The List that Keeps Getting Longer and Longer: This Is Christina Yuna Lee’s Story
One day I was casually scrolling through my Instagram explore page when I came across a post by Daisy Han. It was a picture of a tweet she had posted saying, “I see me. I see increased, targeted hate crimes against Asian women. Do you see us? Let’s build our cross-racial coalition for grief, for solidarity, for healing, for the community — for #ChristinaYunaLee.” Maybe it was the vulnerability in her post, the mention of Asian women hate crimes, the name in the hashtag, or the emotion it evoked in me, but it caught my attention and I immediately googled “Christina Yuna Lee.” As I was waiting for the page to load, my heart began to race, fearing that it would be what I thought it was. It was.
Christina Yuna Lee was a thirty-five-year-old, Asian woman, who was stabbed to death in her own apartment after a man followed her into her building. The police were called, and after struggling to open the locked door, found her dead in the bathtub with over forty stab wounds. The twenty-five-year-old man who was caught in the act has been charged with first-degree murder, burglary, and sexually motivated burglary. He is facing up to 25 years of life in prison. According to the New York Times, “her killing fits a pattern that has become an unsettlingly common feature of the pandemic” and has “stoked fears in the Asian community” (New York Times).
While it is important to bring attention to this horrific event, we must also honor the life Christina Yuna Lee lived. She graduated from Rutgers University in 2008 and worked as a creative producer for an online music platform in New York City. She was an artistic, talented, and beloved part of many communities. The question at hand that all of the communities she was and still is a part of asks, “what do we do as a community?”
While I do not know Daisy Han or Christina Yuna Lee, I cannot say that I do not have a connection to them. We are all Asian women facing intersectional discrimination in American society, sometimes resulting in the most appalling event, the murder of an innocent life. What makes us connected is the dual, discriminative experience. We are Asian women, not just one or the other. Both race and gender create a large part of our identity that shape our worldview. I feel as if it is a part of my duty as a woman in the Asian American community to say the names that have been taken and to continue having vulnerable and intense conversations. While all of these conversations evoke fear in myself and the community, we must not let the fear control our lives, but rather help to spread awareness and force others to wake up to the harsh shared reality we experience. In order for me or the community to heal, we must lead our lives with vulnerability, empathy, and awareness. This is Christina Yuna Lee’s story, a story so many Asian women fear, yet cannot sit idly by and watch.
This will not be the first or the last time the Asian community must face the harsh reality of hate crimes. There are many preventative measures that Asian women can take to ensure safety, but that ultimately comes down to spreading awareness and continuing to have these difficult conversations. What stands out to me the most about these accounts of hate crimes is that a large majority of them happen to young, Asian women. The intersectionality of these hate crimes —age, race, and gender—is what band us together as a community. These are all identifying qualities of our existence that helps us to grieve and heal. We are not just young women or Asian, but all three categories in conversation with each other forces our vulnerability to be seen and heard by the larger Asian community, and hopefully society. While young Asian women can take a cab home, walk with friends, or carry self-defense objects, we must continue to tell our stories led with vulnerability in place of fear.
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/nyregion/suspect-christina-yuna-lee-murder.html