For those reading the news, Monterey Park is just the location of the U.S.'s deadliest mass shooting in months. For edacyu, it's always been a safe place. 'Monterey Park has done so much to lift me up over the years. Now it’s time for me to do the same'
that the influx of Asians in San Gabriel Valley “had profound implications for nearly every institution of civic life, affecting the way schools, police, city halls, courts and post offices conduct their day-to-day business.
” Even though we lived in the Asian sanctuary of the San Gabriel Valley, I attended mostly white private schools in Pasadena, where diversity in classculture was a rarity in the student body. Since school constituted nearly all of my social fabric, I felt immense pressure to assimilate into whiteness from first grade into my mid-teens. I often felt I needed to defend my mom’s accented English, or overexplain why the I brought to school looked so different from their beef jerky, even though it was effectively the same. There are some other memories that carry such a visceral hurt, it feels like they happened yesterday. In first grade, the only other Chinese boy told me to “speak English” when I went up to say hi on the first day of school. In third grade, a white friend I had over after school told me my dad “smelled homeless” because he couldn’t speak English and lit incense at our Buddhist altar. In sixth grade, I watched a group of white boys steal a Chinese classmate’s red envelope out of his backpack on Lunar New Year, emptying the contents into their own wallets and throwing the red, gold-foiled lined sleeve in the trash. Seeing this happen filled me with a rage I can’t find the words to adequately express to this day.But in Monterey Park’s bustling Chinese community, my parents and I found a confidence we lacked in predominantly white spaces. My mom transformed into a graceful, elegant woman holding her own as she haggled over mahogany chairs, a far cry from the nervous woman I went shopping with in Old Town Pasadena. My father would order for us at restaurants in CantoneseTaiwanese, a stark contrast to how he stuttered through simple English phrases at Denny’s. And when we visited during Lunar New Year, I felt downright invincible as I looked at the red lanterns hanging from every storefront, the festive spirit of the city washing over me. I didn’t know it then, but Monterey Park’s refusal to assimilate intohelped me proudly embrace my Asian American identity in high school and college. As I got older, of course, a lot of things changed. I moved away from the SGV, first to the Bay Area and then to Los Angeles. The SUPERCO closed down not too long after I got my first rice cooker to take to college. Our Chinese medicine doctor retired.
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