More than 3,000 hate incidents directed at Asian Americans
nationwide have been recorded since the start of the pandemic…
CBS News, 2/25/21

Sixty years ago I knew the danger
of walking past white kids my age
who would sneer and glare
and pull up their eyes –
still so young, I
was relieved if they didn’t
also yell “Jap” or “Chink”

In World War II propaganda
Americans were told
how to differentiate
loyal Chinese citizens
from treacherous Japanese
like my California-born parents
locked up in camps

“How To Spot a Jap,”
a U.S. Army pamphlet
in comic book style,
explaining that “C’s eyes…
have a marked squint”
while “J has eyes slanted
toward his nose”

In 2020 the pandemic
brought our eyes
to the forefront again
as President Trump kept
blaming anyone Asian –
proclaiming the “China virus”
or even “kung flu”

No coincidence
we soon became scapegoats
strangers yelling
“Go back to China”
when we’re Korean
“Infecting and disgusting”
though Pilipino or Thai

In 2021, covid still raging,
a Sacramento teacher
lectures via Zoom –
“If your eyes go up, you’re
Chinese” she gestures,
“If they go down,
they’re Japanese”

As the racist bullying
now escalates to our elders
a grandmother assaulted
and robbed at an ATM
an 84-year-old fatally
smashed to the ground
by a 19-year-old

To those who insist making
“slanty” eyes is harmless fun –
“Can’t you Asians
take a joke?” –
whether Miley Cyrus
or Houston Astro
Yuli Gurriel

No such thing as
a little racism – so-called
innocent teasing
and taunts transform
in an instant to
this all-too-familiar
avalanche of hate

Where attacking us for
our Asian eyes
is as American as
“Japs Must Go” signs,
“Gook” and “Ching Chong” insults,
the Chinese Exclusion Act
as far back as 1882

1

I was an “Angry Little Asian Girl”
long before Lela Lee’s popular cartoon
by that name

When no book or comic
no film or TV show featured
anyone who looked like me

Kids would pull their eyes up
on my way to school
snickering with delight

And on December 7
the teacher would say Pearl Harbor
and all eyes turned my way

2

I was an “Angry Asian Girl”
generations before the website’s
call-out to “strut with us”

When we had marches, sit-ins,
and endless meetings to finally get
ethnic and women’s studies

We protested against the Vietnam War
Jap, Chink, and Gook all
linked in America’s race warp

As we raised our fists
no more the erotic Asian stereotype,
the submissive geisha-China girl

3

I celebrate an Angry Asian Girl tradition
going back to actress Anna May Wong’s
demanding non-stereotyped roles

A history of civil rights fighters
like Yuri Kochiyama
close friend of Malcolm X

Or Grace Lee Boggs
revolutionary founder of
the Detroit Asian Political Alliance

So many fierce activists
from black power/ yellow power
to Asians4Black Lives

4

Here’s to Angry Asian Girl writers
who inspire us through
stories and verse

Nisei like Hisaye Yamamoto
who showed the brutality of camp
but could make us laugh

Maxine Hong Kingston
setting the record straight
in “The Woman Warrior”

Poets Cathy Song, Marilyn
Chin, and Janice Mirikitani –
their words impossible to silence

karma / what goes around vs. how could this happen in america/ how deplorable/ unbelievable /

NO, how inevitable / white supremacists and fascists storming the capitol building / brandishing

nooses and the confederate flag / haven’t we seen this before / ask any native tribal survivor / ask

the thousands whose father or mother or child was lynched / the millions who witnessed the smug

white cop pressing his knee on george floyd’s neck / imagine a young black or latino mugging

\for cameras with his feet on nancy pelosi’s desk / we all know he’d never get the chance / no

black lives matters protestors in the mob / we saw the t-shirts proclaiming ‘camp auschwitz’

and ‘six million are not enough’ / remember charlottesville / trump telling us there were very fine

people among those who marched with torches and nazi slogans / and now he comforts his darling

capitol terrorists / the insurrection still going on / he understands their pain and loves them /

THIS IS the america people of color have always known / the so-called democracy that forced us

into reservations, plantations, world war ii concentration camps, border detention jails / the glorious

land-of-the-free where malcolm predicted the chickens would come home to roost / THIS IS who

we are

Poet AMY UYEMATSU, is a sansei (3rd-generation Japanese America) poet from Pasadena/Sierra Madre. She has five previously published collections: Basic Vocabulary; The Yellow Door; Stone Bow Prayer; Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain; and 30 Miles from J-Town. In 1992 she won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize for 30 Miles from J-Town. Amy was a public high school math teacher for 32 years. Prior to that, she was the first Publications Coordinator for the newly established UCLA Asian American Studies Center and co-edited the widely-used anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971). In describing her work, the Poetry Foundation says that “Uyematsu’s poems consider the intersection of politics, mathematics, spirituality, and the natural world.” In 2012, Amy was recognized by the Friends of the Little Tokyo Branch Library for her writing contributions to the Japanese American community. Now retired, Amy has led writing workshops at the Far East Lunge in LA’s Little Tokyo. Recent essays include “Old Asian American Poets Never Die” (Huffington Post, 2014) and “Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet” (Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, 2017). Since the 1980s Amy has been performing her poetry—including the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival, the Nisei Week Festival, and the Broad Museum’s “L.A. Intersections: Music, Language, Movement.”

Amy’s latest collection, her sixth, That Blue Trickster Time, was published earlier this year (2022) by What Books Press:
http://www.whatbookspress.com/that-blue-trickster-time.html