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Reflections after the Jewish Community Center Shootings
As a kid I loved stickers. When I was in fifth grade, Wonder Bread included a one-inch square, silver-colored, reflective sticker of a Peanuts character with every loaf. I collected them all. Much too precious to actually stick on anything, they all sat in the base of a round mirror I had on my desk. At about the same time, I came across a small sticker of the Taiwan flag, about one inch by two inches, red white and blue. I showed it to my dad and suggested that we put it on the clean, naked bumper of his old ’67 Dodge Dart. I was not particularly nationalistic, I do not think I even understood the Taiwan-PRC distinction then. I just loved stickers. And everyone had bumper stickers in the 70s.
I have always remembered what my father said: that we should not put the sticker on because it would be dangerous to identify the car and us with the Taiwan flag. Such a public display could put us in peril from people who did not like Chinese people or Taiwan, and you never knew who those people might be. In the wake of yet another racially and ethnically motivated mass shooting, at the Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, I think about that sticker. It makes me reflect on the conflict between showing ethnic and cultural pride and wanting to stay quietly anonymous so that no one will hold it against me. Now that multiculturalism is more mainstream, families and school children are encouraged to "celebrate diversity" and explore culture—which I think is a good thing—but I sometimes hesitate to celebrate it too much or too openly. Like some Jewish schools and parents who are considering having their children cover up their yarmulkes so as not to be "walking targets," I long for a way to cover up my difference as well. I want the solution to be as simple as a matter of discretion, because discretion I can control. I can stop speaking Chinese when someone else walks into hearing range, I can stop doing t’ai chi when someone else walks into the park, I can erect Buddhist prayer flags inside my house instead of outside my house where people can see them, I can wash the red tika powder off my forehead before I go outside. However, Joseph Ileto, the murdered Filipino-American postal worker, was not "doing anything ethnic" or cultural. He was just doing his job, supporting his family, helping a man who asked to mail a letter. Buford Oneal Furrow, Jr. shot Joseph Ileto because he was either Hispanic or Asian. Furrow did not know which, nor did he care. Filipino-American lawyer, Rodel Rodis, of San Francisco, told the San Jose Mercury News, "The concern we have is not so much Filipinos being targeted but all minorities being targeted."
Somehow, the Atlanta day trader shooting did not hurt me the way that this Jewish Community Center shooting does. I know that it does not make sense. In the Atlanta shooting, even though one Indian woman was killed, it was random, so it just seems a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to anyone. In the Los Angeles and other hate crime shootings, however, nothing was random: All Jews or all Asians—all minorities—were targeted. Instead of feeling like it could have been me, I feel like it would have been me. I look to see if there are bloodstains on my clothes. Over a hundred years ago, there were six different Chinatowns in San Jose, California. They were all destroyed in arson fires, the news of which was celebrated in the newspapers. Whenever I hear of yet another racially motivated hate crime, I wish I could turn off the television and not read the newspaper, maybe go live abroad. I think that I would rather not know. But when I consider disappearing into the suburbs, eating macaroni and cheese, forcing my children to forget Chinese language and customs—I pick myself up. I have to fight the fear. Rabbi Daniel Pressman of Congregation Beth David in Saratoga, California, told the Mercury News that although his daughter attends a Jewish day camp similar to the one in Los Angeles, "It did not occur to me to yank her out, because you can’t live like that. If everybody goes and hides, then the bad guys win." A girlfriend once confided, "My greatest fear is being killed because I’m Asian. What a waste." She was not afraid of dying. She just knew her life had more value than that. I think about how I would be remembered and by whom, and I am challenged to make my life really count, really worthwhile, to contribute more -- to mock those such as Buford Furrow. I still have no bumper stickers on my car, but the children were back at Chinese summer camp today, and I am writing a check out to the Asian Law Caucus. The Rabbi is right, we cannot live in hiding, or else we let them win.
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