It's been one heck of a week — a lot has happened in a short amount of time. And while part of that is the constant back-and-forth these days about Apple event, I want to talk about something else that has been on my mind lately.
As you may have heard, there was a shooting in Georgia that spanned three spas and killed eight people. The majority of the victims are Asian, and there has definitely been a rise in anti-Asian incidents since the pandemic, but the racism has been around much longer than that. Every day in the past week, I've seen a news story about yet another assault on an Asian-American, and while I'm deeply saddened, I've also grown incredibly angry.
My grandparents and family decided to migrate to America many decades ago for a better opportunity, a better life. While my parents originally came from Hong Kong and Shanghai, and my siblings were born in China, they all earned their US citizenship through hard work, even though their English was not the best. However, I was born in America — sunny California, in fact. While I was natively born here, I am proud of my Chinese heritage, which is actually one of the reasons why I decided to keep my maiden name even after I got married. I'm proud of who I am, my family, and where they came from.
I'm no stranger to racism. I've been told "go back where you came from," had remarks made about my appearance, and of course, have heard those racist Asian terms more than once in my few decades of life. I'm quite tired of the Asian hate, and it angers me that such ignorance continues to exist. I was born here, yet people tell me to "go back to China." I hate being asked "so, where are you from?" just because of my appearance; they also seem so surprised when I say "I was born here." I also hate it when people assume from how I look that I can't speak English, especially when I write for a living (and have a better understanding of the English language than a lot of non-writers).
I'm thankful that I haven't had a physical assault happen to me yet, but I feel like I need to bring something to protect myself when I go out. My father passed away two years ago, so it's just my mom and she loves to go out and tries to be friends with everyone — I fear she doesn't fully grasp that not everyone can be trusted and something may happen to her once she can go out again.
I hate that this is a genuine fear that I, as well as so many other Asian-Americans, have right now. It should have never reached this point to begin with. As much as I love living in America, I also hate the fact that things are the way they are because Asians have been used as a punchline for jokes for too long. And when the former leader in chief made people think things like "Kung Flu" are okay to say, and pinpointed the blame on China, it was just the last straw that broke the camel's back.
The Asian hate needs to stop.
In other news, there may be no March event after all from Apple. In fact, it's being said that Apple purposely let it slip that there would be an event in March to weed out leakers within the company. Honestly, this wouldn't surprise me one bit, considering how secretive Apple is about things, but I'm also a bit disappointed. After all, a few of us here at iMore have been looking forward to AirTags for a very long time, and it appears we may have to hold out just a bit longer.
C'mon, Apple, give the people what they want already! But from what it looks like, we may have to wait for April. But the real question is whether or not Jon Prosser will actually shave his eyebrows. This is what we all want to see, right?
In the meantime, there are also those ridiculous Intel commercials with "I'm a Mac" Justin Long. It's similar to how Samsung rips on Apple, but now with Intel. Just because Apple decided to dump them aside and go with its own in-house silicon instead, which also has been blowing Intel out of the water. It's laughable, to say the least, but hey, even Justin Long needs to get paid — he's just doing it for Intel now, instead of Apple. Oh well.
Anyways, that's it for this week. Hopefully we get an Apple event soon-ish.
-Christine Romero-Chan
