On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old man went on a shooting spree at three massage parlors in Atlanta. He killed eight people, six of them Asian women: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng. The shooter, Robert Aaron Long, cited his sex addiction as the reason for his actions—to him, these women were temptations to be purged. Most men try to “cure” their so-called yellow fever by dating Asian women; Long opted to kill them.
At a press conference, Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office summarized Long’s motives: “It was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” The media seized on this flippant remark, and social media was flooded with hot takes. One year later, a Google search for “Atlanta spa shooting ‘bad day”’ returns about 2.5 million results. Individual searches for “Atlanta spa shooting” and the name of each Asian victim return between 1,400 and 22,000 results. Even adding up all the search results on these victims—a poor way to determine just how much was published about them, since most articles include all their names—gives you just 91,600 results. Surely these six lives were worth more than 3.7 percent of the discussion devoted to Long’s bad day?
When the media did focus on the victims, there was often a salacious undertone to much of the reporting, as journalists tripped over themselves, and sites like Rubmaps, trying to determine if the women had in fact been sex workers. Shimizu’s words ring in my ears: “Sex is the primary site of contestation over the making and unmaking of Asian female legibility in popular culture.” In English-language media, these women were centered when journalists wanted to interrogate and stigmatize the possible uses of their sexuality; otherwise, they served as props in yet another mass shooting story.
I return to GQ’s “Oriental Girls”:
When you get home from another hard day on the planet, she comes into existence…. She’s there when you need shore leave from those angry feminist seas. She’s a handy victim of love or a symbol of the rape of the Third World nations, a real trouper.
The Asian victims in Atlanta were in America because of the rape of their homelands. What the cultural conversation around Long’s bad day missed is that these women, who were between the ages of 44 and 74, were all born during or just after a period of US-led wars in Asia. For them, immigration was one of the few paths to escape war and economic devastation. These women had been “real troupers”—whitespeak for oppressed people who quietly accept injustice. Once in the US, they had limited ways to earn a living, thus entering a system that exploited them while rendering their risks invisible.