One year after Atlanta killings, Asian American women are still being dehumanized

Naomi Ko has been accosted while riding the subway in New York, yelled at for wearing a mask on the street in Minneapolis, and called a "COVID-spreading" sexual slur outside of a Korean mom-and-pop store in Pasadena.

The men who confronted Ko all blamed her for the coronavirus.

"I am the physical representation that it doesn't matter where you are geographically," said Ko, a filmmaker who splits her time between Los Angeles and the Twin Cities. "You can still experience anti-Asian hate on your Asian female body."

Hostilities toward Asian Americans had already been building across the nation when a gunman opened fire a year ago at Atlanta massage parlors, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent. It was a galvanizing moment for the Asian American community. But as we mark the anniversary of the shootings this week, it's worth pointing out that pandemic-fueled racism has not waned.

In fact, the national Stop AAPI Hate organization has tracked more than 6,270 hate incidents in 2021 against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. That's up 35% from the previous year. Women were the targets in 62% of the reports.

What's less explored is how acts of violence — as well as the more garden-variety racism Ko has experienced — can shape one's sense of fear and personal safety.

Ko has taken bystander training, keeps a golf club in the trunk of her car, and carries around various pepper sprays.

"It's like the new Chapstick for me," she said with a laugh.

Ko, a native of Rosemount, is hilarious, like the girlfriend you call for wisdom and laughs. She has an assertive voice and at 5 feet 7 — taller than most of us Asian women — always thought her athletic build would help buffer her from verbal harassment. In middle school, if someone jabbed her with a racist insult on the playground, she would fight back.

But you know what she did on that New York subway when a man called her a "ch—" and blamed Ko's "people" for the pandemic?

She put on her headphones and stepped off the train.

"My behavior has changed a lot," she tells me. "I know society thinks of us as demure and submissive," which is why she made a point to engage with racist bullies in the past.

But in bystander class, the instructor told the students not to do anything that would escalate the situation.

"It probably helped me and kept me safe," she said. "But me walking away, that was not going to help Asian women in the longer run. That was not going to stop that man from doing the same thing he did to me to another Asian woman, and it's really hard to grapple with that."

This year marks another unsettling anniversary. We'll be coming up on 40 years since Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, was brutally murdered in Detroit because of his race. The father and stepson who beat Chin with a baseball bat blamed him, assuming he was of Japanese descent, for the disappearing jobs in the city's auto industry.

"It's because of you [expletive] that we're out of work," one of Chin's killers said to him, according to a witness.

What struck me is how much that comment resembles the attacks directed at Ko and others. It's because of you we're out of work. It's because of you we're in this pandemic. The rhetoric is meant to justify the abuse.

Not long after Chin was murdered, as a little girl, ThaoMee Xiong overheard her Hmong mother on the phone telling a social worker that the men she worked with at the factory were harassing her, even to the point of chasing her on the highway.

"She was looking for someone to advocate for her so she could tell her boss this was happening," said Xiong, who grew up in Appleton, Wis., and is the new executive director of Minnesota's Coalition of Asian American Leaders. "He was a Hmong job counselor, and all he kept telling her was to be patient, that there was nothing we could do. It was just very Hmong at the time to sweep things under the rug, grin and bear it, don't make too much noise. He was like, 'Do you want to lose your job?' "

Her mom being aggressively pursued on the road was the first thing she thought of when Xiong heard about the 2021 Atlanta shootings.

"There's these stereotypes of Asian women that make us vulnerable to all folks, but especially men, because we're hypersexualized and perceived as being meek and obedient," said Xiong, whose group is holding events this week in remembrance of the shootings. "We're so objectified that we're completely dehumanized."

I remember realizing how much learning our country needed to do after the spa shootings. I remember cringing every time I heard someone say the shootings were not racist because the gunman simply had a sexual addiction for Asian women. Believe me, that does not make Asian women in this country feel any safer.

Lately, I can't bring myself to click on videos that pop up in my social media feed — or in texts from my parents — of an Asian grandma getting kicked in the face or a woman in Chinatown being clocked onto the pavement. They're just too disturbing, and if I were to consume all of these videos, it would tip my own personal balance from feeling informed to feeling relentlessly on edge.

But we do need to hear their stories.

Last month in St. Paul, a 15-year-old boy allegedly shot and killed Julia (Yuliya) Li, a 34-year-old businesswoman who immigrated from Kazakhstan. Police say Li was in her car going about her daily life, and that the shooting appeared to be random.

The Pioneer Press reported that Li worked in a marketing role at H.B. Fuller. She graduated from the University of Minnesota, where she was a member of the ballroom dance team, and earned an MBA from the University of St. Thomas. She was a wife, daughter and sister.

Ko, the filmmaker, tweeted a few simple lines about Li. A simple gesture intended to show that her life meant something.

As Ko and I ended our call, both she and I wished it was about something else.

"I'm pretty exhausted talking about our collective trauma," Ko said. "I hope we can talk more about the other things that make us human, and not the blood that we've bled."