I grew up in the South as an Asian American. It was clear I wasn’t welcome.
By Cecilia Kim,
Cecilia Kim is working on a memoir about growing up in the South as an Asian American.
When I heard the news Wednesday morning of the shootings that took place in Georgia, I was getting ready to catch a flight to the very state where the atrocities took place. It was cold and damp for Los Angeles, and as I wiped my eyes from sleep while making my way toward the kitchen, I heard my brother walk down the stairs. “Did you hear the news?” he asked me, his face red with anger. “Some 21-year-old guy went to three massage parlors and killed eight people last night in Georgia. Six of them were Asian, four of them, Korean. The shooter was White.” A wave of shock came over me. I’m Korean. I grew up in Georgia. My aunt owns a massage business, in Montana.
It felt like it was no longer a matter of if something like this would happen to me or my family, but when.
Growing up in the South as an Asian American is no easy feat. I was relentlessly teased by my White classmates that I had “slits” for eyes, that my food smelled “like fart,” that my face was so flat it looked like it had been “run over by a car.” When my immigrant parents were finally able to buy their first house after almost a decade of moving the family from apartment to apartment, their celebration of their white-picket-fenced American Dream came to a sudden halt. We were one of the first Asian families to settle in a predominantly White neighborhood, and our neighbors saw to it that we were not welcome.
The expansive oak tree that spread its branches over our front lawn was repeatedly toilet-papered by the neighborhood kids, often before a rainstorm. Then the sodden toilet paper — too high to reach, too messy even to bother — would fester on the branches in moldy wet clumps until they disintegrated on their own. The shoes we’d take off outside our door were once discovered with baked beans poured into each one, rendering them unwearable. The final straw was when we were “ding-dong-ditched.” My mother had opened the front door to see a brown paper bag sitting on the front doorstep. Inside it, a lump of feces.
Unable to speak English, my mother called my name, demanding we go knocking on doors to find the culprit. I pleaded for her to calm down. I begged for her to stay silent. I didn’t want to be known as the kid whose mother threw a tantrum in an otherwise “peaceful” neighborhood. But I lost. My mother dragged me, her unwilling and humiliated translator, up and down our cul-de-sac. I remember the blank stares from our neighbors; their unapologetic, unsympathetic faces. “It was just a silly prank,” I translated their words. “You know how kids can be.” I apologized profusely on behalf of my mother to the parents, ashamed to have complained about what they, and consequently, I, believed to be an innocuous children’s game.
Looking back, I now know that what my mother was seeking was accountability, any sort of acknowledgment, an apology. Yet, I was the one apologizing.
Even after that incident, the hazing, the deliberate intimidation didn’t stop. A mother of one of the neighborhood kids drove her Ford Expedition down our street, stopped her car in front of our driveway and allowed four young girls cackling with excitement to jump out and scream, “Chinese fire drill! Chinese fire drill!” before taking off. I hid behind the window blinds, hoping they couldn’t see me. Our neighborhood had made it clear that it wasn’t okay to be me, so I tried my best to disappear.
Asian hate crimes increased nearly 150 percent between 2019 and 2020, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, and they’re still rising. When I read about the elder Asian community under attack, I think of my grandparents who used to live in Los Angeles, walking and taking the bus their only means of transportation, and I wonder if they would have fallen victim to these crimes if they were still here. When I reflect on the recent crimes against Asian Americans following the pandemic, I remember when a White man hurled racial slurs at a family friend who was filling up at a gas station right after the 9/11 attacks — the man thought he was Middle Eastern. When I hear the news of six Asian American women shot dead in Georgia, I think of my aunt in Montana, who owns a spa, and her employees, all of whom work merely to survive.
After my flight landed in Georgia, I stopped Thursday at the site of two of the killings. There were camera crews, a few bouquets of flowers — not as many as I might have expected, or hoped.
Hate elicits fear. Fear elicits hate. Both beget violence. This has to stop.
Read more: Alafair Burke: Who will march for Asian Americans after the killings in Atlanta? Eugene Robinson: Remember these words whenever anyone tells you policing is colorblind The Post’s View: The Atlanta shootings cannot be dismissed as someone having a ‘bad day’ Andrew Wang: Anti-Asian violence is surging. But we can’t answer bigotry with bigotry. David Futrelle: Robert Aaron Long apparently thought he was the victim of his own desire. He’s not alone.
