by Jonathan Chan
Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Yong Ae Yue
who has the right to
steal another’s breath? that
there should be no light through
these wounds, that the white
singe of anger should raise flesh
above flesh, that a son would have
no time to mourn his mother,
that her face would be marred by
fetishised blame? that this intractable
wail would rise yet again, that it should
blister across pixels, across towns, across
seas? that broken images should grow
in this unforgiving heap: cracked
skulls, bruised cheeks, a last breath on a
daylit street? that this razing of bodies
would see only disease: no life in unheard
anguish, no love in second skins? that
brutality would breathe in sordid
fantasy, that temptation would vanish in
delusions of lead? that eight pits should be dug,
as the moon swells and heaves, that this grief
should not vanish as the waves recede?
that these words should grow thick, that these
words would grow thick. who has the right to steal
another’s breath?
who?
Jonathan Chan: In March 2022, demonstrations and rallies were organised across the United States to honour the lives of eight individuals: Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sinophobic rhetoric from government halls to college dorms had forcibly yoked people of East and Southeast Asian ethnicity to the transmissible virus. The past year has seen a spate of cruel spontaneous attacks on people of East and Southeast Asian descent in North America, both young and old, male and female.
These incidences of violence have left Asians and Asian Americans feeling unsafe, unwelcome, and anxious about leaving their homes. They have also become a focal point for anxieties surrounding discrimination against East Asians in the United States, which can be traced to the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the internment of Japanese Americans and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, to the tactics of dehumanisation employed to empower American GIs to kill Korean and Vietnamese combatants from the 50s to the 70s, and also to the murder of the Chinese American Vincent Chin in Michigan in 1982, against a backdrop of growing Japanese economic competition with the United States. The Biden administration’s hardening line against China, a continuation of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, has in some ways emboldened and legitimised such suspicions.
Yet, as Jay Caspian Kang has argued, there has also been an unwelcome conflation of physical violence against individuals from lower-income backgrounds with micro-aggressions and bullying experienced by the upwardly mobile, all folded within the project of Asian America. Many in the community are derisory when they think of massage spa workers. Discrimination against Asians in the United States is historic and varied, but also takes different forms along class lines, whether toward the refugee, the migrant worker or the business consultant. Moreover, what was particularly noxious about the murder of these eight people was how it sat at a nexus of purity culture, white evangelicalism and anti-Asian racism, coalescing in the shooter’s desire to expunge his lust through murder. “Asian women” became a cypher for sexual temptation, under which even those who were neither Asian nor women were deemed deserving of death.
These tensions informed one another as I wrote this poem, still shaken by the cruelty involved in the murder of George Floyd. At that point in time, I was preparing to move to the US to embark on a course of graduate study and wrestling with what it means to return as someone born in America but now naturalised as a Singaporean. The solidarity expressed by so many Singaporeans in response to these acts of violence occasionally felt hollow given the existing discrimination by Chinese Singaporeans against Indian Singaporeans and South Asian migrant workers. I sought to tread carefully, weaving other incidences of violence against those of Asian descent, all as a means of critiquing the powers that be in the US who enable such conditions where racism, hatred and violence can fester. I thought of my relatives and loved ones in the US for whose safety I feared from a distance. I thought of the great moral reckoning needed to affirm the humanity of those of different ethnic and class backgrounds. And this question has only persisted in my mind over the course of the last two years: who has the right to take another’s life? Who?
Published: Tuesday 29 March 2022[RETURN TO WRITE TO POWER]
Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor and graduate student at Yale University. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated in Cambridge, England. He is interested in questions of faith, identity and creative expression. He has recently been moved by the writing of Thich Nhat Hanh, Ilya Kaminsky and Robert Hayden. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.