On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, shot and killed eight people—six of them Asian women—at three Atlanta-area massage spas. That morning, I drafted a statement for an Asian American organization responding to the violence. It included a quotation from the actor Steven Yeun:
“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you.”
I was surprised to find that the quotation was divisive. Some of my peers thought that Yeun’s statement meaningfully captured the Asian American experience. Others thought that it hypocritically shifted blame onto other minority groups for not supporting Asian Americans when we had not been particularly good allies ourselves. Ultimately, the quotation was erased.
Five years later to the day, Long still awaits trial and I still wonder about what was left unsaid about these shootings, which took place in the fever dream of the COVID-19 pandemic and all that it meant for Asian Americans. We saw a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, but also the killing of George Floyd. Writers and thinkers raised looming questions about what it means to be Asian American, but have left only an incomplete tapestry of answers.
In the early months of the pandemic, the writer Cathy Park Hong gave a name to the emotion that Yeun described: “minor feelings.” As Hong writes in her essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” In Asian Americans, this evokes “the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” In other words, feelings of knowing that being Asian American means something but never having that meaning validated by others.
But nobody likes a miserable person with a chip on their shoulder. The popularization of “minor feelings” has always sat uncomfortably with me because the concept defines Asian American identity by accepting that America is about a Black and White conflict and that Asian Americans—along with all other minorities—are condemned to be secondary characters whose struggles matter less. I refuse to accept this America, where the shadow of slavery is used to silence, rather than uplift, other claims of injustice.
Other writers, however, have supported this version of America by perpetuating the caricature of Asian Americans as rich, educated, and entitled. More than a year into the pandemic, Jay Caspian Kang published The Loneliest Americans, in which he critiques the children of Asian immigrants who came to the United States after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. The Hart-Celler Act lifted discriminatory laws that had severely limited immigration from Asian countries, marking the end of nearly a century of exclusion. But because the Hart-Celler Act gave preference to educated and skilled Asian immigrants, the children of Hart-Celler are generally upwardly mobile and, in Kang’s view, “had no experience with American racism or oppression.” In contrast to earlier Asian Americans who experienced the blunt brutality of Chinese exclusion or the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the children of Hart-Celler (which include Kang and myself) are instead agonized by microaggressions and the struggle to come to terms with our racial identities.
Kang suggests either that racial violence against Asian Americans is minimal, or that what matters most is class, not race. But violence against Asian Americans is undeniably significant; it is just often invisible. The historian Beth Lew-Williams has observed that the omission of Asian American violence in national memory was often caused by the violence itself, which pushed Asian Americans out of their communities and, eventually, the country. Leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1886, armed white mobs drove the Chinese population out of Tacoma and Seattle with violent beatings and, in 1871, a mob in Los Angeles lynched seventeen “Chinamen.” The violence was not limited to Chinese Americans. In 1907, a mob in Bellingham threw rocks at and beat South Asian migrant workers to expel them. And in 1930, another mob in Watsonville, California, ransacked the homes of Filipino farmworkers and shot at them to drive them out. Erasure from national memory is a testament to the existence, rather than the absence, of violence.
Kang has a point when he critiques privileged Asian Americans who claim their status as “people of color” to obscure the extent to which they are well-off. But it is a reductive point. In the Seattle riots, elitism offered no protection. As historian Lew-Williams describes in her book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, in one instance, a mob broke into a Chinese businessman’s home, grabbed his pregnant wife by her hair, and dragged her down the stairs and into the street. There are privileged minorities of all backgrounds who have not directly suffered racial violence, but who nonetheless must live in fear of it. It remains real in our lives. And as we (hopefully) move further from the degree of racial violence that has stained our past, the struggle to understand our racial identities is a necessary one that should not be blithely waved away.
What of the Atlanta spa shootings, then?
There is always a temptation to use an act of racial violence to clarify race-relations and racial identity. At its best, such reckoning can awaken our national conscience and spur a movement for reform. At its worst, it can perversely turn a personal tragedy into an allegory. Using the Atlanta spa shootings to demystify anti-Asian racism more broadly and define Asian American identity should be done with caution.
Although known as the “Atlanta spa shootings,” the shootings took place in two counties. In Cherokee County, Long shot and killed four people (Daoyou Feng, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and Paul Andre Michels) and wounded a fifth person, who survived, (Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz) at Youngs Asian Massage. Three of the victims were women, and two were Asian. He then drove to Atlanta, in Fulton County, where he shot and killed three women (Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, and Suncha Kim) at Gold Spa, before crossing the street and killing another woman (Yong Yue) at Aromatherapy Spa. All four women were Asian.
According to Cherokee County’s District Attorney (now judge) Shannon Wallace, investigators found no evidence of racial bias, but she would have argued that Long was motivated by gender bias if the case went to trial. She considered the diversity of the Cherokee County victims (alongside women of Asian descent, a white man and a white woman were killed, and the sole survivor of the shootings was a Hispanic man from Guatemala) and Long’s statement to detectives that he was motivated by sex addiction. As the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office explained at the time of Long’s arrest, “he blames the massage parlors for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex.” Long pleaded guilty to murder charges in Cherokee County and was sentenced to life without parole. But he did not plead guilty in Fulton County, where prosecutors are seeking the death penalty under Georgia’s hate crimes statute. In 2021, many speculated that the incident could be a test case for a new hate crimes statute enacted in Georgia after Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, was fatally shot while jogging near his home in 2020. Long’s trial there has not yet been scheduled.
To suggest that the shootings were motivated by gender and not race ignores how Asian women have been sexualized throughout history. Under the Page Act of 1875, for example, Chinese women were prohibited from immigrating because they were assumed to be prostitutes. Hundreds of thousands of women in Asia were sold into sexual slavery by Japan during World War II; in fact, the Atlanta area, like many other cities, has a statue memorializing these women (euphemistically called “comfort women”). It is easy to imagine that for Long, Asian women provided sex, or at least proximity to it, because of Western stereotypes that massages are sexual. And with the little money and bullets he had, he could exercise power over people that some deem of lesser value.
To say that I, as a son of Hart-Celler, have something in common with the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings is admittedly uncomfortable. But racial violence blows past lines drawn on gender or class. Ultimately, race gives me proximity to the tragedy, which can, to some extent, be understood by anyone. As Judge Ellen McElyea, who sentenced Long in Cherokee County, put it: “Once hatred is given a gun, it doesn’t matter who gets in the way. We are all subject to being the victim of a hate crime, whether we belong to that group or not.” Although we should, as the writer Hua Hsu cautions, be sensitive to “the long-standing challenges of organizing Asian Americans around a single, shared story,” that should not prevent us from speaking out against racial violence and learning about the lives that were lost so that they are remembered as more than self-serving allegories.
Five years later, I remain fond of Yeun’s quotation because it emphasizes the untold Asian American stories that have yet to be etched into our national memory. Yeun’s observation about the marginalized stories of the “Asian American experience” is not limited to violence. Remembering acts of violence can humanize us, but it should not define us.
Although it is painful to remember tragedies like the Atlanta spa shootings, the act of remembrance can transform the victims into people. For example, the journalist May Jeong wrote a 2022 article in Vanity Fair about the shootings in which she confronted the personal, heartbreaking facts and contextualized them within the broader span of history to tell nothing less than a story of America. The story contains much tragedy—of Yue opening the door and being shot in the face—and senseless chance; a bullet travelled through Hernandez-Ortiz’s nasal cavity rather than his brain, allowing him to survive. But it also contains undertones of hope, like Feng and Park immigrating to the United States in pursuit of economic opportunity. Daoyou Feng, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun González, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue are more than numbers. They deserve to be remembered beyond headlines emphasizing a death toll or Long’s motivations.
The beauty in Yeun’s quotation is that it is ambiguous enough to reflect one’s personal understanding of what it means to be Asian American. I now agree that without proper care, my use of Yeun’s statement could have been inappropriate. The Atlanta spa shootings took place less than a year after Tou Thao, an Asian American police officer, stood by as Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck. For my peers at the time, the statement understandably captured the anxiety of overstepping in a sensitive political landscape. But as the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen concluded after wrestling with the implications of Thao’s inaction, Asian Americans have to choose whether to stay silent or to “be a model of justice and demand greater economic and social equality for us and for all Americans.”
I continue to find inspiration in Yeun’s pensive, “Sometimes I wonder . . .,” which implies that the invisibility of Asian Americans is not a static, universal truth. Carefully remembering the Atlanta spa shootings can be part of imagining a new Asian American identity that transcends minor feelings. It can lead us to the America that is unsaid in Yeun’s quotation: an America where we are thinking of everyone else, and they are also thinking of us.
***
Eugene Lee is a lawyer who lives in Seattle.
