I Cry for My Mother Who Can’t Weep
I write today, as I have at times needed to throughout my life, in speaking up and fighting for my mother. She and I moved from South Korea to New York City in 1999, which is the place we have called home for the past 22 years.
It is a deeply disheartening and tragic reality to witness what has become the current state of America. As the news of ceaseless violence and unrelenting hatred toward minority groups and people of color across the nation continues to flash before our eyes, a certain paralysis tightly grips my entire nervous system; my body becomes stiff, my heart stops, and I feel as though I can’t breathe. Perhaps because it is a familiar sensation I can recount, and perhaps because this feeling sits too dangerously close to home. In a brief moment of reflection on both my mother’s and my own experience of trauma in the United States, I can instantly recall the event when she was racially assaulted and spat on by a total stranger while simply walking, minding her own business, in the middle of Fifth Avenue in broad daylight. Or, the time I was almost run over by a driver who ignored a stop sign. When I asked him not to hit me, he responded, “Go back to China,” then proceeded to get out of his car and assault me physically. My mother stood by and witnessed this in horror, while frantically calling the police, who arrived eventually and demonstrated no desire to help. Instead, they mocked our efforts to seek justice for what they called a “random” occurrence of violence. All this before Covid.
Perhaps it’s redundant to list how many times my mother, a Korean woman in her 60s who has not left the country in over two decades, has been berated and blamed for bringing the coronavirus to the United States since the pandemic began. Or, how she recently needed to move (read: escape) to a new apartment after only a year of living in a South Brooklyn neighborhood where a rotating group of locals routinely blocked her driveway making it completely inaccessible, and on separate occasions, broke the mirror of her car and keyed the body, and even went so far as to break into it, leaving the vehicle a violent mess inside, but taking nothing from it. In reading evidences of these attacks, one can identify different manifestations of the same motivation.
Today, my heart sinks yet again, when I get on the telephone with my mother and she only very reluctantly, knowing how upset I would be hearing this, shares with me her most recent episode of a racial abuse. Since 2015, my mother has been running a small kimchi business based in Brooklyn. In the so-called progressive neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn where we have our weekly farmer’s market stand, a customer demanded that my mother pay him in cash for empty jars of kimchi he was “returning.” She answered politely, but resolutely, “No,” to which he proceeded to assault her with a barrage of profanity-ridden racial slurs, which invariably started and ended with the hackneyed, “Go back to China.” To his and many racists’ dismay, we are Korean. With much dignity, however, we push on everyday despite these nightmares writing themselves like an unending chapter of a book, over and over again.
In her powerful recent essay in The Cut, “Swallowing Our Bitterness,” Kathleen Hou expounds upon her Taiwanese American family’s experience of enduring racist hate in America. It’s a survivalist practice, a learned habit if you will, that all Asian families in America have in common. Negative stereotypes and not-so-micro-aggressions create a constant undercurrent of fear that we must carefully tread on, further informing us of the fragility of our status in this country. “Death by a thousand cuts,” as the popular saying goes. Sadly, the sharpest of inflictions are often dealt when we least expect them by people we have come to trust the most: self-proclaimed allies, best friends, and even family. Pain is an effective signal of reinforcement that keeps one confined in their inhabited system of control. To cry out loud would mean to be vulnerable, and weakness is a luxury that cannot be afforded to many immigrant and POC families who find themselves perpetually in a mode of survival. “Good medicine tastes bitter,” said Confucius. And we continue on, “swallowing our bitterness,” hoping the bitterest of our silence brings us healing at last.
The alienation and denigration of people of Asian descent in America and the Western world at large have persisted for centuries to pave the way for the recent rise in violence against those who look like me and my mother. To reduce the cause of such phenomena only to the pandemic would be grossly ignoring the root of the problem. For far too long, the lack of ability and receptivity, not to mention, care, by the West to properly acknowledge and understand the cultures of the East has created a living condition in which our identity — our mere physical presence itself — has become devalued. Often, the value of this identity is something that becomes determined, or negotiated, by the perceiver, rather than being understood in its wholeness no matter whose perspective we find ourselves in. For centuries, our collective existence has operated and resided in Western spheres with a tragically truncated sense of this collective ‘self.’ In the face of such reality, it is often the elderly, women, or those who lack the second language proficiency to fully access one’s own sense of agency, who easily become subjects of targeted hatred that aims to mute their rightful experience to life.
There is nothing “random” and “senseless,” as the media often suggests, about these cowardly acts of hate-crime fueled by xenophobia. The people who are getting hurt are not just the people you hear about in the news coverage; in reality a much greater percentage of population are suffering without being mentioned. And conversely, the people who are carrying and spreading this deep-seated racist belief, like the contagious virus it is, are much closer to you than you may want to accept or believe. So take a look at yourself in the mirror. The choice is on you to decide whether you will excavate and terminate these ideas in your head, or continue to perpetuate the hatred that is actively destroying and killing innocent people in your communities. Niceties never healed the world and we do not seek your sympathy. Only that you change.
