Earlier this month, I posted about being invisible and how my identity as a daughter of immigrants contributed to feeling unseen.
And I am not alone. I grew up in Alhambra.
Monterey Park was the neighboring town where the restaurants didn’t make my family feel like second class citizens. My cousins and siblings escaped to the bowling alley in MP. That’s where we could get into trouble like all the other kids and not be singled out for our racial differences. I think the population today is well over 60% Asian.
I woke up last Sunday to a text from my cousin asking, did I hear about the mass shooting? I told her no, but a quick search and I knew exactly where it happened. The local news took a couple of days to catch up, or I was avoiding it.
The shooting took me back to the 80s, the English-only street sign legislation debates in LA Metro neighborhoods. They took me back to 2021, the Atlanta shootings. My heartache. My community.