Artwork by Sresta Aitharaju
A day after the Monterey Park shooting, I began working on a social media post to express my solidarity with the grieving Asian American community. It was initially headlined: “On January 21st, Monterey Park marks the 33rd mass shooting of 2023.” I decided to scrap the headline because within the 24-48 hours I had started writing, the tally rose to 39.
When this article was posted, a month after the Monterey Park incident, there had been at least 80 mass shootings recorded in 2023, thus continuing a recent, disturbing trend where mass shootings outnumber the days in a year. While this statistic seems absurd, it is not unfamiliar. Behind these statistics and growing tallies is an American experience defined by gun death. For American youth, there has been no reality void of incessant anxiety and grief. Our childhoods have been defined by the commonplace gun violence headlines, community vigils, and school lockdown drills.
But that is what makes Monterey Park and the gun violence epidemic a tragedy: it is familiar – and continues to grow uncomfortably familiar – as incidents become increasingly common and personal.
While I am not an immediate resident within Monterey Park, the city and the surrounding San Gabriel Valley provide an extension of what I consider “home.” A temporary escape from the whiter suburbs of Santa Clarita, I spent many a weekend in Monterey Park, developing my sense of ethnic identity by immersing myself in a community that is densely and proudly Asian American. My childhood was weekend brunches of bickering with my sister over dim sum and egg custard tarts. Then, it was Saturday morning haircuts with stylists who, although spoke Vietnamese rather than English or Burmese, communicated with me just fine. And then, it was Lunar New Year celebrations, where the cultural conception of the holiday was preceded by childish petulance to collect money-filled red envelopes.
After years of making visits to friends and family, I came to know San Gabriel Valley well. If you get the chance to visit, you will discover that the valley is a microcosm of the AAPI interpretation of the American Dream. In cities saturated with high schools of nationwide prestige, after-school tutoring programs, and a stressful culture pushing competition and success, diasporic communities like Monterey Park represent the Asian immigrant hope for social mobility through individualism, agency, and hard work. There, you find sentiments where culturally normative desires involve attending a prestigious college (preferably in the Ivy League) and securing a high-paying career (preferably in STEM). Thus, the AAPI American Dream comes with the alluring promise of success with enough willpower and a strong work ethic. However, this dream derives itself from more than a desire among AAPI immigrants to build their families and support their communities, but also from a historic permeation of xenophobia when Asian Americans were purportedly averse to the American economy. Whether it be the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that affirmed anti-Chinese labor sentiments, or violence after the contemporary scapegoating of Asians as the cause of COVID-19, American history exemplifies pressures of Asian conformity to American civic values as a prerequisite to citizenship. This pressure creates a system of conditional inclusivity that promises the American Dream in exchange for AAPI obedience and diligence.
The influence of the American Dream within so many Asian communities is why instances such as Monterey Park are so heartbreaking. Despite these pressures to work hard and do right by the values of the US Constitution, the rose-tinted lens of the American Dream shatters upon seeing places cultural communities defiled by gun violence.
Witnessing the shock surrounding Monterey Park, I know that the community falls under the “unconventional” victims of gun violence – the ones that you would never expect to see as victims of mass shootings. Monterey Park unfortunately, is not a particularly uncommon incident, and joins one of many cases of gun violence which share sentiments that “you would never think it could happen to you”. The truth is, the American gun violence epidemic is systemic and does not spare communities such as Monterey Park. When we rely on American individualism to rationalize our outcomes of success and failure, or life and death, we fail to acknowledge the presence of political institutions in determining our lives. When we continue to wait for incidents such as Monterey Park to occur before acknowledging the deep-rooted dangers of gun violence, we allow for mass shootings and gun death to become increasingly normal despite the devastation it brings.
As a gun violence prevention activist, I know that the political organizing sphere lacks AAPI voices. Regardless if this is a result of the model minority myth that pressures AAPI representation out of politics or a cultural indifference to American governance, we must acknowledge the dangers of allowing disparities in political representation to persist, for we allow our communities to fall victim to institutional oversights. Preventative measures that protect racial and ethnic safe spaces require an engagement with politics and policy to close the gaps between the promises of the American Dream and our present reality.