I’m okay.
I’m tired. I feel burdened by this seesaw of anger and grief and guilt I’ve been feeling since last Wednesday after reading about the Atlanta Spa Shootings. What makes it worse is the debate over whether the killings are also a hate crime. Six Asian women were murdered. Call it what it is.
The morning after the shootings my boyfriend asked if I had heard about what happened in Atlanta. I hadn’t, so I looked it up. Reading the news headlines I was taken aback. All the stories I’d been seeing on social media about the rise in Asian hate crimes had come to a head. A few friends messaged me later that morning:
Sending you love and light today.
Fuck white supremacy.
Love you, friend.
Fucking racist piece of shit.
Their anger and concern helped.
I went along with my day — coffee, work, lunch, work, reading updates a little at a time throughout the day, and it all started to feel a little personal. Six of the victims were women, more than one victim was Korean, the shooter went to three different spas (all Asian owned).
Work ended and I went out for a friend’s birthday dinner, and felt relatively normal through it all. But later that night, while in the shower, I started thinking about the people who were murdered, and seeing the faces of the women that could have been my mom or my aunt, and I began to sob. I didn’t quite understand what I was feeling; grief, fear, an overwhelming sense of injustice, and it was crashing down on me. I cried everything out and then put myself to bed, dehydrated and swollen.
The next day I kept crying at random times throughout the day, and began to think about all the times this has happened in other BIPOC communities and felt guilt for not feeling enough at those times and for not doing more. How did they handle this burden?
That evening I had a missed call from my mom, and then a text to me and my sisters, asking how we were doing. I called her back and let her know I was fine and hadn’t experienced any incidents.
I always worry about you the most during times like these, she said, you look the most like me.
Part of me wanted to tell her how I was feeling, but I didn’t know how to put it into words, not when she was feeling guilty about me sharing her Korean features. There’s something wrong when a mother has to worry about her daughter because they share the same face. So I told her I was okay, I didn’t know what else to say.
Yet, those that lost their lives are no longer able to be okay, and their families and loved ones left behind aren’t okay. How can the rest of us be okay when this keeps happening? It’s this ugly gruesome puzzle that keeps fitting into place again and again. This story isn’t new. Hate crimes aren’t new. Mass shootings aren’t new, as the most recent Boulder shooting so sadly demonstrates.
We keep yelling to be heard but are continually drowned out by the cacophony of racists and callous individuals. Can we make enough noise to be heard above the slurs, the bullets, and systems that are against us? I honestly don’t know. Sometimes it seems like it, other times it doesn’t.
So you see, I’m tired, and there’s still much work to be done.
