On Being An Asian Woman
Why silence leads to erasure.
A block from me lives a slender pointy-nosed old white man with frizzy grey hair. When I was a teenager and my OOTD was high-waisted denim shorts and a scoop-back AA bodysuit paired with a winged cat-eye, he used to ask my neighbours, “where does that girl with the disabled mom live?” Sometimes he would loiter outside my window. I grew older, moved away and forgot about him.
Until early last year. A couple months into the pandemic, he spat “Chinese!” at me as I passed him on our street. My face flushed, I felt angry and shocked. But what followed was worse—for days, and then weeks, and then months afterward, I felt that same visceral fear of not being safe that I used to feel as a teenager.
I hung a bedsheet up over my translucent curtains every night, hoping he wouldn’t look in and make the connection that the same girl he used to creep on all those years ago was the vi…