Written by Wayne Huang.
Image credit: Police Line Crime Scene by Tony Webster/ Wikimedia commons, license: CC BY-SA 4.0.
On May 15, 2022, a fatal shooting occurred at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California. During a lunch reception, the gunman locked the doors and opened fire with approximately a hundred people present. The church has been recognised for its significant role in Taiwan’s democratisation and independence movements since the 1970s. It has led to the suspicion that this historical connection motivated the assailant to travel over a hundred miles from Las Vegas to target the church. The shooting resulted in six individuals being shot, including Dr John Cheng, who lost his life while attempting to disarm the gunman.
One year after the tragedy, I feel compelled to write to commemorate Dr Cheng and all the Taiwanese people, both within their homeland and abroad, who have lost their lives simply because they are Taiwanese. Living in a country plagued by distressing shootings, I also feel compelled to explore different avenues for fostering solidarity beyond the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) framework. While acknowledging the unparalleled impact of chattel slavery on Black lives, I contemplated the insights of antiblackness theorists when confronted with the Laguna Woods shooting. I align myself with anti-blackness theorists to think about gun violence and erased subjectivities. I see them as thinkers who shed light on the meaning of survival in the face of death, who reject the confines of liberal-progressive discourse. In this respect, we are in the same boat.
In the Wake: On Double Erasure
Boat creates wake when it moves through the water. Christina Sharpe draws upon the multifaceted connotations of “wake” to develop her auto-theory of the quotidian calamities endured by Black people in the afterlife of slavery. As the term’s conventional meaning suggests, the wake keeps death-in-life in view. Sharpe defines wake work as “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.” It reconstructs life in the face of death. It is an effort that survives the end of the world.
Sharpe writes: “We live in the knowledge that the wake has positioned us as no-citizen. If we are lucky, the knowledge of this positioning avails us particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, re/imagining the world.” My wake-work aims at re-seeing the double erasure of the position of Taiwanese. The 62-year-old gunman, Chou Wen-wei, was initially identified as a Chinese immigrant who was aggravated by the growing political tensions between Taiwan and China. However, subsequent sources claimed that Chou is, in fact, Taiwanese. Some referred to him simply as Asian. Further evidence reveals that he is a member of the Las Vegas chapter of a notorious pro-unification association directly funded by the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification (CCPPR).
Amidst the confusion surrounding Chou’s identity in the US media, China adopted an extremely ambiguous approach in its coverage of the incident. The state-owned media, CCTV dedicated merely two lines to the news: “Orange County police announced that a May 15 church shooting suspect had been captured. Many people were shot. One person died. Four people were injured.” The report refrained from mentioning ethnicity or nationality; neither Dr Cheng nor Chou Wen-wei was named. No additional context was provided, despite the evident connection between violence and Chinese nationalism. When asked at a regular international press conference, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said he had noticed relevant reports on the shooting. He urged the US government to “take action against its increasingly severe gun violence problem.”
A parallel erasure, more implicit in nature, occurred within progressive circles in the United States, particularly among groups focused on combating anti-Asian hate. As Wen Liu points out in her comment after the incident, the Stop AAPI Hate coalition, a nonprofit based in California, remained awkwardly silent on the shooting, in stark contrast to their responses to the killings in the Korean salon in Dallas and in the Black neighbourhood of Buffalo. On May 24, 2022, Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) released a letter addressing the incidents in “Buffalo, Dallas, and Laguna Woods” altogether:
We understood that violence always exists in a context. That context includes the racialised anti-Asian rhetoric of the pandemic, the country’s long legacy of white supremacy, a culture that makes access to guns too easy, and the many disproportionate challenges facing working-class and immigrant communities.
A glaring omission in this list of contexts is evident. How about the role of Chinese nationalism? The resemblance between Chinese state propaganda and the discourse surrounding Stop AAPI Hate is striking and does not necessitate a grand conspiracy theory. More than ever, we need a wake work to rewrite the double erasure perpetuated by Chinese nationalism and US progressive racial politics.
Position of the Unthought: On Assimilation
For Taiwanese who have experienced life overseas, this scenario may be all too familiar: You visit a website, perhaps to purchase a flight ticket, apply for a scholarship, or register for a membership. Browsing through the list of countries, you find that the only option available is “Taiwan, China.” Despite the frown on your face, you decide to carry on. This everyday denial is a reality experienced by many Taiwanese.
According to Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers, Black Americans face the irrevocable loss of their genealogies. The discourse of “motherland” (or “ancestral” land) employed by the Chinese state and nationalists to characterise the China-Taiwan relationship reverses this gendered rhetoric. Taiwanese are burdened with an undesired genealogy, like a child carrying a cursed family name. The mother-and-child narrative says, again and again, I possess you; you belong to me; I claim you, and if you say no, I can kill you. The missiles deployed along China’s coastline and the hovering fighter jets make this point clear. This rhetoric of annihilation, the extreme form of Chinese nationalism, is what we see in Chou’s motive.
In a dialogue between Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, the concept of the “position of the unthought” was coined to highlight the problem within American political discourse and imagination. The Black experience is often relegated to this position when social scientists adopt an integrationist approach that implies an “ultimate metanarrative thrust of the national project.” Similarly, in the context of Stop AAPI Hate, the inherent Sinocentrism contributes to the erasure of the position of Taiwanese. The US progressive racial politics further perpetuates this by homogenising Asians, in which China and ambiguous Chineseness become the most dominant symbols, overrepresenting the diverse AAPI communities.
Stop AAPI Hate, originally initiated by the Chinese for Affirmative Action, has expanded its focus to combat all forms of anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander hate in the name of solidarity. However, its origins as a response to pandemic-related hate crimes highlight its core mission of destigmatising Chinese Americans. There is, therefore, an unsolved tension between the reaffirmation of Chineseness and the struggles faced by other Asian communities living in the shadow of China. Within this Sinocentric framework, any criticism of China is often labelled as “hate” against the broader AAPI community.
It is important to acknowledge that Chinese Americans have faced increased violence during the pandemic, and I do not deny this fact. I intend to slow down this metanarrative and examine the position of the unthought. When progressive organisations like Code Pink joined Stop AAPI Hate and advocated for statements like “China is Not Our Enemy.” I wonder whose interests does this “our” represent? Code Pink’s China FAQ not only overlooks the struggles of other nationalities under Chinese nationalism, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan but also disregards the relentless efforts of many Chinese grassroots activists and dissidents who have sacrificed their freedom and lives.
The way “AAPI” assimilates diverse experiences to construct a unifying Asian identity brings forth concerns about the underlying power dynamics. Are Asian Americans prepared to confront the complexities of Asian-ness, including the historical trauma and ongoing geopolitical violence that exist among Asian communities? While the Middle Passage serves as a shared foundation for the Black struggle, is there truly a shared ground for Asians? All too often, white supremacy is invoked as the sole problem.
Towards Thick Solidarity
While it may be unfair to generalise that Stop AAPI Hate represents the entire spectrum of US progressive politics, there is a clear deficiency in the progressive-left narrative when it comes to addressing the violence of Chinese nationalism. On the other hand, the Laguna Woods shooting has led to calls for heightened policing, surveillance, and state intervention. Recognising the pervasive presence of antiblackness among overseas Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans is crucial. Jared Sexton refers to this mentality as “people-of-colour blindness,” which can potentially inflict more harm than good on Black and other non-white communities, further marginalising the position of the Taiwanese.
This piece is an initial exploration into the pressing need for “thick solidarity,” what Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange define as “a kind of solidarity that mobilises empathy in ways that do not gloss over difference, but rather pushes into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialised experiences.” It is an intersectional empathy that acknowledges both interconnectedness and interstices. The term Black-Asian solidarity will remain an empty signifier if people who use this term fail to recognise the enduring impact of chattel slavery and the unequal power dynamics among different Asian communities, both in Asia and in their diasporic counterparts.
Taiwanese have much to gain from thinking along with antiblackness theorists. They are trailblazers who question the ambiguity of the “we” statement; they are thinkers who refuse the easy answer provided by progressive narrative; they are predecessors who know how to rebuild a world without given genealogies; they are survivors who are most attentive to how seemingly benign political discourse reinforces annihilation; they are activists who explore alternatives outside assimilation. According to Sharpe, wake work is both a process of thinking as well as a practice of care and healing. Embracing these insights might be crucial for our country’s and community’s survival.
Wayne Huang, born in New Orleans and raised in Taiwan, studies anthropology, Islam, and Southeast Asia at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This article was published as part of a special issue on One Year After the Laguna Woods Shooting Tragedy.
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