By Mahlon Meyer
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
It looks like a blotch. But when you look more closely, you can see a square drawn around an old house in a photo. The person who drew it used pink, as if she were trying to create a remnant of a girlhood that, in fact, never existed.
For it was in this house that she, at 15, defended her mother with a knife as a homeless person tried to get in, who was yelling, “I’ll kill you all!” It was in front of this house that a neighborhood child molester, in a raincoat, groped little girls when they were 8, 9, and 10.
Thirty years later, if she could travel back in time, with the half dozen guns she now owns, she would pick her targets carefully.
“Knowing who I was back then, I probably wouldn’t use a gun on the flasher because I didn’t know it was wrong then—I just thought it was part of life living in that neighborhood,” said the 43-year-old Cambodian refugee who came here when she was 4 and goes by the pseudonym, Ace P., in gun shooting circles. “As for the transient, I would, because I had a sense of danger. And mom was with me.”
Ace P. training (Photo courtesy Ace P.)
No more assumptions
Thus, the new face of gun ownership in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community emerges—from bad dreams, from childhood, from a new threat of anti-Asian hate that has persisted now for almost a decade, and from a gun lobby that knows how to target a growing fear among the community.
For decades, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, elected officials took it for granted that all AAPI communities were opposed to guns.
And ever since the Wah-Mee Massacre in 1983, when gunmen tied up and executed 13 people in the Chinatown-International District (CID), it has been taken for granted that gun violence was even more strongly condemned by Chinese Americans.
Not a monolith
But as Ace P. illustrates, the stereotypes are wrong. A full 58% of Americans have been directly or indirectly touched by gun violence, according to the AAPI Victory Alliance, a nonprofit. But support for gun control is waning among AAPIs and is no longer monolithic.
Ace P. after shooting at a gun range (Photo courtesy Ace P.)
Only 68% of Chinese Americans still “strongly agree” that “we should have stricter gun laws,” according to an Asian American voter survey organized by Asian American Futures, another nonprofit. For Filipinos and Vietnamese, the numbers drop to 52% and 50%, respectively.
Yet at the same time, there is no other minority group that has such a high level of fear about gun violence, according to the AAPI Victory Alliance.
All in all, the mixture of fear, trauma, and strong cultural differences and experiences make the issue much more complex than one would expect.
An interest in justice
Ace P. grew up wanting to be a law enforcement officer or an FBI agent. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, she moved to another camp in the Philippines when she was 3. She grew up with a strong sense of the importance of justice. After coming to Washington state, her parents often shared stories of the communist revolution in their home country that heightened her sense of uncertainty.
“The communists had spies who would wait under your house and listen to everything you said,” she said in an interview. “If you said one thing wrong about the communists, you would be executed.”
Free, but alone
After Ace grew older, and was working as a data analyst, a promotion moved her to Chicago—the first time she was on her own.
“I always had to put my parents’ needs first,” she said.
Free now to pursue things she wanted to do, such as to go for long drives or go hiking in neighboring Wisconsin or other states, she was at first elated.
But several incidents reminded her of the uncertainty she felt as a child. In addition, she was now alone.
A sense of danger
It started when she was visiting the Planetarium in Chicago. A man seemed to be following her.
“There was no one else around,” she said.
On solo hikes, or long drives, she felt the loneliness and isolation pressing down on her—but also a sense of danger.
A major incident
During a stop at a gas station in Indiana, a man came up to her open driver’s side door and started chatting.
“It was to distract me,” she said.
At that moment, the lights went out in the service station, and she felt someone else scrabbling at her other front door—trying to get in.
“I looked at the man in front of me and I said, ‘My name is Ace, and I want to thank you for being so kind.’”
He took a long look at her then seemed to come to a decision.
He slapped his hand twice on the roof of her car.
The intruder on the passenger side immediately left. And a blue pickup truck pulled up out of nowhere.
“You’ve gotta be more careful,” he said. “There are some bad people around here who will take advantage of you.”
And with that, he left.
Solace and community
“He could have reached over and choked me,” said Ace. “But because I had humanized myself, I was able to use my personality to disarm him.”
Still, Ace found solace in guns and the gun community.
Through social media, she found a gun group that met up once a week.
Just for joining, she was given one week of free training.
She gradually amassed multiple types of Glock automatic handguns. And she became proficient in shooting and handling an array of other firearms.
Other survivors
But her story, though increasingly common, is not the whole picture. As gun violence specifically targeting or involving the AAPI community has grown, so have voices against gun violence from the same community demanding stricter laws and more accountability from elected officials.
A nation of survivors
Mia Livas Porter lost her brother 30 years ago, when he took his own life with a gun after a 5-year struggle with schizophrenia.
Mia Livas Porter also lost her brother through gun violence
“We didn’t just lose my brother, Junior, that day. His death fractured our family. It shut down my brother, Danny, who was the one who found Junior’s body. Up to now, he can’t get married, he’s anti-social, he can’t have friends, he’s afraid to get a job. And my dad’s health deteriorated. He died within three years. And I tell people he died of a broken heart,” she said in a virtual convening last month sponsored by the AAPI Victory Alliance.
But it was not until the Monterey Park, California mass shooting in January that she joined gun control groups and began advocating for gun safety.
“Being a strict Filipino Catholic immigrant family, we had to bury our shame. We were raised with the message that what happens in the family stays in the family,” she said.
But this year, she has attended conferences in Washington, D.C. and helped lead the virtual convening about gun safety.
“We have become a nation of survivors,” she said.
Healing from the inside out
Ka Lor Vang, another survivor of gun violence, is a member of the Hmong minority and spent her early childhood in a refugee camp in Thailand. Vang also lost a younger brother. He was gunned down at the age of 22 with his wife and 5-year-old daughter in the living room of his in-law’s house on Mother’s Day in 2018.
Ka Lor Vang lost her brother through gun violence
“We don’t know what were the motivations, why it happened, but we do know, it started because of guns,” she said. “Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out why we have this issue in a first-world country. What is the root of it and how can we stop it and prevent it, not just for AAPIs, but for every citizen?”
Like Porter, Vang shared her story in an attempt to change the prevailing narrative about gun ownership in our country.
In part, they were responding to a question that came up during the convening, in the chat comments:
“If not guns, what can we do to feel safe as a community?”
Vang, who has gone back to school to study nursing, responded emotionally.
“Healing from the inside out. Advocating and trying to make change in the local government and seeing there has been change in safety gun storage laws and local gun restrictions and background check laws,” she said. “Those are small movements, yes, very small, but they have been reassuring to me that we as a society are getting to where we don’t need weapons to keep us safe in the home, and it’s going to be a whole community that’s coming together to keep each other safe, in the knowledge that there are good people out there.”
Vang mentioned, for example, that the man who stopped the shooter in Monterey Park didn’t have a gun.
“We don’t need guns to fight guns,” she said.
Actions
Both listed multiple actions anyone can take to prevent gun violence.
These include advocating for legislators to write laws and to ban assault weapons and ammunition, voting for candidates at every level who support gun safety—from the school board to the White House—requiring extreme risk protection orders, raising awareness about a new national 988 suicide-prevention line, and increasing awareness about safe gun storage.
Henry Lo, the first openly gay city councilmember from Monterey Park, who was also at the convening, said local ordinances that require safe storage exist but that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have put them in jeopardy.
Fueled by gap between rich and poor
Moreover, gun violence not only grows out of increasing economic disparities, it fuels them.
Porter said such actions as planting more trees and creating parks in low-income areas have been shown to decrease gun violence.
According to a study, “Social capital, income inequality, and firearm violent crime,” published in “Social Science and Medicine” in 1998, the breakdown in social cohesion—the idea that no one will look out for anyone else any longer—contributes to a belief in the need for guns.
At the same time, gun violence increases hardships for the poor.
In Monterey Park, the shooting took place during the Lunar New Year, a time when businesses depend on increased sales.
Since the shooting, local businesses and restaurants have seen a drop in customers. One noodle shop, for instance, was typical of the decline.
More than 40% of clients had stopped coming since the shooting, said Lo.
Targeting the Asian American community
Meanwhile, gun manufacturers have taken advantage of anti-Asian hate crimes, which have fueled fear in the community. Traditionally, manufacturers play on themes such as men needing guns to be masculine. Now, the industry specifically has begun targeting Asian Americans. One ad shows an Asian man with a long automatic weapon in his hand, held jauntily up, while he laughs uproariously while looking down from the top of a tall building, surrounded by other Asian men.
The caption reads that he no longer has any need to fear anti-Asian hate.
Sales of firearms to Asian Americans have increased almost 30% during the past two years, according to the Firearm Industry Trade Association.
“Asian Americans have the lowest rate of gun ownership, but because of anti-Asian hate, gun manufacturers have used the opportunity to sell firearms to our community, and I say that’s unacceptable, and we will not let our community become a new ground to promote more gun violence,” said Lo.
Serious gun safety
Ace is certainly aware of the dangers of gun violence. Statistics show that guns in the home are much more likely to be used against loved ones, often by mistake, or in suicide, than to ward off a home invasion.
Ace recently bought four biometric safes for her guns at $300 each. She tells her family members, including her beloved nieces and nephews, “There are never any pranks done in this house.”
Each family member knows to call or text first before coming over.
“It’s not bad for them to grow up with an awareness of gun safety,” she said.
Home invasion
Still, the memories of childhood remain—and the determination never to let them repeat. As a child, Ace encountered a dead body behind a dumpster. Teachers at school warned children about the dangers of child molesters. And somehow, her house seemed to be an epicenter.
“The M street house, where I grew up, was where all the neighborhood kids—all of them immigrants like me—experienced the flasher, or child molester, and where the transient tried to get into my house,” she said.
In fact, the encounter with the enraged transient man was based on a misapprehension.
“A bunch of gangbangers started beating up a homeless guy near our house. After they got tired of it, they ran into an alley next to our house. Then, he got up and ran after them. It looked like they had run into our house. I had been outside, and I ran inside and locked the door. The transient who got beat up tried to get in. My mother put down the dead bolt. But he was outside, in the walkway, and he was so pissed, he kept trying to break down the door,” she said. “Only my mom and I were at home. I only had the kitchen knife, but I knew that wasn’t enough. That’s why I’m so big on protecting against home invasion.”
Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.