Mei Mingxue Nan
OPINION
EDMONTON JOURNAL
I have lived in Edmonton for 10 years now without encountering blatant racism, but that changed one Monday evening in early January 2022. I was visiting the AHS COVID-19 walk-in clinic at the South Park Centre to receive my booster shot. I was fourth in line and standing about 1.5 metres away from the people in front of me, a young white hetero couple with a preschooler sobbing for fear of needles. The man suddenly turned around, quickly looked me up and down, and then waved the back of his hand vehemently towards me as if shooing away a pest, all the while shouting impatiently at me as if he were annoyed at having to spell out every word for an ignorant foreigner: “Six feet, you know, six feet, six feet please.”
I have lived in Edmonton for 10 years now without encountering blatant racism, but that changed one Monday evening in early January 2022. I was visiting the AHS COVID-19 walk-in clinic at the South Park Centre to receive my booster shot. I was fourth in line and standing about 1.5 metres away from the people in front of me, a young white hetero couple with a preschooler sobbing for fear of needles. The man suddenly turned around, quickly looked me up and down, and then waved the back of his hand vehemently towards me as if shooing away a pest, all the while shouting impatiently at me as if he were annoyed at having to spell out every word for an ignorant foreigner: “Six feet, you know, six feet, six feet please.”
© Provided by Edmonton Journal Hundreds came out to support the Stop Asian Hate rally at the Olympic Plaza hosted by the Calgary Asian Community in Calgary on Sunday, March 28, 2021.
I stood there dumbfounded at suddenly being put on the spot. His child stopped crying and stared back at me. Why did he choose to turn around and admonish me for standing too close, when his family kept a closer distance to the group in front of them? My impression from his hateful gesticulations was that I was the embodiment of COVID, given my Asian appearance — a member of an ethnic community that has been unjustly blamed for the pandemic. As the queue moved forward without me I stayed where I was, with several metres of distance between myself and anyone else.
Paralyzed and tongue-tied, I thought of Larissa Lai and her book Slanting I, Imagining We, in which she illustrates how anti-Asian racism denigrates Asian Canadians as both proliferating and perpetually foreign. I thought of Cathy Park and her book Minor Feelings, in which she trenchantly observes that for Asian-Americans, racism means adults being treated like kids and kids like adults.
I thought of my parents, who had been berated by an elderly white man in the South Park Walmart in the spring of 2020, when hate crimes and hate incidents against Asians and Asian-Canadians were spreading as quickly as the virus. “Don’t touch anything!” he hissed as my parents grabbed a shopping cart. He took his verbal assault a step further, following my parents through the store to ensure they did not touch any merchandise. My parents only smiled nervously and left the store after this racist tirade, and they have never gone back.
I was not with my parents during the Walmart incident, but I had assumed all along that I would respond differently under similar circumstances — respond better — with my proficiency in English and my knowledge of critical race theory. But alas, as it turned out, none of that mattered. In facing a similar situation, I too was tongue-tied.
At that time, I only glared at the man with disapproval, but now I am writing this little piece to illuminate how insensitive and under-informed some North Americans can be when it comes to anti-Asian racism. When the 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang made his plea for Asian-Americans to “embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before,” did he really think that “wear[ing] red white and blue” would rewrite the history of early Chinese immigrants who were regarded as harbingers of contagion?
Yang’s plea sounds particularly ironic in face of University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax’s recent comment that the U.S. is “better off with fewer Asians,” given the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.” Wax’s comment embodies both yellow peril discourse and the model minority myth and shows how these dichotomies — upon which anti-Asian racism functions in North America — have remained largely unchanged.
I am therefore writing to remind myself and whoever may be reading this that we all must actively work to make our society, our Canada, our world better, less racist, and more inclusive. Doing this will require bold action, not passive endurance. History has taught us that taking the high road is ineffective in resisting racial violence and promoting social transformation. Truly accomplishing this will take generations of people who reshape public culture by speaking up and making waves.
Mei Mingxue Nan is a PhD student of comparative literature at Harvard University. She is a two-time recipient of the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships.
I stood there dumbfounded at suddenly being put on the spot. His child stopped crying and stared back at me. Why did he choose to turn around and admonish me for standing too close, when his family kept a closer distance to the group in front of them? My impression from his hateful gesticulations was that I was the embodiment of COVID, given my Asian appearance — a member of an ethnic community that has been unjustly blamed for the pandemic. As the queue moved forward without me I stayed where I was, with several metres of distance between myself and anyone else.
Paralyzed and tongue-tied, I thought of Larissa Lai and her book Slanting I, Imagining We, in which she illustrates how anti-Asian racism denigrates Asian Canadians as both proliferating and perpetually foreign. I thought of Cathy Park and her book Minor Feelings, in which she trenchantly observes that for Asian-Americans, racism means adults being treated like kids and kids like adults.
I thought of my parents, who had been berated by an elderly white man in the South Park Walmart in the spring of 2020, when hate crimes and hate incidents against Asians and Asian-Canadians were spreading as quickly as the virus. “Don’t touch anything!” he hissed as my parents grabbed a shopping cart. He took his verbal assault a step further, following my parents through the store to ensure they did not touch any merchandise. My parents only smiled nervously and left the store after this racist tirade, and they have never gone back.
I was not with my parents during the Walmart incident, but I had assumed all along that I would respond differently under similar circumstances — respond better — with my proficiency in English and my knowledge of critical race theory. But alas, as it turned out, none of that mattered. In facing a similar situation, I too was tongue-tied.
At that time, I only glared at the man with disapproval, but now I am writing this little piece to illuminate how insensitive and under-informed some North Americans can be when it comes to anti-Asian racism. When the 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang made his plea for Asian-Americans to “embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before,” did he really think that “wear[ing] red white and blue” would rewrite the history of early Chinese immigrants who were regarded as harbingers of contagion?
Yang’s plea sounds particularly ironic in face of University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax’s recent comment that the U.S. is “better off with fewer Asians,” given the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.” Wax’s comment embodies both yellow peril discourse and the model minority myth and shows how these dichotomies — upon which anti-Asian racism functions in North America — have remained largely unchanged.
I am therefore writing to remind myself and whoever may be reading this that we all must actively work to make our society, our Canada, our world better, less racist, and more inclusive. Doing this will require bold action, not passive endurance. History has taught us that taking the high road is ineffective in resisting racial violence and promoting social transformation. Truly accomplishing this will take generations of people who reshape public culture by speaking up and making waves.
Mei Mingxue Nan is a PhD student of comparative literature at Harvard University. She is a two-time recipient of the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships.
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