Why We Hate Asians
Why We Hate Asians
Atlanta’s massage-parlor assassin was an agent of something larger and darker than he knew.
Forget the outrage over Atlanta.
Forget the righteous indignation.
Forget Trevor and Barack, though
They are certainly telling us the truth.
Forget Biden, standing behind the presidential podium,
Telling the nation, this must stop.
Forget the 150% increase in Asian-directed hate crimes.
Forget all that, and look at the other truth.
We hate Asians because we have to.
Because their starving, ravaged women stood on the rank
corners of bombed-out, napalmed Vietnam,
Singing a lullaby we could not resist:
I love you good all night, GI. I love you good.
While Hanoi outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and
wiped the floor with its last imperialist invader — US.
We have to hate Asians because they work harder,
And get higher grades in school.
We have to hate them
Because we love their long silky hair too much.
Enough to pay high dollar in wig shops all across America.
Especially urban strip malls where women of color have
Been brainwashed to believe they are not good enough
As they are.
We have to hate Asians because they make more money than we do.
Because they made good use of our post-AIDS fear of sexual intercourse,
Helped turn it into a foot-fetish, bonanza,
a mushrooming profit-making, pedicure machine.
Small-framed, bending low, kneeling at our feet,
They practice servility, laughing all the way to the bank.
I love you good all night, GI. I love you good.
We have to hate Asians because they held the line
In Korea, a war we’re still fighting.
We have to hate Asians because China nipped coronavirus in the bud.
And we’re still running scared
Trying to get the jump on vaccine production and new variants,
arguing all the while about masks, lockdowns,
and our precious freedom — to breathe
death on one another.
Sure, it started in China, and they beat it
With the brute power of totalitarianism,
Dragged screaming citizens into forced quarantine,
Used surveillance to enforce sealed lockdowns,
A price that, if we paid it, would be the end of us.
But that’s not why we hate them.
We hate them because we need a scapegoat
for a pandemic that has brought us to our knees.
And because we are secretly afraid
that they are coming for us.
With their math, their science, their TikTok espionage.
With their self-discipline and their expensive cars.
We especially hate the Chinese
Because they are playing the long game,
Have more patience than we do,
Understand history in terms of centuries
And millennia, while we think only
of the next election cycle.
We have to hate Asians because they will not go away.
They rebounded from the coolie railroad past,
Bounced back from the Exclusion Act of 1882,
Returned to the American cities they were born in
after forced relocation to the internment camps of World War II.
They even came back after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
They come back, they come back.
The Asians always come back.
No matter what we do.
We have to hate Asians because they are not obese.
Because they invented Tai chi, Qigong, Yoga,
Gave us Jujitsu, Buddha, Formosa oolong, and meditation.
Because they understand the value of using the enemy’s
Power against him.
But mostly we have to hate Asians because we can’t tell them apart.
We can’t tell Koreans from Chinese. We can’t tell Vietnamese
From Japanese, or Indonesians from Malaysians or Filipinos.
We can’t tell Thai folk from Indian folk or the Dalai Lama’s Nepalese exiles.
All we know is that we don’t know.
And we don’t know shit about Asians.
Which is why we call them Asians.
Which is why we have to hate them.
Which is why a so-called white man
with pubic-hair on his face,
opened fire in three Atlanta massage parlors,
killing six…Asians.
It’s not a hate crime, he told police.
But we know better.
He was acting for the rest of us
Shooting on behalf of America,
Where we have to hate Asians,
Because we fear them.
© 2021 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading.