bric-a-brac
When I heard the news from Atlanta, the targeted murder of Asian women by a 21-year-old white man, the thought that came immediately to mind was the way we’d characterized, in my writing cohort, the climax of a novel: “shocking, but inevitable.” Anyone paying close enough attention could see it coming, as much as you might want it not to be true.
It’s a strange time for me, about a week away from the anniversary of my arrival in the U.S., which now, shockingly, was nearly five decades ago. From the news of the shooting, and “the discourse” that followed, I started to draw language and context to what had previously seemed a more disparate, disconnected array of experiences and feelings of being in this Korean woman's body, in a country policed by the imaginations and desires of white men.
I don’t have a lot of words today, mostly I am just processing, as they say. Grateful for the kindnesses that arrive in messages and calls. Grateful for the broader statements of solidarity, of recognition, not of me personally, but of the long history of objectification, sexualization, and exotification of Asian women and girls.
Patricia Park expresses it well.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Western male fetishized the veiled Middle Eastern woman. One need only watch The Thief of Baghdad (1924) to catch a glimpse of some of these perceptions at work. In the 1840s, following the end of the First Opium War, the treaty port cities in China, Japan, and Korea were the site of a feeding frenzy for the United States and other Western powers—all desiring a piece of the profitable trade-route action. This led to a rise in the Western bourgeois desire for Oriental art and collectibles: decorative fans, postcards (more often than not bearing sexualized images of geishas), and other bric-a-brac.
It maybe is foolish to say, but I don’t feel more fearful about being victimized than I have before. It is not fear that I’ve been contending with these last days. It is, I think, more of an overwhelming sadness, deeply-felt sense of relentless invisibility, of not mattering, of never having truly mattered in the racist, nationalist, dehumanizing, gaslighting schema of this place that only ever wanted the idea of me, of my body, of my kind. Not the reality and complexity of a life that is recognized as fully human, as fully belonging. Mostly, I am so tired.
