Being and Becoming Asian in the Time of COVID-19

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic started, I've been missing my late parents so much, possibly far more than I ever have in my life. Like many of you practicing social distancing, my usual activities in the outdoors have been off the table since things have shut down or posed an added layer of risk that I’m not currently interested in taking. Like many who are able to, I’ve instead turned inwards to get reacquainted with things from the past I’ve left in favor of the outdoors. For me, these are things that bring me back to my childhood, feel familiar, and are comforting. I’ve found myself drawn to the comforts of my family and home.

I'm also processing a lot during this time, as I'm sure many of us are for our own reasons. With ample time away from the skydiving and skiing communities, I’ve had lots of time to think. I've sat with my anger about hate crimes and everyday harassment against East Asian and East Asian-passing folks—against my friends, cousins, and myself. I’ve sat with my anger about how this pandemic has cracked open our broken system in America, and has very clearly revealed the inequities disproportionately impacting black communities, indigenous populations, and the poor. I've sat with my anger about how the current administration and its supporters don't seem to mind. 

I've also felt particularly alienated from the outdoor communities in which, in an ideal world, I'd of course love to feel the trust and joy across these communities that many do. But with certain folks coming out of the woodwork—those who deny that we should look out for our fellow human beings, and those who support leaders whose beliefs hinge on granting basic human rights to some and not others—I can’t. I love having a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, but for the time being, I feel the need to stick to my close friends, only some of whom I’ve met through sports. I know I was aware of this before, but it’s all come to bear at once during this current collective experience. 

Being Asian during this time in America has brought me a fair amount of pain. But, with all this downtime and time away from the outdoors, I’ve turned to the comforts of home to self-soothe: cooking and eating the food that brings me back to childhood, watching old family videos of moments at home and playing music together, and reconnecting with friends I grew up with, with whom I feel a sense of shared heritage and implicit understanding. 

What’s been unfolding for me the past few weeks started off with seeking comfort in dealing with this new normal of alienation from a community I wanted to trust, and isolation from the people I care about. Through finding comfort in the memory of my parents, I started to let go of this tension and process the heavier questions of why I felt so hurt and angry about what’s going on in the world today. 

By exploring my own heritage during this time, I feel like I’m stepping into myself and becoming Asian. In connecting with my past, I’ve started to integrate the sides of myself that were previously fragmented and it feels like growth; in other words, I’ve been softening into my identity.

My cousins, my brother (center), and me having a great time on Christmas one year.

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and in honor of my wonderful parents who are spending time together somewhere in the afterlife, I want to share with you the process I’ve gone through so far, from the comfort I sought, to the discoveries I made about my own heritage. I will caution that this has been a messy, vulnerable process, and that’s reflected in what follows. 

Being Asian: Seeking comfort

I have days where reading about anti-Asian hate crimes and mentions of the "Chinese flu" is too much. Days where I'm fucking angry and I want to ask my parents about how they dealt with the anti-Asian sentiment and racism they experienced as immigrants—my mom's family from Korea and my dad's from Taiwan—only some 30 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented Chinese people from immigrating to the US, was repealed. I want to ask how they coped and how they reconciled what they were experiencing in America with what they left at home. 

I get angry when I remember the violence I’ve experienced as a young Asian woman living in a very white mountain town in a very red state. I get angry when I see Asian people not standing in solidarity with and not holding space for other POC who are suffering—who have been suffering. Part of the anxiety of this experience for many of us is in imagining what our new normal will be after all this dust has settled, and I frequently think about what things will look like for POC in America. 

The days when I’ve been particularly exhausted, I just want to be comforted, and this comfort often comes in the form of cooking and eating the food my parents and grandma made for me growing up. 

My halmeoni (할머니, grandma) making kimbap when I visited her in 2019.

Comfort food to me means Korean soups like kimchi jjigae, a stew made with spicy, fermented cabbage and an anchovy stock, and soegogi muguk, a beef and radish soup that reminds me of the love and care my grandma put into the food she made for my family. It means Taiwanese breakfast food that I used to eat with my dad at little delis in the San Gabriel Valley which had not a lick of English on their menus: dan bing, a thin scallion pancake with egg wrapped inside, and fan tuan, a roll with sticky rice on the outside and dried pork, preserved vegetables, and a deep-fried piece of dough on the inside. 

These are a few things I eat when I want to feel safe and happy and content in the moment. It’s what I eat when I miss my parents or wish that I had some folks close by who understand where I come from. Food brought us together even when my parents were incredibly busy and through sharing meals together, I bonded with my best friends from childhood. With this newly granted time at home, I’ve been learning how to make these dishes (and they’ve turned out amazing), and I’ve been wondering why I didn’t try to sooner.

Growing up, I listened to my dad talk to his mom on the phone in Taiwanese nearly every day. He always started the conversation with a specific phrase which he taught me literally meant “have you eaten?”. It’s a common greeting that’s used to ask, “how are you?”.

There’s a trope that Asian parents and children don’t explicitly say “I love you” to each other, but I’ve learned that food is a vessel for this love, and it’s communicated through both actions and words. 

Aside from a brief stint in weekend Chinese school during my elementary-aged years, I never formally learned any form of Chinese and relied on my dad for one-off translations of words I recognized. It’s something that hits me as a pang of regret to this day, especially since I’ve discovered that Taiwanese is one of the most comforting sounds in my book.

I learned recently that people were prohibited from speaking Taiwanese publicly during the period of martial law from 1949 that lasted nearly 40 years. I’m glad that my dad and his family kept this piece of our history and brought it with them when they came to the United States. 

My dad and me (probably eating dim sum together) in 2014.

With all my time freed up from sports, I’ve also started self-studying Taiwanese. It’s incredibly difficult for me, only having learned non-tonal languages like my mom’s native Korean. I really struggle to hear and replicate tones. Maybe I should’ve started learning something more linguistically foundational, like Mandarin, but I think half the reason I’ve gone about things this way is to just hear the language and feel the comfort of it, a little bit every day. This feels foundational to who I am. 

Becoming Asian: Questioning and understanding

Many days, I can hold space for myself and self-soothe. Other days, I don't want to be angry, but I am. I’ve noticed that my feelings have often seemed disproportionate compared to what I've dealt with personally. (Although, yes, I very much think it is important to care about the things that matter, even when they don’t affect us personally.) I wanted to understand why this anger felt so “big”, and why dismantling racism and continuously doing anti-racism work within myself matters to me so much. I wanted to understand why I get so incredibly frustrated when people fight back to preserve their own privilege. 

I’ve tried unpacking these feelings with the lens of looking to the past. Did I grow up experiencing unfairness within my family and friends? Are there moments from the past where I’ve felt this similar feeling of anger over unfairness?

These types of questions usually help me peel back the layers to get to the pithy truth, but this was not one of those situations. This frustration always felt like it was beyond my own immediate family and about something bigger.

Serendipitously, I stumbled across the modern Korean notion of han (한) a few weeks ago, which can be described as a kind of collective, unresolved rage, resentment, or grief over injustices experienced. One academic describes it as a feeling that "encapsulates the grief of historical memory-the memory of past collective trauma". 

It's rooted in the Japanese colonization of Korea, as well as the subsequent US occupation of the south and Russian occupation of the north. The north and south are technically still at war to this day. It’s the grief of an entire nation not getting to see their siblings grow up or their families ever again because a government not their own tore their country apart. It's this feeling of unresolved anger that's passed down through generations, and one that many Korean and second-generation Korean folk can attest to feeling in their own personal forms.

Really, you don’t even have to be Korean to feel han. You might feel it if your ancestors were—or you are—subject to injustices that are particular to those who look like you. 

My mom and me at a local mountain nearly 20 years ago. Snow!

I didn't get the chance to talk to my mom about this, so I can’t know for sure, but I get the sense that a lot of the values she instilled in me from a young age were tied to her own version of han at least in some way. She often told me when I was young, with a palpable sense of frustration, that I needed to comport myself in a certain way. She told me that I’d be treated differently because I was a girl, because I was young, because I was who I was, and the world wouldn’t always look on me favorably.

I feel like this was her han that she passed down to me. And especially now, I really understand where she was coming from. 

Learning about this cultural idea has helped me contextualize these memories and understand the strong current-day feelings I have around doing right by POC, women, and other marginalized groups in this country. Maybe feeling for these injustices is my version of han. It all makes more sense now, and honestly, it’s taken off the weight of some of this anger, even if there’s no way to talk with my mom about her thoughts.

I very much feel more connected to my ancestors. It feels like looking into my own roots and learning to appreciate my family’s history has led me to the path of processing and repair in this moment. In many ways, I’ve come to appreciate a deeper side of my heritage, beyond the tip of the cultural iceberg. In many ways, I am becoming Asian.

The Process Continues

I’ve grown so much in the last 3 or so years, and I’m lucky to have felt this growth accelerate in the time of this pandemic. Learning to honor the values that are important to me, even in the face of feeling alienated from the communities I want to trust the most, has been part and parcel of this recent process in appreciating my roots, my family, and our history. Learning how to acknowledge and feel my feelings, to sit with discomfort when it pops up, has also been incredibly important to that end. 

At the bottom of all this, for many of us, it is clear that there’s a lot of pain in the experience of Covid-19, whether it’s from being denied care in some way, experiencing loss of family or friends, sitting with our grief, working on the front lines of this pandemic, feeling isolated and questioning why we need to stay at home, or general discomfort from all the things that are being dredged up from our respective pasts. 

I know it’s been a chaotic rollercoaster ride of a few months for most of us. I hope that you are granted the opportunity to do the reflection and introspection you need and want in this time—with some space to breathe, support from your loved ones, and what support we can get from a very broken system—for your well-being is an end in itself, and you are deserving of it by virtue of your humanness. I hope that you will be able to hold space for yourself and your experiences, and that your loved ones will do the same for you. 

A lot of my own pain in all this is in realizing that the outdoor communities I’m part of might not always have my back in the way that I would want, even if I want to show up for others in that way. It’s in realizing that I love parts of the town I live in, but that I might need to leave because I’ve been treated a certain way based on how I look.

Yet, I am damn proud of my heritage. I am so incredibly lucky to have the cherished memory of my parents and a newfound appreciation of our heritage. I know this will keep me going until my friends and I are back in the sky and mountains together, and beyond.