Just watched from the sidelines this time, but I am in awe of everyone who stepped up to update the letter and the translations and come up with even more permutations, and especially to those who returned from the 2016 team!! https://twitter.com/LettersForBL/status/1270008272804884482

I've seen some questioning from within the AsAm community lately about whether the effort of calling in our family members is a worthwhile priority in the context of all the work we have in front of us, especially given the time and effort that goes into it. It's a good question!

For me personally, the value of @lettersforBL and other similar projects has been two-fold:
1) Fighting right wing radicalization in my parents' community
2) Alleviating a painful source of friction in my life
3) Practicing (collectively!) the slow work of changing minds

1) Leading up to the election in 2016, the first-gen Chinese immigrant media landscape suddenly started moving very quickly to the right. I found this out when my parents—generally liberal people—started forwarding me misinformation translated from Br**tbart on WeChat.

We didn't know it then, but a quiet radicalization of the Chinese immigrant community was underway. This is a great writeup to read on it: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/wechat-misinformation-china.php

My parents are smart, kind people, but I saw how the shift in narratives they were consuming was affecting them.

A personal intervention like the one @LettersForBL enabled allowed me—a person whose intentions they trust, even if we disagree a lot!—to set a different narrative in front of them like an antidote. It gave them an alternate frame to interpret through in the months to come.

The letter and I are not the only reasons my parents didn't become right-wing chuanfen zealots, but I could *feel* how we made a slippery slope much less inevitable. And them standing their ground gave purchase to their friends and colleagues around them.

I can only speak to the middle-class Chinese community, but I know it wasn't just us that went through this in the last few years. Preventing radicalization of these communities keeps votes, $$, organizing power, and tokens out of the hands of the far right.

2) At a more personal level, having this conversation with my parents removed an additional (exhausting!) source of heartache. My parents aren't exactly enthusiastic about my political tendencies now, but at least it doesn't feel like ANOTHER battlefront.

This time around, I could share my grief and fury with my parents openly and hear it echoed back.

3) This wasn't the result of one conversation, or ten. It happened because the letter began a dialogue, and gave us a foundation on which to build future conversations.

If you really need someone to come along with you and they aren't already onboard, you can't just tell them to read a book. You have to walk back to where they are, take their hand, and guide them along. It's a hard skill that improves with practice.

This hard work of empathetic redirection isn't always what people are owed (see: white randos in your mentions), but it's a really powerful tool. I'm endlessly grateful to all the @LettersForBL collaborators, 4 years ago and now, for showing me and each other how to do this.