I cannot speak for others, however, I will speak for myself.

As a second-generation Chinese-American female, the Asian hate crimes were upsetting initially mostly because I worried about the safety of my mother and other Asians (friends, family, and clients).

Then, the March 2021 murders of six Asian women—Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Sun Cha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, and Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng—created a fever pitch, an inflection point for me.

Visceral parts of me imagined what it would have been to be killed–simply for being Asian, for being female.

The words of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters and abolitionists  had already spoke of this–that seeing George Floyd killed in those minutes, they were watching themselves being smothered for simply being Black.

In My Grandmother’s Hands, by Dr. Resmaa Menakem, I had read how witnessing the murders of Black citizens were experienced as collective trauma. As a trauma therapist, I understood that, but only now do I understand this on the visceral, experienced level. By reading about the deaths of these 6 women, I was experiencing the collective trauma of being Chinese, a woman, and all of the imposed identities that come with that. Dr. Gary Bailey, Assistant Dean at Simmons (my alma mater) said in the On Point episode: The Chauvin Trial And The Re-traumatizing Experience Of Remembering, said this is the cultural and legacy trauma that we are experiencing. Also, here is a link to an excellent podcast where Dr. Menakem introduces his concepts.

Without the work of abolitionists, researchers, journalists, and activists for BLM, as an Asian woman, I don’t know if I would have ever found a way to identify the shellac of imposed identities.

And that is the other part that is so hard to explain–there is no end to this work of undoing racism when you are BIPOC, AAPI, LGBTQ, Body Positive/HAES, or grew up (or still living in) socioeconomic poverty.

There is no “one” racist event that can be brought to light and corrected; its a whole of reality that is skewed to make everything not fitting into the white-dominant model, feel as if it should change to fit.

That, is the undoing.

Thank you to Resmaa Menakem, Dr. Dawn Belkin Martinez, Dr. Gary Bailey, and all of the activists  for mentoring us in this way with your vulnerable sharings and invitations to speak up. Thank you to our allies for listening and speaking up when we are too exhausted to do so.