Safety
August 14, 2022
How do we learn to feel safe? During our childhood, if we are lucky enough, we had our parents to protect us and we learned to trust and rely on them for safety. I grew up in a simpler time in Taiwan when we had a whole village to raise us. Parents seldom think twice about letting their children go to school or go out to play by themselves. The adults around us including the neighbors, police, teachers, and other family members, were the extended parents who watch over us and keep us in line. One night, when my classmate and I walked home from an evening class for our college exam preparation, a 40-ish man followed us on his bicycle. I noticed him because he was the only adult in our class full of teenage students. This was the first time I got scared. Instead of going home, I went to my friend’s father’s store and called my mother to come and pick me up. The next day my mother had a serious conversation with the night school administrator. The administrator confronted the guy by using a shaming tactic. The guy never came back again. Those days, shaming worked in my culture.
To this day, as a grown woman, I continue to be vigilant of my surroundings when I am in the public. And I never left my door unlocked when I am in the house. When traveling, I always request a hotel room on a higher floor without an adjacent door. I never park my car in the airport’s remote parking lot.
After I came to this country, the first time a white man yelled at me “chink go home,” at a gas station, followed by another man who spits at me sometime later, I realized I not only need to worry about my safety because I am a woman, but now I need to worry because I am a person of color.
I noticed there are two kinds of fear. We see the bear trundling down the hill toward us. Or we hear the leaves shivering in the windy forest. The first fear is more tangible and could come from a direct experience. The second one requires a lot of imagination. This fear is indirect and implied. As a child, if you noticed your parents automatically locked the car door when you were traveling in a minority neighborhood, even if they never said anything, you already got an image of fear that impact your response later without any real direct experience. My fear is not imaginative. Luckily, I have not had such a direct assault toward me for years now. But the threat did come from many subtler and covert sources in the workplace almost daily. Then the pandemic happened. The direct threat came back. I had a car slowed in front of my house and the driver gave me a finger. I had received anti-Asian hate mail. Yet, I am luckier than those who must ride the subway every day. My fellow Asians continue to be attacked in public places, whether being pushed off the Metro platform, slashed by knives or box cutters to their faces, or carjacked in the parking lot of supermarkets. Nothing like this is new but we are still luckier than black and brown people who often are the target of the police’s heavy-handed treatment and end up losing their lives.
While I maintain my vigilance, I told myself I cannot live in fear like this. To keep living a peaceful life, I must keep my heart open and trust that most people have goodness in their hearts and that this is still a country of law and freedom. I trust that there is a village around me that will keep me safe.