A collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts — Introduction (not to be confused with a beginning) This writing comes collected over four months of scribbled thoughts from bearing witness to the world’s intimate and collective raging and grieving, or in some corners, a dense immovability. I scribbled through the relentless intensity of anti-Asian violence gutted with the mass shooting in Atlanta; through the heart wrenching state-sanctioned…

Inspired by the Radical Notions of Grasping at Our Roots — I remember distinctly a time in my professional career when cultural competency and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were too radical for my workplace, that the extent of multiculturalism was food fairs and performances, and that diversity meant geography — look at all the different ZIP codes we come from…

This is part five in a collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts. For contextual grounding, please visit the landing page. — In asking how #StopAsianHate can be a site of struggle that situates Asian/Americans inside of movements, I’m also asking how #StopAsianHate can be a site of love and abolition too. How are we situating ourselves in the radical love of Asian/Americanness that has less to do with food and culture…

This is part four in a collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts. For contextual grounding, please visit the landing page. — FAQs these days are littered with: “How can people be allies to fill-in-the-blank-BIPOC community?” This question comes in every formulation, a barometer for the endless permutations of how white supremacist violence gets enacted on BIPOC communities here and by proxy. Because I am Asian American, these blanks are often filled…

This is part three in a collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts. For contextual grounding, please visit the landing page. — Parts one and two manifested my frustrations with #StopAsianHate, and I am not withholding that I’ve used this hashtag in desperation and grief, which speaks to my always present and ever-evolving tensions with the limitations of language. Do we use what’s available to us with its mainstream reach, knowing that…

This is part two in a collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts. For contextual grounding, please visit the landing page. — Let’s start here: the recognition that our bodies, relationships, and stories are not — can never be — apolitical, decontextualized spaces. We are sites of struggle: the meanings and identities of our lives are endlessly constructed, contested, negotiated, and reinvented in historical, sociopolitical, and cultural collisions. When we come together…

This is part one in a collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts. For contextual grounding, please visit the landing page. — After the mass shooting in Atlanta targeting Asian women, rage consumed me. It was the kind of rage that fed off my grief, buried in the marrow of a numbing sense of normality that life just is and would keep being just is. I raged that nothing stopped for this…

“I’m sorry and sorrier that sorry is rarely enough.” — Kiese Laymon — Borrowing from the words of writer and author Kiese Laymon, we’re sorry and sorrier that sorry is rarely enough. This letter comes to you on the heels of the Atlanta shooting, followed rapidly by the Boulder shooting; we’re still wading through Derek Chauvin’s re-traumatizing trial, and now living through the…

Inspired by Mia Birdsong, adrienne maree brown, and other BIPOC Healers — Building on Part One, I want to begin by briefly writing directly to white folks: Racialized trauma also lives in white people — you. As Lama Rod Owen details (and I’m paraphrasing below), the trauma of whiteness looks and feels like: The ongoing proximate harm of white supremacy on Black…