Poetry, History, and the Path Ahead: Afro-Asian Solidarity Amid the Twin Pandemics
By Joie Zhang, HW ‘22
Around the time when the US reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19, my grandmother—a retired nurse—requested an Uber trip from Koreatown to Chinatown. The driver took one look at her Asian face before driving away, canceling the ride.
I’ve always been proud to be Chinese American. I like my bifurcated worlds that interact at the junctures of food, idioms, and history. I swell with pride when I hear about Asian Americans making strides toward representation in the media and politics—shattering the myth of the model minority along the way.
But it was the moment I saw Grandma recount the Uber situation with an irritated look on her face when I realized for the first time that Asian Americans could be labeled as dangerous disease vectors.
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While reading Afropessimist literature at a debate camp, I saw a parallel between civil society’s constant fear of Blackness—highlighted by the tragic death of George Floyd—and the reemerging fear of Asian Americans—characterized as the “Kung flu.” Moreover, the August 6th Executive Orders that were supposed to ban TikTok and WeChat (but remain ambiguous about implementation) reflect the latest escalations in a new Cold War between China and America.
Through my experience as a Chinese American researching Black scholarship in debate, I sought to understand the complex relationship between anti-Blackness, Orientalism, and the historical tensions of Afro-Asian solidarity against white supremacy.
I learned that Afro-Asian solidarity has a complicated and painful history, and Asian Americans are undoubtedly indebted to the work of Black activists who led the civil rights movement and paved the way for the emergence of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). The AAPA was founded in 1968 at UC Berkeley and marked the informal beginning of the Asian American movement.
In 1983, American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson took time out of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to support the burgeoning movement to demand justice for Vincent Chin, a Chinese American citizen who was bludgeoned to death by two white men in what functionally constituted a hate crime.
When the assailants were given the lenient sentences of $3,000 fines and just three years of probation, Asian Americans all over the US united to demand justice. As a result of Black activists like Jackson raising awareness, the federal government finally decided to reinvestigate the case, and Chin became the first Asian American whose court case was evaluated under the 1964 civil rights legislation that issued federal punishments for hate crimes.
As such, while Asian Americans and Black Americans have had distinct experiences in civil society that should not be conflated, these two racial groups can both relate to the prejudice that comes with being non-white. In the face of white supremacy, Afro-Asian solidarity has relentlessly demanded for justice and has permanently influenced American society today.
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After Grandma learned about the recent and highly-publicized killings of Black Americans, particularly the death of Ahmaud Arbery, she was terrified because she realized that she could very well have gotten that same fate. Grandma mentioned that even though she was humiliated when the Uber driver sped off, she still considered herself lucky. At least her scenario didn’t become one of the ever-increasing cases of coronavirus-related hate crimes against Asian Americans. At least she wasn’t physically injured.
However, as a debater, I realize that this mindset—albeit pragmatic—justifies an unacceptable complicity within unjust social structures. There is no ethical explanation for racial discrimination, so we all have an obligation to push back as much as we can in every instance that we see prejudices emerge.
It is high time to set aside our prejudices and use our debate skills to advocate against all manifestations of racism, no matter how big or small. Therefore, I hope the following poem serves as a reminder that racial discrimination will only impede us all from implementing solutions in the years of recovery and societal change that lie ahead.
I choose poetry as a medium because I want to encourage readers—particularly those who might initially be confused—to persist in researching, reflecting, and coming to deeper understandings of the whole story. In this sense, analyzing poetry yields a heuristic that can be applied to how we re-evaluate our complicity in oppressive social structures.
Furthermore, creative writing has a unique role in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity. Directly inspired from the 1955 Bandung Conference, the Afro-Asian Writer’s Conferences acted as platforms for political discussion and cultural exchange. The Lotus journal that was published from the 1960s to the 1990s was aimed at fostering solidarity from a Third-Worldist and anti-Eurocentrist perspective. And of course, while these movements were not perfect and had their faults, it is worth pulling from historical tactics of solidarity to confront our present circumstances.
Phoenix Talons
By: Joie Zhang
Three thousand years
Eight cuisines
Papier-mâché project
Supposedly unclean
The Dragon and the Tiger Fight
The Buddha Jumps Over the Wall
Xi Shi's Tongue is fried
But Stinky Tofu surpasses them all
Dark golden rolls glisten with honey
The egg tart’s flaky crunch
Too soon it’s left me wondering
What’s on the menu for lunch
I find myself at the seafood markets
Where grandmothers holler for the freshest
And the smiling butcher quips:
All of my fish are the freshest
Chinatown is a dragon of its own
My adventures and perils mirror the creature as it rears its head
But when I welcome my fellow Starbucks addicts to my favorite teahouse
They are baffled to see me here when the world makes me feel suppressed
All they want to do is scrutinize
Keep China at a distance
Fetishize its monolid eyes
Wear it as amber jewelry
Ornamentalized
Devouring orange chicken more often than apple pie
Gagging over “barbaric” bird’s nest and phoenix claws
Rejecting the dishes that they didn’t appropriate
Ordaining that coercively fattened foie gras is bourgeois
Chop suey translates to “leftovers”
General Tso? I’m sorry—who?
These simulacra haunt us
What can we all do?
Question our assumptions
Keep a malleable mind
Stay open to dialogue
Put our opinions on the line
Our differences don’t have to create the dichotomies that divide us
Those who agree with each other don’t have to form cliques
We can revamp our culture in favor of a harmonious overture
Starting with something as simple as phoenix feet
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Bibliography
1. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/504224-trump-again-refers-to-coronavirus-as-kung-flu
2. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/17/business/tiktok-ban-oracle-sale-explained/index.html
4. https://time.com/5837805/asian-american-history/
5. https://time.com/5851792/asian-americans-black-solidarity-history/
6. https://advancingjustice-la.org/sites/default/files/UCRS%205_Vincent_Chin_Lily_Chin_story%20r2.pdf
7. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/29/magazine/jesse-jackson-aims-for-the-mainstream.html
8. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/who-vincent-chin-history-relevance-1982-killing-n771291
9. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-14-me-chin14-story.html