It is late May as I am writing this piece for TAP—my heartfelt reflections on racism, anti-Asian racism, and the shared and varied experiences of Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in the United States through the lens of my lived experience as a Chinese American woman, a person of color, and a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst during this time of Covid, violence, and racial reckoning.
May is Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a time to acknowledge and celebrate the history, contributions, and cultures of AAPIs in this country. It is also a celebration of diversity, representing progress beyond the ideals I heard growing up of “color-blindness” and America as a “melting pot.” This month, history is being made. The alleged gunman in the Atlanta spa shootings in March—in which eight people were murdered, including six women of Asian descent—was indicted on murder charges. The Fulton County prosecutor announced her intention to pursue hate crimes charges if he is convicted, which would be the first application of Georgia's new hate crimes law. On May 20, President Biden signed into law the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act that fights anti-AAPI violence.
These advancements are welcome, but we are still in the midst of a precipitous rise in killings, beatings, and harassment of AAPI people. Racialized hatred and blame for the “China virus” and “kung flu” were fomented at the highest levels of government last year. Violent incidents have continued to mount since the Atlanta murders. A 75-year-old Chinese American woman, Xiao Zhen Xie—who was beaten, fought back, and cried out in shock afterward in Cantonese, her voice cracking in anguish—reminded me of my grandmother. A 65-year-old Filipina American woman, Vilma Kari, was brutally kicked and stomped on in front of a Manhattan building a couple miles south of my office after the attacker shouted, “You don't belong here!” The silent response of the building staff was to close the door. The website Stop AAPI Hate totaled over 6,600 anti-AAPI hate crimes or hate incidents between March 2020 and March 2021, notably toward women, youth, and the elderly.
I want to acknowledge that the struggles of Asian American Pacific Islanders differ from other groups' struggles. In contrast with Black or Indigenous people of color, AAPIs are mostly immigrants or descendants of immigrants who came to the U.S. by choice. While we have suffered from racism and, at times, racialized violence, we have never existed in this country in the context of our ancestors having been forced here as slaves, driven from our homelands, systematically brutalized, or unequivocally seen (then and by some still now) as less than fully human, based just on the color of our skin. This is the first time many AAPIs have experienced mortal danger due to racism, in sharp contrast to the reality for so many Black and brown people in our country.
But even so, the collective traumas of people of color are intertwined and not mutually exclusive. The complex story of race in America tends to be collapsed into a Black and white binary that renders other races/ethnicities less seen. Despite numbering about 23 million and being the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S., AAPIs are often invisible in the discourse and in statistics and polls; we are left out or merely listed as “other.” For some white Americans, the shootings brought the startling revelation that AAPI people are minorities that suffer at all. It shocked into awareness some AAPIs, as well, that racism does indeed affect them as much as they would like to believe it doesn't. Other AAPIs are much less surprised, aware that to some degree racism has prevented them from being fully seen, known, and included their entire lives.
I'd like to take this opportunity to explore the ways and historical context in which AAPIs in America have been impacted by racism, including how we have been stereotyped, erased or less seen, and subject to discrimination and violence. I will direct particular attention to the experiences of AAPI women and relate some of my own experiences growing up and living in this country. I will examine how the Atlanta shootings occurred within a clear context—at the intersection of racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant sentiment, and religious prohibitions against sex—and also comment on psychoanalysis and its approach to race.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.
As we psychoanalysts know, blueprints for how we see ourselves and others are laid down at a young age. These beliefs are built upon or changed as we grow, have more experiences, and move into the larger world. People also do see color from a
Meredith J. Wong, M.D., is a psychiatrist and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. She serves on NYPSI's Committee on Racial Consciousness & the Diversities and APsaA's Committee on Gender & Sexuality.
young age, even if they protest this fact. As social creatures, we are evolutionarily hardwired to see differences of all kinds. What becomes problematic are the relative values placed on certain characteristics versus others, and the resultant license to discriminate as a result. The famous and heartbreaking doll studies by Black psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark—“Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children” —and subsequent studies over the years have shown that both white children and children of color display pro-white implicit bias from a very early age, and value or devalue themselves and their peers accordingly.
People also locate themselves in the world in relation to others—through similarities and differences, who is like me and who is not. Yet psychoanalysis traditionally privileges the individual, with the “social,” including race and racism, seen as external. Psychoanalysis may attribute racialized self-image, perceptions of others, and transferences solely to a patient's internally-generated conflicts, such as around sex and aggression, or to relational attachments while dismissing the effects of the very real racial, ethnic, and cultural surround on the intrapsychic lives of the patient and analyst and everything the dyad constructs in the analytic space. White is seen as normative, and not discussing the actuality of race and racial difference (i.e., focusing only on symbolic meanings) as neutral.
For me, it has been a long, difficult journey to stop seeing white as normative. I am a third-generation Chinese American whose grandparents immigrated in the 1930s and ‘40s from Toisan in rural southern China. Growing up in a small, conservative, extremely white, and racist town, I had a deep yearning to belong. I did not realize at the time how much my wanting and striving for acceptance and approval in (white) others’ eyes involved a devaluation of my Asian American self and unwitting participation in the devaluation of other people of color in the process. It took years for me to realize, consciously, how rarely people who look like me, or any people of color, have been fully seen in America—or in the white space of psychoanalysis—historically and to this day.
My first encounter with racism was in nursery school. I had not seen myself as Other until I was excluded from playing with some kids based on appearance. It was upsetting and confusing. I was then bullied throughout elementary school for my race. When I was 7 years old, a common racist taunt was a song that went:
“Chinese”—kids pulled up the corners of their eyes.
“Japanese”—kids pulled down the corners of their eyes.
“Dirty knees. / Look at these / boobies!”—kids pulled out the front of their shirts.
It took years for me to realize, consciously, how rarely people who look like me, or any people of color, have been fully seen in America—or in the white space of psychoanalysis—historically and to this day.
Then they laughed, self-satisfied or perplexed when I did not find it funny too. At times, I would walk by and people would just yell “ching chong ching chong ching chong!” at me. Even if not as malicious, people might say a bunch of gibberish and ask what that meant in Chinese. I spoke back when I could but still felt badly about myself. I felt ugly and alienated, and internalized the racism.
The internalization of my Asian-ness as bad and Other stemmed not just from racist taunts. In elementary school, I sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” every day with the other kids but understood early on that the soaring lyrics did not include me or my family. I saw stereotypical depictions of East Asians with pointed hats and bucked teeth and wondered if my eyes were really mere slits like that—unseen, unseeing, and diminished, their expressiveness erased. Shame twisted in me as I read award-winning faux-Chinese children's tales by white authors, their foolish characters steeped in exoticism and played for laughs. I didn't see myself, a kid of Asian descent who was also American, reflected anywhere.
Children are quite straightforward in what they say. Then racism goes more underground with age. Violent acts of racism make the news—as they should—but racism and discrimination can be so much more casual. People of color experience racism in many small but stressful ways—microaggressions or quiet assumptions—that don't get talked about as much but that white people participate in and may not be aware of. The values and behaviors inherent in this casual racism contribute to the systemic racism that keeps minorities down, Others them, and provides fertile ground for more violent acts, especially against Black people. Black people have long been perceived as more dangerous, sexual, and immoral; less intelligent and hard-working; and more responsible for their difficulties in life than white people. It's been shown that Black boys are viewed as older and more threatening than white boys of the same age, which leads to deadly consequences, like with Trayvon Martin (Phillip Atiba Goff et al., “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” 2014). Black men are also perceived as larger than similarly sized white men (John Wilson et al., “Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability,” 2017).
Asian American Pacific Islander people, in contrast, are often stereotyped as a monolithic, (over) compliant “model minority” who works hard, has few emotional needs, and has “made it” in America. This stereotype is highly problematic. Far from a homogenous group, AAPIs originate from over 20 countries across East, Southeast, and South Asia and the Pacific Islands. Each of these countries encompass a multitude of variations in ethnicity, culture, language,
and religion. Some AAPIs, such as the Hmong, live in deep poverty, and some are hampered by intergenerational trauma, such as Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. AAPIs have immigrated to this country at different times; for different reasons (seeking opportunity, fleeing from trauma, or both); and in different ways (alone, with family, or to join family, as a spouse, child, or adoptee—cross-racial or not). They come from different socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds. Wealth disparity is higher among AAPIs than any other racial group. Not all AAPIs prioritize education and, for those who do, striving against racism is a common motivation.
Many AAPIs suffer from systemic inequalities as well, including access to quality education and to physical and mental healthcare that meets their language and cultural needs. Even AAPIs who appear on the surface to have “made it” may be suffering in less obvious ways. For example, they may matriculate into elite schools—against the odds relative to similarly matched white people—but in adulthood find themselves disproportionately unable to advance, like other people of color. It is even harder for AAPI women, who have to contend with both a “glass ceiling” and “bamboo ceiling.”
The “model minority” myth, while seemingly complimentary on its face, comforts white people who want to believe this country is a pure meritocracy—where success is attained merely by bootstrapping—rather than a place that bestows white people at birth with unearned privileges that then accumulate over the years. These false beliefs most egregiously hurt non-Asian people of color by suggesting that Black people and others are at fault for not doing the “right” things to succeed in the traditional sense, and therefore no changes need to be made to address inequalities.
The “model minority” myth also relies on silent complicity: When AAPIs do speak out, the illusion of near-whiteness shatters. Like other people of color, AAPIs may quickly become objects of projected aggression if they are perceived as a threat to white power and superiority. Anne Anlin Cheng, in The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief , and David Eng and Shinhee Han, in “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans , describe a racial melancholia for AAPIs as they strive for an idealized American whiteness that can never be attained, while simultaneously their ethnic heritages are lost and racialized selves devalued. Stereotypes may limit AAPIs in their sense of possibility—what they can be interested in, do, or accomplish—which can contribute to poor self-esteem, depression, and anxiety, especially if they are unable, ambivalent about, or do not wish to quietly fit the model of what they are “supposed” to be.
Shame due to internalization of the “model minority” myth combines with a multitude of other reasons to make AAPIs in need of mental healthcare less likely than the general population to get it. This is especially true of immigrants and the second generation, and to a lesser degree the third generation. These other reasons include cultural stigma, fear of “losing face,” favoring of other support systems, a lack of culturally appropriate care, access issues, and differences in mental health education and perception of benefit. These topics have been explored in the work of researchers such as Jennifer Abe-Kim , Oanh Le Meyer , Sunmin Lee , and Stanley Sue .
There is a strange duality in which AAPI people are lauded as succeeding in the American Dream yet are seen as “perpetual foreigners.” I can't remember how many times I have been asked in inappropriate settings by random people, “Where are you from?” When I answer, “New York”—knowing full well what they are looking for but wanting to see if they will catch themselves or dare ask again—they say, sometimes with irritation, “No, where are you really from?” If I then try to explain how my family has been in this country for over 80 years and I don't speak Chinese, they are shocked and in disbelief.
The “perpetual foreigner” stereotype and relative invisibility of AAPIs in American history are reinforced in our schools. The AAPI experience may be conveyed to children in the barest sketch, mostly as a romanticized story of immigration and the building of the railroad, with a couple bumps in the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese American internment—of almost 120,000!—after Pearl Harbor. The U.S. is largely portrayed as a noble land of freedom, opportunity, and adventure, the land of John Wayne, the shining city on a hill. This glosses over American imperialist and racist attitudes and the toll they have taken on people of color, who have put untold work into building this country into the prosperous nation it is today.
I think Asian American Pacific Islanders would be perceived as less faceless and foreign if the true and centuries-long American history in this country were taught with the nuance it deserves, as dissonant as it may be to how (white) America wants to see itself. This necessarily includes the racism AAPI people have faced and fought against. Prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Page Act of 1875 had already essentially banned “Oriental” women from immigrating, based on a stereotype characterizing them all as “lewd” and “immoral” prostitutes. In the 1870s and '80s, Chinese Americans suffered from multiple massacres, expulsions from their homes and towns, and lynchings due to growing fears of “Yellow Peril,” a racist and xenophobic positioning of Asians as “filthy yellow hordes” who represented a mortal, moral, and existential threat to the West by spreading disease and supplanting white Americans in “their” jobs and country.
Some AAPIs, far from being passive, fought back against racism in the courts: The parents of 8-year-old Chinese American Mamie Tape, for example, attempted to desegregate San Francisco schools in 1885. Store owners Yick Wo and Wo Lee fought for nondiscrimination in the enforcement of laws in 1886. In 1898, Wong Kim Ark asserted his birthright citizenship. Almost 70 years later in 1965, Patsy Mink, a third generation Japanese American, became the first woman of color and first Asian American woman elected to Congress—the same year that stringent U.S. immigration regulations based on race and national origin loosened through an addition to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. This opened the door to new waves of AAPI immigrants from across the Asian continent.
One hundred years after the anti-Asian violence of the late 1800s, a redux of the
fear of white job loss led to the murder of Vincent Chin. In 1982, two white American autoworkers in Detroit, thinking Chin was Japanese, used racial slurs and beat him to death yet received only probation and a fine of $3,000 plus court fees. Chin's death was a turning point in the development of a unified Asian American—and later, Asian American Pacific Islander—identity, as AAPIs of different ethnicities and national origins recognized the need to work together in the fight against racism. East Asian AAPI groups are certainly not the only ones who have been targeted. In 1989, a white man in Stockton, Calif. stated, “the damn Hindus and boat people own everything” two weeks before opening fire in a schoolyard, killing five children and wounding 29 more and one teacher, the majority of them Southeast Asian. South Asian AAPIs, especially Muslims and Sikhs, have suffered from racialized harassment and violence in the aftermath of 9/11.
We can then see that anti-Asian scapegoating for the Covid-19 pandemic, with the Atlanta shootings occurring amid that, is only the latest iteration of “Yellow Peril.”
The Atlanta shootings are also a contemporary example of how racism, violence, gender, and sexuality in this country are inextricably linked. Sexual repression and disavowal in Western culture, with a particular Puritanical and now evangelical bent in the United States, mean that society often places responsibility for men's sexual behavior on women (who “tempt” them) and projects sexual feelings, desires, and anxieties into racial Others, who are then experienced as both thrilling and frightening.
The stereotype of Asian women as hypersexual and submissive also has deep roots. Asia was seen as a feminized land to be plundered and conquered when the first European explorers arrived in the Americas, originally in search of Asia. In the 1800s, limited American exposure to Asian women, further exacerbated by their sexualized banning under the Page Act, dovetailed with an American fascination with, but lack of genuine exposure to, Chinese culture. The U.S. then brutally colonized the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century and, during the mid-20th century, fought imperialistically in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Sexual imperialism occurred in parallel, in which the promise of willing, unassertive native women was specifically used to recruit American G.I.s. During the Vietnam War era, the continued availability of native women's bodies was officially sanctioned and arranged by the U.S. military via “Rest and Recreation Stations” through agreements with local governments. Less talked about, then and now, is how many Asian and Pacific Islander women were dehumanized, sexually exploited, and violated, with mixed-race children abandoned in the process. This topic is explored in depth by Sunny Woan, an attorney, in her paper “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence” .
So when I heard about the Atlanta shootings, it was immediately apparent that they had occurred at the intersection of racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant sentiment, and religious prohibitions against sex, whether the white perpetrator was conscious of it or not.
Meanwhile, 20th century American film and theater amplified the hypersexualized view of Asian women while minimizing the violence done to them. Asian women are often portrayed as simple, exotic, submissive China Dolls/Lotus Blossoms or devious, entrapping Dragon Ladies, as in the musical Miss Saigon (premiered 1989, set in the 1970s) and the film Full Metal Jacket , in which its 1960s Vietnamese sex worker famously said, “Me love you long time.” In pornography, the depiction of Asian women in these kinds of roles and as victims of sexual violence flourished and continues to flourish. In cinema, The Joy Luck Club and Saving Face —the latter about AAPI queer female characters—for years stood nearly alone in portraying AAPI women in varied, complex, and non-stereotypical ways. It is only very recently that these textured portrayals have become more common in films such as Crazy Rich Asians , The Farewell , and Minari .
So when I heard about the Atlanta shootings, it was immediately apparent that they had occurred at the intersection of racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant sentiment, and religious prohibitions against sex, whether the white perpetrator was conscious of it or not. After all, six female body workers of Asian descent were murdered in Georgia, where at the end of an election rife with racial hatred and white fear of replacement, Black and AAPI voters had rallied to swing the state and entire election blue. But when the shooter insisted it was about sexual “temptation” and the sheriff said the shooter just had “a really bad day,” many white Americans were quick to disavow, with a palpable sense of relief and even scoffing laughs, that the attacks had anything to do with race.
This derisive response impacted me deeply. The world feels less safe if some white person can just have a “bad day” or be frustrated with Covid and then someone who looks like me ends up punched or dead, after which people may say, “Oh, well.” I was struck acutely with the pain of erasure and simultaneously brought to a new level of understanding of what Black and brown people contend with.
My lived experience tells me that the phrase “racially motivated” need not pertain only to cases where race is the sole motive. Over the years, I've been catcalled or hit on countless times with the words “Ni hao” or “Konichiwa” paired with an attempted accent or bowing. Sometimes the person becomes angry if I ignore them or respond negatively. Sometimes they call me a “chink.” On dating sites, some would see me as simple, exotic, and willingly submissive right off the bat, simply because I am an Asian-appearing woman.
Those men would probably also say that sexual interest was their motivation, not racism, even though racism informed their fantasy and their fetishizing behavior. Maybe that same type of fantasy—of the submissive, faceless Asian prostitute or the manipulative, entrapping Asian prostitute—contributed to the Atlanta shooter feeling so threatened and tempted, his own disavowed sexual and aggressive feelings projected into the women. It is not clear if any of the women killed were actually involved in sex work, or if that was only the shooter's fantasy.
There are people who argue that because some of the recent perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes have been non-white, the surge in attacks cannot possibly be related to white supremacy. The unfortunate reality, though, is that we are all a part of this white-dominated society pervaded through and through with racism. Minorities turning on one another does not mean that a broader racism is not at play.
Indeed, systemic racism will continue to endure unless individually and collectively, we—especially those of us who are white—continue to unpack our own perceptions and work to change them, person by person, group by group, and institution by institution. We need to talk with our children early about race, racism, and difference. As part of this society, we all have blind spots to interrogate and education to pursue.
Psychoanalysis has a long and difficult history with regard to race, with limited literature that has only recently grown, as detailed by the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Beverly Stoute in “Race and Racism in Psychoanalytic Thought: The Ghosts in Our Nursery” . Similar to and as part of (white) America, our field has had difficulty acknowledging its white normativity and the damage done due to racism. For psychoanalysts, it is important to note that ideas of analytic neutrality and silence on the subject of race can serve as a defense against one's own discomfort in this matter. On an institutional level, the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality was finally formed last August. It is tasked with the important work of investigating systemic racism and its underlying determinants embedded within APsaA.
Anton Hart, in “From Multicultural Awareness to Radical Openness: A Psychoanalytic Engagement of Otherness,” describes striving for “radical openness” while engaging psychoanalytically with issues of Otherness by “attempting to notice, question, and relinquish presumptions about oneself and the other” . It is important to acknowledge and accept that, inside and outside the treatment room, errors and enactments are bound to happen in navigating issues of race and difference. These exchanges can hopefully be seen not as live grenades to be buried but invaluable windows into others' and our own experiences of race and difference, furthering dialogue rather than shutting it down. By trying to truly see our fellow humans and turning that recognition into action, we will be better able to affirm the humanity and dignity of people of color, address race as it pertains to us all, and heal any breaches that may occur, together.
As analysts, we potentially have much to contribute in fighting racism, both in our personal lives and through our work, as part of and in interaction with the larger world. But first, we must honestly acknowledge where we ourselves are on the subject, and keep working.