This story is adapted from 'It Just Stays With You': The Corrosive Health Effects Of Decades Of Anti-Asian Violence, originally published with
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, originally published with NPR member station WBUR.
Days after a man shot and killed six Asian women and two other people in Asian owned spas in the Atlanta area in March, Doris Chang sat with her 11-year-old son to learn who the victims were. The news held their faces and their names – Asian faces, Asian names just like his.
“My son looked at a picture and he said, ‘that looks like Ā-pó,’ which is my mother,” Chang says. “So, it was really, really hard not to personalize [the shootings] as something that could have happened to anybody in my family, anybody that I know.”
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The day of the Atlanta shootings, I was shaken.
Like just about everyone, my own mental health during the pandemic had suffered before the March 16 attacks at three different spas. Despite usually identifying as mixed race, the Japanese part of me was stunned by the shootings that left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian women.
As a journalist who reads and writes about horrific atrocities all the time, the past decade of news coverage has been a little traumatizing. As the pandemic wore on, I found it harder and harder to get out of bed and go to work after all, what awaited me was a shift full of more coronavirus coverage, protests against police violence or perhaps another attack on an Asian elder.