Sex, Lies, And History Books

The Atlanta spa shootings highlight again the problems Asian Americans face against violence—and Asian women particularly are seen as inherently violable. Writer Xoai Pham shares her story.

- Xoai Pham

The day after Robert Aaron Long killed six Asian women as they were working at a series of massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia, I spent the day thinking of my mother.

She is a nail technician, a different kind of care worker. But like massage workers, she tended to people’s bodies. Cutting, buffing, filing, polishing. I grew up familiar with the smell of acetone. I eavesdropped on the women in her salon speaking to one another in Vietnamese while massaging the feet of wealthy white women.

I imagined what would have happened if Long entered my mother’s salon, looking for more businesses where Asian women worked, and shot up the place. The glass decals shattering, the leather seats punctured by bullets, water from the pedicure fountains spraying all over the bodies that littered the floor.

And then I remembered a former client of mine, in the years I was in the sex industry. A middle-aged man who told me he loved pedicures, because he could fantasise about the women putting down their tools and pulling down his pants to give him a blow job.

Long was a patron at two of the massage parlours he shot up. He blamed his acts of murder on a ‘sex addiction’.

In the 24 hours after he killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, I didn’t have it in me to do anything but cry. That night, I decided to drink, in the comfort of my apartment, hoping the company of a man I met on a dating app would be enough to take my mind off of grief. Like me, he wasn’t sure either about how to process the violence that happened. But we talked and drank and I laughed every now and then.

Eventually, he made advances that I didn’t want. “Okay,” he’d respond. Then, he tried it again. And again. And again.