The Indiana Graduate Student Coalition organized a #StopAsianHate gathering Wednesday at the Sample Gates to mourn the shooting that killed six Asian women in Atlanta.
Graduate student Huixin Tian was told by the other event organizers she would be one of the public speakers for the gathering the day before.
Tian said the speech was her first time ever speaking publicly. The night before the gathering, she sat in front of her desk, thinking it would take hours to finish her first speech draft, she said.
She said she didn’t think she had much to say, but the moment she started writing, her memories came flooding back. Years of suppression, unfair experiences, anger, grieving, sadness – it all came naturally onto the page.
Tian came to Bloomington from China eight years ago to pursue her master’s degree. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student at IU studying information science.
“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after college,” she said. “So I took a gap year to think it through. I realized I can easily go back to my hometown and find a job with my degree. It won’t be a hard thing to do, but it’s a life that’s very predictable.”
She decided to apply to graduate schools and enrolled at IU. In 2015, she started to work as an assistant instructor. She said the teaching experience helped her shape a bond with the Bloomington community.
“I’m part of the community,” Tian said. “We, the students, interact with locals and all people from different backgrounds everyday. This is a bonding. We are not suspended. We are actually as rooted as they are.”
In the spring semester of 2017, Tian and another AI worked in an IU biology class. A student came to Tian and asked for more points for his lab practice. Tian explained how the grades work and why she was unable to add any more points. The student stayed persistent, Tian said.
“The way he insisted on that one or two points — I know from the way he talked and in his eyes, he didn’t expect me to say no,” she said.
Later the student turned to the other assistant instructor, who was an American man. Tian said the issue was settled after five seconds.
“We Asian women, for so, so many years, are pictured as the nerds who can never lead,” Tian said during her speech. “We are always expected to only say yes.”
Pallavi Rao, a Media School Ph.D. student who was in charge of social media for the event, said she heard a lot of Asian international students were upset and hoping for an event in response to the mass shooting in Atlanta.
“So we really felt that some level of an in-person event would be great,” Rao said.
Patrick Saling, one of the community members who helped organize March to End the Madness, an event raising awareness to homelessness in Bloomington, said the intersections between the homelessness awareness and stop-Asian-hate movements are visible.
“We can see that folks are compelled to action, and we’re moving already in the same direction. This is how we build a people’s movement,” Saling said.
Tian said her social battery was drained after the speech. She used to be a person who avoided confrontation, she said, but she was influenced after reading the widely publicized statement from the Cherokee County sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Jay Baker, who said the suspect in the Atlanta shooting was having a “really bad day.”
“Some may find a way not to acknowledge the shooting as racial or sexist, but we know the truth,” Tian said. “We know so we are standing together right here, right now.”
