- What does it feel like to be relevant only when Asian women die? You’re celebrated until another killing happens ––to be valuable, only deserving of empathy and love, when you’re brutalized. That’s the Asian American plight. We’re not visible at all. Only visible as a corpse.
- Your mother advised you that the way you protect yourself from racism is to disappear. Warning you ahead of time to stay small to be a smaller target. (As a mother who raised an Asian child) I assumed somehow subconsciously that my whiteness was his whiteness and that it would protect him. He dealt with racism in every school and town but he dealt with it alone because he didn’t have a guide.
- The body holds and knows so much more than we do.
- Privilege is not just about economics. It’s about access to space. It’s about advantage. What happens when your face predetermines what you can do in the world.
- I am reminded that to be raised by a woman who survived war that NOT all suffering equals trauma. Some of us experience difficulties and not all of it is an immediate transfer to trauma. How we decide to live we still have some control over. We could be victims but whether we live in victimhood is up to us. I never saw my mother live as a victim. How could she not when she experienced so many things. Every day was a new start for her, a new page.
- I will be vulnerable but it is NOTHING compared to what our mothers experienced. They truly suffered.
- It is so easy for a small yellow child to vanish, the real work is to be known, and the best way to be known is to be an artist.
- How Asian Americans are expected to perform in the culture up against hundreds of years of erasure. I’m not here to cook your food, do your nails, or sew your pants. I’m here because I have things to contribute. People will view you as inconceivable. There’s a beautiful hill to climb becoming an Asian American artist.
- The poison of war entered them. They passed it down to us.
- Seek to understand where our loved one's pain comes from.
- The complexity of the various violences we experience with our Asian mothers come from them being hurt, and come from systems that began way before they were even born. They were up against so much. It doesn’t erase the harm we experienced but it throws it into context. It amplifies them as people who tried their best. It’s actually beautiful.
- Every mother had their limit. Motherhood is often abstracted in tropes and stereotypes like the doting mother, the obsessed mother, the tiger mom. No one talks about the trope of the tiger mom seated in the anxiety of failing when you come from a country where you’ve seen your parents starve, your village burned down. Their abuse is an unskillful expression of love. The violence in my mother was an expression of her powerlessness. She had no agency, as a woman in her relationships, in the world, in her job.
- Trauma doesn’t make sense. PTSD are people living displaced in memory for refugees and the veterans.
- Survival itself is a creative act.
apr 13 2022 ∞
feb 3 2023 +