Trigger warning: This blog post discusses violence, mental health, and trauma.

Act 1. The Pursuit of Violence

Section 1: What the American Dream Was

"The price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted."

~ Dream, Sandman #19

Will Smith once said, “Look around you at your five closest friends, and that’s who you are. If you don’t want to be that person you know what you have to do.” That was my bread-and-butter philosophy to be successful. At one point in my life, I almost captured the American Dream with that philosophy. I would have sat in those cushy velvet couches, lounging in those meeting rooms filled with tropical plants to fit a jungle theme. I would have been dressed in business casual, with an emphasis on chic clothing from Kenneth Cole. My role, content manager, would have been integral to leading an innovative media company in the heart of Soma. I would have impressed people at bars bragging about the company being co-founded by Al Gore. I almost did, but this fantasy was all fabricated in my head.

In truth, I was sitting on top of Potrero Hill in San Francisco, avoiding the reality that I didn’t get the job. I had just left a night of networking at a social event. Though my feet were sore from walking around selling myself to strangers, it was my hurt pride that exhausted me enough to finally sit down. As I sat there gazing out at the skyscrapers, car headlights moving with a destination in mind, I felt like I was getting nowhere. However, there was something waiting for me at that moment. Some would call this fate, a predetermined path that I would eventually take. Others would call this a series of Rube Goldberg events. However one would interpret it, it was coming at me fast.

“Hey.”

“HEY!”

I turned around to see a man approaching me. His eyes, locked on to me, disclosed bad intentions. My eyes watched him lift his shirt from the bottom hem. A gun hung on his waist. I did not wait to see what he was gonna do with that gun. I ran as fast as my heart skipped in fear. That was the first time I sprinted with so much vigor that I could barely feel my lungs pounding against my ribcage. When the transcendent state wore off, I felt my legs start to give out. My body fell hard onto the concrete. I was a bloody mess. I was grateful that I got away and I was ready to get home to end the night before it got worse; however, I wasn’t ready for the reactions I would get about my night.

Word got around about my encounter. When some family members found out, the interrogations came flying and fast. Their tone was less about curiosity and more about accusation. “Why did you run? That was stupid of you to do.” We argued about whether I would have been shot immediately or not.

But there was one question from a family member that infuriated me the most: “Was he black?”

Her tone was aggressive as if I were guilty of something in the most racist way possible.

In shock, I yelled back “Why does that matter?” She didn’t press further about my well-being – maybe her questions were only for gossiping purposes. 

Our culture has this obsession with interrogating people's character: He’s a thug. He did drugs. Nothing comes good out of being out late at night. She was wearing a short skirt. It’s easier to blame the victim because people don’t want to believe that violence could happen to them. There I was that fateful night, trying to network and find opportunity, only to be condemned. Because of that scrutiny, I deeply believed I was a nobody, nothing without a job. I was in a place where I wasn’t able to tell my story. The right to speak is a form of wealth that I didn’t have.

Section 2. The Status of the Halo Effect

aka "physical attractiveness stereotype"

or "what is beautiful is also good"

One of Will Smith’s signature movies is The Pursuit of Happyness, a 2006 American biographical drama film about Chris Gardner, a father who raised his son on the streets in San Francisco while training at a major brokerage firm. However, Gardner managed to keep his homelessness a secret from his co-workers and bosses. In one scene, Gardner can’t get to the homeless shelter in time and is forced to sleep in a bathroom stall in the Transbay Terminal located downtown. Will Smith, laid out on the bathroom floor, allows his son to sleep on his chest while he wedges his foot against the door to keep people out. You can see in his tears that he felt Gardner’s pain, trying to survive for his son. In real life, that building does not exist anymore as that’s where the Salesforce Tower now stands. Next to that building is the Millennium towers, the tallest residential building built in San Francisco. The median sale price to own a condo there is $1,400,000 with a median price per square foot of $1,074. My first loft party I was invited to was in that building, staring down where Gardner slept. I remember the relief that came through me that I wouldn’t have to resort to sleeping on BART again, similar to how Gardner and his son slept in a bathroom stall in the adjacent building of the party, waiting for it to open up in the morning.

At that point in my life, I too had built my way up from that moment on top of Potrero Hill. I was freelancing with a few celebrities to build their online presence. I had my stints running a few social media campaigns for name brands. I had an ongoing personal training business that was running smoothly. With my new persona, I felt like I was allowed into high society. At the loft party, I approached a woman near the bar. I felt I could talk freely without feeling like I needed to sell myself.

I struck up light party banter with her. She engaged politely, but the conversation didn’t move past anything superficial. Then she was grabbed by the arm abruptly and told, “You need to be talking to a young white professional.” She and her “rescuer” didn’t even excuse themselves as they walked away from me. I felt more than insulted that they were both Asian women. I felt that an eraser pressed against my body, rubbing away all my life experiences that I had written out for myself. All my complexities and nuances and hard work were nothing because my skin said to them I wasn’t good enough. 

I tried to get some perspective from the people around me. “Well, Long, some people like blondes, and some people don’t.” The more I tried to talk about the racism I encountered throughout the years – being told Asian men are genetically unattractive, that I’m not American enough – the more it seemed no one believed me. Not even Asian people in the Bay Area were on my side. My stories were unbelievable because the Bay Area was "progressive," it was the Post-Obama era. In Rebecca Solnit’s essay about silence in her book “The Mother of all Questions,” she talks about whose voices are above others: “There has long been an elite with audibility and credibility, and an underclass of the voiceless.” If the right to speak has credibility, then my skin will never allow me to be credible.

Section 3. Getting into The Hurt Business

“It only take a half a second to establish the hit (Really)”

-Smoke DZA

About 47 miles northeast from the Salesforce building is the city Antioch. As reported in the SFGate.com, in the 1870s white residents of Antioch became the heroes in the public eye as they successfully burned down Chinatown in 1876. The San Francisco Chronicle at that time applauded their work: “The actions of the citizens of this place will, without doubt, meet with the hearty approval of every man, woman and child on the Pacific coast and will go a long ways toward convincing the people of the Eastern States that the Chinese nuisance on our seaboard has assumed such vast proportions that it is beyond the pale of political issues and has come to be a disgrace that must be wiped out.”

On a federal level, in 1875, the Page Act banned single Chinese women from entering the U.S. because they were assumed to be prostitutes, corrupting the whites. Summarized in NPR’s podcast Invisibilia, A Very Offensive Rom-Com: In 1945, the War Brides Act allowed U.S. soldiers to bring Asian wives to America. Asian femininity became mainstream, going from prostitutes to what we now call Asian fetishization. The Asian men who helped build the railroads went from being villainized in newspapers as sexual predators to being forced to take on so-called women's work as launderers, cooks, house boys, and domestic servants. This is the emasculation of Asian men.

America will only speak of racism in the past tense. The ecology of it is still not the environment’s fault; it’s your fault for not being a young, white professional. Since I wouldn't give up my identity through assimilation, the next best work option was accommodation: going full-time as a personal trainer in the care industry. My identity is acceptable when I am at service. To be in service for those allowed to be in “The American Dream.” The same service of using our hands to make you look better through your hair, your nails, your skin. Not good enough to be invited to those parties you get dressed up and pretty for. Good enough to serve you boba, but not good enough to sit next to you while you drink your boba.

PhD holder in Performance Studies Summer Kim Lee writes in her article “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality” that Asian Americans are subjected into the “After You” embodiment: being polite after we do service. However, after all the years of the injustices I endured from being ignored, I had become defiant to being polite. I once yelled at a tech worker long enough until he left the bar for harassing a waitress. I heard the next day he came back to apologize. On more than one occasion I found myself calmly asking men standing a foot taller above me, “You want to fight? Or you want to talk about it?” Gradually my boxing attire became my chic attire: I noticed altercations at bars dropped as I wore my leather Nixon watch with a tank top. Keep those hands dressed professionally, but get rid of the sleeves because they’ll get in the way if someone wants to throw down. My voice had always been silent in the presence of racism, forcing my hands to speak with clenched fists. Through boxing, I got to know the science of violence: Aim for the face. Flick that jab quickly to snap his nose in half. Knockouts don’t come from the face – the frontal skull has too much bone protecting the brain. Swing that left uppercut up into the ribs. That's the liver shot: blunt force to the liver that’s so excruciating, it’s a contractual guarantee that it’ll bring any person to their knees. This is how people think in the hurt business.

What I hide though is that no matter how much I rehearse violence, I can only condition how my body will respond with violence. It doesn’t make one’s emotions immune to violence. Nothing can dampen the searing pain when violence travels through your soul. When the #StopAAPIHate campaign went online, I tried my best to not engage. I get that extreme measures needed to be done to get people to notice, as Terry Nguyen writes in her article, “The spectacle of anti-Asian violence on Instagram”: “Headlines are easy to forget, but images and videos linger in one’s memory.” I did not need to relive being silenced about my experiences. My body can’t tell the difference if it’s my body that is being threatened or that of someone who looks like me. I was getting the same visceral feeling I got before any boxing fight, when my friends at the bar would just say “Don’t worry about it,” when I heard Asian girls say “We don’t date short, stumpy Asian boys.” It was hard to ignore friends reposting viral videos of vulnerable Asian Americans being attacked, as they screamed for help from the public. Then there was one news report of a mass shooting that caused America to snap, including me.

At the press conference in Atlanta, we all watched as the police officer spoke on behalf of the shooter. Instead of judging the shooter’s character like this country does to black and brown bodies, the cop said he was having a bad day. The shooter reportedly blamed his “sex addiction,” this fetishization that America has propagated against Asian women. The shooter targeted care industry locations, he targeted my fellow care industry workers. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng died at the hands of the shooter, but the cops apprehended the shooter alive. Black and brown bodies have been dying by the hands of cops for way less than mass murder.

This was all my years of watching my denial, giving benefit of the doubt to the attacker, not some shoeshine boy like me. This was all the years knowing someone was willing to cross the moral line to kill someone due to  their race, while people said I was being irrational. This was knowing the shooter was given a pass because he was white. 

Act 2.

The Result of Violence

Section 1. Taking the Law into Their Own Hands 

American culture has this obsession with the troubled protagonist or the bad boy you can’t tame. I’m talking about the James Dean-type character who is emotional yet disobedient; they live wild and rebelliously, dying young without compromising. However, instead of hoping these men live to mature into healthy older adults, perhaps through seeking therapy, we continue perpetuating this trope of Twilight-like vampires, seduced by the idea of the broken white male. In recent times, voices have begun speaking out against unethical treatment and abuse from those in power toward the unrepresented. “Words bring us together, and silence separates us,” Rebecca Solnit reminds us about the power of voice. Civil groups representing women as well as BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQ people have banded together to bring down toxic monoliths who prey on the weak through manipulation and power with movements such as #MeToo and Gun Reform. However, in the ever-forever fight for control and power, toxic groups are taking it to the next level in a form of vigilantism, as one who is above the law and crosses the moral boundaries for “their” greater good. 

In 2020, during the civil unrest of the Black Lives Matter movement, pro-gun advocates shared articles and memes about “#RooftopKoreans.” Pictures of Korean Americans armed with military-grade weapons during the 1992 Los Angeles riots surfaced after four white Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted in the brutal beating of Rodney King. Pro-gun groups tried to change the narrative from the focus of Black Lives to shooting looters that were damaging property. On the other end of the spectrum, certain Asian online communities have adopted a crude form of vigilantism to combat racism focused on the emasculation of Asian men. Twitter has called them “MRAsians,” because their behavior resembles that of so-called “Men’s Rights Activists:” anti-feminist, threatened by women’s power, and preoccupied with men’s perceived disempowerment. Public Asian-woman figures who are in interracial relationships have had to deal with the dangers of being doxxed online and thousands of death threats being sent in their inboxes. 

When it comes to police reform, law enforcement have felt threatened as they feel that the people have turned on them. They have organized in their own movement: Blue Lives Matter. Police who swore to protect now have a sense of moral authority to determine who lives and dies, but there is nothing more troubling than actual military and police personnel who embrace their own brand of anti-hero: through the Marvel comic character The Punisher.

Section 2. The Punisher draws the line

The Punisher character was created by writer Gerry Conway and artists John Romita Sr. and Ross Andru. Frank Castle, an ex-military personnel who served his final tour in Vietnam in 1971, comes home from war to find his family murdered by the Italian mafia. Thus, his murderous ways of justice and revenge becomes his calling. His signature white skull that covers his front chest against his all black uniform has become a symbol for some law enforcement, with cops posting the character's iconic skull logo on social media, t-shirts, and even police cars.

This didn’t please co-creator Gerry Conway nor Marvel Comics at all. Marvel Comics decided to allow their artists to respond to the police appropriating The Punisher's skull. In Punisher #13, a story written by Matthew Rosenberg, Frank Castle is cornered in an alleyway by uniformed cops who start fanboying over him:

Conway has spoken publicly on how he feels about police using the symbol. In an interview with syfy.com, Conway said: “[The Punisher is] supposed to indict the collapse of social moral authority and the reality some people can't depend on institutions like the police or the military to act in a just and capable way. The vigilante anti-hero is fundamentally a critique of the justice system, an example of social failure, so when cops put Punisher skulls on their cars or members of the military wear Punisher skull patches, they're basically sides with an enemy of the system.” He has gone so far as to say that any law enforcement who carries that symbol should be fired immediately.

Last year, Conway launched a fundraising effort called Black Lives Matter: Skulls for Justice to “claim this symbol for the cause of equal justice and Black Lives Matter.” Working with a number of BIPOC artists, Conway has created t-shirts adorned with the Punisher logo and the Black Lives Matter slogan, with proceeds going to Black Lives Matter-related charities.

Conway has gone further to empathize with war veterans who have suffered from PTSD as a hope of the Punisher character to evolve in the same interview with syfy.com: “Today though, given what we know about PTSD, what we understand about how soldiers are affected by our ongoing, multi-generational war in Afghanistan, a character like The Punisher can speak to something that's important for us to come to grips with as writers and artists.”

The repetition of trauma; the extreme spikes of cortisol levels; my knuckles, enlarged from all the years of breaking down the bones through punching – these are all the byproducts of violence that has been slowly killing my body. Though my training through violence has given me skills of resilience and hyper-sharp awareness, sometimes I'm too hypervigilant to enjoy ordinary beautiful moments in life. Even someone like Mike Tyson, who used to be the most feared man on the planet, has admitted to what fighting did to his soul: “I always cry before I fight, it’s just who I am. I’m getting ready to change into somebody I don’t like. He brought like, jealousy, envious, guilt, he brought a lot of stuff. No one ever put that together, that’s who I was. Everything that was bad was that guy.”

I look at characters like The Punisher from afar and sometimes relate to their rage, wishing extreme measures would be taken to individuals who try to wield power for selfish reasons. Yet, I still know in my heart there’s a cost to crossing that line, as there’s no turning back. At times, I think of the man who pointed his gun at me. I don’t remember what he wore, what he looked like, nor even his skin complexion. I have never been angry at him. We both, in a way, are products of our environments that failed us. We both had to resort to violence to survive. I am just thankful that I had never been in that man’s position to resort to violence like that.

Act 3. Applying Violence

Epilogue.

The Body Keeps the Score

The day after the Atlanta Shooting, an elderly woman was attacked on Market Street in San Francisco. However, this woman – Xiao Zhen Xie, at age 75 – defended herself, leaving her attacker with injuries that required a trip to the hospital. People applauded her resilience and tenacity to fend off the culprit. If you read the online comments about the news, there is this catharsis and Schadenfreude feeling of vengeance being served, Dr. Kay M Tye tweets her reactions:

Sickened by the irrational racial violence in SF rn...

... but the karmic irony of this elderly Asian woman KICKING HER RACIST ATTACKER’S ASS lifted my spirit.

Elderly Asian Woman Beats Up Man Attacking Her In San Francisco

Xiao Zhen Xie’s Gofundme campaign grew wildly popular and was able to raise $1,000,640. In a twist of events, she donated all the money to charity organizations that are fighting Anti-hate crimes. She is quoted as saying in her GoFundme: “She said we must not submit to racism and we must fight to the death if necessary. She also stated multiple times to donate all the funds generated in this GoFundMe back to the Asian American community to combat racism. She insists on making this decision saying this issue is bigger than her.”

In so many ways, Xiao Zhen Xie is a lot like The Punisher. They both dismiss the idea of hero worship. The Punisher says a hero should be found somewhere else, as when Xiao Zhen Xie relinquished the money to an issue bigger than her. Barbara A. Misztal writes in her research paper “Collective Memory in a Global Age: Learning How and What to Remember”: 

Collective memory is not just historical knowledge, as it is the experience mediated by representation of the past that enacts and gives substance to the group’s identity. Memory helps in the construction of collective identities and boundaries, whether these are national, cultural, ethnic or religious.

How we remember Xiao Zhen Xie should be not only as a heroine, but as an indictment on a culture that has allowed elderly people to be attacked in the first place.

I think about Xiao Zhen Xie a lot. I was within a mile from her when she got attacked that morning. My bus that I caught that morning passed by that area an hour before. I ponder if I could do what she did. No, not the part about attacking back at her assailant, but whether I would be able to give away $1,000,000. I can honestly say that I don’t know if I have forgiven all that has happened to me. Deep down, I would feel like that money is owed to compensate for what I have gone through. The book “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk states that: “Our capacity to destroy one another is matched to heal one another.” I have much more healing to do to equal out the violence in my blood. As I traverse that journey, I don’t want my “Feel Good” story to be a blueprint for people like me to live beside a flawed system that goes unchecked. The way this country judges character, it demands that the victim find their own solution rather than the country collectively look inward to understand why that person got there.

I think of Will Smith’s quote again. I look at the people around me and see they are me. The elderly Asian women who catch the bus with me. The Korean owner of the corner shop where I get my tofu and yerba mate kombucha. The nice lady who waves at me everytime I walk by her grocery store while she makes her masks. The woman who I used to buy beer from at the bar Liquid Gold, who I now run into at the grocery store. I don’t like what is happening to them. I don’t like what is happening to us in the news and in our hearts. I am trying to find my way on what to do.

Blog banner and graphics by Van Lam