After the tragedy at Monterey Park, one of my professors wrote an article engendering us to “reimagine what it means to be safe.” What does healing mean in conversation with deeper issues of militarism, racialization, and gendered violence? More importantly, how can we collectively embrace each other when injustice reveals itself in its fullest and most violent form? As a student-leader of multiple pan-ethnic AAPI student groups at the Claremont Colleges, those were the gut-wrenching and emotionally hazardous questions I sought to answer.
Day of the tragedy, I began coordinating Pitzer College’s response process, coordinating with my Center for Asian Pacific Students Manager, the Office of Student Affairs Deans, and Campus Life to facilitate resource-sharing, healing spaces, and collecting funds. The weekend after, our AAPI affinity group planned a trip to Monterey Park to pay our tributes at Star Dance Studio, and we hosted an on-campus fundraiser for the victims during our Lunar New Year event.
This week, we went to Monterey Park, where its City Council talked to the cohort. We collectively reflected on what happened and its social implications. The Councilmembers made clear the structural deficiencies revealed by the event. Housing, mental health, and other services in this ethnoburb were historically overlooked and disinvested by the state imaginary, and that manifested into difficulties in coordinating various county and city agencies.
After our conversation with the Councilmembers, I headed inside Monterey Park’s city hall. Upon entering, I saw a world of visionary art. Artists had transformed the City Hall. Aurora Park victims and their families sent over dozens of cranes, displayed in a beautiful glass display surrounding a quilt with dragons, pandas, and frogs — Chinese folklore symbolic of great power, luck, friendship, and healing. On the other side of the city hall, local high school students put up banners imbued with joy.
In our comprehension of social movement, I feel like we sometimes have a narrow understanding of “activism” as a battle of pure political redistribution. Art proves there are other ways to inspire collective change, not just societally, but on the level of subjectivity, of the human experience. The textures and rhythms moving through and produced by aesthetic ideology work to manufacture our ways of being, feeling, and acting with each other in this world. At Monterey Park, I felt an almost intrinsic human interdependence exhibited all around me in the art, from aspirations written on a wishing tree to the soaring dreams of better worlds carried by origami cranes, this art that I happened to stumble upon rooted and invigorated me. Creative social change work and cultural acts, especially for Asian American & Pacific Islander communities, reclaim stories so often lost in dominant cultural narratives. So often, we seem to value only bourgeois “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” experiences, (e.g. “Crazy Rich Asians”), dehumanizing other creative lives, like those in Monterey Park.
The artwork and city council conversation gestured towards a core value of community that’s slowly been reinforced throughout my time in the CLA. Former State Controller Betty Yee this week told the cohort that we must “always put a foot in the community.” We cannot entirely rely on political consultants, campaign managers, and legislative directors to save us. We must listen to the most marginalized and silenced, to the voices and people erased by “statistical insignificance.” Monterey Park’s community invigorates my belief in our collective political wills and our solidaristic agencies at the grassroots level.
The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of CAUSE or the CAUSE network.
Written by Kenny Lê, Leadership Academy 2023 Intern.
The CAUSE Leadership Academy (CLA) for students is a nine-week, paid, internship program that prepares college undergraduates to lead and advocate for the Asian Pacific Islander community on their campuses and beyond.