‘A little less lonely’: Kansas City shows up to support, honor its AAPI communities
Chi Nguyen stood before a diverse crowd of a few hundred people Sunday afternoon in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. Her shirt read “I am Vietnamese.”
“My parents love the United States. Like, really love it,” she said to laughs. “They even love Little Caesars supreme pizza.”
She detailed her story to the crowd through a microphone. Nguyen was born in Vietnam. In 1978, she and her mother escaped to the United States. She was 18 months old.
Nguyen spoke as part of a “Stop Asian Hate” vigil sponsored by Cafe Cà Phê, a Vietnamese coffee shop near West 11th and Mulberry streets. About 500 people gathered in front of the cafe to remember the eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — gunned down in Atlanta spas earlier this month. Over the last year, racist anti-Asian rhetoric and attacks have escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nguyen is proud of her culture, and that she can speak two languages. But, she told the crowd, there are many times her culture and race have caused her pain and shame.
When, in school, she hoped kids couldn’t smell the lunch her mom packed for her. When people mispronounced, or didn’t even try to pronounce, her name. When strangers asked if she knew Kung Fu. When her son was called “chicken fried rice” on a soccer field.
But she said the worst pain comes from wishing that her two sons, who are biracial, didn’t look like her.
“I thought maybe, if they looked less like me, then they would be more safe,” she said.
Nguyen, despite her nerves, took the stage between U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II and Kansas state Rep. Rui Xu and Missouri House Rep. Emily Weber to ensure the members of the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders community gathered went home after the vigil feeling “a little bit safer and a little less lonely,” she said.
Standing before the silent crowd, Nguyen said she now knows she’s not alone.
Mari Matsumoto, 33, of Leawood, was among those in the crowd listening.
Two days earlier, Matsumoto, who is from Japan, said she was spit on at a store and told to go back to her own country. But she said the harassment and name-calling were present in her life well before the pandemic.
It was a memory from Jackie Nguyen, owner of Cafe Cà Phê, that Matsumoto especially related to.
It was a story about Lunchables — a popular boxed meal for kids — told by Nguyen, a first generation Vietnamese American.
Growing up, Nguyen brought rice and grilled pork splashed with fish sauce for lunch. Kids made fun of her for bringing “dog” or “rotten fish,” she said.
“Growing up, all I wanted was Lunchables. It was the epitome of the American dream,” Nguyen said. “To me, Lunchables were cool. They were American. They were white, and growing up, all I wanted to be was white.”
As a child, Nguyen stopped speaking Vietnamese to prove she was American-born. Now, she’s opened Kansas City’s first Vietnamese coffee shop to push the Asian narrative.
“America has done a really good job at making us Asians feel like ‘the other,’ haven’t they?” she said. “I’m tired of feeling like ‘the other.’”
Nikki Ray, 35, of Kansas City, listened from the street with her 8-year-old daughter, Etta, whom she adopted from China in 2017.
“It’s hard for me. I’ve never experienced and won’t experience what she will,” said Ray, who is white. “You think you’re adopting them and bringing them to a safe place, but I don’t feel super safe for her. I think the more that people can see, the safer it will be for our kids.”
Hattie Watson, 11, of Kansas City, is Asian American. In Kansas City, she said, she often feels invisible.
“White supremacy erases the important and nuance of AAPI experiences and often pits us against other communities of color,” she told those gathered. “We deserve to be seen regardless of how many of us there are.”
Kayla Reed, who joined the vigil from the sidelines, was at a water fountain in third grade when a boy walked up to her and called her a racial slur. She corrected him, saying she’s Korean. He called her the slur again.
“I think that example goes to show that hatred is taught at a young age, and it carries on throughout generations and through individuals unless people have these realizations that that’s not OK, and that’s hurtful and that’s so derogatory,” Reed, 23, told The Star in the days following the Atlanta killings.
At the time of the water fountain incident, Reed — who now serves as the associate of marketing & public relations with The National Association of Asian American Professionals Kansas City chapter — was living in rural southeast Missouri with her brother and single mother from Korea.
Growing up, she saw how people treated her mother, who spoke English as a second language. In school, kids commented that she was supposed to be good at math, but she wasn’t. Ashamed of the stereotypes, Reed didn’t want to identify as Korean.
Now living in Kansas City, Reed continued to draw attention away from her Asian heritage until she connected with a colleague who looked like her.
“It was a huge moment for me in my life because I was like ‘you know what, I’m so tired of living this life of being ashamed to be Asian and looking different,” she said. “I feel like I’m finally at a point in my life where I embrace that and am so proud of my background and our stories of how we got here.”
Reed’s mother hopes to move back to South Korea in the coming years to take care of her own aging parents. But she’s also never really felt like America was her home, or that she belonged.
“My mom will frequently tell me, ‘you know you’re doing things that I could only have dreamed of,’” said Reed, who also made an appearance at Saturday’s Stop Asian Hate rally in Overland Park.
“I can’t even be silent about it even if I wanted to because I’m just like, this is real stuff that matters in life, beyond everything else of work, and all of your successes,” she said.
This story was originally published March 28, 2021 at 6:31 PM.
