Editor's note: Since 2020, violent attacks on Asians have increased significantly across the United States, among which the violent attacks and murders against Asian women are shocking, angry and fearful.

text/Pantea Lee; translation/Gong Siliang

Editor's note: Since 2020, violent attacks on Asians have increased significantly across the United States, among which violent attacks and murders against Asian women are shocked, angry and fearful. Although the U.S. government said it is unclear whether the race of the victims caused them to be attacked and emphasized that many offenders have mental illnesses; however, the "sexualization" and "sub-humanization" of Asian women in the United States have long become disgusting stereotypes . Asian women in danger society and culture are determined to call on the government to assume their responsibilities. This article was originally published in The Nation and was written by Panthea Lee.

On March 11, a man with the figure of an football athlete attacked a 67-year-old Asian woman when she walked past him, he shouted, "Asian bitch!" She ignored her. He followed the woman into her building, punched her from behind, and knocked her to the ground. Then, for 1 minute and 12 seconds, Tammel Esco mechanically and constantly hit her with his fist. Esco struck her more than 125 times, stepped on her seven times, and spitted at her before Esco left. The victim's name has not been released, she has a facial fracture, a brain bleeding, a cut and abrasion to her head and is currently undergoing treatment in the hospital. Esco has been charged with attempted murder.

Local time on February 14, 2022, in Manhattan, New York, USA, police confirmed that the suspect was named Assamad Nash, 25 years old, a homeless man, and had had several felony crimes before. Currently, Nash faces two charges of murder and burglary.

Four weeks before the incident, in the early morning of February 13, 35-year-old Korean-American woman Christina Yuna Lee went home after a party and was murdered in her apartment in Chinatown, New York City. Someone followed Lee into the building and forced into her apartment. One hour and 20 minutes later, she was found dead in a bathtub, naked and stabbed 40 times on her body. The attacker was Assamad Nash, 25, a homeless man. It is reported that Nash had tried to sexually assault Lee, and Lee died in resistance.

125 hits and 40 stab wounds. I can't erase these numbers from my mind, I'm trying to understand what they mean. How can a person hit the old man, her flesh, or even her bones, and 125 times over and over again? How can a person stab another person with a knife up to 40 times until she dies from bleeding? Do these people understand that the target they are attacking is human? Or do they think these Asian women are inferior humans? This is not a rhetorical game, but a serious question.

Lee's murder has had an impact on me. A few hours ago, I was still in Chinatown and I remember it was the first warm sunny day of the year. It was "Super Saturday", a tradition of the Lunar New Year, where lion dancers wandered the streets to drive away evil spirits and bring good luck. In the past two years, the Asian American community in New York has suffered “punishment.” In 2021, anti-Asian attacks increased by 361%, and the new crown discrimination brought a stunning economic blow to Asian businesses. It can be said that this celebration is a much-needed comfort. The air was filled with the sound of firecrackers and military bands, confetti floating, and laughter. Spring is here.

The next morning, the headline I saw when I woke up was: "A woman was followed and stabbed to death in her apartment in Chinatown." I checked Lee's address and realized that I had passed by her apartment the day before. News reports show that she is three years younger than me and loves art and music. She sounds like me.

"New York Post " got the surveillance video of the night Lee died. The newspaper splices together grainy fragments of four cameras in her building. Camera No. 1 shows a woman walking to the building and then stopping, probably looking for the key. A hazy figure walked past her and has been wandering a few feet behind her since then. Camera No. 2 shows Lee entering the building door.Before the door was completely closed, the figure disappeared from Camera No. 1 and appeared in Camera No. 2 and slipped in from behind her. Lee then appears on camera No. 3 and walks towards her apartment. The man in gray followed her. Without any warning, she walked out of the camera range. The figure followed closely behind. Camera No. 4 was frozen in the empty streets and witnessed it all, but there were no other witnesses on the scene. The video of this video is shrouded in purple light and shadow, giving people the feeling of a supernatural horror movie. I watched it over and over, hoping to see a different ending. I hope to see a passerby appear in camera No. 1; in camera No. 2, Li Neng closed the door behind him; on camera No. 3, she heard footsteps and ran away. Every time she reappears on a new screen, I feel heartbroken. But the provocative shot refuses to change. After several loops of videos, I can no longer feel my inner feelings.

As the media continues to focus on these horrible details, I long to see more about Lee, not just the last time she goes home. Her death became a headline for the news, but what was her daily life like? I searched for clues online. She made a documentary about the new orleans street rap singer. I looked up the director on Facebook and we have six mutual friends. On Instagram, I browsed the director's photos and found that Li had many friends around him. I clicked on the tagged friend and scrolled through their photos, looking for her. I found Christina celebrated her birthday in Mexico in 2020, welcomed the New Year in Fleebush in 2019, and spent Friends Day in Williamsburg in 2018. She loves Paulie Gee's pizza. I wonder if she would drizzle the hot honey from the store’s signature on her pizza, like me. I read the mourning of these friends.

"She rarely walks, she dances...she will call me randomly and act super excited, just like she just won the lottery prize, telling me that she bought the sweetest strawberry from the nearby farmers' market."

"She set a seat for people at the meeting, would have lunch with completely different and random team members, and told others at Zoom meetings, 'You're applying lipstick so perfect today'."

"My sisters love to look for beautiful pebbles in the sand and sprinkle them on their heads so they can get closer to nature."

This time, I want to thank the social media for the "rabbit hole". My “voyeurism” allowed me to see her as an autonomous, story-based, happy quirk, and memorable dance moves. And not just "another dead Asian woman". Because in the past two years, we have encountered too many people leaving.

On February 14, 2022, local time, in Chinatown, Manhattan, New York, USA, flowers were placed in front of the home of Christina Lee, a victim, to express his condolences.

From March 2020 to December 2021, the Stop Asian Hate group reported 6,506 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islander women; the actual number may be much larger than that. This is almost twice as much as a hate incident against men. However, media reports on the death of Christina Lee put the issue of racism in the following way, understatement of the sentence: unknown authorities know or don’t know anything.

CNN: "It is not clear how Lee's race or ethnicity affects her attack."

New York Times : "The authorities have not yet determined whether Ms. Lee was the target of attack because of her race."

As a reporter, I understand why the media is reluctant to propose an explanation "further" than the police's statement. For police, hate crimes require a higher burden of proof. Although some have used the increase in hate crimes to propose higher police budgets. As an activist, I also know that hate crimes can be sentenced to heavier sentences, which can put many people who are themselves victims of society in themselves inhumane imprisonment systems that cannot fundamentally solve the crime.

However, as an Asian woman in the United States, this report of “who knows if race plays a certain role (in the attack)” feels like a cultural emotional manipulation (gaslighting), denying our experience and American history.

long sentences

Filipino-American film producer and cultural scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu wrote in The Hypersexuality of Race: "In rest and entertainment venues such as Angeles, Olongabo and other U.S. military bases scattered in Southeast Asia, street vendors display hats and T-shirts with long sentences or simple abbreviations of LBFM, as souvenirs for wild times, wild women and wild places."

This long sentence is "little brown fucking machines powered by rice”), this statement can be traced back at least to the period of the Philippines and the American war. In 1898, despite the US telling Filipinos that the Americans were eager to help them defeat the Spanish colonists, the US reached an agreement with Spain to buy the Philippines for $20 million. When the Filipinos took up their weapons for independence, the United States deployed 125,000 troops to persuade them. The war lasted for more than three years and caused damage to the country. Filipinos who have never considered sex work for their lives are forced to do sex work in order to survive. And American men who hadn't known any Asian women before found themselves in a country where "most of the women they meet are in the sex industry." In the Philippines, a soldier can "get a girl at the price of a burger." Filipinos are considered so obedient that American soldiers sexually insulted these women in ways they never thought, and American soldiers could never treat their wives or women from their hometowns like this: "Filipino sex workers often report being treated like sex toys or pigs by American soldiers. There is a dirty saying in the US soldiers - three holes."

The US military registered sex workers, regularly tested them for STDs, and tagged them, just like tagging pets, strengthening their status as "secondary human". The military believes that this system is out of the needs of the empire. Paul Kramer, a historian who studies the U.S. empire, said: "The idea was that soldiers had a strong sexual desire and they needed to find a channel for sexual venting in the military. If we didn't set up a system to check women and they would get sick, then we couldn't fight. It assumed all this about male sexual behavior and then said: It was a pragmatic question about human power. We needed men to keep healthy."

Half a century later, when the US colonial rule over the Philippines ended, this ideology had spread throughout Asia, laying the foundation for the region's notorious porn entertainment and human trafficking industries. When World War II ended, in order to prevent the Allied forces from raping civilians, Japan established a network of brothels, recruiting 55,000 women, each of whom "services" up to 60 soldiers a day. At the beginning of the Internet, many women committed suicide; after the brothels were closed, Japanese people would see up to 330 rape cases every day.

In 1950, a few months after entering Korean War , the U.S. military launched a program called RR (Rest and Rest) to give them a moment of rest from service by sending American soldiers to Japan. The soldiers’ slang for RR, “ rock and destruction” and “rape and run”, show their views on the plan. By 1965, the network of comfort stations had spread to the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore , and 85% of the surveyed American soldiers reported having had sex with prostitutes. A year later, U.S. Senator William Fulbright announced that " Saigon has become a brothel in the United States."In 1975, when the United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam, there were a total of 500,000 prostitutes in the country.

1969 American soldiers and Vietnamese prostitutes during the Vietnam War .

Other Western countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, have also developed their own military RR projects. Kramer called this system of sexual exploitation a "military complex." On a nostalgic website, an Australian naval officer recalled his resting time in Thailand in the 1960s: "Nothing is non-sale. I guess it's about serving soldiers who have just returned from the Vietnam battlefield and participated in the RR program. Every wish is fulfilled. There are many affordable hotels there, and of course there are massage parlors. The 24-hour escort and guide costs about THB 400-500 (US$20-25), and you can extend the time."

RR is not a relic of the past. In 2018, in a post titled "RR Information?" on the US Army Reddit forum, a soldier asked about the current situation of the project. The response to the most votes was: "My cousin went to Thailand and spent 14 days having sex with prostitutes, drinking and eating. I went home to see my son and spent his 2nd birthday with my RR. (I suggest you) Go to Thailand to find a prostitute."

United Nations and many international NGOs provide rest and rest for staff who serve in hard jobs or humanitarian settings. While many people will use the break to visit their families or quietly decompress stress, the program has become notorious as it has led to sexual assaults on other rescuers and local residents. Western men have a clear arrogance, almost a kind of ridicule. In extreme global inequality, they play the winners, showing off their privileges in front of those losers. When I was working in Southern Hemisphere , I saw men grabbing women as they pleased, and many people acquiesced to these behaviors: the money these men spend an hour can support their families for a whole month. In response, I cut my hair off and started wearing ill-fitting, loose clothes. I want to hide my gender. I want to protect my body. I don't want to look like an Asian toy for Western men.

She is very interesting, not complicated at all

I clearly realize that I am fighting a long tradition. In 1887, French writer Pierre Loti published the semi-autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthème, which tells the story of a naval officer traveling to Japan to find his temporary wife. "(Kujiko) is a creamy little woman with dark hair and cat's eyes. She must be very beautiful, not much older than a doll," the officer said after marrying Kujiko. "She absolutely has no idea. Even if she has, what does it have to do with me?"

"Madam Butterfly" 1995

She is just another oriental artwork in his collection, beautiful but lifeless. This book has been a huge success. Lotti reprinted more than 200 times in his life alone and inspired the creation of opera (in 1904, set in Japan), which in turn inspired one of the earliest technical color films of Hollywood , "The Sea Death" (1922), the popular musical "Hidden Miss Saigon " (in 1989, set in Vietnam) and the movie "Madam Butterfly" (1993). Although the location of the story changes with the changes in Western geopolitical interests, the story remains largely the same: an Asian woman falls in love with a white man, gives birth to his child, and then realizes that her love is not rewarded, so she commits suicide. Despite decades of protests over Miss Saigon, the show's 25th anniversary resuming in London in 2013 broke the box office record, selling £4.4 million in tickets on the first day alone.

In 1990, the British "GQ" published an article titled "Oriental Girls", which explored the "endurable attraction of the great Western male fantasy": When you get home for another day on this planet, she appears, undress you, bathe you, and relax. Then there is sex. She is fun and not complicated at all.She will not attend confidence training courses, will not insist on being treated as a person, will not worry about career development, and will not regard her climax as an unnegotiable requirement.

When Asian women are no longer fantasy, they become jokes. Stanley Kubrick) The 1987 film " Full Metal Jacket" tells the story of US Marine Corps in the Vietnam War. One of the Vietnamese prostitutes had a famous line: "I'm so horny. Me love you long time." 2 Live Crew used this line in their 1989 title song "Me So Horny", which ranked No. 1 on the Billboard Rap Songs chart; Sir Mix-A-Lot also used this sentence in "Baby Got Back", and the song became the second best-selling song in the United States in 1992. These songs helped cement the status of “I’m lustful” as a cultural slogan and meme; and also became a nightmare for Asian women who are constantly plagued by racist booing.

Fatal therapy for yellow fever

Every woman has stories about wretched men. Asian women are no exception, and their stories are often special. The Fleshlight Chronicles is an Instagram account that documented the racist teasing Asian women receive on dating sites. These include things like “I want to try Asian women; because I like Asian food, I think maybe I like this too”.

Because such a chat cannot be avoided, some women have to roll their eyes with their fate. However, we rarely study the roots or meanings of “yellow fever” (slang, referring to an obsession with Asian women). The word itself implies that the body of Asian women is the birthplace of the disease. This concept has profound roots: J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, insists that Asian women have a special strain of syphilis. In 1876, at the centenary celebration of the American Medical Association, Sims sounded the alarm for this deadly "virus". Over the next century, in brothels throughout Asia, the U.S. military screened women for venereal diseases to prevent the spread of this imagined yellow fever to soldiers.

Until today, the concept of "yellow fever has problems, but it can be cured" still exists. “I’ve never been with Asians before, and having sex with you will be a dream come true,” wrote one in the Chronicle of the Body Light. The idea of ​​“I need to cure my yellow fever” has had a fatal impact.

On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old man shot wildly at three massage parlors in Atlanta . He killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women: Park Soon-jung, Kim Hyun-jung, Kim Sun-che, Yue Yongai, Tan Xiaojie, and Feng Daoyou. Gunner Robert Aaron Long called his sexual addiction the cause of his actions, and he believed these women were temptations that needed to be cleared. Most men try to “treat” what they call yellow fever by dating Asian women; Long En chooses to kill them.

At a press conference, Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office summarized Long En’s motivations. "It was a very bad day for him, and that's what he did." The media seized on this rash remark, and social media was filled with heated discussion. A year later, if you search for "Atlanta shooting + a bad day" with Google , you will see about 2.5 million results; if you search for "Atlanta Spa shooting" and the name of each Asian victim, you will see 14 million to 22,000 results. Even if all of these victims are combined, they can only get 91,600 results. Because most articles collectively contain their names, the number of articles that are actually published is much smaller than this.Is these six lives worth less than 3.7% of what it is about "Dragon En's bad day"?

When the media focuses on victims, many reports often carry a lewd sexual cues as journalists and websites such as Rubmaps are working to determine whether these women are really sex workers. Celine Parenias Shimizu's words echoed in my ears: "In popular culture, sex is the main focus of the debate about legibility of Asian women." In the English media, these women become the center when journalists want to interrogate and humiliate the potential uses of their sexual behavior; otherwise, they are nothing more than props in another mass shooting.

I read The Oriental Girls by GQ again: When you get home for another day on this planet, she appears… She is there when you need to rest from those angry feminist oceans. She is a victim of love, or a symbol of rape in the third world country, and a truly oppressed person.

The reason why Asian victims in Atlanta are in the United States is because their motherland has been hurt. The cultural dialogue surrounding “Long En’s Bad Day” misses one point: These women aged 44 to 74 were born during or just ended in the US-led Asian War. For them, immigration is one of the few ways to escape war and economic destruction. These women were “really hardworking people” (referring to those oppressed who were treated unfairly). Once they arrived in the United States, their ways of making a living were limited, thus entering a system of exploiting them, while also facing invisible risks.

Mental illness and metastasis attention

When asked about his opinion on Lee’s murder, New York Mayor Eric Adams replied that the city must do more to address mental illness. During a recent vigil for the murdered Asian women, officials lined up dutifully to lament “Another tragedy”, lamenting “It must stop!”, pointing the finger at mental illness and taking photos everywhere.

However, mental illness is just a "props" to divert attention. Treating the perpetrator as a rebellious weirdo ignores the key to the problem. Psychiatric disorders operate in specific cultural contexts. Mental patients are still leveraging existing cultural templates, and they may misrepresent or act in more extreme ways. And when it comes to Asian women, the cultural template has long been sexual slander: three holes, rape and runaway, “I’m so hungry.” The offenders Nash and Longen, and many others, only came to fatal conclusions through this information.

repeatedly denies the role of race and points the finger at mental illness, which exempts the country from guilt. The message behind these comments is: These attacks are strange coincidences, the act of madman. ;So let's lock them up and then everything is the same.

However, the government has done far from enough to recognize and manage these risks. Simon had been in and out of the hospital for the years before pushing Ms. Go to death. In 2017, a psychiatrist working in a state psychiatric hospital pointed out that Simon had said it was only a "question of time" that he pushed a woman onto the rails. But he was discharged from the hospital.

To figure out why our society has failed people like Simon, and their victims, I contacted Jason Wu, an experienced public defense attorney who is subordinate to the Legal Aid society. Wu criticized mainstream analyses of anti-Asian violence, which draw on the traditional criminal framework of “there are some bad guys doing bad things.”"But this is taken out of context, their biases are incited in our current political environment, which is related to the racialization of a virus and the geopolitical tensions that play a role in Asian Americans," Wu said. "This kind of political action is not new. But at this moment, we should hold accountable and the government should take responsibility, too."

March 17, 2021, held a candlelight vigil in Garden Grove, California, against the recent violence against Asians, and expressed grief and anger at the shooting that killed eight people in Atlanta, Georgia yesterday, including at least six Asian women.

In the long-term shadow of violence against Asian women in the United States recognized by the United States (violence is strengthened through culture and distorted by mental illnesses incited by the country but refuses to treat), Asian American women are constantly being told that “we must find our own solutions for our safety.” My group text messages are full of chats about where to buy maces and coupons about personal safety alerts. At the rally, staff from a well-intentioned nonprofit organization handed me a flyer with a self-defense strategy. I looked at them blankly. I imagined how to teach my parents how to do karate palm strokes; it was unbearable just thinking about it.

Meanwhile, authorities continue to investigate whether the recent victims, my sisters, have been targeted because of their race.

Select the third rail

I rarely listen to music or read books when waiting for the subway train to arrive. On the contrary, I stood in the middle of the platform, with the same distance from both sides, hoping that this would make my space larger.

My partner and I envisioned "What if I get pushed onto the rails?" and we designed a few options from the best to the worst. Plan A is to squat under the edge of the platform and stay away from the track. Some stations have front halls on tracks that can accommodate the size of human bodies for service personnel to use. I never noticed them before Ms. Go died; now I look for them as soon as I enter the station. Plan B is to run the train on the track (stop point) until I reach the far end of the station, in front of the train stop so that I can get the attention of the train operator.

C plan, only used when I was pushed in front of the oncoming train and had no time to implement Plan A or B, is lying between the two railings of the track, turning my head to one side as the train passed me. I've had a nightmare in Plan C: Lying among wet garbage and rats, a string of 85,200 pound metal carriages whizzing past me, just a few inches from my face.

My partner stressed that in all these cases, I can't touch the third rail, the metal railing from which the train takes electricity. He warned that if you dare to touch it, you will be done.

"How long will it take?" I asked.

"It could be instantaneous. With so much voltage through it, you might not even feel anything."

I imagined that I might choose a third track. It is better to die quickly than to be hit by a train. But there is a worse way to die.

When I was thinking about my choice of death and trying to understand Christina Lee's death, I felt like I had to go to memorialize her. In Chinatown, I offer flowers and notes to her monument; on Instagram, I collect the memorials I found into a post. I felt lost, but I knew I had to know and remember her.

The next day, I found a comment on my post from someone who claimed to be my neighbor. I clicked on his profile: He did live next door to me, and I waved to him, but never knew him. He found my post through the hashtag #ChristinaYunaLee and wrote: "In the summer of 2020, Christina and I often drink on my porch. I remember she smiled and cheering for you and your boyfriend, and you were doing the same. Your instinct was right, you actually shared a lot with her without knowing it."

His message stopped me. One night poured into my mind like a forgotten folder of images emerged from the filing cabinet.It was a sultry Brooklyn night. A friend just got a new job and we are celebrating. My partner and I sat on our porch to toast her and waved to the couple on the next porch. As we were about to go for supper, my partner suddenly wanted to see us off with the old songs of Robbie Williams . With the "Angel" sounding in the speakers, he began to over-represent the 1997 hit song and danced with it.

I can clearly remember that scene. I picked up my phone, opened my photo app, sorted the photos by location, and zoomed in onto the map until we found our apartment. I scrolled until 2020 and continued to search: June, July, August, September. Nothing was discovered. Go again and scroll upwards: September, September, July. Finally, I found it.

This is a 38-second video, filmed on July 24, 2020 at 8:39 pm, my partner sang and danced in front of our building. I heard laughter coming from outside the screen, from not far away.

"Where I wander, / I know life won't defeat me / When I call out..." He sang loudly.

I heard a woman laugh. Bright. Have no worries.

"My boyfriend loves Robbie Williams!" I shouted, trying to choke back the laughter.

"Great!" Christina shouted back. I can't remember how many times this video has been played, just to hear her laughter and these two words: Great!

He turned around and sang the last few words for them: "She won't abandon me...I fell in love with the angel instead." They cheered.

"I'm Panthia, this is Trolls!" I shouted and waved to them, the first and last time.

At this point, the video ends.

Editor in charge: Han Shaohua

Proofreading: Ding Xiao