The wave of reality hit me hard. I had identified as an Asian female since birth but had not truly comprehended the consequences of this classification when living in America. The dreadful feeling of being attacked, whether by words or weapons, is what awaits me outside the bubble called school. This bubble, the same one that put me in an illusory haze, is what I have to break to enter reality.
“Have you seen this email chain? It’s honestly so scary.” My roommate asked one day with a subtle but shaky voice. I peeped over her shoulder to gain further information and spotted the subject title: HR 127. Part 3. It was an all-school email sent out by a junior upperclassman. “No, I haven’t,” I replied, utterly confused by both the title and her reaction. Before she could say more, I jumped out of my chair to grasp my phone and quickly clicked on the email. Shocked by the number of scrolls I had to make to reach the end of the chain, I decided to sit back down and properly take time to read.
“We need to understand the basics of how firearms operate before we can explore the rest of the bill,” I readout. Firearms? An image of the recent Atlanta shootings popped up in my mind, but I brushed the thought off and continued. “At their core, firearms are basically controlled explosions. The main parts of a firearm are…” I stopped midway, not seeing the point of carrying on. Just by skimming the next few paragraphs, I could tell the sender meant to explain firearms and the related terminology. I then rolled my eyes to the number of responses, adding up to a shocking total of thirty-seven. I had never seen more replies to one student! Slowly moving my thumb up, I followed the words. “This is incredibly insensitive and tone-deaf,” one of the responses stated. “It hasn’t been a week since the horrendous shooting,” read another. I realized the long chain included an ongoing debate on the appropriateness of an email regarding firearms when the Asian community had been so heavily affected by the recent shootings. As I continued reading, I looked back to my initial reactions to the Atlanta shootings. I remembered dismissing the news as trivial, as only one of the numerous gun violence I had naturally accepted as part of America. Even after hearing of the lost Asian lives, I could not understand my peers, so mentally disturbed by an event that occurred more than a thousand miles away.
I had nearly approached the end of the email series when I came across a response from a senior identifying as Chinese. Her email stated, “After reading the news on the Atlanta shooting, I am extremely worried about my safety when coming back to the U.S . . . I am genuinely scared.” My thumb stopped its once steady movement. I read her words again. And again.
I finally understood what my roommate meant when she said, “It’s honestly so scary.” The ‘It’ didn’t mean the length of the email chain. “It” meant the acknowledgment that the same gun could be pointed towards any of us in the Asian community at any moment — just because of our race.
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