breathe: reflections and art from asian communities at duke

reflections and art from asian communities at duke

breathe in with us...

introduction duke’s asian students association collected reflections to help our communities process, heal, and breathe with one another after the murders of eight victims, including six asian women in acworth and atlanta, georgia on march 16, 2021, as well as the increase in violence against asian/americans in the united states. we encourage you if you are able to donate to the fundraisers set up by their families and loved ones for Hyeon Jeong Grant (Kim), Sun Cha Kim, Paul Andre Michels, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Yong Ae Yue, Elcias Hernandez Ortiz, Soon Chung Park, and Xiaojie “Emily” Tan as well as fundraisers for Ms. Chen and Ngoc Pham who were brutally attacked in san francisco on march 17, 2021. there has also been a fundraiser set up for asian american organizations that are working tirelessly in georgia to support communities that have been deeply hurt. we have kept this post updated with links for resources and to donate. these events are frustrating and often we feel helpless, but we must also remember to ground ourselves in processing and defining this hurt to see where we can go from here. this zine’s reflections include ramblings, poetry, and visual art. this is a space for you to process (and scream) as you need. we believe in art and journaling as a form of healing and self-love, and we hope that this community collection of art allows us to heal but also to hope for a better and safer place. thank you to the individuals who have bravely and honestly shared their vulnerable art and writing with us. asa understands that in order to do good work, we need healthy communities in order to make change together. note: if an artist/writer’s work resonates with you, we encourage you to reach out to them! we hope that this is a cathartic and healing exercise for both you and the creators.

I am so sad.

I am grieving for the eight people, including six Asian women, murdered by a white man on that Wednesday night. I read the stories from their children and families and cannot help but cry. I empathize with the desire to want to know names, to humanize, to refocus the narrative onto the victims and those they cared about, but I also cry at the thought of hearing my mother’s own name used as ammunition in the mouths of people who never even knew her, who never even cared about her. I desperately hope that the loved ones who survive the dead are able to mourn on their own terms, and quietly among themselves if they so desire.

I am weeping for the 33 Vietnamese refugees that were deported on the night of March 15. I hurt for their separation with their families and communities that are in the United States, whom they cannot reunite with perhaps ever again. the US tore them from their homes, resettled them into violence, threw them into prison and detainment, and now they are being deported.

I am mourning the millions upon millions of lives that have been ended, uprooted, disjointed because of the historic and ongoing American and Western imperialism and capitalism that have gotten us to this very moment: the colonization of an entire world, the extraction of nature and people as resources, the bombings of nations trying to free themselves from imperialism, the massacres of millions, the traumas that entire generations carry with them and pass onto younger generations. we flee the violence that Western imperialism and militarism oxidized in our homelands only to arrive and find that the US is the very same violence dressed up as a door.

art by kayla marr

I am so frustrated. when people ask, “why did this happen?”

I can point to the way that violence is wrapped up in US militarism, imperialism, cisheteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and anti-communism.

I can articulate that there has been a massive spike in violence against East and Southeast Asians in particular since March of last year because of the way American imperialist media has been printing Sinophobic news about China, especially around the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can tell you that these murders, attacks, and violence aren’t happening just because of “hate” against bodies like mine, but rather it is a continuation of the historic sexual violence that American and Western imperialism forced onto Asian women.

I can explain why it feels so silly to beg elected officials, police agencies, and university administration to decry these abuses as if these same institutions and systems are not responsible for the legacy of United States aggression and militarism in Asia.

I know these things, and yet I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about others.

I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about others

I am so angry.

I want to rip this world apart. all the systems of imperialism, cisheteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, Orientalism, the list goes on, were created by people, so it is us that can will destroy it all. I want it all burned down so that we can begin to build a world that centers care and accountability and healing. we must reimagine everything.

I am trying to be hopeful. because of abolitionists organizing to circulate resources and help communities feel safe and protected without replicating systems of policing. because of books and theories that have been written that so clearly lay out why systems of power are so deeply exploitative and intrusive and what must be done to dismantle them. because of long histories of solidarities between marginalized communities fighting for liberation, solidarities that still exist today. because of mutual aid networks that show how quickly communities organize to support and care for their members. because of the people in my life, particularly women and femmes of color, who care so, so deeply for one another that we will destroy the world if that’s what it takes to live without anxiety and fear. because of the world in my dreams that I love.

I want to be hopeful. so fucking help me. words by shania khoo

art and words by elizabeth lee tw: sexual harassment I was around 8 years old when my mom started working at my uncle’s restaurant. my older sisters would go to practice with my dad while my brother and I would go with our mom since no one could watch us. there was one day where it was just me and her - a girl’s day. her and my aunt would laugh at the register in taishanese, and I would smile along pretending I was in on the latest gossip. and then two men walked in. it wasn’t anything out of the usual - at the prime age of 8 I was familiar with grown men who made me uncomfortable, who would try to speak to me in a way that no 8 year old should be spoken to - but this time was different.

I still have nightmares.

I still hear their croaks.

I still see their red eyes, empty.

I still see my mom’s eyes, terrified and alert. but her smile was still wide. her smile was big enough to compensate for her eyes. her eyes stared at my aunt, and then stared at me, and her smile became even wider. she smiled, so I smiled back.

I learned at 8 that I need to smile in order to not get hurt, but I don’t want to. I want to scream and cry and hurt all the men who hurt my mom. I just want to exist, but every day makes it harder.

mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry when i first heard of the shootings, i didn’t process it.

it was only three days later, in the silence of midnight, when i started sobbing. because earlier that day, i had seen that hyun jun kim had two sons. two sons that she alone provided for. and in that moment, when i was about to get in the shower, i thought about my own mother.

my own mother, who has suffered so much for me. whose kind, soft heart has been battered by life. who people constantly take advantage of because they know she has no other choice but to comply, to provide for me. my mother, who lives for me, who silently supports me without question. my mother who always looks at me with so much fondness, and so much pain in her eyes. my mother, who waits until i go to bed to cry alone in the shower. our lives are supported on the backs of asian mothers. the strongest warriors i know, who will carry the sky without so much as a complaint, all for their children.

mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry mama, i’m sorry looking at them teary-eyed while insisting that they’re fine. smiling as the sky crushes them and asking you if you want the last bao zi. shouldering the weight of the world with a grace unmatched. i am so sorry you lost her. i am so sorry you will never see her smile again. i am so sorry you will never come home to her warm arms, circling around you like a loving fortress. i am so sorry you will never again be greeted at the door with the smell of dumplings and know that you are home.

mother, i know i am not the perfect daughter. i should be kinder to you. i should call you more. i shouldn’t have yelled at you so much or argued with you. you do so much for me, and i will never be able to thank you enough. but please know that i see you. i appreciate you so much. if i ever lost you, i think i would break into a million pieces. to every asian mother we lost, i’m sorry we couldn’t do more for you.

words by cynthia dong

words by ruby wang my mother told me today that she felt scared on her trip to costco she saw white customers file in without problem but yelling followed her step through the automatic doors the screams sent trembles down my mother the employee’s loud screams at my mother were slow as if she could not understand english to her, this seemingly small encounter at costco felt like a demand to prove herself in this country i grew up wishing i was white every barbie doll i held and cartoon characters i watched was white in middle school, i had crushes on boys but they only talked to girls who looked nothing like me i began waking up wishing for a head of blonde hair and eyes blue like the Maddies and Annes in my class so you could imagine how confused i became when the white boys started dating only asian girls and i saw the koreaboos and weeaboos obsessed with BTS and attack on titan drawing their eyes to mimic mine and my monolids you pick and choose what you want to like about us it’s best when we can be “cute” and “docile” that way we can be like the asian girls you dream about but make sure we don’t have thick asian accents though unlike european accents that are so desired have a chinese accent with broken english then you’re a chink and dog eater once you’ve degraded us, you can scapegoat us when a pandemic comes you escape responsibility all of a sudden it becomes a china virus it’s not til we die before you realize you’re at fault

art & words by celine wei

brighter days

art by athena yao

"Brighter Days" is depicted as an oil painting of me and my little sister, back when we were toddlers living in our old Bronx apartment.

Creating this piece felt bittersweet as I was transported back to our childhood innocence.

words by athena yao In Chinese, my given name means freedom. It is pronounced lan, and the character for it is 岚: the character on top means mountain, and the one on the bottom represents the wind. It represents the movement of wind flowing freely through the mountains, because I was born in the land of the free.

I grew up reading books about George Washington, the glorious history of the American Revolution, and the country that became a sanctuary for the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I learned to sing songs about purple mountains and shining seas, to proudly recite

the Pledge of Allegiance every morning as a uniformed little girl looking up at stars and stripes.

Towards the end of seventh grade, my family achieved the American Dream. We traded our roach-infested apartment in the Bronx for a spotless white house on a corner street in Long Island, New York; we swapped out urban views of the Whitestone Bridge for white picket fences, perfectly manicured lawns, and spacious lacrosse fields out in suburbia. I swapped hour-long subway rides to school for five-minute walks across a footbridge overlooking a highway, birds chirping from a nearby strip of forest.

There were still the moments of confusion, the loneliness and the tears that came out at night. The girls at school didn’t look like me; they had blonde/brunette hair and sported Ugg boots and JanSport backpacks.

They grew up scoring goals to the cheers of soccer moms who drove around in minivans to petition to allocate part of the town budget to stringing snowflake street lights during Christmastime. But I adjusted.

Eventually, I also walked into the locker room after school, dropping off my JanSport backpack to slip on a black-and-gold jersey. I placed my hand over my heart, enthralled by The Star-Spangled Banner during the opening of a track meet. On team picture day, my dark hair stood out among the airy golden halos of my teammates; the reserved, closelipped smile I learned from my mother contrasted their white teeth. I soon learned to smile like an American too. After all, I was living the dream, wasn’t I? — Yet in the past couple years, months, and weeks, something has changed.

I walk outside, the warmth of my face mask unbearingly hot as I cross paths with a soccer mom with her face uncovered. She gives me a close-lipped smile while keeping her distance. Last month was Lunar New Year. Amidst the celebration, my friend shared a post on social media: the Asian-owned bubble tea place near his school was looted and vandalized. I spent my evening reading about hate crimes, recoiling at images of graffiti from a New York City subway station: “Kill all Chinese people for COVID.” I am taken back in time to two months ago, when I sat in the car with my mother, daydreaming while looking out my window. A car stopped at the

light ahead. There was a large American flag mounted on the back, flying next to another black-and-white version with a blue stripe across the middle: a proclamation for blue lives. On the top of the car, I saw gold stars on a red background, and I pointed it out to my mother. “That’s the Chinese flag. Is he Chinese?” she asked.

The light changed, and as he drove ahead, I noticed the black ink scrawled across the flag. I realized that he was not Chinese; he would rather be anything but Chinese. I turned away from the window, but it was too late: I already felt the stab in my chest.

I walk down a friend’s street in my town and see American flags waving proudly in front of each house, yet something has changed. For the first time in my life, the sight of the stars and stripes do not elicit pride or hope or a sense of belonging, but fear. They flash back to videos of the people from my town barricading Black Lives Matter protesters.

They take me back to the Capitol riots in January—to the lies and conspiracies, to the way the flag was waved around as some sort of excuse to trample upon the foundations of our democracy. They bring me to this past week, the aching in my chest as I read about the victims in Atlanta and wince at video footage of anti-Asian hate crimes and graffiti across the country. They are a reminder of my realization that my family has not truly attained the American Dream at all—that the dream itself is still merely an illusion for people like me.

Today, as I watch the news and walk the streets, I reflect upon a country that is so torn up in the fight over black and blue that we all end up battered in bruises and divided opinions, a country in which the soughtafter illusion of happiness is unattainable for those who do not fit the race criteria set by people like the suburban developers of my hometown on Long Island. I think of the tightness in my chest when people ask where my family is from: I do not tell them that my mother is from Wuhan, that I first feared for the lives of relatives halfway across the globe before the virus spread to the United States as well. I do not want to see the apprehension in their eyes.

I think about that uniformed little girl in the Bronx looking up at the American flag, eyes sparkling as she pledged allegiance to the flag and the republic for which it stands…“with liberty / and justice / for all.”

That little girl has grown up, and she no longer feels free.

Do you feel the sorrow swimming in the depths of your heart?

Inside, reminders scorch you inside out burning blood to the ends of the earth (your toes) a canal a mile long cuts across (your stomach) shrapnel and debris fly overhead lodged silently beneath (your arms) sleeping in the sweat of (your tongue)

Where you can’t let yourself go You run for the first time in months because a body physically in motion can’t cry any longer You became a master of dissociation - cramming for tomorrow’s midterm, buried under demands of work, and streaming countless episodes - just to numb, lessen, and short circuit the inevitability of despair You are reminded of your own vulnerability Your grief undoes you, recalling the loneliness of ordinary life and the need for communion and community so with cheap Gorilla Glue, You sew yourself back together for even if six of your own were murdered last night, Your assignments are still due in the morning

Because You know You’ll weep and won’t be able to stop

In response to ‘he had a really bad day’ In memory of Delaina Ashley Yuan, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Julie Park, Hyeon Jeong Park, and two unnamed victims of white supremacy

Excuses fly from the police officer’s lips lies of whiteness spun to maintain exclusivity and comfort the Insulation of privilege and power at the helm

He had a sex addiction He was only eliminating His addiction Still aren’t sure if it’s a hate crime

A really bad day Day bad, really?

Really! bad.

Day. And you feel that if anything you’ve had a really bad day actually several really bad days but you wouldn’t go shoot eight people on a rampage Would you?

Sickened with Grief Glazed over vision meet ashen cheeks nauseatingly sweet remnants of syrup laced between your teeth You almost forgot

How could you Forget but

How could you Remember

Bittersweet traces of chocolate lodged in your throat waiting to be expelled

He had a really bad day And suddenly shards of last nights dinner re-emerge forming a sorry puddle at the edges of your feet you turn to the blank wall distancing from the acrid odor You’ll have to clean it up later words by katherine gan

words by theo cai

a a note note on on griefs griefs

with something approaching curiosity, i track the many forms my grief takes after unimaginable violence: • first, rage opens a pit below my heart and above my stomach: one part righteousness, one part cruelty, one part raw hunger. i want to eat the world not to sustain life, but to dissolve it in my acid.

• then, guilt for not knowing enough, not doing enough, for not being able to carry all the people and things i need to carry to get us through—i don’t think i can get us through, and i feel such • shame for how slow i am to learn and act when people are dying. people have died. any insights i might have about racism, misogyny, immigration, and the criminalization of sex work stopper at the top of my throat. i could repost some instagram graphics and retweet some links but aren’t i ultimately • powerless? the scythe of white supremacy and all its affiliates keeps swinging and i keep ducking. if i straighten up, • won’t it get me, too? try as it might, fury’s fire can’t fully cauterize fear, so every open part of me still weeps. everyone is thinking about their mothers and aunts; i can’t even begin to with mine. where do we go from here? i’m not sure—it scares me how unsure i am. how can i change something so big? how can i change something that wants my life any way it can get it? i don’t want us to live in precarity, at the mercy of bad days or bad eggs, rotten systems or rotten hegemonies. i don’t want us to die anymore. i wish that alone were enough. where do i go from here? i know i must move, but struggle with direction. the many faces of my grief demand many ways of facing them, so i turn towards each in turn: i read, listen, write, love the full width of my love and find that my range of emotion is wider than i thought. mourning makes me tender; i flex with care and name the aches. yes, i still believe that we’ll be free. faith alone isn’t enough to get us there, but i’m doing what i can right now, and i know you are, too. once the pain eases, we’ll move together.

...breathe out with us

march 2021