The Bella Bulletin Newsletter: April 2021 Edition

Legacy of Anti-Asian Racism in America is Real. It's Up to All of Us to Change That.

March 29th, 2021 was my breaking point.

What seemed like a normal day changed the moment I turned on the TV to watch The Crown on Netflix as I grabbed a cup of tea.

What I saw instead was surveillance camera footage of an innocent 65-year-old Asian American woman assaulted in the daylight of New York City as two security guards watched without helping her. Not even a small sign of shock - just closing the door as nothing happened. This kind of indifference - the very act of doing nothing - by a bystander is how, in my opinion, many Asians and Asian Americans feel about the way this country treats them What does it take for my friends to acknowledge that we are not the “model minority” and we are more than those stereotypes? What does it take for the media to acknowledge that we are here and that we’ve been erased from nigh every statistic simply because the sample size is too small? What does it take for Congress and the White House to acknowledge that we are an integral part of this country, and that Asian American history is part of American history?

As a third-culture kid, my realization that I am “the other” became an inseparable part of my identity at a young age. When I was 9 years old, I moved from Japan to an allwhite neighborhood in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, where I was not only one of the very few Asian students in the school, but I also spoke no English.

This meant I had nobody to turn to when my classmates and teachers casually mocked my accent or told me I couldn’t join a game they were playing because I didn’t have sandwiches for lunch like them. It didn't take a long time to realize that my English abilities do not protect me from this kind of “casual racism”. I vividly recall being kicked and spat on by a student from another school during a school excursion, saying “People like you don’t belong here”. I understood every single word that came out of that girl’s mouth. I had no words.

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