A Personal Reflection, March 17, 2021

Blog Post
Written By Muhan Zhang
Graphic by Jess X. Snow.

Graphic by Jess X. Snow.

It’s at once so easy and so opaquely difficult to  explain why the news of the killings are affecting me so much. Sad news is upsetting, and even more upsetting for those who actively engage in thinking, writing, activism, community, family with those impacted. The more I expand my understanding of how things are connected (how the personal is political, how local injustices are global, how independent events are systemic), the more I extend my empathy beyond my tribe or region, the more the headlines about violence and injustice near and far feel personal, the harder it is to wrap my head around the fathomlessness, ceaselessness of the injustice and suffering in the fabric of our (collective and individual) daily reality. 

These ruptures are a shock to the system, shaking me out of the complacent haze with which I - we - daily navigate life so we can get on with it, until something happens and we can’t anymore. These moments are characterized by a profound cognitive dissonance that this (???) is the world we live in, and whatever accumulation of Trump/Fox News soundbites, fetishized background/bit actors, Orientalist aesthetics, pornography (etc. etc.) has once more broken a dam and led a white man - a person not themselves ever experiencing the material systemic racisms written into law & order & labor & capital but only perceiving these virtual grotesque white imaginations of the Other as projected by the aforementioned media - to kill. For those who actually experience and live under this oppressive regime - both in the “real”/material world and its distorted reflection beyond the looking glass of our screens - the cognitive dissonance forces us to consider how unsafe we actually are. I really want to reject this impulse, because of how much I hate self-pity, how much I acknowledge my many privileges (pertaining predominantly to class), how much I must subsequently wrestle with how much I actually suffer versus what is only imagined, how much “I” am or am not any number of “we”’s. But I guess sometimes it doesn’t really matter how deep the well is because the journey down still feels like falling.

As my stomach has been dropping and my head spinning on this day, I remembered a couple of things. First, a recent memory from this weekend that I put away and recalled just now, of when I was alone at Tom’s place on Commercial Drive for the first time and went out at 10:30pm to buy pizza down the street. I’ve gotten pizza, run to the corner store, leisurely strolled this area at night countless times since I started dating Tom last fall, but virtually always with him, a tall white man, accompanying me. I had never conceptualized this area as dangerous or unfamiliar and someplace I needed to be cautious, and didn’t think to when I stepped out to buy pizza, until I was catcalled by a pair of white men passing me on the sidewalk. I’ve been catcalled a lot in my life, including in Vancouver, but to have this happen in a neighbourhood I’d become so familiar with triggered a similar (albeit less intense) feeling of cognitive dissonance as described above. Having walked this street exclusively in the company of a man, I was suddenly experiencing it in his absence - or, more aptly put, experiencing it as myself, in all of my (apparent) vulnerability as a visibly small Asian woman. In the moment, my thoughts flashed to (other) (more) violent news of the woman in the UK who was killed by a police officer while walking home. I quickly imagined dashing into one of the local establishments I’ve become familiar with for protection. A few days later (last night), walking alone to the bus stop downtown after drinks with friends, I call Tom, just in case. I think about how the other woman was on the phone with her partner when she was murdered.

It’s hard to confront the reality that you are maybe never safe, that the society you live in does not protect you, does not accommodate your very simple needs and desires, like your ability to grab pizza or bus home (not even very late) at night. In these moments, loath to fall into the self-absorbed despair and self-pity which I so despise, I spiral horizontally instead, trying to extend my empathy towards those who disproportionately experience more violence and less access than myself. This hurts me too (especially when I think of all the Karen’s and white women who would cry wolf and never think to think of deeper and intersectional injustices), but it also helps me to build a mental bridge between myself and others to hold on to. Solidarity is itself precarious and painful, as I’ve experienced amply in the past months of working in a fragile fledgling anti-racist consortium. I don’t know how to navigate my own grief and guilt as it confronts someone else’s. I don’t want to compound my private pain any more. I see the posts calling on me to do so for others, and others to do so for me, but sometimes I just don’t want to anymore.

When I first caught glimpses of this news late last night, my first impulse was to log out or delete Instagram so I wouldn’t have to see the outpouring of anger and grief on IG posts and stories, the graphics, the screenshots of Tweets, the headlines and clips of bad media coverage, and the op-ed’s refracted again and again ad infinitum. This brings me to the second thing I remembered while sitting here spiralling, and what led me to writing all this. In several of the major cultural/media moments sparked by widely publicized violence in recent years, most notably the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, I have also reacted in a similar fashion. I stayed up all night after the first inklings of #MeToo testimonies started multiplying on Facebook, writing through frantic heartbeat and frenzied thoughts on my phone in bed in the dark a thing that would later be published as a half-baked opinion piece in a student newspaper. Last summer I wrote thousands and thousands of words spanning personal reflection/introspection on my complicity in anti-Blackness and more outward-facing advocacy and CTA’s to the Canadian art world. At one point I also spent up to three or four hours daily on the phone with my friend and Arts Accountability collaborator, as we both tried to process/learn/grow while doing “the work” in tandem with one another. I think the latter experience was actually and positively transformative, but it also maybe crystallized into a particular kind of sensitivity or trained my mind/body into a particular neuro-physiological response to violence in mass media. (Call it a trauma response or don’t, this is just a theory/personal reflection).

I don’t know, I wish I were able to either be so distant from this that it registers just as a headline, or so advanced in my personal development that I am able to move past or move simultaneously inward and outward as I process. But also this is only Day 1 and maybe today I’m allowed to just turn off my phone and cry.

Resources (writing and artwork that have helped me):

Organizations I’ve donated to*:

*As of posting this, I gave $50 to SWAN, $25 to Butterfly, set up a $20 monthly gift to WISH, and $20USD to Red Canary Song.

Muhan Zhang
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