A Reflection on Anti-Asian Violence
When I studied abroad in Italy, on a late night out on a quiet side street, I heard two men yell “Hello Kitty, Kitty!” I looked back, confused, not sure if they were speaking to me. I walked a little faster, my heart thumping. What sounded like imitations of a cat’s meow followed me.
A couple years later when I had returned back to Italy to work at the USA Pavilion at the World Expo, I experienced regular greetings by Italian teenagers, palms clasped together in prayer, bowing, shouting in my face “Hello, Cina!” followed by cackling laughs. More well meaning, older Italians would take a look at my name tag “Adriana Di Fazio,” pull at the corner of their eyes and ask me where I really came from.
Although half-Italian, my racially ambiguous, ethnically Asian presence provided enticement, entertainment, and confusion to many. I had experienced small doses of racism back home in New York but never quite as direct or frequent. If they did happen at all, I had buried them deep in a mental box not to revisit.
In Italy, the onslaught of stares, taunts, and microaggressions gave me enough reason to feel scared for my safety and eventually leave the country. Moreover, I had the naive realization that what I went through in Italy was only a minute fraction, incomparable version of what Black and brown people experience in America everyday.
The recent news of Anti-Asian violence has left me feeling heavy. The murder of six Asian women in Atlanta last Tuesday night has made me feel numb. But if I’m being honest, I’m not sure if it’s just that or an accumulation of this entire year—the deep fear of possibly re-electing a racist fascist President, the hundreds of thousands of people dying all around the globe, the continuous murder of Black and brown people at the hands of the police. The truth is, I feel like an overflowing cup of grief that sorely keeps getting refilled back up.
But only if I really let myself feel that. I’ve buried myself under reading, work, tv shows, only to keep my head and heart weakly afloat. Like most people, I’ve been trying to retain some sense of mental and emotional grounding in a reality that is simply too hard to fully bear.
Feeling this way, it’s easy to slap the words white supremacy as the cause of what’s happening across the country. There’s something deeply satisfying in that answer in a direct and precise way. And for the most part, it’s true. But I can’t help but feel that it’s incomplete. Before this week, the most prominent incidents of Anti-Asian violence were committed by Black men. While blanketing what is happening as white supremacy feels pointed, I am unsure if our language holds all the nuances fully, clear. I am left asking myself, what is really happening here?
At the start of March, Jay Caspian Kang wrote an Opinion for the NYTimes titled “We Need to Put a Name to This Violence.” He writes about the history of Black-Korean violence in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The recent rise of Asian American support of Donald Trump. The exclusion of Asian students from diversity initiatives for public schools. He warns of the limits of progressive language about race and its assumptions.
As a half-white, half-Asian daughter of immigrants, I am familiar with these limits. My mixed racial ethnicity has often left me without words to describe my contradictory existence. My parents’ conservative politics leaves me unsure where to place myself within a progressive party that is meant to support family stories like our own. I am unable to comfortably locate myself and my family in the mainstream narratives about immigrant communities and race.
My personal spiritual work involves making sense, processing, and healing these disparate parts of myself into a whole. I am aware that the violence that is occurring against the Asian community involves racism, white supremacy, and that there is a lot more. I am interested in more nuanced conversations, complex narratives, that take into account the spaces in-between, an understanding that is more representative of the whole. Ultimately, I am interested in the work of deep transformative justice and healing, getting to the root of the issue, even when it takes a bit longer to find the words.
In the midst of this country’s painful racial reckoning, I am afraid that our lack of language to describe the complexities of racial violence, or perhaps our unwillingness to engage, will leave us with a relentlessly open wound that is fed by our shortcomings, festering for more.
This piece was originally published on the Mixed Race Meditation Group Blog.
Adriana DiFazio (she/her) is a first year MDiv student in the Buddhism and Interreligious Engagement Program. She is one of the facilitators of the Mixed Race Meditation Group and identifies as half Filipina-Chinese and half Italian-Turkish. You can connect and learn more about her work at www.adrianadifazio.com.
