My Eyes are a Revolution
When I was little, I would stare in the mirror at my dark, almond shaped eyes, my long black hair and wish for blond hair and blue eyes. For whiteness. When I think back, some of this was the cruelty of children – pulling their fingers into slanted eyes, experimenting with hurling slurs. But it’s also so much bigger.
I grew up not seeing myself anywhere – not in positions of power or the media beyond tired racist tropes, nor seeing our history in what I was taught. Not knowing why the frequent questions of “where are you really from?” and “what are you?” stung so much. My eyes represented an uneasy feeling of unbelonging, perpetual otherness, inferiority, and invisibility.
It took me decades to dismantle and name these insidious effects of white supremacy, and to have immense pride in being a young Chinese woman. And yet, I find myself forced again to ask what my eyes mean. Stop AAPI Hate recently reported ~3,800 hate incidents targeting Asian Americans over the past year. Of those, 68% involved women. There is a visceral sense of fear in my community right now. We are being spit on, called a virus. Told to go back to where we come from amongst slurs and vitriol. Grandmothers set on fire and doused in acid, grandfathers’ faces bruised and slashed, slammed to the ground on their morning walk. Dying from their injuries.
And two weeks ago, in what feels like the culmination of something we've been screaming desperately about into a void for a year, eight people - six of whom were Asian women - were murdered at massage parlors at the hands of a misogynistic, racist white man who was “having a bad day.” Who saw these women as a “temptation...that he wanted to eliminate.”
What we’re seeing today is how toxic political rhetoric – like when a president says “Kung Flu” and “China virus” – leads to scapegoating and violence. Yet this is not new – this wave of hate is rooted in hundreds of years of structural racism.
Ideas of “yellow peril” – the fear that Asians, and particularly the Chinese, would invade the West and disrupt its values – date back centuries. Chinese people were stereotyped as dirty, diseased, and stealing white jobs; Chinese women accused of immorality and sexual deviance. This translated into immense violence and xenophobic policies like the Page Act effectively banning Chinese women (1875) and the broader Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
These were the first laws that limited immigration based on race in the U.S. and set the stage for future decades where Chinese (and many Asians) were barred from immigration, citizenship, land ownership, testifying in court, and voting. It led to violent scapegoating during pandemics, economic downturns, and wars, from Japanese internment during WWII, to the killing of Vincent Chin in 1982.
These past weeks since the massacre in Atlanta have hit me hard. My heart breaks as I see the most vulnerable in our community killed and dehumanized by the media and law enforcement. Working class women, mothers and grandmothers with full and complex lives, working to the bone in harsh conditions to support their families in an unjustly stigmatized industry with little pay or protection.
This hate crime is inseparable from the objectification and fetishization of Asian women’s bodies, tied toxically to American imperialism and wars abroad. A recent study hit painfully close to home for me in its unpacking of the experience of being an Asian American woman: perceived as docile and subservient, not a leader, faceless and invisible, and an exotic, hypersexualized object. We must reject and forcefully dismantle this.
Today, I instead choose to see joy and strength as my community works through this pain and calls for justice. I think of the strong Chinese women from whom I am from. My great grandmother, sold at 17 as a concubine and sent to Canada, serving men in Chinatown tea houses to provide for the family back in China. My Popo, left to raise herself in those same dank alleyways. Turning 91 today. A personification of strength and resilience. My mother and aunt who taught me our history, helped me understand these shadows and all my ancestors endured for me to have a good life. I watch as communities organize to protect our elders, as BIPOC stand in solidarity against white supremacy, as we have many times before. I watch as society finally starts to wake up. As our communities march in the streets and Asian women bring our voices in ways that feel like a new consciousness. I am held up by the signs that little girls carry that declare “Proud to be Asian.” I think about better, safer, vibrant futures for them.
And so, as I nurture this fragile and tender hope, I’ll leave you with a few words that deeply moved me from a lovely children’s book that I find myself curled up with on this Sunday morning:
"My eyes crinkle into crescent moons…carrying tales of the past and hope for the future.
My eyes that kiss in the corners and glow like warm tea are a revolution.
They are mama and amah and mei-mei. They are me. And they are beautiful."
“Eyes that Kiss in the Corners” written by Joanna Ho and illustrated by Dung Ho (2021)