the perfect home
in defense of asian women and safety in community
Today’s story is going to focus on sensitive topics that me and the homies are processing in real time so it can get heavy. Take breaks, hold space for yourselves and for each other, and breathe when you can.
TW: death, grief, collective trauma, racism, hate.
Pictured: Do Ho Suh’s The Perfect Home II, in 2019 at the Brooklyn Museum.
This Korean artist replicated his apartment in Chelsea using hand stitched translucent fabric, each room color coded to represent the different types of space we build our lives around. But as the piece moves from museum to museum, the form of the piece also shifts slightly, adapting to fill the environment around it. // It’s been almost a year since I moved out of my family’s home during a very chaotic period of life. Many things I lost are still lost, many things that are broken are still broken. I’ve grown into a much stronger person but I can’t deny there are times it feels like I’ll never get the luxury of knowing what it is to feel the normal things people often take for granted - like a home. Instead mine is affected by circumstance and shifting to fit into the environment given. I enjoy being independent and living in my own space, having my own schedule, not commuting 4 hours a day. but sometimes it still doesn’t quite feel like a home. I find myself couch surfing now just as much as I did when I was a rogue college student. I wonder if I’ll always feel uncomfortable calling a place home - that few places ever deserve a title that secure. How any moment you can be uprooted and once again it will take months for you to find enough solace to dig deep, enough peace to lay your head.
- Roxanne’s journal, March 2019
Pictured below: Do Ho Suh’s The Perfect Home II in summer 2021, at the LACMA.
I return to Do Ho Suh’s installation with thoughts of how delicate life is, and how in delicateness there can live such complex detail. How we twist and turn to call something ours, even momentarily. It’s been a few years since I wrote that journal entry, so I feel like I’m in a better place mentally now. But sometimes, I come back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in relation to the experience of being an Asian woman in America.
Source: Plateresca / Getty Images
As an Asian woman, as a woman of color in general, it often feels like these tiers are actually inverted. That in order to achieve basic physiological, survival-based needs, we must first risk our lives trying to live a life we can be “proud” of.
Source: LinkedIn
Do you recall a time when you felt safe — I mean like really free of worry, untouchable, comfortable, like it was truly yours? Do you consider your home a sanctuary? Do you consider having a home a privilege?
I’ve been mourning the loss of another young Asian woman, Christina Yuna Lee, in New York City. Her death follows just one month after Michelle Alyssa Go’s. Both incidents come far too soon after so many others in Atlanta, San Francisco, and more. Please take the time to learn more about them. I do not want to get into the gruesome details because it just makes me sad. I did not know Christina, but she is familiar. Familiar to me and to all of us. And sadly, so is the way in which her, Michelle’s, and many others’ lives were taken.
Sometimes I don’t read the articles right away because I fear opening one and recognizing a loved one. I feel terror I have never felt before these days. I fear for my sister and my mother and my friends and my colleagues anytime I know they must make a journey alone. New York City has always been my home, and no matter how wild it was, I never felt like a stranger in my own city — until the past year or two.
Pictured: a tweet thread by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee
Violence towards Asian women is not exclusive to the limiting idea of a “hate crime.” Hate crime implies that these incidents are isolated occurrences, things that happen by freak nature or just a wrong place wrong time accident. Violence is deep-seated in Western culture in the normalization of treating Asian women as disposable, objects. Exoticized, fetishized, submissive, seen as weaker or less. Though daily invalidation and fluctuating feelings of invisibility vs hypervisibility are not exclusive to the Asian community, there are times when I see these events cause a worse response in which Asian groups become more insular and call for more police enforcement. This is not the way. Black and Brown folks have had to navigate this same fear from origin, and increased police action has not improved these conditions. The current events reflect the greater, glaring failure of the systems in place to serve communities of color and the mothers, sisters, daughters that exist within them.
New York City funnels billions of dollars into the NYPD already and yet we still cannot count on them to do much more than to fixate on what is convenient for them. Crime, generally, stems from desperation and loneliness. Lack of hope, lack of support. But can you imagine what even one of those billions could do if they were allocated towards proper services for the homeless and those struggling with drug addiction and/or mental illness? The number of innocent lives that could be saved, but also the ones that our messed up society often deems unworthy of saving.
Pictured: Poems from Brooklyn Antediluvian by Patrick Rosal (if I’m citing this incorrectly, my apologies - this is purely from memory as I have no other records of what book I was reading from in these photos)
Of course I’m angry. Of course I’m falling apart behind the scenes. Of course I have to continue on regardless. In reflection of the “perfect home,” home is not a singular, fixed point to me. I find that in times like these — when I have to second-guess my interactions outside of the home, when I have to look in the mirror to remind myself I’m here and I’m loved, when I have to put in more effort to ground and find gratitude in a thankless world — community is what keeps me together, community is my perfect home. It isn’t my resilience alone. It’s my Discord server, it’s my friends coming over to cook together, it’s my partner making sure I fall asleep and staying on the phone when I have nightmares.
I started taking a TV Pilot course recently to help me level up my skills in the industry. In class, I am writing a pilot whose main characters are all Asian women. I tend to get writer’s block often but with these characters, I constantly feel like there’s something exciting to share and portray. I’m only supposed to be writing a pilot episode but I already can see a season in my head. There has been a rise in Asian representation in media and entertainment but we are still behind in certain aspects: such as why many people still put Awkwafina on a pedestal, why we grab and reach to defend problematic politicians like Andrew Yang just because they get us a morsel of collective attention. So yeah, writing about a group of girlfriends advocating for themselves in a world that won’t, doesn’t seem like much — but it means a lot to me.
Around 2019, I joined a collective called The Cosmos, which started out as a Slack group of Asian women professionals and creatives just trying to connect and hang out. I’m happy to have seen it grow into what it is today, even in spite of the challenges founders Cassandra Lam and Karen Mok have faced keeping their brand sustainable and true to their values. They currently have their own newsletter called The Care Package, which offers resources on events and opportunities for safe, accountable healing spaces.
In the days to come, do what you can to care about each other. Grieve with each other. Scream and yell and when you’re ready, steal back your joy. Actively rest. Actively seek out brands, businesses, spaces that prioritize you. Not just when something bad happens, but because we’re all we got.
Some businesses/brands for you to support/visit (occasionally, I will return to this post with updates):
Lealovebeautique - resin goods and self-defense items
Send Chinatown Love - support small businesses in NYC Chinatown
Luya Poetry - Chicago-based grassroots poetry org centering people of color
The Cosmos - collective/network/healing space/community for Asian women
Land to Sea - cafe/creative event venue in Brooklyn
Survival Arts - self-defense collective for women and children
How Bout Knot - mindfully made macramé
Just For Keyks - my mom’s dessert business, ships nationwide!
Yu & Me Books - new Asian woman-owned bookstore in NYC
First Sip Cafe - Asian woman-owned cafe in Chicago
BRWNGRLZ - the flyest earrings you’ll ever wear, made in California
Wing on Wo - porcelain/home goods
Sampaguita Press - Indie press publishing underrepresented voices
Asian American Feminist Collective - grassroots racial and gender justice group based in New York City engaging in intersectional feminist politics grounded within our diasporic communities
Pictured: Poem by Christian Aldana, published by Marías at Sampaguitas.