Dear reader, I'm writing today to talk about racism. Yes, Racism, specifically anti-Asian Racism, everyone's favorite topic (mine included)! It is perhaps a timely topic, with #StopAsianHate going mainstream after all this time. In my opinion, though, Racism hasn't as much as surged in recent months, as it has made itself more visible. Racism was always reclining in our hearts (mine included), drink in hand as it hummed a little ditty; lately it's just decided to turn up the volume.
I used to think, for instance, that East Asians got the light end of the stick when it comes to our burden. A decent amount of our population is not in jail, for instance, and we have education levels and incomes comparable to White people. But the events of this year - not only the Atlanta shooting, but the real violence of 2020 and 2021's anti-Asian attacks in general - have shown me that we're not as sheltered as we appear on paper. The roots of this physical Racism were there all along; it was just in more "quiet" forms: the bamboo ceiling, the hypersexualization of Asian women, notions of Asians as dirty and dogeaters, perpetual foreigners yet also quiet, hard-working model minorities who won't fight back.
This quieter Racism is the topic of Alexandra Chang's book Days of Distraction. Chang wrote this book before Covid and all its accompanying horrors occurred, but I think that makes her story all the more pertinent. There are no hate crimes in the book, no shootings, no yelling to go back to your own country. There is just the subtle headache of every little thing piling on, bit by bit.
Days of Distraction is a semi-autobiographical book following a Chinese American journalist (also named Alexandra) who is tired of being ignored at her job in San Francisco's tech industry. When her White boyfriend decides to move to small-town Ithaca, NY, to attend graduate school, she decides to quit her job and accompany him. This journey leads her to question where her career is going, where her home lies, whether an interracial relationship is worth the struggle, and how to establish herself in a place that marks her as invisible and yet hypervisible.
This book is what you need to read if you are a non-Asian American who wants to know what it is like to, well, be East Asian American. It will put you in Alexandra's headspace, and what a crowded headspace it is. Alexandra worries about literally everything: about being in an Asian female and white male relationship (a common interracial pairing), about being seen as too short when she's the average American height, about whether she's part of the problem and is complicit, about whether she's the tagging-along girlfriend in her boyfriend's story, about whether the towns on the road trip will be suspicious of her, about that time in seventh grade when her teacher said something racist, about how she can't speak Mandarin, and so on into infinity.
It is a lot to take in. When I was reading this, I noted to myself that Alexandra can be a very annoying protagonist sometimes. At the same time, these are the exact things I myself think about (maybe I'm annoying too!). Thus, Alexandra's character, like many Asian Americans, is perhaps "annoying" in her anxiety, but that is what makes her so, so human. After all, this annoyance doesn't make her anxiety any less real; the reasons for it, for instance, are very real. Rather, we can see through this abundance of anxiety that Racism, even "small" bits of it, is drastically harmful to a person's--and to a community's--psyche.
Read this book, even if you have no Asian American friends or loved ones. Read this book. It will help you understand why recent events have taken such a toll on the Asian American community, why there was a foundation for recent violence in the first place, and why race matters for all races, even in the small incidents that seem microscopic. It will open an avenue in your mind, even if it aggravates you along the away as it counters Racism with its very own tools: by pushing and prodding and not bothering to apologize. I give it 4/5 stars.
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