By Greg Yee, Superintendent, PacNWC
Happy Chinese New Year PacNWC Family! As we usher in the year of the ox, I write to you with a heavy heart in this season that is usually filled with great joy. Let me start with how I have held this season in the past.
Chinese New Year is the greatest day of celebration for Chinese around the world and many other cultures that follow the lunar calendar. Even as a 5th-generation Chinese American, I have vivid memories of extended family gatherings, lavish spreads of food, and of course, those cash-stuffed red envelopes with which our elders would bless us kids.
I cherish the memories of all of us grandchildren stopping what we were doing at a later point in our special evening together. We’d put the bumper pool cues down, turn off the Atari 2600, or walk away from our board games. We all gathered in the dining room and all the kids would individually serve a cup of tea to my paw-paw (grandmother). The entire family would look on as we bowed and said in our best Cantonese, “gung hay fat choy!” We were rewarded with a lai-see (red envelope) .
That’s a part of my family memories. But greater than my family, there is always a palpable buzz that is felt throughout the Chinese community this time of year. It’s usually a very busy time of cleaning, preparing, and shopping. Like so many, Mary and I ourselves ordered new money (unwrinkled, unblemished, fresh bills) from our bank to stuff into lai-sees In a normal year large gatherings are planned and we travel far and wide to be with each other. Chinatown gets even more crowded building this New Year energy.
In our current covid year that has changed so much, what has come with our lunar holiday preparation has been the shocking surge of violence and terror against Asians. We’ve seen the recent horrific videos from San Francisco and Oakland of elderly Asians being randomly attacked, pushed to the ground resulting in some actually dying. In fact the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce tallied over 20 assaults in the past two weeks alone.
Mary and I were born and raised in these two cities, respectively. The attack in Oakland was across the street from my home church where my 89-year-old father and 87-year-old mother and all my elderly church uncles and aunties still attend. One of the victims was as young as 55, my age this year. My family and spiritual roots are deeply embedded in Chinatown. To see this kind of violence was absolutely horrific. And it has profoundly added to the trauma and fear the Asian community has been experiencing most notably this year.
We’ve also heard about the windows of 9 Asian-owned businesses being smashed in Portland’s Jade District last week. As 64 Asian Covenant pastors gathered to process and support each other this past Thursday we heard of one Covenant pastor’s family’s store in the greater Seattle area who also had their business vandalized. We hear stories from all over the country of attacks on subways and buses, in stores, on trails, in one’s own neighborhood, in parking lots…
Covenanter Dr. Russell Jeung (New Hope Cov, Oakland, Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University) created www.stopaapihate.org to begin tracking assaults on Asians Americans at the beginning of the pandemic. He shared testimony accounts with the Asian American Covenant pastors last week that was heart-wrenching and left many of us in tears.
There has been trauma upon trauma and these latest attacks on our elders as we headed into New Years has been just too much.
Covenant pastor Rev Brian Hui who serves in the Bay Area and as one of the Covenant Asian Pastors Association (CAPA) officers put it this way, “When I try to explain why these incidents hit people like me so hard, I say it’s not just because our elders are so vulnerable, but because they are our most honorable. They are the best of us. They are the people we bow to. Even in death, we bow to them and offer them food before we eat ourselves. And at least for me, when I think of Chinatown…it was the only place my grandparents could be themselves, other than at home. And so to see our venerable elders, people who are our grandparents, having their honorable faces knocked down onto the very streets where they’re supposed to feel most free to be themselves, that really hurt.”
Pew Research found that during our current pandemic that 31% of Asian Americans report that they have been victims of slurs or racist jokes. They also found that 26% of AsAm’s feared that someone might actually physically attack them.
It’s just too much.
I offer this illustration I heard from a Midwinter Conference speaker a few years ago to close:
A rabbi once discovered the true meaning of love and humility from a pair of drunken friends in a country tavern. While chatting with the owner of the tavern, the rabbi saw the men embracing and declaring their love for one another.
Suddenly Ivan said to his companion, “Peter, tell me what hurts me!” Sobered by such a startling remark, Peter replied, “How do I know what hurts you?” Ivan’s answer was immediate, “If you don’t know what hurts me, how can you say you love me?”
Through their interchange, the two companions underscored the fact that the true humility which issues forth in love is not fostered by navel-gazing but by bending down to look up into the eyes of another. From that humble position, the hopes and needs, the hurts and fears of the other are readily perceived; from that position of humility, love can be offered and service can be rendered, not with an air of condescension but with the warmth of compassion.
I’m not able to offer answers or solutions here right now. I only offer you a prompt from the Asian American portion of our beautiful-Covenant-family mosaic. We are in pain.