Irene Choi Instagram – Strawberry cream cake. The day before she turned 50, Xiaojie Tan was killed by a homegrown gun-toting terrorist. Meanwhile, her daughter Jami bought a strawberry cream cake so they could celebrate her birthday the next day, but it never happened.
It’s been a week since we found out about the Atlanta shootings that left 8 people dead, 6 of them Asian women (4 of them Korean like me, one with the same name and of similar age as my mom). Two of the shootings happened at massage parlors in an area so familiar to me that I recognized it immediately from a headline thumbnail photo. I drove by them every time I went to work while living in Atlanta during the first season of Insatiable. My cats’ vet clinic was behind one. I frequented the Wendy’s on the same block on lazy days. And while the world kept turning and the internet continued to push Nature’s Cereal (note: omg guys, it’s fruit salad and juice 😒), time stopped for some of us — literally and figuratively.
6 Asian women lost their lives. At first, I thought, “It’s not just their lives that were lost because millions of Asian women in America also lost a sense of security.”
But then I wondered if we ever had a sense of true security, but rather a veneer of complacency. The more accurate reality is that we’ve become accustomed to the way we’ve been ostracized and fetishized, that this feeling of being othered must be the norm, which in turn has led many of us to internalize the implicit bias assigned to us and to believe that maybe our voices don’t deserve to be heard.
A lot of useful conversations have been happening in the past week — some deservedly repeated more than others. For that, I’m grateful, but know that there are still many out there who deny and doubt the legitimacy of our experience. So I’m having this cake in honor of Xiaojie Tan and the other women who won’t be able to celebrate another birthday. While unfortunate that it took a tragedy to cause a shift, I’m hoping that their deaths are not in vain and that we rise stronger. #stopasianhate
PS: this is actually my 5th slice of cake in the past week because cake is what I do on “bad days”.
Artwork by my childhood friend @artbyalexchiu | Posted on 24/Mar/2021 23:59:01
