李晓美Beauty at Dawn

In the fall of 2020, my roommates and I were assigned to a dorm on the border of Manhattan Chinatown, and I quickly fell in love living in a neighborhood where I'd grown up visiting family. The streets were quieter than normal, but by our spring semester there, news flooded out about stabbings and beatings of Asians across the country and on streets I walked home on every day. As I read about them, I was glad to be near a hum of Asian presence reminding me that people and life continued, even when the rest of America seemed ready for us to be wiped clean off the face of the continent. But as months wore on, I also felt strained and distant from some of my friends. The seeping threat felt existentially serious to me, but many white friends seemed to be barely conscious of the violence. I didn’t particularly fear harm against myself, but I felt protective and powerless at the same time. I thought of my two little sisters, wondering what they knew and crushed when I imagined how they felt. I felt myself wishing I had more of a community of Asian friends around me. I worried that this was partly my fault. What hurt most was the feeling that waves of pain and fear were crashing against me alone, and that no one was behind to hold me up. I felt unmoored, like I was drifting on a floe of ice off of solid ground.

I was grateful to feel attached to the neighborhood I was in – although I did not grow up in New York City, or even in the Chinatown in Boston, I felt weirdly like I was home. My paternal grandma (yin-yin) moved to Chinatown decades ago. She started her own fabric store and lived in the neighborhood for many years until her death, eight months before I moved to Chinatown, blocks away. I liked walking around thinking that she must have known the same streets well.This February I bought a qipao, the first item of Chinese clothing I’ve ever owned, for a Lunar New Year party with my roommates. In May I made these photos for a class, with yin-yin grandma in mind. I wanted to acknowledge the deadenedness I was trying to escape, and to express my sincere first attempt at claiming heritage that I have often before felt too ignorant of to assert.