Feeling emotional, raw, and angry in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, SuChin and Kulap felt an urgency to share their unfiltered thoughts. Six of the 8 people that were murdered in Atlanta on March 16th were Asian women. This special episode delves into how centuries of anti-Asian rhetoric and laws, sexualization of Asian women, and white supremacy have impacted them, their families, and our society. Plus, how we can all start to educate, advocate, and activate to dismantle this harmful system.

 

Please note, Add To Cart contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

 

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Kulap Vilaysack & SuChin Pak

SuChin Pak  00:09

Hey everyone, welcome to a very special and urgent edition of ADD TO CART. I’m SuChin.

Kulap Vilaysack 

And I’m Kulap. So Tuesday Night, March 16th, Robert Aaron Long, age 21, a white man who just hours before illegally purchased a nine-millimeter handgun went on a rampage at three spas in Atlanta killing eight people. Today at the time of this recording, he is charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault. Six of the victims were Asian women.

SuChin Pak

So far as we’re recording this, the names of some of the victims have been released, we will post more names as they continue to come out in the press. Names from Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth are 33-year-old Delaina Ashley Yaun, 54-year-old Paul Andre Michels, 49-year-old Xiaojie Tan, 44-year-old Daoyou Feng, and Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz 30 was injured.

Kulap Vilaysack

This is what police had to say this morning.

Police Officer 

The suspect did take responsibility for the shootings. He said that early on once we began the interviews with him. He claims that these and as the chief said we do still early but he does claim that it was not racially motivated. He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sec fiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places. And it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. And he was pretty much fed up and then kind of at the end of his rope and, and yesterday was a really bad day for him. And this is what he did.

SuChin Pak 

If you go to stop AAPI hate, which is a great organization, you can start to see some of these numbers that are coming in, they have received almost 4000 reports of Anti-Asian hate incidents. There’s 150% increase in reported incidents in 2020 alone. That is just reported incidents. So you can imagine within those numbers, what the actual real numbers are. Some of the headlines that you may or may not have seen in the past few months, there was an elderly man who was robbed in Oakland just recently, some suspects have been arrested for brutally attacking two Asian men in San Francisco, their photos, they’re hard to see are online.

SuChin Pak  02:40

A college student in New York was left with five stitches after an attack in Brooklyn. The list goes on and on. I’m reading from just the headlines on another great resource and a site called nextshark.com. If you aren’t getting these headlines, it’s because you’re not paying attention to the people that are reporting about this. It’s not being reported as much in the national news outlets and media organizations. So it’s up to us to make sure that we stay informed, but what’s really happening in our communities and in our cities. I want to say that the STOP AAPI Hate has just released a lot of numbers and findings and data around these incidents. The most reported hate incidents by states are broken down. California being the top, then New York and Washington and Texas, the list goes on.

SuChin Pak

There are reports from every state, people of all races and ethnicities are targeted. This isn’t one ethnicity within the Asian community. Women report incidents 2.3 times more than men, and 68% of incidents involve verbal harassment, businesses are the primary site of discrimination. So these are just some of the statistics that we’re looking at, some of the context that we wanted to give you for some of our listeners who may not be aware of where we are as Asian Americans. And you and I are Kulap personally as we sort of sit and watch this, as members of this community, as activists in this community, as storytellers within this community. We’ve talked about this before, we’re continuing to talk about it and there seems to be no end in sight.

Kulap Vilaysack  04:29

I vacillate between despair and fury, and the evening of the incident, I just, I could barely speak, SuChin. We’ve said over and over, we’ve cried out, stop calling COVID-19 anything other than what it is, don’t call it Kung Flu. Don’t call it China virus. Four years of a president who creates constant dog whistling to white supremacists, who in my opinion, a white supremacist himself resulted this.

Kulap Vilaysack 

The sadness that I had last night became just full-blown rage. I could barely listen to this man speak to me. So conscious and caring to the perpetrator, to the murderer, that he had a bad day. Okay, and he is the poor thing just had a bad day. This is what happened. And just hearing about him and how he likes pizza, and he was a quiet boy, I’m just like, fucking enough. Enough. I don’t, I don’t want to know his name.

SuChin Pak 

Yeah. We humanize the terrorists; we humanize the terrorists.

Kulap Vilaysack 

And it makes me so fucking mad to hear, any jokes, at all, any in any sort of minimization of these victims because of where they work, what their occupation is, regardless of what they do. No one, oh God, like, guns have more rights than sex workers do in this country. And these women, these women..

SuChin Pak  06:29

These mothers, these grandmothers. They do this out of necessity of survival. They don’t do it, because it is a privilege that is offered to them.

Kulap Vilaysack 

And this ties back to a conversation we bring up over and over again, the lie of the model minority.

SuChin Pak 

I think that you know, there was a post I read, and I can’t remember to whose credit it was. But I just remember reading it and like sobbing. And he posted that, you know, our parents, our grandparents, these women, the sacrifice, they make themselves so small, they walk so quietly, they try so fucking hard to be invisible, just to survive, just to survive. And then this happens. And we have the audacity to blame them. Or to create a narrative. That is so untrue and harmful, and like you said, minimizing to the pain and the struggle of so many immigrant families, so many Asian women that come here, just to put food on the table.

Kulap Vilaysack 

And for the police to speak for him for them to say, well, he it’s.. It’s probably not racially motivated, because he has a sex addiction. He doesn’t go to a strip club, he doesn’t go to a sex shop, sex toy shop, right? He goes to these businesses. He knows these businesses. He’s frequented these businesses run and owned by Asian American women. But it’s not about race.

SuChin Pak  08:12

Of course not. It’s just a random coincidence, I suppose. I mean, I think, for me at least, a big understanding of the word gaslighting in the last two years, the vocabulary to which I’ve learned and I’m seeing. The term is for me at least, how I internalize it, is that what you’re saying is wrong. What you’re saying is not true. And in fact, it’s your fault. That layer is what the gaslighting for me is. It’s not that you’re telling me that my truth is a lie. But not only that, that it’s my fault, that somehow I am responsible for the pain and I’m also responsible to somehow solve someone else’s pain, to somehow make it okay for somebody else to feel comfortable.

SuChin Pak 

It’s our fault that Asian women are the being fetishized. That’s our fault.

SuChin Pak 

That’s right. We have control over that. And the fetishization of Asian women, these jokes. These images may love you long time. Sucky, sucky. I mean, on and on and on that we have grown up with. They’re not just jokes. What they mask is misogyny, racism, violence, de humanizing of a group of people. And then when you do that, you’re allowed to eradicate them without moral conscience and without calling it what it is.

Kulap Vilaysack  10:04

This is terrorism. It’s sexism, it’s racism. This is terrorism that back to what you’re saying about gaslighting say what it is, say what it is.

SuChin Pak 

It’s, you know, I remember I read this article about even the language that we use against, specifically around the violence against women, you know, and then you know, the streets aren’t safe. The nights are dangerous. The streets and the nights aren’t killing women.

Kulap Vilaysack 

Yeah, that’s right.

SuChin Pak 

Do you know who is? Men and mostly white men. That have access to privilege, that have access to guns, that have access to a system that defends them, and just even slightly gives them room for a soft landing. Those are the people and so when you even the language that we speak, and the way that call it what it is, don’t tell me that the streets are dangerous.

SuChin Pak 

Tell me that men are killing women, tell me that guns are killing women. Tell me that, tell me that the white man holding the gun killed these Asian women be very fucking specific about the language that you use. Because when you don’t use that kind of language, what you do is you eradicate the actual source of the pain and the violence. It’s up to us to make sure that we continue to name the violence.

Kulap Vilaysack 

Yes. And it is hard not to get the message about who’s protected here. That he was able to walk away, that George Floyd is dead because of some cigarettes. And this guy, three businesses, killed eight people, stopped on his way to do more in Florida is alive. And it’s so loud and clear. It’s just so loud and clear. Yes. Oh my goodness, oh, poor guy. Bad Day. Bad Day, we’re all in a fucking pandemic, we all have had so many bad days, you stupid motherfucker. Like I just the police, it just further to me is like policing is not the answer.

Kulap Vilaysack  12:45

Especially not for those businesses, especially not for those women who may or may not be undocumented, who may or may not be sex workers. And we like it, I’m so angry last night, all I could do was just like see and punch the air. And literally what I’m doing, and I am not ashamed to say it. I am on Twitter. And I’m noticing people who are talking, what they’re saying and people who are not. And I’m saying this to even good friends of mine, you’re on a clock before I either confront you or you’re out of my life. I’m fucking serious about that.

SuChin Pak

You know, I digested this last night. And I went to sleep and I woke up and again, you know, despair and sadness. And then I was like, Okay, what am I going to do about this? You know, I have access to contacts that have sway, that have influenced, that have people that are famous, people that matter. You know, and I say those that with quotes. And I wrote them an email because, Kulap. People outside of the Asian American community don’t understand what’s happening, the level of urgency and fear that is happening on a daily basis. And so I sent out that email and I felt kind of good, I felt kind of good. It was more of an email of like, let me educate you. Here’s some resources, here’s some links, some books, some documentaries, get informed about what’s happening.

SuChin Pak  14:17

And then I sat with it. And you know, I really don’t like to, as we laugh and joke on this podcast, about my personal habits. I don’t like to share a lot of my personal stuff and it because it frightens me to put that out there for other people to take in different ways. And so I’ve always kind of kept silent and I woke up this morning thinking about those women, thinking about the jokes around them being sex workers and thinking about the hate and this Asian fetishization of us and how it leads to violence and all of this stuff started to connect. And I remembered and I shared a post. And I’ve never shared this publicly, of when I was at MTV, I had an incident where my coworker, after watching me on the news said to a room full of women, “look at her, that Asian, sucky, sucky whore.” Something to that effect.

SuChin Pak 

And I was really young. And I want to remind myself, because I beat myself up a lot about this time, there was no social media, you know, I had no way of understanding or talking to anyone about what this was. And I went through this ordeal where I decided that I wasn’t going to stand for that, not for myself. But for the people in the room. The women in that room that were processing that it was okay for a man to speak in that violent manner, and that they were going to get away with it and that I as an Asian woman, was going to submit, swallow and make myself invisible. And so it was months of an ordeal and it was so traumatizing. But I think the most traumatizing thing that I look back now, is everyone telling me was just a joke. Come on, can’t you take a joke? You’re being too sensitive. He says he’s sorry. He’s so sorry.

Kulap Vilaysack  16:33

What you posted where someone a superior said, well, you know, it’s his livelihood.

SuChin Pak 

It’s his livelihood.

Kulap Vilaysack 

You’re asked to consider him.

SuChin Pak

Yeah, that’s right. And I did. But at the end of the day, I had enough presence to understand that wasn’t my job. That putting that on me. That guilt on me was part of this gaslighting. Yeah, you’re taking it, you know, too hard. And then also, gee, you’re going to get this guy fired. Oh, my goodness.

Kulap Vilaysack 

Makes me so mad.

SuChin Pak

And so I connected that this morning for the first time in understanding how a joke like that leads to the death of six Asian women gunned down in a massage parlor. That’s not a far leap.

Kulap Vilaysack 

No, it’s not.

SuChin Pak 

That’s what we do. That’s the language that we keep. That’s the language that we say. And I have to say, while 99.9% of the comments have been so supportive, and all of that, I didn’t do it for that. Obviously, I did it because I felt like if there was anything in here, that someone in this kind of situation or in pain could take away from the story, then my god take it because I don’t it happened so long ago. It’s not like something I carry with me. But there have been comments that I’ve erased. And one of the comments was five-year-old have said meaner things to him than what that man said to me.

SuChin Pak  18:18

And I just, and I just look at that. And I feel such a sense of just sadness. You know, just like, this is where we are. And you think you think about this cool up, I think about all of these people, these victims that speak out, and how much hate and gaslighting that they get. And I know all those things are true, and yet I can remember, you know that one comment.

Kulap Vilaysack

I mean, to add to what you’re saying. And to go back to what the Cherokee, Georgia police said, of the content of what they were speaking of. The murderer doesn’t get to say if he’s racist, that’s not for him to inform us, it’s his actions. Okay, so no matter how they say it, it’s like he did. That’s not for him to decide. It’s just as it wasn’t for this person to say to you to erase your feelings, to speak of his experience and to lessen your feelings by saying a five-year-old said worse than him. Like you don’t have the right. You don’t have the right. He had no right to say that to you. It’s so maddening.

SuChin Pak 

But it’s, you know, and for anybody listening that is in any position of power. You know, I think that for me, the betrayal wasn’t even from him because he was kind of garbage from day one. And everybody knew it. You know, he had a file, really thick. Mine was just a small little annotation and just a list, a litany of plaints it’s the system, the company..

Kulap Vilaysack  20:03

That upholds the status quo.

SuChin Pak 

Right. He didn’t just wake up that morning and become a racist, misogynistic asshole. He was a racist, misogynistic asshole from day one. And he had been there for years. And if I had said nothing about it, he would still be there, you know, or he would still had a career. So I say this is that it’s all of it. It’s not just on us, either. It’s also on all the people that hold any sort of power to create an atmosphere where this is the dialogue that’s honored. This is the dialogue you listen to, right?

Kulap Vilaysack

Somebody tweeted something that I thought was just and I’m gonna butcher it, but paraphrasing in a fake conversation of a male saying, you know, yeah, it’s really tough these days. You know, I don’t know how to talk to women in this me-too era. And a woman replying oh, yeah, since I was like, 10. You know, I’ve held keys like I was Wolverine, but yeah, go on. Go on. Yeah. Keep continue. Speak on what you’re talking about.

SuChin Pak

Yeah. Tell me about your pain.

Kulap Vilaysack 

Yeah. So hard. Yeah. How hard it is. All these bad days. Yeah.

SuChin Pak 

Tell me the last time that an elevator opened. And you were in there by yourself and a man walked in, and you had that instinct to get off of the elevator, everything in you, but you didn’t want to come off like a bitch. You don’t want to be rude. You didn’t want to like make someone feel bad. And so you sat with the terror of like going up. I mean, every woman has this story. Like the elevators, like my greatest fear is getting trapped in one of those or a parking a lot.

Kulap Vilaysack

I have a dear friend who was assaulted in an elevator. You know, these aren’t like a Boogeyman. Like, this is what we deal with, live with. Like, so many. I’ve just, you know, God, I shot man, I can take a joke. I can take a joke, SuChin. I’m a funny person I could take a joke. And I’ve forgotten so many of your jokes, not you. So many people’s jokes about who I am. I was sexualized as a very young person. I’ve been abused since I was very young. Like, this is what has happened here it’s not just of course it’s not just Trump. It’s systematic. People have said this over and over again. The dehumanization, the racial stereotypes, the discrimination, the abuse of Asians is not new in America.

Kulap Vilaysack  22:50

From the Chinese Exclusion Act from, you know, what’s happened to my homeland, in Laos, and how many people Americans have bombed and killed in Southeast Asia. You know, we don’t talk Vietnam War, the secret war. We talked about the war in the Philippines. We get that, you know, and what’s done here both like the brutalization, and I just fucking enough is enough. It’s enough. And I need people to educate themselves. And I need people to listen. We’ve been seeing for years. Make him stop. How many senators, SuChin? Couldn’t sign Grace Meng’s bill? All of those Republicans. Still fall to. Blood on their hands.

SuChin Pak

Yeah. I mean, blood on so many people’s hands that this is happening. And I think that the reason why, I mean, at least for me, the heart palpitations and the panic attacks, and we’ve talked about this is this that, you know, they’re attacking our parents and our grandparents in broad daylight and killing them. And we’re all stuck in our houses, unable to even do anything about it. The personal level of fear and helplessness is immobilizing on a good day. And then on a bad day. I just, it’s, you know, it’s just an abyss of dark emotions. So it’s something about seeing these women..

Kulap Vilaysack  24:35

These women who are, you know, relatively around our age I think they had had a choice not to go to work. Yeah. Do you think that they had the ability to stay home? The answer’s no. They had to work.

SuChin Pak 

So, what do we do with all this? I mean, we’re still processing it, as you can see from our ramblings and we have some things that, you know, we can share with you guys, and we can share with one another. I mean, that’s all we, I mean, I think we should just do that right?

Kulap Vilaysack

Yeah, there are, I think it’s really important to support and highlight and amplify the work of local organizations, Atlanta based resources, including the NAPAWF, which is the National Asian Pacific American Womens Forum. So they do direct their advocates to support immigrant Asian women worker and reproductive rights in Georgia. There’s also Advancing Justice, Atlanta, and of course, Advancing Justice nationally, as well. They’re the first legal advocacy nonprofit dedicated to the civil rights of AANHPI in Georgia and the South East. And also, a group that I’m really familiar with is the Asian American Advocacy Fund. They are at Asian-AAF. There are grassroots 501(c)(4), social welfare organization. And they did a lot of work hitting out the Asian American population to vote.

SuChin Pak  26:33

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching. There are two books that come to mind. Minor Feelings by Cathy Hong Park, it’s such an amazing read. If you want to know about Asian rage, this is a good place to start. And why we’re so angry. The other one that I was thinking about was, we had met Chanel Miller Know My Name, which just kind of popped into my head as we were talking about this, and the ratio of women and Asian women. That’s such a beautiful book, I recommend that. And then I have been watching this incredible PBS documentary on Amazon called Asian America, it’s five part.

SuChin Pak

It goes from the very first Asian immigrants to land here in America and just goes through the entire history of Asian America as we all know; US history is taught through a very specific lens. So for me, I think that I’ve been finding words to even articulate what I’m feeling because I don’t have the words often, you know, I’m sort of fumbling around for them.

Kulap Vilaysack 

Same, same.

SuChin Pak 

Yeah. So I think it helps to understand where the history of it and to understand the actual articulation of what we’re trying to say.

Kulap Vilaysack  27:58

I think there’s a great article, it’s an opinion article from Elle. And it’s ignoring the history of anti-Asian racism is another form of violence. It’s written by Dr. Connie Won, Connie Won, PhD is a co-founder of AAPI woman lead who they’re also somebody you should follow as well, but it does give a lot of really an overview of what we’re talking about here. I also want to mention some just some general orgs, too. Red Canary Song is a New York City based org that aims to advocate for migrant sex workers support migrant leadership and fight against unjust policies. Also, we talked about them a lot but @stopaapihate is necessary as a necessary follow, @goldhouseco our friends at hate is a virus and also @aaldf which is the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

SuChin Pak 

So, for all of our Asian you know, community members, you know, we sit with you in grief and in sorrow and in pain. And for anyone sitting outside of this community. Shame on you, if you are not speaking out on this, if you’re not educating yourself on this, if you’re not reaching out to one person in our community today, to show support, to lend just a kind word.

Kulap Vilaysack 

If you’re not talking to your own family members and people in your life, about this, that’s right. Advocating for us. Shame on you.

SuChin Pak

You know, we’re Asian anti-shaming all over the place. We’re pointing our fingers, but we’re doing it because you need to do it. And it means, it means the impact is enormous.

Kulap Vilaysack  30:04

I mean, SuChin and I as Asian aunties, but I know you both a big thing that we identify as, is because we’re older sisters were firstborns, right? Even with, you know, all my half siblings, I am still the biggest sister. And, again, I really want to reiterate what Susan said, it’s like, for my little brothers and little sisters, there we hold and love you and see you, you are not invisible. We will get through this.

SuChin Pak 

No, we are. And I mean, I see this, you know, in myself, this old crotchety Asian person that doesn’t like to share anything I woke up and it’s the first time I ever felt like sharing in my pain. And I think it’s because I’ve been seeing so many of these stories coming in people sharing all of that matters. It you think that it doesn’t, but it really, really does.

Kulap Vilaysack 

It does matter.

SuChin Pak

Yeah. And so, anyway, we wanted to get this episode out, you know, before our regular episode, because we felt it was urgent. I also want to say thank you to Lemonada, who suggested that we do that, you know, and that’s what I’m talking about is this is the community that we should be pouring our energy into. It’s the community that supports us. And it’s the community that we live in. It’s the community that we’re from, but it’s also the community that supports us.

SuChin Pak 

So I do want to say, I do feel very touched that we’ve been given this space to do that in the platform. Yeah. And I also want to say that I am so grateful for your friendship. Because in large part, I think me not being so silent. Just in general, because I think I have been, is because of you. And also I’m scared of you. And if I don’t do it, I feel like you’ll say something. But it’s a good kind of fear, because it makes you a better person.

Kulap Vilaysack  32:11

How dare you make me laugh?

SuChin Pak 

So we leave this on a silly happy note. A hopeful note. Because ultimately, that’s also part of who we are.

Kulap Vilaysack 

And I also want to say, you know, I’m so grateful for your friendship. And also you really do help me have words. I mean, truly, like sometimes, like yesterday, I just was like it just like, oh, well, what I feel right now is the violence. I feel like violence. And that is what I you know, and I think you have such a grace about you. And when you posted that I knew what that knew, but that took I knew that wasn’t easy. I knew that’s not something you would ever do. The fact that you did that it just, I just see you. I just see you. I really, really, really appreciate you.

SuChin Pak 

Thank you. And I just, I want to say one. And then one more thing. I think about my 20 young year-old self. And I remember that time, Kulap. And I never got and I still never got to hold that, you know, in the strength that I am as a person today. Because something like that wouldn’t have guided me in the same way. But I’m telling you, I was gutted.

SuChin Pak  34:00

And I never dealt with that. And so it feels really good to complete that for me, because I’m totally complete today on that. You know what I mean? And in sharing that today. I did not think that, that I would feel this immense sense of relief. I had no idea that I was carrying that sadness. So part of that has been this podcast. Part of that has been your friendship. And a lot of that has been just the outpouring of love from the people that have joined us on this. This shopping show. Anyway, Add To Cart there it is. Alright, well, regular episode coming after this one, but it was good to share.

CREDITS

ADD TO CART is a production of Lemonada Media. Our producer is Claire Jones and our editor is Ivan Kuraev. The music is by Wasahhbii and produced by La Made It and Oh So Familiar with additional music by APM music. Executive producers are Kulap Vilaysack, SuChin Pak, Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs. Be sure to check out all the items we mentioned today on our Instagram at @AddToCartPod. Also, please take a moment to rate review and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast.