HORRIFIC ANNIVERSARIES
On this day in history, a lot of horrific atrocities were committed against Asian people. And even though we are commemorating past acts of violence waged against Asians, the numbers of anti-Asian attacks are only continuing to rise over the past year.
Today is not only the one year anniversary of the shootings in Atlanta, in which a white domestic terrorist brutally murdered 6 Asian women in a fit of misogynistic racial animus, but it is also the 54th anniversary of the Mỹ Lai Massacre, in which roughly 400-500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed by US Army soldiers. Among those victims, many were women and children who were gang-raped and mutilated.
Image and caption source: Wikipedia
“South Vietnamese women and children in Mỹ Lai before being killed in the massacre, 16 March 1968. According to court testimony, they were killed seconds after the photo was taken. The woman on the right is adjusting her blouse buttons following an attempted sexual assault that happened before the massacre."
In the case of the Atlanta shootings, we know these women’s names:
XIAOJIE TAN
DAOYOU FENG
HYUN JUNG GRANT
SUNCHA KIM
SOON CHUNG PARK
YONG AE YUE
In the case of the Mỹ Lai Massacre, it seems that we don’t. History does not remember the names of those hundreds of innocent people who were slaughtered, perhaps because of the sheer number, but also because history never took the time to learn those names. Even as news outlets commemorate the one-year anniversary of the shootings of Tan, Feng, Jung Grant, Kim, Park, and Yue, they don’t mention their names, instead referred to these victims as “six Asian women”. As an example, this National Public Radio article covering the one year anniversary of the shootings does not mention their names at all. Unless trying to protect the anonymity of a minor, this kind of reporting in any other context would be unthinkable.
Perhaps that is part of why incidents like the Atlanta spa shootings are so easy to forget and write off as aberrant events in the timeline of human history. But the shootings were part of a long-established pattern of violence against Asians: from race riots and pogroms in Los Angeles (1871), San Francisco (1877) , Denver (1880), Tacoma (1885), and Seattle (1886), to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin and the 1989 mass shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA, not to mention the Vietnam and Korean Wars, just to name a few examples. Many have described the LA massacre of 1871 as one of the “largest mass lynchings in American history”, and yet few Americans know that it even happened.
The anniversaries of these atrocities are important to observe not just to commemorate the victims of these acts of terrorism and racial violence, but also to ensure that they are not erased from history. We should be demanding that people say the names of Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, and Yong Ae Yue in the same ways we call for the names of Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Elijah McClain, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Emmett Till, and so many others. It’s the first step towards honoring their humanity, individuality, and identities. And it ensures that we will never forget.