Shootings linked to longtime Asian stereotypes

The recent massage parlor shootings in the metro Atlanta area in which eight people died, including six women of Asian descent, were a virulent expression of racism long rooted in the stereotyping and sexualization of Asian women, said Amy Chin, a community cultural leader from Manhattan's Chinatown in New York City.

The victims were shot dead on March 16 by 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long at three massage parlors in Atlanta and nearby Cherokee County in the state of Georgia in the United States.

Chin said she thinks that the media and entertainment industries have helped perpetuate a highly derogatory and misleading image of Asian women over a very long time, contributing to an environment of hatred.

"What we see now is the cumulative effect of what has long pervaded our society," said Chin, who served as president of the board of Think! Chinatown, a Manhattan-based nonprofit.

An example often cited was the 1989 musical Miss Saigon, the tragic tale of a doomed romance between a Vietnamese bar girl abandoned by her lover, a US Marine. Despite being a phenomenal box-office success, it was viewed by many who protested against it－mostly Asian American women－as racist and sexist.

After the shootings, Variety critic Caroline Framke described her disgust at reading some comments on Twitter.

"This response is horrendous, but it shouldn't be surprising," she wrote. "Reducing Asians to flat, heavily accented caricatures is a favorite pastime in this country."

In briefing the media one day after the shootings, Cherokee County Sheriff's Capt Jay Baker said that the suspect claimed that the shooting was not racially motivated. "He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as something that allow him to, to go to these places. And it's temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate," Baker said.

FBI Director Chris Wray also said, "It doesn't look like these shootings were racially motivated."

Framke called insinuations of Asian women begetting violence through their sexuality an "exhausted stereotype" for productions on screens big and small. "Every single genre－whether comedy, drama, or police procedural－leans on the shock value of dead or endangered sex workers, many of them anonymous Asian women who are rarely afforded more nuance or humanity than that basic description," she wrote.

The shootings left many families to grieve.

Toward the end of her life, 51-year-old Hyun Jung Grant had been working at Atlanta's Gold Spa to raise her two sons, who described her as their best friend and confidante. At Young's Asian Massage, Xiaojie Tan, another shooting victim, kept a running list of cities she'd hoped to visit once she retired with money left after supporting her family. "I just want to hold her tight," Tan's daughter Jami Webb told CNN.

Last March, as the COVID-19 pandemic started to grip the country, Chin said she experienced something she hadn't since her youth. "I was walking as a car drove by and the person inside the car yelled a profanity out the window at me and said, 'You Chinese are disgusting,'" she said. "It's so funny because I was born in America and have lived in New York my whole life."

She said it brought back memories of being taunted by "a little boy down the street" who "pulled his eyes back and went 'ching ching chiang chiang'" to mimic what he thought Chinese sounded like.

"I wasn't hearing those things that much since I became an adult, but the incident last March really gave me the sense that it was going to get bad. It did get bad, but I didn't realize that it would get this bad until I heard about the killings in Georgia," she said.

Chin said she sees ties between anti-Asian hatred and former US president Donald Trump's politicizing the pandemic. "When you have the president calling it kungflu, it all adds up to people having this bias against Asians."

Framke said that moniker is a typical example of racist jokes made "at Asians' expense", disguised as humor.

Chin said she was stung by a comedian who talked about not daring to walk his dog in front of a Chinese restaurant because "he's afraid that his dog might disappear".

"It's actually calling many people dog-eaters. That's so racist. But if you complain about it, people always say, 'It's a joke. Can't you take a joke?' But it adds to the prejudice that's already clouding the minds of many, prejudice that could lead to hate," she said.

It has also given rise to the type of indifference that's "empowering" to those whose aim is to cause harm, said Karlin Chan, a Manhattan Chinatown-based social activist who organized the Chinatown Watch during the height of the pandemic last year to protect local businesses from harassment.

Chan also referred to Baker, the Cherokee Sheriff's Office spokesman, who aroused controversy by saying, during the briefing on the shootings, that the suspect "was pretty much fed up and had been, kind of, at end of his rope. And yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did".

According to a CBS report, just hours after the comments were made, people searching on the internet "uncovered Baker's apparent Facebook posts from April 2020, which appear to show him purchasing and promoting a T-shirt that called COVID-19 an imported virus from Chy-na".

Chan said the pattern of shooting massacres in the US has her concerned.

In April 1999, two seniors at Columbine High School in Colorado killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives. Since then, there have been at least 240 more school shootings in the United States.

"My major concern," Chan said, "is that the Atlanta shooting is going to spawn copycats of its own".