daikon* issue #2 Summer / Solidarity

ISSUE #2 SUMMER

SOLIDARITY

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白萝卜 白蘿蔔 lobak 菜頭 củ cải trắng หัวไชเท้า 흰무 大根 मूली ‫یلوم‬ mooli

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all content produced by: Hanna Stephens Isabella Normark Jade Chao Jemma Paek Jess Routley Jun Pang Kay Stephens Louise Helmfrid Erica Lindberg Melissa Kitty Jarram Kei Terashi Rosie Rosenberg Cover image by Melissa Kitty Jarram

Manifesto

We are a group of self-identifying South East/ East Asian womxn and non-binary people living within a European context. We have created this zine as a platform for Asian voices that are so often underrepresented and undervalued in mainstream political and feminist discourses. We believe in empowering each other through highlighting the collective frustrations and nuances of our intersectional experiences as a starting point for building a wider platform of solidarity. We aim to share our opinions, celebrate our creativity and build up a stronger collective voice for South East/East Asians.

daikon.co.uk daikon.media@gmail.com

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Contents Editor’s note 5 Solidarity

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A Solidarity of Care

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Why Political Blackness is no longer useful to us, and what comes next 10 I’m not an Asian girl Not yet a white woman 14 Decentre Japan

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SPAM™ - Solidarity for

Pacific Asian Mateys 26 Chinese people: We can do better 28 A poem for International Women’s Day

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Editor’s note

In making a zine which centers diasporic East and Southeast Asian identity in Europe, we’ve occasionally questioned the usefulness of our platform. The idea was born out of a need to share our experiences and build a collective voice, but in a time (and past) of rampant islamophobia and anti-blackness - which, while they affect significant parts of our communities, are also often upheld and perpetuated by our communities - we have thought long and hard about how and why to organise around East and Southeast Asian identity. For us, building wider and better solidarity has always been central to our aim, which is why we have devoted this issue to the theme of ‘solidarity’.

Solidarity can have multiple meanings and forms, but when we think particularly about practicing solidarity in anti-racist struggles as East and Southeast Asians, interrogating our own positionality within structures of racism is crucial. This zine is a rejection of the model minority myth - a racist construct which affect not only Asians, but which plays into a respectability politics that seeks to turn us against other people of colour.

Our refusal to be divided requires that we think critically about our relative privileges and work actively against the complicity of East and Southeast Asians in structures of oppression.

Equally, our practice of solidarity must involve interrogating the power dynamics within the collectivity of East and Southeast Asians. Since our last issue, we’ve particularly reflected about the problematics of centering Japanese identity in our collective spaces after Kei (whose submission is complemented by Hanna’s to elaborate on this, p.20) wrote in to us. Partly, this means addressing the name of our platform, which uses the Japanese name for a vegetable that is popular across the region. While daikon is, for many of us, the name we grew up with in the British context, we’ve added asterisk in recognition of its various names which you will find in the inside cover of our future issues. We also encourage all our readers to to get in touch with us to share your opinions, critiques, and contributions towards a better and more inclusive platform for solidarity with each other.

Finally, we hope that this issue will let us take lessons and inspiration from the different forms of solidarity work East and Southeast Asians are involved with across the European context. As we mobilize collectively against injustice, solidarity is not just an empty word but a force to be reckoned with.

Love and Solidarity, The Daikon Zine Team

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Solidarity Photographer Louise Helmfrid from Uppsala, Sweden, responded to the theme of solidarity by taking the pictures of her schoolmates featured in this issue. She shared some of her thoughts on the importance of establishing spaces of solidarity.

About one and a half years ago I took the initiative to form the group People of Color Katedral at my school. In the beginning, for me at least, it was all about creating a safe space for all people of color to have the opportunity to take part in. It was also about me being able to come to school, knowing that I wasn’t alone in this uncomfortable feeling of not fitting in nor feeling safe. Now when I think about our organization I think about listening, learning and understanding. Sitting in a room full of people with different backgrounds and experiences - being able to come together to listen and learn about priviliges and structures whilst still feeling safe, standing in solidarity with each other.

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A Solidarity of Care Beyond a theoretical understanding of oppressive structures or even the practical work of solidarity, we don’t often acknowledge the emotionality of what it means to feel solidarity. Rather, we are made to think that emotions - feelings of anger, sadness, exhaustion - are misplaced in activist spaces, as if they inconvenience the day to day operations of solidarity struggles.

On the contrary, struggles of liberation always start from a deeply emotional place - led by the very people who also feel the pain of the oppressions they’re fighting. While attempts to stand in solidarity (sometimes just a pretence) can be both co-optive and re-create oppressive structures within activist spaces, a solidarity which starts from a place of emotion has a vastly more radical and meaningful potential. For an ally, the source of emotion is different than for someone who is directly affected by the oppressions you are fighting. They are intimately tied to the feeling and practice of caring.

Care is often de-politicised as a concept. It’s understood as something we do in our personal lives, separate from our political struggles. However, when we extend the care we feel, and the ways in which we take care of our loved ones, to our practice of solidarity, it signifies a commitment to understanding and fighting oppressive structures - where we put in, not only the theoretical, but emotional work to be a better ally.

In contrast to co-optive “allyship”, care as a form of solidarity means listening and being there for those we are in solidarity with. This is a fundamentally emotional process, not only because we are feeling with others, but also because it requires us to continuously interrogate ourselves and our role as an ally. This can, and sometimes should be, a difficult and even anxious process of interrogating and amending our own complicity to the structures which hurt others.

In other words, our feelings are - in contrast to what we are often led to believe - productive, and even necessary, to the practice of solidarity. words by Bella photo by Louise

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Why Political Blackness is no longer useful to us, and what comes next

The Sun newspaper recently ran an article titled ‘BLACK ERASURE: Freida Pinto breaks down in tears after being attacked by Black Lives Matter activists who say she shouldn’t be in the cast of Sky’s new drama Guerrilla’. This title refers to an upcoming TV series about racial politics and activism in 70s London. In this article, the white author attacks “the militants from Black Lives Matter UK” for calling into question why Freida Pinto, an Indian actress, is playing one of the two main characters rather than a black woman. At this film Q&A, the director steps in in defence of Ms Pinto and reportedly “tried to get them to understand that being called Black in the Seventies referred to all people of colour from former British colonies”.

The politics of this piece highlight near perfectly the power dynamics that currently problematise the use of political blackness in this day and age. Here, an Asian person is used as the ‘innocent’ pawn in the attack on black people by mainstream white British society. At the same time, an Asian woman, who is conveniently now black in the ‘Seventies’ use of the word, is making money and gaining success in her career in the white centric British TV industry by standing in place of a black female actress. To the average Sun reader, this article portrays these Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists as unkind, angry and irrational, while in this one instance the Asian woman is innocent.

This move is of course tactical by The Sun, this being probably one of the only articles to feature Asians in a positive light. Here we see a hierarchy of power where whiteness 10

stands at the top, blackness at the bottom and Asians somewhere in-between. These power dynamics are absolutely key in understanding the problems surrounding the use of the term ‘politically black’ outside of its original post-war context.

The reconstruction of post-war Britain relied on South Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrant labour. These immigrants had come from the colonies and were received in Britain with hostility and racism. Excluded from the housing market, exploited in the workplace, and excluded from many public spaces, immigrant groups began to form their own communities. However, racism inflicted by white society was indiscriminate to ethnicity – South Asian and Afro-Caribbean labourers therefore shared the experience of exploitation and exclusion.

Amongst these communities, political groups formed in order to organise resistance to these oppressions. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, director of the Institute of Race Relations writes - “In the workplace and the community, Afro-Caribbean and Asian, we were a community and a class, we closed ranks and took up each other’s struggles”. Further violence towards these communities, such as the Notting Hill Race Riots in 1958, the purposely unresolved killing of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 strengthened unity between the communities. The more violent the racism got, the more the immigrant communities resisted and fought back.

Political blackness is thus the term used to describe this context-specific subjectivity.

The history behind it is essential to the term in that it indicates the economic and anti-racist base of political blackness. If the basis of political blackness was shared oppression, economic exploitation and firm inter-ethnic solidarity then the term becomes problematic now as this context no longer exists. The differentiation of social position, along economic, education and racial lines now works in ways that are incomparable to the post-war era. While the strategic essentialism was useful to Windrush era immigrants in relation to their immediate concerns, nowadays, when racism impacts minority groups differently, this strategic unity is not possible.

Not only does racism now impact differentially, it is so important in this question to focus on power imbalances between diasporic groups, not just between diasporic groups and white society. A key criticism of political blackness is that is creates a colour binary, where it is Black versus White, with no shades of grey. This binary erases diversity of position and political pursuits and essentialises modern anti-racist struggles into one uniform block. I would argue that a colour binary also erases the tensions between diasporic groups, presenting non-white people as equally oppressed.

This, of course, is not the case. As we saw in The Sun’s coverage of Guerrilla, Asians often occupy a difficult position somewhere between whiteness and blackness. In that example an Asian woman was simultaneously benefiting from black erasure and being used as a pawn in the anti-black racism committed by mainstream white society.

It can be seen that Asian people have had choose between the position of the Black oppressed, or the White oppressor and often they have chosen to align with Whiteness in order to gain certain privileges. This alignment is also encouraged by mainstream White society as diasporic Asians are constantly praised for being a ‘model minority’. This term refers to Asian diasporic communities being praised by 11

Counter-clockwise: Olive Morris, Mala Sen, Kelso Cochrane, Furrukh Dhondy

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mainstream society for being hardworking, generally politically inactive and keen to assimilate in order to neatly construct an ideal point from which all other minority groups are measured. Not only does this harm diasporic Asians by politically pacifying them and perpetuating racist stereotypes of the diligent Asian citizen, it serves to justify Islamophobic and anti-black racism by measuring these groups against this falsely constructed ideal. The Model Minority Myth is helpful in this analysis but often it is overemphasised so that diasporic Asians are somewhat absolved of any responsibility for anti-black racism, so it is important to see that there can still be a great amount of agency in this process – Asian people can themselves also perpetuate this myth in order to align with whiteness.

In its original context political blackness relied heavily on a sense of common oppression and solidarity amongst Afro-Caribbean and South Asian people, but today we see that racialized oppression targets groups in different ways in to different extents. The various oppression I experience as a mixed race Asian woman are likely to function incredibly differently to how they would for a black peer. Issues such as light-skinned privilege also mean that, as a mixed white and East Asian person I experience a further level of privilege in comparison to a South Asian peer. Used today, the term risks covering over the diversity of experience, the perpetuation of anti-black racism by Asian people and ultimately stifles the nuances needed to have a constructive conversation about racism in this country.

Though political blackness is no longer a useful term, it is still used in sociological academia and as an everyday word to describe black and Asian diasporic groups and arguably this is because of the allure of its connotations of unity and solidarity. A departure from or rejection of this term perhaps seems too like a rejection of the possibility of solidarity between different groups of diasporic people in the ongoing fight against racism and xenophobia in Britain. If we have learnt anything from recent political events in Britain, Europe and the USA, it is that racism is on the rise and though it affects different group in different ways, no minority group is safe from the intensification of right wing politics. Solidarity is still absolutely necessary, but can solidarity be compatible with the firm recognition of difference?

Absolutely. Solidarity is still essential to the fight against racism and discrimination. For each group to be able to resist racism, they must maintain support for each other in the knowledge that their own particular oppressions are still linked to those of others.

Asian people must know that liberation from their own experiences of racism are inextricably linked to wider modes of racism. With this recognition as a basis for action, we must then begin to better support the activism of other groups and communities. This can take many forms of course – turning up to rallies, protests, sharing information about particular issues to those around for example. Where the conversation about political blackness ends, the conversation about allyship must immediately begin because ultimately we need to adapt our conception of solidarity to respond to the intricacies and diversity of racism today. words by Jess drawing by Hanna 13

I’m not an Asian girl Not yet a white woman TW: abuse solidarity, 1. [mass noun] Unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group. (OED) I often feel like a fraud because of my genetic makeup, constantly reassessing my right to solidarity with an East and Southeast Asian community.

I may be a victim of everyday racism – I know basic (ironically, mostly polite) phrases in Japanese, Chinese and Thai, not because I decided to learn them, but because they’re continually thrown at me in public spaces.

I may be exoticised – people not only ask me where I’m from but they also rarely believe me when I say Sweden. What these incredulous enquirers really want to know is where my mother is from. My background is simply not deviating enough for their expectations. To say that I come from South Korea would be a lie, and would also reaffirm ignorant beliefs that all Swedes look a certain way. If I ever admit that my mother was born in South Korea I’m occasionally scorned because I (1.) don’t know the language of my mother’s motherland (2.) have never been there.

My mother was adopted when she was three years old. She came to Sweden with easy-to-hide scars after having been abused in South Korea by her first adoptive family. She still remembers plenty about her time there, but aside from her love for South Korean cuisine she has little interest in any culture or tradition her birthplace has to offer her (during her first months in Sweden in the late 60s she pushed any food that wasn’t kimchi away from her, repeatedly saying ‘kimchi’ to the confusion of her Swedish adoptive parents. Years later when the first South Korean restaurant opened in Stockholm and my grandfather saw the mysterious phrase on the menu he immediately brought some home for my mother in a Eureka-moment). The remnants of her life in South Korea can therefore only be found in her physical appearance and her taste buds. Everything else that was South Korean about my mother she unlearned quickly after her Swedish arrival.

In the 90s there was a popular TV-show in which Swedish adoptive children went to look for their biological parents. My mother’s friends thought that she would be an 14

Erica and her mother

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Erica’s mother and grandfather

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ideal participant (being the only adopted person they knew), but my mother never even considered applying. She would cringe when the now-adult children on the program described ‘this void inside’ that could only be cured when their roots of blood and genes were found. Instead, her family were the Swedish parents that loved her and had brought her up. The way she sees it, they are the parents she was meant to have, not bothered by any ‘what-ifs’.

My mother is most likely of mixed heritage: South Korean and American. In the aftermath of the Korean War mixed children were looked down upon, they were victims of abuse and insults such as ‘round eyes’. Furthermore, citizenship was defined by the father’s nationality and if the father couldn’t be located, the “fatherless” child could not be granted South Korean citizenship. The only way to register these children as South Korean citizens was by claiming them to be orphans.

This is why I feel like a fraud. I can’t talk about my origins without talking about my mother and whatever there is about her that is South Korean. Just like my mother, my sense of national identity is not plural but singular. I’m Swedish and nothing else. My appearance, however, relentlessly begs to differ.

The way my genes are composed—white daddy and adopted East Asian mummy— means that my understanding of solidarity only reaches me through racism. That is, I can relate to the sense of being othered, but my knowledge about East and Southeast Asians stretches only a little further than the ones doing the othering. I know what it is like to look Asian, not what it is like to feel Asian. This might be why I occasionally wonder if I would have found comfort in an alternative to western culture had my mother had it to pass on to me. Then, I might feel solidarity through cultural understanding as opposed to just through racism: a solidarity through cultural similiarity rather than shared difference. At times I lack a sense of belonging — times where I find white ignorance overwhelming in its persistence, trying to alienate someone who has nowhere else to go.

As it is now, a keen curiosity in South Korea raises issues I’m afraid to touch, which I therefore deliberately avoid. It would feel hypocritical to indulge in, or even research, South Korea too much simply because I worry that I would do so not out of genuine interest but because I am “supposed” to. After all, even if my mother had hypothetically had an interest in South Korea and encouraged me to delve into it with her, neither of us could become anything but what we already are: Asian-looking outsiders.

I remember making dinner with some friends as a teenager. Someone had set the table and when we went to sit down everyone burst out laughing. At every seat a knife and fork had been placed, except mine. Instead of a knife and fork I had been given a pair of chopsticks. My friends saw this as the perfect joke since they knew how “little” Asian I am; and how I was actually as awkward as them when eating with chopsticks.

This memory does nonetheless exemplify how I always have to be reminded of my conflicting appearance. So, when I laughed—because I laughed too—I laughed externally, but internally I added it to the pile of experiences that will make me, whenever I now have to fill in a form, tick the box Mixed: White & Asian. words by Erica 17

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A page from Tōhōsha, special issue, ‘Manchuokuo: An Epic’, nos. 5–6, 1943

Decentre Japan

In the UK, Japan is heavily romanticised as a hyper-modern, “advanced” and “well-developed” country. Whilst this can slip into fetishisation, where the bulk of the microaggressions I experience come from, I know that this also gives me a lot of privilege that non-Japanese SE/E Asians do not have. The fact that Japan can be perceived in this way is undoubtedly due in part to wealth gained off the back of violent imperial history. This history affects present power imbalances between different SE/E Asian countries, both in terms of wealth and cultural perception Therefore, to assume that we all start at equal footing in speaking about our identity and how issues of racism affect us is wrong. In building solidarity between us as SE/E Asians, we must recognise that our various backgrounds carry different amounts of power and dominance that play out even in European contexts.

Disclaimer: I’m still in the process of learning about Japanese history so this will not be a thorough covering of all of it. However, I’d like to share some history to offer context as to why Japan holds a level of power in struggles for the empowerment of SE/E Asians. Descriptions of the war crimes committed by Japan are quite distressing so please approach with caution (I have put trigger warnings for when these will come up).

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Since as early as the 1860s, Japan set its sights on becoming a modernised (i.e. westernised) global power. Heavily inspired by western social and economic systems, military power became emphasised as the means through which national economic development and stability could be achieved. The desire for power and the need for natural resources to achieve this led the drive towards imperial invasion. Japan constantly sought out to be on equal footing to the west, and when they were not recognised as equals they chose to exert their power in other ways – through the attempted domination of Asia. As there isn’t enough space in this piece to talk about all the atrocities committed by the Japanese1, I’ll instead write about a few things that highlight the problematic ideologies and brutality at the core of Japan’s rise to power in the region.

Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere This was an imperial concept created by the Japanese Empire during 1930-45 that promoted “pan-Asian cultural and economic unity” of NE Asians, SE Asians, Oceanians as well as East Asians. It was framed as a way for countries to gain freedom and independence from western colonial oppression, but in reality was a front for the Japanese to control already occupied Asian countries during world war II, in which puppet governments manipulated local populations and economies for the benefit of Imperial Japan. The idea of racial ties of blood were used as a justification for pan-Asian unity, yet Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare also released a policy document laying out the central position of the Yamato Race (the dominant ethnic group of Japan) within the Co-Prosperity Sphere and promoted the idea of Yamato superiority over other Asian races.

Propaganda efforts included: the dropping of pamphlets by airplane over Philippines, Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, Singapore and Indonesia, urging them to join the movement; cultural societies that attempted to replace English with Japanese in all conquered nations; pamphlets depicting Asians marching or working together in happy unity with all flags of all nations and a map depicting the intended sphere; a network of Japanese-sponsored film companies that produced shorts, newsreels and feature films to encourage Japanese language acquisition as well as cooperation with Japanese colonial authorities.

In building our own “pan-Asian” diasporic solidarity in opposition to white supremacy, we therefore must be conscious of not centring Japan and furthering our own interests at the expense of other SE/E Asians.

Under the ideology of Japanese supremacy, any suspected anti-Japanese sentiment was dealt with brutal force. Power was exerted through both physical and sexual violence. Although there are many more cases I could have chosen, the next section will look at three events in colonial history that give an idea of the way the Japanese army operated.

1 If you want to find out more, the Wikipedia pages on the ‘Empire of Japan’ and the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ are good places to start 21

Sook Ching massacre TW: murder This took place from 18 February to 4 March 1942 at various places in Singapore, following the Battle of Singapore and the surrender of the British colony.

The aims of this attack were to “purge Overseas Chinese” people, though also more broadly as a way to remove prospective anti-Japanese elements of the country. The Japanese set up designated “screening centres” all over Singapore to gather and “screen” Chinese males between 18-50 years old.

They imprisoned but mostly executed those who were singled out as informers or who were teachers, journalists, intellectuals, or event former servants of the British, and those they arbitrarily deemed to be “suspicious” characters.

Official Japanese statistics show fewer than 5,000 deaths while the Singaporean Chinese community claims the numbers to be around 100,000. In 1966 Japan agreed to pay $50million Singaporean dollars in compensation, half of which was a grant and the rest a loan, but never made an official apology.

All areas highlighted in red have been formerly occupied by Japan

Nanking Massacre TW: murder, rape, descriptions of violence An episode of mass murder, mass rape, theft, arson and other war crimes committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, which took place from 13 December 1937 to January 1938 (although many atrocities were reported to have been committed outside this period during the march of the Japanese army from Shanghai to Nanjing). Sadistic acts of rape were committed systematically in a process through which soldiers would go door to door, searching for women of all ages to capture, rape and kill afterwards. Newly built government buildings and homes of civilians were torched, and one-third of the city was destroyed as a result of arson. Even beyond the city walls there was widespread destruction, looting and burglary. There was even a contest between two Japanese troops to see who could be the first to kill 100 people with a sword before the capture of Nanking.

This was covered by Japanese newspapers yet some historians say this was a concocted story used to raise national fighting spirit. However, a Tokyo district judge in 2005 stated that the lieutenants did admit to the fact that they raced to kill 100 people and that the story cannot be proven to be clearly false. Either way, approaching and reporting murders in a game-like manner is disgusting.

In total, it is estimated that between 200,000-300,0000 Chinese were killed in the incident. This was all committed in a context where preliminary negotiations suggested that the Chinese were ready to surrender, and there was no obvious explanation to why this occurred in the first place.

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Comfort Women TW: rape, death, sexual slavery, dehumanisation, misogyny Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories from 1932 till the end of world war II. Young women were abducted from their homes, lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants, then incarcerated in comfort stations both within and outside of their home countries. Earlier comfort women were Japanese prostitutes who volunteered. However, as Japan continued military expansion, they found themselves short of Japanese volunteers, and so coerced local populations to serve in their comfort stations.

This was used as a way to symbolically “castrate” other Asian men by showing how they could not defend “their women” and to degrade the women themselves. The majority of the women were thought to be from Korea but also included women from China, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, Indonesia, the Netherlands (captured in Dutch colonies in Asia) and Australia. In Korea, the overwhelming majority of Korean girls taken came from poor backgrounds and daughters of the gentry and bureaucracy were spared unless their families showed signs of pro-independence tendencies. There are debates about the number of comfort women, ranging from 50,000 to 200,000 but approximately three-quarters of the women died. Rape, beatings and physical torture were said to be common.

Reflecting their dehumanised status, Army and Navy records referred to the movement of “comfort women” as “units of war supplies”.

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Aftermath There has been a mixed history since amongst Japanese political figures of denial, down-playing and apologies and compensation. For example, in 1965 Japan provided an $800 million aid and low-interest loan package as compensation for Koreans forced into labour and military service and in 1992 Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologised to South Korean President Roh Tae Woo and before South Korea’s National Assembly. However, in 2007 prime minister Shinzo Abe stated that there was no evidence that the Japanese government had kept sex slaves. Following protest from the surviving sex slaves, in December 2015 the Abe-led Japanese government agreed to pay $8.3million to fund supporting comfort women and apologised to South Korean President Park Geun-hye over the phone. However, the Korean comfort women regarded the resolution as unsatisfying as they weren’t protesting for money, rather for a formal and public apology from Abe and the Japanese government and the correction of Japanese history textbooks which has not yet been met. Either way, there is still a lot of (justified) anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea that we must be conscious of amending through acknowledging our wrong-doings and acting in solidarity with Korean people.

It is these histories that we carry with us, so we must be conscious of avoiding their continuation. Although there might be more tensions between the older generation as it is still very recent history, my privilege has meant that I could largely turn a blind eye to this and not be fully aware of the extent of Japanese behaviour until writing this piece. This has resulted in my own ignorance about approaching issues of SE/E Asian identity. For example, I only recently starting thinking about issues of appropriating other SE/E Asian cultures in claiming a diasporic SE/E Asian identity. Also, I have not fully understood my role in building up our voices as one of an ally as well as a member. I am very grateful to Kei for turning my attention to the issues of centring Japan in our name, daikon. To keep things transparent and to hold us to account, we have chosen to keep the name daikon* but add an asterisk to constantly remind ourselves to critically reflect on how power dynamics operate not only between us and other racial groups but also within the category of SE/E Asian.

When we move towards decentering Japan in building SE/E Asian solidarity, we must also be aware of the ways in which indigenous and ethnic minority people within Japan have been erased. We must make sure that, in decentering Japan, we do not further erase and rather highlight the existence and importance of indigenous and ethnic minority people. Kei provided us with some insights on this, outlined in the next section.

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The Erasure Of “Japanese” Indigenous and Ethnic Minority Communities

I truly think it’s important that we do not see ‘Japan’ as an mono-ethnic nation, and that we recognise that the Japanese state has been and will likely always be in a perpetual state of creating and re-creating this lie whilst making use of indigenous and other ethnic-minority communities to do so.

There are two major indigenous groups in Japan; the Ainu and the Okinawans/ Ryukyuans. The Ainu only got official recognition as being an indigenous group, thus receiving (meagre) funding/reparations towards their community, in the late 70s. The Okinawans/Ryukyuans in the south are as of yet not considered indigenous people despite the fact that the independent kingdom was invaded by Japan in the early 19th century. Even in the 70s, 30 years after ‘the war’ supposedly ended, Okinawa/the Ryukyu Islands were ‘returned’ back into Japanese possession from US occupation with indigenous people having little say in the decision.

Another ethnic minority group who disrupt the idea of ethnic homogeneity are Nikkei people (people of Japanese descent who emigrated and built new communities outside of Japan), the majority of whom came from Brazil and South America. The state had hoped that by bringing in ‘racially-Japanese’ ‘immigrants’, the ‘purity’ of the Japanese race or culture would not be threatened. Nikkei people were invited to work and settle in Japan, then attempts were made to force people back to South America when it turned out that the Nikkei were not as Japanese™ as the state had hoped they’d be.

These groups were, and still are, made to bear the brunt of Japan’s modernising and/ or westernising efforts; indigenous communities both in the old Japanese empire and in the *current* one are branded as ‘less civilised’/’more savage’; with attempts being made to exterminate their culture whilst also generating profit for the state through a voyeuristic tourism industry.

words by Hanna and Kei

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SPAM™ - Solidarity for Pacific Asian Mateys

I identify as my mother identifies: as Japanese (not really much choice but at the same time, it also offers us privileges). But our family originates in the cluster of islands in present Kagoshima Prefecture, which used to be part of the Ryukyu Kingdom until Japan invaded and kickstarted an era of violent expansionism (as explored in Hanna’s piece about Japanese imperial history).

The Ryukyu kingdom was centred around the island of Okinawa, which is now famed for its tropical nature, beautiful beaches, SPAM™-infused cuisine and hosting a disproportionate amount of the US troops stationed on Japanese territory.

As the number of people frantically googling, ‘where is Guam?’/ ‘Is Guam American?’ increases, I figured that now is probably a great time to bring up the impact of the US military complex in Asia and the Pacific region (not forgetting the fact that the US is also an illegal settler state occupying stolen land in North America) and maybe posit SPAM™-solidarity as a basis for creating links between people and places in the Asian-Pacific region.

SPAM™-solidarity (aka Solidarity for Pacific Asian Mateys) was inspired by my days as an exchange student in South Korea where breakfast almost always included eggfried SPAM™, and conversations I had with other Asian (Filipino, Hawaiian-Okinawan, Indonesian) exchange students centred around our complicated ‘love-hate’ (where love is forced) relationships with SPAM™. Then, a few days ago (yesterday, lol) I came across a poem by Chamorro academic and poet, Craig Santos Perez, entitled ‘SPAM’s Carbon footprint’.1 The poem is witty, but also heart-breaking at the same time, and his words felt 1 https://youtu.be/oNkwbm1fykI 26

extremely relevant to what I was feeling and thinking.

Also check ‘I Eat Therefore I Spam’2 by the same person.

I think these poems truly encapsulate everything I was feeling about SPAM™, and also throw some light on the history of Guam, which is important considering the recent events concerning North Korea and the big ol’ Trumpito.

Can we take SPAM™ and use its mottled pink sponge meat as a framework for solidarity that specifically addresses US military occupation and hegemony, to think about the kingdoms and countries whose economies have been forced into dependency on tourism and military camps which harm indigenous communities, and whose local culinary repertoires are inundated with SPAM™ derivatives (I like to call this SPAM™pression, aka the shit that happens when the US military decides to fuck you over; it is clear and slimy, much like SPAM™ residue) which also physically harms communities through its high trans-fat percentages. SPAM™-solidarity brings those of us fucked over by SPAM™-pression to band together, fight with and for each other against US military hegemony, and also stand in solidarity with iaopoc living under SPAM™-pression in the US of SPAMerica, as well as in the rest of the Americas (SPAMericas??). In terms of pan-Asian diasporic solidarity, identifying the axis of SPAM™-pression can be useful, altho of course, it does not address issues beyond those areas covered by (drowning in) SPAM™.

I figured that US military hegemony would be a good place to start because of its sheer vastness. Also, questioning and threatening US militarism in turn questions and threatens other military hegemonies and militaristic states, especially in Japan and South Korea, and no doubt more (I don’t know a great deal about the intricacies of the military co-dependencies of other nation-states in Asia Pacific region, although Thailand may be one due to its co-operation with the US during the Vietnam war, but again, I don’t have enough knowledge) because of how these militaries are linked and depend on US militarism, and reproduce the conditions for SPAM™ to flourish in their own countries. words by Kei art by Jess 2

http://www.kenyonreview.org/2013/02/i-eat-therefore-i-spam/ 27

Chinese people: We can do better CN: Anti-Asian violence, mentions of anti-SE Asian sentiment, anti-black violence, erasure You would be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t at least heard of the treatment of Dr. David Dao at the hands of United Airlines staff on Sunday, 9 April. The story has made the rounds on the news and social media, as well as video evidence of the callous and violent way in which Dr. Dao was forcibly dragged off the plane, kicking and screaming, as the rest of the plane’s passengers looked on.

There have been many reactions to this incident – from United’s initial botched non-apology, and international outcry on Twitter and Facebook, to false and sensationalist media reporting on Dr. Dao’s “sordid” past. One response was that of Zishi Zhang, a high-school student who filed a petition with the White House to open a federal investigation into the incident. The petition remarks that “[t]he passenger was shouting that he was chosen to leave the flight only because he is Chinese, according to the news report by the New York Times”, ending with the hashtag “#ChineseLivesMatter”.

This petition and its explosive popularity are extremely problematic. Not only do they contribute to false reporting and the erasure of Dr. Dao’s identity, and therefore the continued homogenization of Southeast Asian narratives by East Asian – specifically Chinese – narratives, it is also one of many instances of the co-optation of the queer Black women’s labour behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

The erasure by #ChineseLivesMatter of Dr. Dao’s Vietnamese identity is only one example among many of Southeast Asian erasure in Asian diaspora narratives. The homogenization of Southeast Asian identities under an all-encompassing ‘Chinese’ label is one that has led to continual erasure of the nuanced ways in which racialization of Asian people affects different groups in different ways. For example, in discussions about the model minority myth and the wage gap, the disparity in wage earnings between Southeast Asians and East Asians has been neglected in the development of the myth of the ‘meritocratic’, and yet anti-Black and anti-brown nature of the American Dream. By framing Dr. Dao’s experience as one of a Chinese person, the hashtag 28

mobilizes people on the basis of a mistaken identity, contributing to continued misreporting about this incident. #ChineseLivesMatter homogenizes all Asian experience as “Chinese” and contributes to the erasure and marginalization of Southeast Asian people and their experiences of oppression, both within the Asian community by East Asian people, and in wider society by white people.

The popularity of the hashtag #ChineseLivesMatter is also disturbing for other reasons.

One way in which this petition has been promoted in the Chinese community in China (on such sites as Weibo) is to say that “if the petition reaches one million signatures, the American federal government will be forced to respond, with significant media attention; this will show the world that Chinese people can protect their rights overseas using foreign politics tactics, too!” (translation of an excerpt of a post on Weibo, original here). In conflating Dr. Dao’s experience as a Vietnamese-American with that of a Chinese person travelling overseas, this post ignores the lived experience of people of colour living in the diaspora under conditions of structural racism. It posits that all ethnically Chinese people experience oppression the same way, regardless of where they actually reside. Rather than a movement ostensibly aimed at bringing United to justice, then, #ChineseLivesMatter becomes a social media flexing of Chinese ethnic nationalist muscle for people who may not ever experience/have ever experienced racialization and racism in their home country.

This is not to say that Chinese people do not face racism when they travel abroad, or that whiteness does not have a pervasive impact on people in non-white majority countries. But these experiences are different from those of Chinese people born in the diaspora, people who experience micro- and macro-aggressions every day, at the 29

feet of white supremacy. The reason why people are calling this incident violent and racist is precisely because it is happening in a context where the lives of people of colour so often do not matter: America. It makes no sense to be advocating for the rights of all Chinese lives when it is specifically Southeast Asian-American lives that are on the line.

Ultimately, attempts to rally international solidarity towards asserting the rights of Chinese people in general sits uncomfortably with the specific concerns of Southeast Asian-Americans travelling on an American airline, in the context of white supremacist America with its violent state apparatus designed to exclude and, in some cases, to kill. It constitutes yet another instance of the crude appropriation of the struggle of diasporic SEA/EA people for our own ends. And the way it has been discussed in Chinese circles smacks of nationalist jingoism: Chinese people are claiming Dr. Dao as one of their own, but only insofar as he proves the point that Chinese people in general are treated unfairly by the West – a conflation of diasporic lived experience with nationalist geopolitics. #ChineseLivesMatter also does a disservice to the very cause of the racial solidarity that this hashtag seems to suggest should be a priority for political mobilization.

The hashtag #ChineseLivesMatter is only the latest instance of co-option and stealing of Black people’s labour for other minorities’ social justice mobilizing. Through the history of racial struggle and into the present day, a pattern has emerged where non-Black people of colour, and it seems especially East Asians, have exploited for our own causes the cultural resonance of phrases and imagery that Black activists have worked to build up, without reciprocating any meaningful solidarity or reflection.

For example, Michele Selene Ang 30

was recently widely celebrated for wearing a shirt designed by Will Choi with the slogan “Scarlett & Emma & Tilda & Matt”, ostensibly to criticize the many instances of whitewashing that have occurred in films in the past year. While the design of the shirt is one that appears to be relatively common – left justified, Helvetica text against a plain background – the shirt has widely become associated with the visuals of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Gloss Rags, founded by Randi Gloss, a social entrepreneur, activist, writer & educator, produced a t-shirt collection called “And Counting” in 2014 which sought to “memorialize Black men and women who have been killed at the hands of police and trigger-happy citizens. […] The fallen brothers & sisters’ names are listed simply yet profoundly.” These shirts are stark in their message and their centering of Black lives lost to racist state and white supremacist violence.

While Choi may not have explicitly intended to co-opt this aesthetic, it is difficult to imagine how he could not have been aware of the use of this design by Black Lives Matter activists. This is particularly important given the difference in scale of the problem that the shirts are trying to address: while the shirt from Will Choi is an ironic take on the centering of white people in what we would expect to be Asian roles, the “And Counting” shirt raises awareness of the real and deadly consequences of police and state brutality.

This is where the ‘Chinese Lives Matter’ hashtag becomes especially egregious. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, founders of #BlackLivesMatter, have all written about the ways in which BLM has been co-opted by other liberation groups under the banner of supposed “unity” against oppression. Such movements and hashtags as #AllLivesMatter constitute an erasure of queer Black women’s painstaking emotional and activist labour, as well as a deflection of the reality that Black lives disproportionately suffer the brunt of white supremacy, and so must be centered in the fight for liberation.

In exactly this vein, #ChineseLivesMatter appropriates the iconography of #BlackLivesMatter, steals from the queer Black women who have devoted their lives to the upholding of Black people’s basic human rights and dignity, and deflects the racial justice conversation – the icing on the cake is that such mobilization has been done on behalf of an incorrectly-identified group of people.

And not only do Chinese people steal from Black people’s labour, we refuse to reflect on the anti-Blackness in our own communities that makes us complicit in the sanctioning of state violence against other people of colour. We become appropriative oppressors, happy to steal from other people of colour’s labour, while adamantly refusing to confront the racism that persists among our families and our friends. We conveniently ignore that in May last year, a Chinese washing machine company advert hit international headlines for its grossly anti-Black content. We refuse to confront the difficult reality that in Black neighbourhoods across America, Korean- and Chinese-Americans have virtually monopolised the Black beauty business, frequently shutting out aspiring Black business-owners from entering the market; to assume responsibility for the fact that earlier this year, a Korean store-owner in North Carolina was caught on tape violently assaulting a Black female customer, prompting a boycott of Asian-owned stores in the area. We willingly forget that in 1991, a Korean liquor store owner was 31

convicted of voluntary manslaughter for fatally shooting 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, and was sentenced to probation, community service, and a fine, rather than the 16 years recommended by the jury.

In December 2014, Black Lives Matter activists marched in Brooklyn to protest the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley, an unarmed Black man, by NYPD officer Peter Liang; three months later, over 3000 Chinese-Americans showed up at New York City Hall to demand that charges against Liang be dropped. What they argued was that all killers should be prosecuted, not only a Chinese one – but it appeared to be less a demand for racial justice for all and more a request to grant us, too, the protection of whiteness that has shielded so many police officers from any repercussions at all. While for some East Asian people this marked a watershed moment towards anti-racist Asian organizing, this selective outrage did nothing more than demonstrate the way in which many of us have misunderstood white supremacy – the way it pits people of colour against one another in order to assert its own invisibility.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Andrew Sullivan’s article in New York Magazine, in which he uses the model minority myth to dispel the argument that Dr. Dao was targeted because of his race: “Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I mean, what isn’t these days? […] Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites?”.

In classic liberal fashion, Sullivan argues that because Asian Americans as a racial group have bootstrapped their way to success in spite of a long history of hardship and oppression, they should now be considered as individuals in their own right. Dr. Dao, you weren’t violently hauled off that United flight because you were Asian, it was because you were “disruptive and belligerent”.

Disruptive, that is, interruptive; belligerent, that is, hostile and aggressive. Individual traits that are wholly unrelated to Dr. Dao’s race, and yet, funnily enough, are the exact opposite of the model minority myth, one designed and used by whiteness to prove that we live in a post-racial society in which minorities can succeed (or rather, they can reach the level of success of white capitalists, and potentially even surpass it)… provided, of course, they are not Black. Provided, of course, they keep their head down and mind their own business. Provided they continue to aspire to whiteness, even though they can never realistically escape the effects of being racialized as non-white – as Other. Provided they do not interrupt the way in which white supremacy works to keep all people of colour down, albeit in different and yet simultaneously violent ways; provided they do not resist incursions on their space, their existence, in a hostile, aggressive manner. Provided they do not disobey.

The other side of Sullivan’s argument appears to be that all of the other people of colour who are not Asian American and who are not Jewish have somehow not yet earned the right to say that they live in a post-racial society, because of a problem with their ‘culture’, their ‘way of life’. The arguments seems to be that Black and 32

brown people have not earned the right to be violently attacked on account of their individual actions rather than their race.

While this may sound absurd, we are complicit in perpetuating this myth every time we invoke the model minority myth to expound Asian diasporic exceptionalism, or anytime we refuse to counter such claims with a broader commitment towards racial justice for all people of colour.

‘It’s not my problem,’ we have always said, ‘they won’t come for us.’ But what do we do now that it appears they are perfectly willing to assault us in broad daylight?

Hijack the momentum of the very movement we were previously content to ignore, and equate one act of violence against ourselves with the decades-long structural, traumatising, and murderous over-policing of Black Americans. Because while many East Asian people and other people of colour have called United out for its racism online, the silence of East Asian communities in the face of other instances of racially-motivated violence has always been, and continues to be, deafening. Where were we when a Black woman was dragged off a Delta flight in December 2016? Are we similarly outraged when Black and brown people are stopped from travelling due to racial profiling or racialized Islamophobia?

We have to stop only getting angry when racism hits home. We have to realize that as much as white supremacy might trick us into thinking that we are exceptional, that we have earned our stripes as the “model minority”, we will never truly belong – in the words of Franny Choi in a poem addressed to Peter Liang, “No one wants to see us alive, either”. We have to confront the fact that insofar as the the model minority narrative creates (East) Asian-ness as a homogenous myth of success, where whiteness is always just a touch out of reach, such a myth also demands that we step on Black and brown people’s necks to try and get there.

If we are only willing to show up to ask to be let into the white man’s house, we should stop abusing the name of racial justice. If we are truly dedicated to racial justice, however, we must let go of our parochial obsession with accessing racial privilege and instead ask how this system of privileges can be destroyed. We must fight for every cause, not only for those we perceive to be our own. Only then will any of us be free. words by Jun 33

[Written for International Women’s Day ‘17] To all the powerful Inspiring Strong Creative Encouraging women in my life Society tells us to doubt our self worth It tells us we are not enough Tells us to be jealous of other women Now we need support One another We need to recognise our fights are better won when we come together than torn apart on a manufactured battle field Created for the sole purpose Of artificially crafted catty competition Well those fields were made of plastic There was no soil at all No wonder we couldn’t grow Couldn’t spring out and upwards It’s fake And it doesn’t exist

words by Rosie photo by Louise

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We need to change the arena We need to adapt our focus And we must go hand in hand and remember that we are not in competitors In this white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy we call life we need our sisters Not just our C I S cisters we need you By our side Let support and love be our war cry And allow the falsities of societal pressures trickle trickle trickle away

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