Seattle, WA

This week, I had the chance to attend a convening called AAPI's Beyond Bars & Beyond Borders in Seattle, WA. It was an opportunity for me to learn more about incarceration & deportation in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, from currently & formerly incarcerated brothers, and from other community organizations. I was grateful, honored and humbled to be in such a space, with the people who fight so hard for their villages.

Incarceration in the AAPI is multi-faceted. It starts from the moment you step foot on this soil they say belongs to America. We’re faced with the model minority myth. The model minority myth tells people that Asians are smart, educated, successful, and wealthy. As a “second-generation refugee” I can say that it’s not all true. There are so many Asians in the world, from so many places, with such different experiences and histories. When we’re all put together under one term, it masks & invalidates our lived experiences. The model minority myth prevented so many Southeast Asian youth from having the proper ESL resources they needed to be successful in school and forced many of them to drop out. The model minority myth doesn’t provide afterschool programs that help with homework and that provide a safe space for Southeast Asian youth. The model minority myth doesn’t tell you that Southeast Asian parents worked multiple jobs at factories, shipping warehouses, and grocery stores and could still barely make ends meet. The model minority myth doesn’t tell you that Southeast Asian parents worked too much to be able to give their children the love and attention they needed. The model minority myth doesn’t tell you that our families were illiterate farmers in the homeland and hadn’t learned the value of education. The problems that immigrants and refugees face in adjusting to American life funnels youth into situations in which they are criminalized and funnels them into the school-to-prison pipeline. This week, we met with incarcerated men at Monroe Correctional Center. James’s first time being incarcerated was at 10 years old. Think about how incarceration teaches (or does not teach) a child that what they did was wrong. Similarly, think about how school suspension teaches students right & wrong, when that student probably isn’t motivated to be there in the first place. James said that if anything could have taken him off the path to incarceration, it would have been an afterschool youth program or a softball team; anything that would have made him part of a group, and would have kept him off the street. Who would have ever though that a gang would be more welcoming than the school system. For some, incarceration leads to deportation, the ultimate life sentence. A lifetime away from the family that raised you and the country that (mal)nourished you. For these refugees who were forced to flee from their homelands as before they were even born, as infants, as young children, America is the only country they’ve ever known. To be sent back to a country that you’ve never known, for a crime that you’ve already paid the time for, is inhumane. Let us not forget that the wars in Southeast Asia, that forced us out of our countries, were started by the United States of Amerikkka.

AAPI’s are currently the fastest growing population in the prison system. Because of the model minority myth, there is very little support for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who are incarcerated and even less support for them when they are released. There is so little that is being done to prevent our young Southeast Asian brothers from entering the system to begin with.

This week has affected me in so many ways.

Seattle was my mother’s first home in the US, and in this way, it is also the beginning of the story of my life. Highline College, where we held our last session was where she attended her first ESL class. When I stepped off the plane, into the airport, I thought about how my mother must have felt. I came from 90° weather in Charlotte; she came from 90° weather in Laos. I’ve always thought it was chilly in WA. She came must have felt the same way. It just made me think, did my mother come to the US to continue to see pain and tragedy in her community? This America, with its police violence, criminalization of people just for the color of their skin or the texture of their hair, incarceration of young & impressionable youth, and the dehumanization of the incarcerated… is this what she expected to come “home” to? I always think a lot about my mother when I am in these spaces. My mother was the first person who taught me to stand up for what I believed in, to defend myself, and to fight back when I was wronged. I don’t know if she knew that I would take those lessons to heart so many years later, and if she envisioned me doing it in this way. She’s a fierce woman, who, despite living through the change of a regime in which freedom of expression was so restricted, has always had her fist in the air and breath in her lungs to shout out what was wrong. I think that if weren’t hetero-patriarchy, social norms, her own immigrant struggle, she’d be in these spaces with me too. She is the one who led me here after all. 

All of my mother’s American siblings live in Washington state. My mother’s side of the family is very much the side that shaped me into who I am today. They love strongly and give so much of themselves, with very little show of affection and very little need for validation or shows of gratitude. I always feel a sense of longing when I visit my family in WA. I feel like there is never enough time to give them love, to have conversations with these soft-spoken people, and to understand what made them who they are, which in turn, made me who I am.

WA is home to so many Southeast Asian refugees, who arrived there shortly after the war. Coming to Washington now, in 2016, with a new view on who I am as a Southeast Asian American, I find myself wishing to see more of this community. To see all of the things I never thought were important while I was growing up. It’s more than an urge to sightsee. I want to Washington through eyes of these refugees, to see how they built life & hope through their experiences of war, escape, and trauma. When I see places like the markets & banh mi shops in Little Saigon, the Khmer & Lao Buddhist temples, I see resilience. I want to understand that resilience and I want to carry it with me like my mother did & still does. As a Laotian-American, born and raised in the United States, I have so much privilege. I’ve never lived through a war or refugee camp. I’ve never been forced to leave my home in order to survive. I’ve never been scared to get take a journey on an airplane, because I always went willingly, and knew that I would be returning home soon. Just hearing and learning all that I did this week about incarceration and deportation was rough for me, and these are things I’ve never even experienced; I can’t imagine what it felt like for the people who actually experienced it. Do I have resilience in my body? I don’t know if I do. I certainly don’t have as much as the people who lived these experiences. 

This is what I carried with me throughout this convening. It weighed heavily on my heart.

"Past. Present. Future." Where my past and present is, where we worked to build our future.