AsianWeek correspondent Shirley Lin finds solace at D.C. march
By Shirley Lin | Special to AsianWeek
The sun shone so vigorously, the speakers’ words rumbled so forcefully, that at long last I felt my skepticism begin to thaw. Not often since Sept. 11, 2001 — or was it Dec. 12, 2000? — had I reason to rejoice in the current shape of our democracy. But in the strength of hundreds of thousands of veteran, raucous, pensive, novice, comfortable, afflicted, but thoroughly patriotic Americans I saw the seeds of unified protest.
Until the national march on Washington last Saturday I had never been to our nation’s capital. Never before marched shoulder-to-shoulder in a procession packed farther than the eye can reach. Never clamored for peace with anti-abortion Episcopalians and “international” socialists on the same street. Yet the Rev. Al Sharpton, ever-spirited in his own way, had called all of us “children of Martin Luther King.”
After hours of rallying, the people took to Independence Avenue, striding two and a half miles down to the Navy Yard — a huge military complex in the heart of one of Washington’s working-class communities — to conduct a citizens’ inspection for weapons of mass destruction. Through the simple fact of our bodies, we offered the world incontrovertible evidence of our dissent and a commitment to a nonviolent resolution in Iraq.
Asian faces here were few and far between. A medical student from California. A hapa from New York University. For an explanation I searched my own political parentage — what it meant to be an Asian Pacific American activist in D.C., claiming as my birthright the same strip of ground that housed voices for civil rights, for peace in Vietnam, for reproductive rights and other struggles for social uplift when I couldn’t bring myself to tell my own father I’d snagged one of the last South-bound buses in an effort to prove that history indeed belonged to people like us.
Sadia Yacoub, an undergrad from Pakistan at American University showed me a homemade armband — a crescent and star inked on a scrap of white cloth. She and 60 other members of the international Progressive Muslim Network (PMN) joined a feeder march to protest the INS special registration program.
“Our Muslim identity has already been made public,” she explained. “We must tell others about the unjust practice of registering our classmates and other Muslim men.”
PMN, she tells me, is headquartered in South Africa, where the group was firmly entrenched in the anti-apartheid movement.
Yang Xio, his green-fatigue jacket done up in rows of anti-war buttons, bussed in all the way from LaCrosse, Wisc. with a Hmong youth group called HOPE. His community opposes the war, having already tasted the empty promises of the U.S. government to Laotians during the Vietnam War.
“The war didn’t solve anything,” he said. “We know men, women and children will die.”
Having survived and resisted legacies of war, the perpetual backlash against our communities at home, APAs have only begun to mobilize at the grassroots and establish common cause with the rising anti-war movement. Our personal histories have already made clear the need to demand truth, rebuke state violence and look beyond the fiction of our borders. Or perhaps the anti-war movement will first remember: so many of us are here because Uncle Sam was there.
Shirley Lin is a freelance writer based in New York City.
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