices who are not Asian, but who wanted me to know that they stand in solidarity with me, that they’re ready and willing to put in the work to make things different. Their support means so much to me, because this isn’t an issue that only rests on the shoulders of marginalized people. We need deep friendships and support in all of our communities—not just the ones that come from our culture.
Laura: I’m grateful to Melissa and Winnie for leading our team well through the grief of the past few weeks—and also for leading us back to hope. They’ve reminded me that there is still a lot we can do. Amidst the hate crimes against Asians in the U.S., there has also been an outpouring of support and love from that community and its allies. Oakland, California, the city I call home, has been featured in the news time and time again because of violence against Asians. After an 84-year-old man was killed while walking in his neighborhood, a group of concerned community members started the organization Compassion Oakland to escort elderly Asian Americans who fear for their safety. There are organizations that provide legal support, mental health services, and financial aid for those targeted by hate crimes. We’ll be including resources to support and educate ourselves on Asian communities in our show notes for today on our website shelterinplacepodcast.info.
In her essay, “What does it mean to be an American?” Sarah Song writes that “genuine democracy demands solidarity. If democratic activity involves not just voting, but also deliberation, then people must make an effort to listen to and understand one another.”
Melissa: For me, being American means thinking individually, rather than collectively. That has always been the push and pull between both sides of that hyphen for me. And we can learn from both.
I think when people are having a hard time here, we say things like, “Think about yourself. Take care of yourself first.” And that’s important, and often mental illness is stigmatized in certain cultures. I definitely think about my growth, my dreams.
But when I think about success, I never think of just myself. I think about what I can do for my family. In teams, I think about how I can help everyone else reach their goals. Just like my parents did for me.
My parents sacrificed a lot, and worked really hard, so I had the power to choose who I wanted to be. And my mom may be Dominican, and my dad may be Chinese, but isn’t that the American dream? I chose my profession, I chose to go to college, and these weren’t things my parents had much choice about for themselves. So they gave that to me. They gave me that American, individual freedom.
When I have kids, I’ll tell them about their family history, like how my grandfather followed my grandmother from China to Peru to be with her. I’ll cook lo mein with thick noodles during the Lunar New Year and tell them if they eat them, they’ll enjoy a long life. One day we’ll all visit the Guangdong region in China where our ancestors are from.
Everyone is going to find their own entry point. You shouldn’t feel ashamed if you aren’t ticking all of the boxes. It’s very easy to compare yourself to other people, but I want to tell people that those boxes don’t define you. You get to decide when you feel comfortable in your own identity.
I am going to continue to build my identity. Sometimes I feel like I’m far behind, but I know my friends have their hands outstretched to me. There may be people who gatekeep identity. But there are also people who will invite you, who will teach you. I’m happy I found those people.
Laura: Melissa’s story isn’t just about understanding her own identity. It’s about ultimately embracing our American identity as a hyphenated one, too. It’s one of the best things our country has going for it—not just the variety of foods and traditions and languages, but the opportunity for complex and wonderful relationships, the chance to learn from each other that we are more than what we appear to be. We were made for something bigger than this life we’re in right now.
At Shelter in Place we talk a lot about transforming our communities by first transforming ourselves, so today I want to invite you to resurrect that old dream of possibility. Step into a life that is bigger than the one you know. If there’s a particular culture or group that rubs you the wrong way or that you don’t know much about, take it upon yourself to become a student of that culture.
Explore America’s hyphenated identity—not just through research or reading the news, but through relationship. You might just find that you end up with a new cultural appreciation—or even a new friend. Maybe it’ll give you a new definition of what it means to be American.
If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. If you’d like to help us but can’t donate, consider becoming an ambassador for Shelter in Place. When you sign up for our referral program and share Shelter in Place with others, you help us expand our community. We’ll give you a shoutout on our website just for signing up. Each month, we’ll recognize our listener of the month with a special thank you on an episode.
Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Blue Dot and Storyblocks. Melissa Lent and Nate Davis were our associate editors for this episode, and Samantha Skinner and Winnie Shi were our associate producers. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Winnie Shi, Eve Bishop, Isobel Obrecht, Alana Herlands, Melissa Lent, Clara Smith, Quan Zhang, Samantha Skinner, Elen Tekle, Shweta Watwe, and Michele O'Brien.
Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.