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something important about the attacks on elderly asian americans: the scale and details of violence could be greater and uglier than we’ll ever know. here's why i think that. a thread
last spring, my dad went to the grocery store wearing a mask. this was before masks were widely worn. while shopping, a group of teens swarmed him, coughed on him, and insulted him. for future trips, he would sit in the car for a very long time before daring to go into the store
i feel rage and despair at this story, but also because of a terrible fact: i didn’t find out until summer, months later. my dad didn’t want me to know and never planned on telling me. i had to ask, directly and insistently, about discrimination for this to be revealed to me
his silence has various reasons. and one of them, i think, was his reluctance to (further) expose me to the quotidian horror of being asian in this country. he wanted his child safely tucked in the dream of america he’d envisioned as an immigrant. for him, silence was protection
so our elders may be protecting us in ways that keep us from protecting them—when we should be protecting them. i don’t think we’ll ever know the magnitude of hate they face because they won't tell us everything. it’s love for us. but it’s such an injustice for them
