Un-Containing Asian/Americanness: This is Not Yet a Love Letter to Us, Asian/Americans

This is part one in a collection of five imperfectly scribbled parts. For contextual grounding, please visit the landing page.

Unsplash Image by Toa Heftiba

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 grief of mine and grieving of others. Tinged in sorrow, I burrowed inside a bone-deep fury of exhaustion, screaming into a void where no one could hear me, not even myself.

It took some time for me to see that this rage, this fury, was directed at my own Asian/American community, a sudden realization that unhinged me. As a medley of peoples muddled together into a racial group, we were hurting in ways simultaneously familiar and strange. There remains some messy trauma in my relationship to Asian/Americanness that I need to come back to again and again. Perhaps some resentment or blame or shame for allowing us to get to this point of brokenness.

I wondered then, and wonder still, if the trauma thickened from how we couldn’t agree on our own brokenness. Are we? To what degree? How deep? And for how long?

Which is to ask, as an un-contained fellow Asian/American, do you see our brokenness the way that I do?

Continue onto part two or return to the landing page.

This collection of writings is a work in progress — open to your critiques, thoughts, feelings, wonderings, tensions, and tenderness. This collection, however, is not open to hateful comments or remarks that do not have the intention or invitation of trying to understand, connect, or “work out” conflict and differences.

Always and with immense gratitude,
c.