In the past, I have written a lot of essays and political op-eds about racism and sexism, rivers of words arguing for and explaining varieties of the ongoing, abiding fight to get free. This is not what I’m writing today. On Tuesday, three days ago, a white gunman allegedly shot and killed eight people at three Asian massage parlors in the Atlanta area, including six Asian women, in a racist, sexist attack on massage parlor workers, and today I am not spending any more of my limited time alive defending the humanity of marginalized people, arguing once again with those who don’t already see it that we are all fully realized people deserving of human rights. This long, hard week, I have felt especially pulled toward the company of fellow Asian women, so that is who I will write to here.

To Asian women, not for—there’s no speaking for us, splendidly vast and manifold as our people are. And my experience of this world, and of America, is that of being a Korean American woman born in Seoul, so let me be specific about the body I inhabit: I moved to the U.S. with my family when I was three years old. I write and teach for a living; I’ve worked in the service industry, at a restaurant, but not since college. It is by no means a given that my life has a lot of overlap with the six Asian women killed while working at massage parlors, even the four women of Korean descent, except that much of America has trouble telling any of us apart.

It is a standing, pain-riddled joke with close Asian women friends that if we haven’t yet been mistaken for each other, we’re not really friends, and my friends laugh, and I laugh, and still they keep mixing us up. To date, I have been mistaken for Asian women who are almost a foot taller than I am, with women 15 years younger or older, biracial people, women who descend from every East Asian and Southeast Asian nation, plus Sri Lanka, as well as India, all of us thrown together by the willful, lazy illogic of racism.

But I love being in this company—I love it here, with my sisters. I always have, and there’s not anywhere else I’d want to be. With femme-presenting siblings too, though here I hesitate, as I know at least some nonbinary friends prefer not to be categorized with women. It is also true, as many have pointed out, that when it comes to gender-based violence from male strangers, femme-presenting people who aren’t women are of course vulnerable, so I’ll write this to you if you want to be here, and not if you don’t. And while our siblings of color live with and are killed by white supremacy too, and while our sisters of color and our white sisters live with and are killed by misogyny too, today I have to write to us first, with the Asian women who have been crying all week, who are grief-stricken, furious, afraid, and heartsick, our bodies rioting beneath the heft and bulk of a racist, misogynist tragedy while we mourn.

Dear Asian women living in America,

Until this week, though I’d often tried, I wasn’t able to bring myself to tell my parents to watch out for the upsurge in anti-Asian attacks, in part because I can’t bear it that they moved to this country mostly for my brother’s and my sake. A lot of you have had this experience too, especially but not at all only during the past year, as we’ve seen and heard reports of Asian people being shoved, punched, knifed, hit with a sock filled with rocks, disfigured in a possible acid attack, and killed by strangers, as our elders are attacked and at times killed while they’re walking down the street, as slurs and hatred are thrown our way by everyone from online harassers to the previous president of this country.

Lately, every time I’ve heard about, read about, or encountered a fresh incident of hatred, the quiet refrain belling in my head like a chant, or a dirge, is: our hearts are breaking. I’ve found this frustrating, for who does it help, what action is involved in having a breaking heart? I’m listening more, though, today, to this refrain. Minutes after I first read about the attacks, I started thinking about what I should do, how I could be useful. Maybe I need to take another minute, maybe several minutes, to sit with this breaking heart.

I will carry for a long time, for instance, the moment I first saw the Korean victims’ names written in Korean. In hangul, which I associate with joy, with homecoming. With deep, good safety. It is the language written on the books in my parents’ house, on the menus of restaurants I turn to when I really miss my mother’s food, in the birthday cards my parents send, retelling me the story of my birth in Seoul. This time, the hangul marked the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.

For a moment, though, I want to go back to that flicker of homecoming. It’s not just that I love being a Korean woman; I also love that my life is full of Korean women. No one is more intimidating to me than ferocious Korean women, and it is part of my life’s work to try to more fully be one of these women. The prospects improve with age, I think. Our mothers are alarming; our grandmothers are terrifying. In my group chats with Korean women, when one of us has been insulted, a conversational leitmotif is that we almost pity the offending person—who is most often white, a man, or both—for fucking with us, for not having understood what kind of long-lasting trouble they’ve just heaped upon their own heads.

I love our care for one another, our devotion, and now I’m back to talking about Asian women. A powerful urge to care for our people is a blessing, but it can also be a burden, one that has felt especially heavy, perhaps, these past months. One that has made this heartbreak also feel like a kind of failure. Those of us who are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, have from a young age taken on the role of protecting those of our elders whose tongues were shaped in other lands. We grew up interpreting for them, and we put ourselves between them and rude, racist strangers, and we flared up with rage for our elders while they told us not to worry, they were fine.

As a result, it has perhaps felt all the more brutal that we can’t quite protect our own elders. Elders who, in a lot of cases, moved to this country for us. Many of us have also been physically distanced from those we love most by this pandemic, and so it can feel as though we’re failing in this respect too, by not having been able to be there to keep our loves safe from a virus for which they, and we, are being blamed.

And meanwhile, others are failing us. Have been failing us. The media is buying into and merrily spreading the killer’s lies about his massacre not being racist. They publish his name and print his photo so that, much as I have tried to avoid it—reading the news with a hand held up to block out his face—I will carry that image to my grave, as I know many of you will. We’re told that the killer couldn’t hold out against the “temptation” of Asian women’s bodies. Before we even knew their names, there were assumptions that the killed women were sex workers—as though that justified the massacre. It does not, and sex work is work; all sex workers deserve the full rights we all should already have. There has still been little reporting on who these women were. Some of you are journalists, and Asian American reporters fluent in the languages some of the murdered women spoke with their families are being told they can’t report on the massacre because they might be too biased, although a white journalist—steeped in this country’s white supremacy, probably unable to fluently speak with witnesses and family members—will most likely be especially ill-equipped to tell these stories well and responsibly. One of the first responses from local governments has been to increase policing in predominantly Asian areas, while many Asian activists and massage-parlor workers and sex workers and community leaders have said increased policing will only hurt us, not help us.

We’ve had to yell so loudly to even get national media and politicians to begin to believe there might be a real problem. I wept, as many of you did, the day last March when the previous president started calling it a “Chinese virus,” because we knew exactly what would happen as a result, the hatred those paired words would incite. We have been told this is new, that we haven’t really experienced racism, all while our entire existence in this country has been twisted, shaped, and contorted by forces like the 1875 Page Act, which halted the immigration of Chinese women on the stated pretext that they, we, were immoral. Were temptations. All while the Asia–ravaging forces of white supremacy, imperialism, and colonialism drove our people here, to this land our ancestors would not recognize.

Some of these failures have come from the people closest to us. So many white friends, family members, colleagues, partners, in-law relatives, and teachers have brushed away, minimized, or entirely ignored our growing alarm. One of the first white men with whom I brought up rising anti-Asian racism replied by asking if this racism was really even happening. I had just told him it was. The silences this week ring loud, in the texts we haven’t received, in the absences on social media, as the people who say they deeply love us, who have heard us talk about this, fail to wonder if we’re okay, fail to see if in this time of great collective sorrow it might be a good time to offer us some of that love.

Yesterday, after the prolonged delay, I finally did talk to my mother, and I asked her to please take extra care when leaving the house. I was trying not to cry, and of course I failed, and of course my mother immediately tried to reassure me. She listed all the reasons she felt okay going to the store—she had this list ready, she’d been thinking it through—and then she started trying to convince me, the one in less danger, not to leave my apartment. If I did leave, she proposed I talk more loudly than usual in English, the hope being that racist white people would know I belonged.

In other words, she’d worried about me, and I’d worried about her, and neither of us had said a word to each other about our long-standing worry because we didn’t want to cause each other any additional pain. It hurts. It all hurts. Still and always, hypersexualized, ignored, gaslit, marginalized, and disrespected as we’ve been, I am so fortified, so alive, when I’m with us. And I am thankful to the many other people, especially our Black and brown siblings who live with systemic injustice, unending police violence, and profound marginalization, who know to extend us their love, along with at least some white people. Recently, I was talking with a close friend, the writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, about some of the complications of our lives as women of color, and she said, in a moment that felt like a cloud breaking, like clarity, “We matter to me.” You matter to me, we matter to me, and I would so much rather have us and our allies on our side than any of them. For we already belong.

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