A "Bad Day"

On a bad day, I’ll grab my favorite Starbucks order and turn on a cheesy romcom movie. Or maybe I’ll go on a long run. If I’m feeling especially down, I might decompress by taking a nap. No matter how bad my day is, however, I do not murder eight innocent individuals, unlike Robert Aaron Long.

Apart from affecting the agency and self-perception of Asian/American women, the trope of hypersexuality can also have deleterious effects on their material well-being and safety. The 2021 Atlanta spa shootings are a grim reminder of this.

I would like to first express my most sincere condolences to the eight victims and their families. The victims’ names are Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng. On March 16, 2021, a self-described sex addict, Robert Aaron Long, targeted three massage parlors and brutally murdered these eight individuals. According to the police, the sex-addicted white perpetrator was having a “bad day” and desired to “eliminate the temptation” (Graziosi). His temptation was Asian women. He fetishized Asian women to the extent that he could no longer let them live. It is no coincidence that six out of the eight victims were Asian women employed at the spas.

Long’s “temptation” echoes the legacy of the historical, legal, and cultural constructions of Asian women as hypersexual. Being a “sex addict” is neither a valid excuse to justify taking eight lives nor does it shield him from accusations of being a racist. To downplay race and highlight the gendered nature of his violence, Long pointed toward his “sex addiction” as a primary motivator. Long’s emphasis on his “sex addiction” distracts us from the gendered and racial dimensions of the case. There is a tendency to frame the violence against hypersexualized Asian women as merely an issue of race or gender. However, the Atlanta murders represent neither just gender nor just racial animus. Rather, they reflect how race and gender intersect in complex ways to render Asian women especially vulnerable to violence. This shooting spree was not an anomaly but one of the many gendered and racialized acts of violence that continues to haunt Asian women across space and time.

We are not your scapegoats.