“There are many ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Silence is not one of them.”
My sister recently wrote this introducing her own reflections on Accountability as an Ally in the movement for Black lives. I come to this moment in wholehearted agreement with her, and I come with the intention of closing the gap anyone may have on the role of silence in our lives and in our world right now.
Being Silenced in Childhood
My family not only appreciates silence, we value it deeply. As Buddhists, my parents made me sit with them every night as a child to meditate in silence. I squirmed and whined, and I had no idea what Mom meant when she said that I had to “Clear my mind and make it quiet.” I buzzed with energy and thoughts trickled like an endless stream. Later did I learn we valued the silence of the mind because this practice demands mental discipline. Clearing of the mind led to Right Understanding, to see things as they truly are. Consistent mental discipline would lead to Right Thought. Right Thought would lead to Right Speech and Right Action, the first four steps along the Noble Eightfold Path. It took me many years to understand how engaged this process is, and how much it demands of the self.
But growing up in the United States, America confused my understanding of silence. In public school, silence is passive. Silence is empty. I was a silent child in school because my mother taught me the value of listening as a practice of learning. So my teachers praised me for all that I learned and I got excellent marks on everything — except speaking. They were concerned that I was too quiet, that I didn’t speak up, that I didn’t share my thoughts, and perhaps there was something wrong with me. So I was rewarded for my compliance in the school system, but inevitably shamed for being a quiet Asian child.
My mother also encouraged silence when it came to expressing emotional hurt or pain; rather, I was not supposed to express those things verbally. I did not know then as a child that my mother is someone who benefits from silent contemplation of her pain. It’s not that she didn’t tend to it; she just didn’t see the point in inflicting pain on others if she could handle it herself and as an immigrant mother, there was too much in the world to tend to and handle anyway. She didn’t see that I was a tender and different sort of child, and I was a child who didn’t know what my softness needed. And non-Asian, mostly white women continued to read my introversion and quiet as a perpetual stumbling block to my potential success.
So I continued in school, silent when teachers were talking and animated when teachers asked for intellectual discussion. But I was silent about the racism I experienced from my peers, silent about the sexual assault I experienced as a child, silent about my loneliness, silent about my body hatred, silent about my ever-growing despair. I was silent about the things I didn’t understand when classmates said racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, oppressive statements. I didn’t understand so what had I to contribute to the conversation, then? I was silent because that’s what I thought I needed in order to fit into society, not understanding I was just playing the role of the silent model minority, a compliant and passive Asian girl in the background.
Caught between my parents’ collectivist and Buddhist foundation of silence and their/my desire to survive in American society, this profound misunderstanding of silence drove me to the brink of suicide many times as an adolescent. The despair and self-hatred were so loud in my head it felt like there was only one way to escape and make it all go quiet. To disappear.
Breaking the Silence
What really freed me from my suffering, however, was not death, but a true understanding of liberation.
When I learned critical race studies at the Student Diversity Leadership Conference in 2009, that language finally gave voice to my pain. To me, things like ‘model minority myth,’ ‘ableism’, ‘institutional and internalized oppression’ were not buzzwords but terms I felt deeply in my body. I finally understood my experience as it was situated in being a Vietnamese/American girl. Racial affinity groups then took me to another place, because then I got to see Southeast Asian people my age use their voices and experiences to share and confirm what we lived through. In our shared understanding and willingness to listen, our speaking up freed all of us.
In college, I later had the honor of being Co-Chair of Stanford’s Listen to the Silence Conference 2015, a student-organized Asian American issues conference. My co-chair and I had numerous discussions of what it meant to honor the intention of the conference title, and we asked “What’s the point of listening to the silence if we don’t do anything with what have listened to?” So we added a talkback community session called “Breaking the Silence,” where conference attendees could share verbally in an open forum or post their thoughts on sticky notes. Attendees shared it was their favorite part of the day, as they got to connect, share, and make meaningful next steps for the day after the conference was over.
For me personally, I felt successful in honoring the needs of my Asian American community, recognizing our need for collective listening as well as collective speaking out.
I later brought these experiences into my work as an Asian American high school teacher, and even had the opportunity to bring that back to another iteration of Listen to the Silence as an attendee in 2017. A workshop titled “Breaking the Silence” piqued my interest, but I watched with a vague sense of alarm as two earnest but misguided Asian American men told young Asian American students of various backgrounds that their silence was violence, complicity with white supremacy, and they needed to start speaking up.
In the spirit of listening to the silence, you could hear the shame in the room. The confusion. The pain.
And from my own experience, I knew that it was not right for a room where so many people shared the experiences and based on a shared racial or cultural identity for this silence to hang over us. This was not the correct understanding — all these young people in the room were present because they wanted to fight for justice and grow. And I knew that many of them also grew up in a household like mine, a home that valued silence in one way while white US society valued silence in a diametrically opposed way, and it was wrong to allow this kind of pain to hang when an Asian American issues conference for youth is exactly the place where we hold that experience.
So I broke my own silence. I shared those thoughts, and that I still believe that to deny always silence was to deny a key part of my cultural upbringing. I talked about how violently I felt the silence of white supremacy in my body as an adolescent, and how speaking it into existence was like an exorcism.
And you could hear the pressure escape from the balloon. Multiple young people came up to me later, in tears, grateful that I gave language to their pain. One Chinese American girl from Cupertino told me she really wanted to become a teacher and share her love of justice and math, but she burst into tears upon confessing she was scared because sometimes she didn’t even have the courage to raise her hand in class. I have a lot of love for that moment, and I have so much love for those young people trying to find their way.
In the era of BLM, Asian American Silence is Violence…
But the year is not 2017. The world is not collectively attending an Asian American issues conference. The world is on fire.
And Tou Thao’s silence literally murdered George Floyd.
But let’s be honest. The silence that kills Black lives is greater than that, because white supremacy is enabled by the collective silence of everyone accepting its design. East and South Asians who assimilate and comply with the model minority myth elect to be silent on the racism rampant in their workplaces, as white leadership refuses to hire BIPOC employees, denies Black and Brown expertise, fails to step aside when people of color are truly the leaders. Asian American silence means that anti-Blackness festers in our families. Our cousins and siblings and frat brothers and best friends appropriate Black culture and fetishize Black people as a means of rebelling against their anti-Black parents. Our aunties continue to buy whitening cream, and our grandparents clutch their bags when Black and Brown people pass them in the streets. Our elders and uncles and mothers staunchly take pride in their myth of meritocracy, believing that there must be some laziness in these other people. Our silence means that there are other young Asian Americans out there, hurting because they do not know there is another way to be, not knowing that collective liberation is truly possible.
So let me reiterate my sister: There are many ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Silence is not one of them.
And if you believe that I should afford you compassion and space the way I did with all those young students at LTS2017, I bring you back to my sister’s words.
If you’re reading this, I want you to take a deep breath and count to seven as you inhale. Hold the breath for four. Exhale slowly for another count of seven.
And listen to the silence.
Right Understanding.
Right Thought.
Right Speech.
Right Action.
These are the first four steps on our path to liberation.
I look forward to meeting you there.
