On March 1st, Lee Isaac Chung’s ‘Minari’ won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes— a kind of pyrrhic victory that saw Asian-Americans once again awarded a meritocratic star of white approval. Some two weeks later, eight people, six of whom were women of East Asian descent, were murdered by a white mass shooter in three Atlanta-area spas: Daoyou Feng; Hyun Jung Grant; Suncha Kim; Paul Andre Michels; Soon Chung Park; Xiaojie Tan; Delaina Ashley Yaun; Yong Ae Yue. The proximity of these events firmly demarcate the poles of the Asian diasporic experience— a constant oscillation between the exalted stature of ‘honorary whites’ and that of perpetual foreigners travailing at the margins of society.
Since the start of the coronavirus- which has been grossly construed as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu” amongst other bigoted terms- there’s been a significant uptick in Anti-Asian racism worldwide. The organisation Stop AAPI Hate has reported 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian racism over the past year in the United States alone, depicting an unrelenting everyday reality that is only exacerbated when we take into account the increasingly normalized encounters that go unreported. Against this harrowing backdrop, ‘Minari’, a multigenerational portrayal of Asian-American life, was barred from competing in the best-motion-picture category at this year’s Golden Globes, instead taking home what felt like the award equivalent to the backhanded compliment of “your English is so good!”. Herein lies the paradox: we’re contenders for the “best” in Western cultural production whilst simultaneously being scapegoated, dehumanised and murdered. It’s a dualism that’s not lost on me, having sown my own seeds of white desire only to find they reap few rewards. They’re the moments when, at four, I surrendered 丹凝 for Dan-Ning, then for Danni; at 11, when I began using whitening creams religiously, a calculated concoction of bleach and dysphoria to wash this brown off me; at 20, when I grieve a culture not lost so much as fetishized, plundered and dispossessed. I understood, long before I could articulate it, that the hypervisible Asian body (mis)speaks for itself— it reads “disgust” and “lust” at once, saddled with the compounded weight of historical and current danger.
The representational silence that has traversed this litany of hate crimes— poor media coverage, performative allyship, and carceral “solutions”— reverberates far across the Atlantic, growing even quieter on British soil. It seems the revered Special Relationship of the brothers in arms extends to a shared disregard of Asian lives, a sentiment whose seeds run deep in their history of racialized colonial wars- those waged on the land and in the psyche. Our old collective wounds— from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s— continue to fester, all while new gashes are torn as Yellow Peril-level virulence re-enters the Anglo-white vernacular. Here in London, there’s been a 300 percent increase in hate crimes toward people of East and Southeast Asian heritage since the start of the pandemic. So when, last April, a driver swerved in front of me to shout “Coronavirus”, the queasy drop in my stomach would be offset by the numbness of being perpetually subject to such aggressions. Alone, the accumulative force of these micro and macro-aggressions rises up in me like a hot oil, bubbling over at its own volition and flattening me in the most unexpected of moments. I don't think any of us know what to do with this humiliation and hurt, but we mustn't misdirect it; in the process of momentarily satiating our hunger for white acceptance, we forgo the most vulnerable of us, including the women who died in Atlanta.
To say that Minari is a quintessentially American film that deserves to be an equal contender to white productions is not to suggest that it’s an assimilation success story, but quite the opposite: when contextualized, it reminds us that to live in America is to incessantly attempt to grow life in soil that is riddled with death. It is to blame the dead for their own deaths, not the country that created the conditions that killed them, wondering, as Alok Vaid-Menon put it, “how many ghosts does it take for a cemetery to call itself a country?”.
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