Six on History: Women's History is Every Month
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2) Women’s History Month: Rosemarie Sinclair
To Asian women, not for—there’s no speaking for us, splendidly vast and manifold as our people are. And my experience of this world, and of America, is that of being a Korean American woman born in Seoul, so let me be specific about the body I inhabit: I moved to the U.S. with my family when I was three years old. I write and teach for a living; I’ve worked in the service industry, at a restaurant, but not since college. It is by no means a given that my life has a lot of overlap with the six Asian women killed while working at massage parlors, even the four women of Korean descent, except that much of America has trouble telling any of us apart.
It is a standing, pain-riddled joke with close Asian women friends that if we haven’t yet been mistaken for each other, we’re not really friends, and my friends laugh, and I laugh, and still they keep mixing us up. To date, I have been mistaken for Asian women who are almost a foot taller than I am, with women 15 years younger or older, biracial people, women who descend from every East Asian and Southeast Asian nation, plus Sri Lanka, as well as India, all of us thrown together by the willful, lazy illogic of racism.
But I love being in this company—I love it here, with my sisters. I always have, and there’s not anywhere else I’d want to be. With femme-presenting siblings too, though here I hesitate, as I know at least some nonbinary friends prefer not to be categorized with women. It is also true, as many have pointed out, that when it comes to gender-based violence from male strangers, femme-presenting people who aren’t women are of course vulnerable, so I’ll write this to you if you want to be here, and not if you don’t. And while our siblings of color live with and are killed by white supremacy too, and while our sisters of color and our white sisters live with and are killed by misogyny too, today I have to write to us first, with the Asian women who have been crying all week, who are grief-stricken, furious, afraid, and heartsick, our bodies rioting beneath the heft and bulk of a racist, misogynist tragedy while we mourn. ... "
Tomorrow, March 25, 6:00 to 7:00pm (EDT)
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