Itsumi Nagakura - A04 - Week 2

The Inevitable Evil

In the past week, I have indirectly witnessed hate crimes against Asians, Asians and other People of Colour (POC) acting hostile towards the Chinese, a decline in the economy, my high-risk mother having to keep on working her job as a waitress so I could stay in the United States, and so many more heartbreaking events caused by COVID-19. Then I read Fight the Tower and realised that as an Asian woman, I could still get discriminated against in the one place I thought could be safe, which was in academia. I was and still am, emotionally drained. 

One sentence that stood out to me in Fight the Tower, was "We know that even those that look like us can hurt us."(138, Valverde) I suddenly remembered my life and the standards I lived by in Japan up until a few months ago. I remembered how the beauty standards were how pale your skin could look or how big your eyes can be with the obsession of "double eye-lids"; both being a physical quality of Westerners. I remembered how if you were like me and half Japanese and half Asian, you were automatically deemed inferior to those who were half Japanese and half White. I remembered how even today, so many "PC" people are blindly tweeting about how much better America is at handling COVID-19 than what Abe is doing. I remembered how Euro-centric life is in Japan. I had felt trapped in a body that would be discriminated against no matter what I did.

Then I read Andrew Yang: We Asian Americans are not the virus, but we can be part of the cure (2020) and I felt better. When Andrew Yang ran for president, I was euphoric. I knew he would not win because he was Asian American but yet I was excited at the slight possibility of seeing an Asian succeeding in America. There is absolutely no Asian representation in politics nor popular culture so even though I knew he wouldn't win, I latched on to the possibility that he would.

(Mazzucato, 2017.) 

What gave me a sense of comfort when reading his article, was that he already knew that racism during this time would happen. He had already acknowledged that although there is good in the world, there is also an inevitable force of evil; he understood beforehand that Asian Americans had to fight to be seen as American than just Asian. Andrew Yang is a realist and instead of being emotional, I realised that this was the approach I should be making in dark times like so. But as an Atheist non-American Asian in the United States living on a scholarship, what is there for me to do? Pray?

References

Valverde, K.-L. C., & Dariotis, W. M. (2020). Fight the tower: Asian American women scholars resistance and renewal in the academy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Mazzucato, O. (2017, February 13). Reel Representation: Asian-Americans gravely underrepresented in mainstream cinema. Retrieved from https://dailybruin.com/2017/02/03/reel-representation-asian-americans-gravely-underrepresented-in-mainstream-cinema/

Yang, A. (2020, April 1). Opinion | Andrew Yang: We Asian Americans are not the virus, but we can be part of the cure. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/andrew-yang-coronavirus-discrimination/