A quick anecdote…

In the 1940s my grandfather and his younger brother traveled from Montana to China to bury their father. During their return journey they stopped in Hong Kong, then occupied by the Imperial Japanese military.

One day in the streets, Japanese soldiers began to beat my grandfather, mistaking him for a Chinese citizen. My great-uncle said that the soldiers probably would have killed my grandfather, but between shouting, “I’m American!” and pulling out a passport, the soldiers finally stopped beating him. 

War is horrific. Beating people is horrific. Killing people is horrific. All of this is horrific regardless of nationality or any other classifier. My grandfather shouldn’t have needed to prove anything for soldiers to stop beating him. But this detail is significant. Because of it, somehow, something got through to the soldiers to see his humanity and exercise mercy. 

Japanese soldiers stopped beating my Chinese-American grandfather and didn’t kill him. If these soldiers could do that then in a time of world war, why can’t our people do the same now?

Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and now George Floyd have all been killed at the hands of fellow Americans in a matter of weeks. Where was our recognition of our shared humanity? Where was our mercy?

One more anecdote: My great-uncle shared this story of his time in Hong Kong when I was visiting him in a nursing home in Oregon. By this point, he was in his 90s. The events of that day he described occurred when he and my grandfather were teenagers. My great-uncle lamented that he’d been frozen by fear to inaction that day. “I always regretted that I didn’t help your grandfather,” he said. It breaks my heart that my great-uncle carried this regret for a lifetime.

So enough inaction. Enough not speaking out. We must stop racist policies that cause our community to be killed by the people we’ve entrusted with protecting us. We must each elevate each other’s humanity, recognize that we all have the right to live and love and have the courage to uphold that for each other.

If that is too lofty, we must at least look within ourselves to find our own humanity and compassion.

The tragedies of Breonna, Ahmaud and George are the ones that we have most recently heard about, but there are countless more similar atrocities that have occurred in the same period that we haven’t heard about, and too many more that preceded them. It’s up to us to stop this from happening again, before more Americans kill other Americans.

Woohoo!

Way back when I recorded an essay for the radio. Remember that? It’s since been produced and published. Grab it on iTunes, Wyoming Public Media, or your local NPR member station.

Oh my! I’ve been waiting for this since February of 2016. When I received the email this morning that it had been completed I almost didn’t open it for fear of hearing my own voice. Of course, that’s silly. I’m so glad I did. So much has changed since I sent a query from chilly London to windswept Wyoming to see if they’d have me on the Wyoming Public Media Spoken Words program. When I went in to record an essay about her, my grandma was still living in her own house at the age of 90. Since then we’ve helped her move into assisted living. When I first went in to record, I was just launching a journey to independently discover who I was as a creative media maker. Since then, I’ve learned much more about that part of myself and feel confident in it. Of course, both of these situations will continue to evolve, not unlike what I describe in this piece, and this podcast captures a perfect snapshot of where my family and I were at that very moment, one tile in a mosaic I’m piecing together.

Many thanks to the team at Wyoming Public Radio & Media​, especially production director Micah Schweizer for thoughtful conversation on third culture and mixed race experiences, and producer Annie Osburne for making sense of it and putting it all together. Thanks to GrubWriters​ and Jennifer Mattson​ for initially giving me an outlet to play with essay, including this one. Thanks to Gakko​ for the media-making and identity formation love. Thanks to CSU APACC​ for the community and Silk Knots support. Thanks to the East Bay Donut Club for the community and nudge to keep writing — this story and others.

P.S. Still building out the Silk Knots archive. Record or write something here.

PSA! Silk Knots needs YOU. Share your story today and get it featured here as an essay or podcast to build community and share our experiences. Get the details here, and feel free to contact me here. I look forward to hearing from you!