for the monterey park and half moon bay vigil

cw: racism, gun violence emily ngo (she/they) and nichole zhang (she/her), pictures by huiyin zhou (they/she)

so, why are we here? what do we want out of this space? there are lots of reasons why we decided to plan this vigil and what we wanted out of it. first and foremost, and the obvious, we were deeply saddened by the mass shootings. people died and people are hurt and are grieving. we are grieving. we wanted to hold space for that, especially on a campus that is structured to actively hurt you and not take care of yourself and in some real ways, punish you when you do.

even beyond the most obvious, we understood the political dimensions of this. we understood that because of the society we live in — a society that is capitalist, racist, sexist, and awful — this society is not made for people like us. people who are of color, who are low-income, who are neurodivergent, people with disabilities, people who are queer. it’s one thing to recognize the immediate tragedy of this event, but another, to recognize that this is not the only tragedy happening in the world, that this tragedy has happened before and that it will happen again, and that’s sad.

it’s infuriating. and frustrating. and depressing. and we wanted to give space for this complexity. there is a lot of violence and a lot of sadness. it’s a lot to hold for one person and we knew that we didn’t want to hold it alone and that we were not alone feeling about this. we wanted to hold a communal space in which we could engage with these feelings in ways that are safe and relieving.

being in aaswg often means thinking about how nonsensical the idea of “asian” is, how we have formed identities around imagined borders or created communities around constructed sameness. when people kill or are killed and we see our own conditions reflected in their stories, even if they don’t neatly align, our own violent categorizations — or those of people in our communities — become abruptly visible. when we grieve their murders, maybe we’re in part grieving our own racializations, our own vulnerability to being twisted or attacked.

to paraphrase moten, the same shit that killed them is killing all of us too, however much more slowly. asian and latinx people were killed by other asian people, and so the anemic frameworks of ‘antiasian hate’ we’ve been given by liberal media are insufficient to understand these shootings. we’re grieving not just because they “look like us” or maybe they experienced the stinky lunch or math homework microaggressions we’ve been told are the foundations of our communities, but because the same matrix of violence which ensnared them ensnares us too.

systems of capitalist exploitation separate ourselves from our bodies and our minds, patriarchal intervention genders and violates us, the u.s. state demands the sacrifice of parts of ourselves that we don’t have. the immediate tragedy of this event is clear, the mass loss of life during a time of joy and celebration that is supposed to set the tone for the rest of the year. even more broadly, though, we’re grieving for the unfailing tragedy of a national epistemology that has built human relations in terms of violence, the wars and slavery and genocides which are all interconnected and have normalized the brutalization of bodies and minds that are not part of the ruling class. we don’t know what to do about this, what to say or how to grieve, because the frameworks for grief and systems of justice that we deserve don’t exist yet. we’re gathered here together, though, because something binds us together, an unrelenting grief because something is not right with this world, but also an unwavering discipline of hope that something else can be created.