Atlanta: An Attack On My Community

By: Steven Zhang

Xiaojie Tan dreamed of traveling the world and celebrating her 50th birthday with her daughter. Tan immigrated to the United States, she built a family and started two businesses, but days before Tan’s 50th birthday, a gunman killed her and 7 others. Instead of celebrating her birthday with her family, they would instead spend Tan’s birthday planning her funeral at a Catholic church. “This was a massacre,” says her family. This is just the story of one of the eight people who lost their lives on that Tuesday afternoon. 

The gunman, identified as Robert Aaron Long, drove to Young’s Asian Massage Parlor in Acworth, Georgia. The spa is located in a commercial area 30 miles north of Atlanta. At around 4:50 PM Long entered the building and shot 5 people, 2 died there and 2 others died in a hospital. The 5th person, a man named Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, remains at a hospital in a stable condition. 27 miles south of the first shooting at 5:47 PM, Long shot 3 people in Gold Spa then crossed the street and shot another in Aromatherapy Spa. All four would die. Robert A. Long would be arrested in his car around 8 PM on I-75. In total 8 people lost their lives that day, 6 would be Asian women.

On Wednesday Capt. Jay Baker described the motivations of the shooter, but sounded somewhat empathetic of Robert Long. Baker told reporters there was no immediate reason to think that this was racially motivated, saying, “He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places and it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Theorizing that he “may have been lashing out.” Before saying a line that hurts me to think that someone could really say this about a hate crime. “He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” A really bad day? When most of us have a bad day we take a nap or binge some TV, not commit a hate crime. A man who killed 8 people is not having a bad day.  Let’s call it what it is, a racially motivated hate crime against Asian Americans. That’s what this is, an attack against Asian-Americans. Robert Long deliberately attacked these Asian-owned spas and even was a customer of these businesses previously. 

As an Asian American, I see this as an attack against my culture and my community and I’m sure I'm not the only one in my community who thinks that. This is just one of the many examples of attacks that my community has faced in the past year. A two year old was stabbed in a Sam's Club for “Spreading Coronavirus.”  Vicha Ratanapakdee was a Thai elder who was killed while taking a walk. Countless others have been attacked physically or by hateful words and comments for the sole reason of being Asian. We are not a virus, hate is a virus. 

A study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism finds that although hate crimes may have decreased by 7% with the rise of Covid-19, Anti-Asian hate crimes have risen by 150% from 2019 to 2020. This is a statistic that just shouldn't be true and although this makes me very sad to hear, I am glad to see that people are not sitting idly by. We must be the ones to make change in the world but we must not forget the people who died so that change can happen:

Delaina Ashley Yaun (33)

Xiaojie Tan (49) 

Daoyou Feng (44)

Paul Andre Michels (54)

Hyun Jung Grant (51)

Soon Chung Park (74)

Yong Ae Yue (63)

Please do what you can, write letters, call your lawmakers, talk to someone, etc. The sooner that we can start making change, the sooner we can stop Asian hate.