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Michigan in Color
Wednesday, April 14, 2021 — 7
YOUR WEEKLY
ARIES
It’s a very intelligent, thought-driven
week for you, Aries. Venus’ arrival in
your values zone sets you thinking
about what truly matters to you – and
you may discover that you have more
to be grateful for than you
realized.
AQUARIUS
GEMINI
When Venus moves into your
spiritual zone on Wednesday, Gemini,
you’ll crave some peace and solitude,
so don’t be surprised if you feel less
sociable than normal. It’s fine to take
some time out or to turn down
invitations – even
Geminis are allowed some
quiet time!
SAGITTARIUS
CAPRICORN
SCORPIO
CANCER
With Venus arriving in your social
zone on Wednesday, Cancer, it goes
without saying that you’ll feel open,
friendly and keen to mix with people
for much of this week.
TAURUS
The arrival of Venus in your sign on
Wednesday boosts your charm and
your social skills to no end, making
this a very good week for finding new
friendships. In love too, this influence
attracts lots of attention –
you are an emotional
open book at the moment,
but this can make you feel
vulnerable when dating.
VIRGO
PISCES
LIBRA
LEO
Venus shifts into your status zone on
Wednesday, which is an interesting
placement – on the one hand, it
makes it easier for you to charm your
way ahead at work, but on the other,
it does create quite a
snobbish vibe around you.
Read your weekly horoscopes from astrology.tv
Venus’ arrival in your travel zone on
Wednesday opens up all kinds of
lovely possibilities – including a
potential romance while on vacation,
if you’re single. Take up any
educational opportunity
this week too, as this is
another avenue for
potential love.
Venus shifts into your intimacy zone
this week, so you’ll want lots of privacy
with your special someone for sure.
This is helpful, because later in the
week, your relationship may come
under extreme pressure.
Focus on your love life this week. With
Venus moving into your love zone on
Wednesday, it will probably be difficult
for you to think about anything else!
This is a deeply sensual and emotional
vibe, which touches your very
soul.
Relationships with colleagues get a
boost this week as Venus arrives in
your everyday work zone. This area of
your chart also refers to your health,
Sagittarius, so a calming, soothing
vibe should do wonders for
your stress levels.
This should be a feel-good week for
sure. With Venus moving into your joy
zone on Wednesday, it’s time to enjoy
yourself. Make a deliberate effort to
do more – much more – of whatever
makes you smile the most.
Family matters get a real boost from
the arrival of Venus in your home zone
on Wednesday. Difficult relatives
become easier to deal with, and peace
– of sorts – descends upon the family.
Enjoy it while it lasts!
This is a very good week for opening
up to other people and sharing your
feelings. With Venus moving into your
communication zone on Wednesday,
that should become easier. If you’ve
had any kind of talking therapy
recently, this week should
start to show results.
WHISPER
“Michigan students, we’re
almost done!”
“HONEY, WHERE is my SUPER
SUIT!”
“WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW.”
A statement from MiC on anti-Asian violence
Disclaimer:
When
we
refer
to Asian and Asian American
communities, we intend to name
East and Southeast Asian and Asian
American communities specifically.
Asia and Asian diasporas are not a
monolith, nor are the People that we
are speaking alongside in this piece.
On March 16, 2021, a white man
purchased a handgun and opened
fire on three Asian-owned spas
in Atlanta, Ga., killing Delaina
Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Paul
Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant,
Yong Ae Yue and three other
women
whose
families
have
requested their names remain
private, along with another victim
left wounded. Cherokee County
Sheriff’s Capt. Jay Baker, who
has previously expressed anti-
Asian and generally racist beliefs
on social media, justified the
attack, asserting it was simply “…
a bad day for (the suspect).” This
refusal to attribute the attack’s
nature to its true origins in anti-
Asian racism, white supremacy
and oppression is a reflection of
our governing institutions’ denial
of these aforementioned systems
permeating
through
the
very
foundation of our country.
Xiaojie Tan, 49, was a massage
therapist
and
the
owner
of
two local Georgia businesses,
including
Young’s
Asian
Spa.
Her ex-husband, Michael Webb,
remarks that “she was full of
smiles and laughter. She was just a
pleasure to be around.” She would
have turned 50 on March 17, one
day after her death.
Hyun
Jung
Grant
(maiden
name: Kim) was a single mother
who dedicated herself to her two
sons. She worked relentlessly at
Gold Spa. Hyun Jung’s favourite
dish to make was kimchi jjigae, and
she loved spending time with her
sons at the aquarium.
After Yong Ae Yu was laid off
due to the pandemic, she worked
as a licensed massage therapist
at Aromatherapy Bar. Yong Ae
moved to the United States from
South Korea in the 1970s and was
the mother of two sons. She was a
great cook and a fan of noraebang,
Korean karaoke.
Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, was on
a date at Young’s Asian Massage
with her husband, Mario Gonzalez,
for a couples’ massage. A server and
grill operator at the Waffle House,
Yaun often shared eggs and grits
with homeless people during her
early morning shifts, and a friend
described a “light around her” that
drew people in.
Paul Andre Michels, 54, was
working on maintenance and
hardware for Young’s Asian Spa.
Kikiana Whidby, the mother of
Michels’ godson, reflected on his
kindness in an interview with CBS
News. Michels was a Detroit native
and his brother, John Michels,
remarked that he was considering
opening his own massage business.
Three other lives were lost,
and one man was wounded. Their
families
have
requested
that
their privacy is honored beyond
these facts. Here are the correct
pronunciations for the names of
Hyun Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue
and Xiaojie Tan. Please honor their
lives and legacies with this in mind.
Between March 19, 2020 and
February 28, 2021 alone, Stop
AAPI Hate has recorded 3,974
firsthand accounts of anti-Asian
violence in 47 states and the
District of Columbia. According
to the report, Asian women
are 2.3 times more likely to be
assaulted compared to Asian men.
It is important to note that low-
income Asian women in service
industries are particularly at risk
to these attacks, demonstrating the
intersectionality between gender
and class in rising anti-Asian
violence. While the form of attack
ranges from spitting to verbal or
even physical harassment, the
majority of assaulters targeted
violent attacks to one of the
most vulnerable within Asian
communities in the U.S.: elders.
Despite this data, it is impossible to
measure the severity of anti-Asian
sentiment, as incidents frequently
go
unreported
within
Asian
communities in the U.S.
Among these attacks, on Jan. 28,
Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-
old Thai American man, was
pushed to the ground and killed
while taking a morning stroll in his
San Francisco neighborhood. On
March 19, Xiaozhen Xie, 76, was
punched in the eye in downtown
San Francisco before crossing
the street. Though she was able
to valiantly defend herself with a
wooden stick, her family reported
that Xiao was “very traumatized”
and became scared to leave her
home. After her grandson raised
almost $1 million for medical
expenses through her GoFundMe,
Xie decided to donate all of the
funds towards supporting Asian
American communities to combat
the
deeply-rooted
anti-Asian
racism present in society at large.
In response to this violence,
police departments nationwide
have increased police presence
in
areas
with
high
Asian
populations.
However,
experts
have
discovered
that
more
policing
does
not
necessarily
lower crime rates. Instead, the vast
history of abuse toward the most
vulnerable members of the Asian
community — including those
with undocumented immigration
status,
mental
health
issues,
women and migrant sex workers
— has instilled a legitimate fear
of law enforcement, exacerbated
by
the
possible
difficulty
of
overwhelming language barriers
and cultural stigma.
For
Asian
and
otherwise
marginalized peoples, the police
prove to be a deadly force. In
December 2020 alone, two Asian-
American men suffering mental
health crises were murdered by the
police. Pennsylvania State Police
fatally shot Christian Hall, 19, while
his hands were raised. Angelo
Quinto, 30, died after an officer
pressed his knee on his neck for
over eight minutes. Additionally,
police presence has specifically
targeted Asian massage parlors,
including two of the three targeted
in the Atlanta shooting, which has
proven detrimental. Yang Song, a
38-year-old Chinese woman and
employee at a Queens massage
parlor, was sexually assaulted
by a man that claimed to be an
undercover cop. In 2017, Song
died after falling four stories from
her apartment during a New York
Police Department raid while
officers were attempting to arrest
her for engaging in sex work. The
argument that the police officers
were simply doing their jobs only
exposes a larger systemic issue of
the inherent corruption and harm
of law enforcement, as well as the
violence of criminalizing sex work.
These cases prove that the police
are
oppressive,
masquerading
as protectors while continuing
to perpetuate the harm they
pretend to subvert, placing Asian
communities in further danger
under the guise of protection.
The misconception that violence
and hate perpetrated against
Asian Americans is new, or has
only surfaced amid the pandemic,
is far from true. Racialized fear
mongering and hatred against
Asian Americans has existed
for hundreds of years. The 1871
Chinese Massacre — where a mob
of white men tortured and killed
19 Chinese immigrants — is one of
countless examples in history of
senseless violence towards Asians
in the U.S. However, this violence
is far more inherent to American
society than civilian attacks, as
it has been rooted in political
schemes to colonize and exclude
Asian populations globally. The
first anti-Asian legislation passed
was the Page Act of 1875. This
law
banned
Chinese
women
from entering the country, due
to a negative stereotype that
these women were sex workers
riddled with diseases, a seed of
fetishization of Asian women that
still can be seen today in much of
mainstream media representation.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act
was passed — the first and only
major act of legislation barring
immigration from a specific nation
— banning the immigration of
Chinese immigrants and barring
Chinese Americans already in
the country from naturalizing.
Its impact is an indelible mark
on U.S. history, preventing Asian
immigrants and their children
born in the U.S. from becoming
citizens (and thus from voting)
until 1943. During World War II,
over 110,000 Japanese Americans,
including over 66,000 U.S. citizens,
were forcibly incarcerated in
subhuman conditions for years.
Its devastating impact is grossly
neglected in history as roughly
1,862 Japanese Americans died
of disease in these camps, and
every prisoner lost their livelihood
during their internment.
MICHIGAN IN COLOR
Columnists & Editors
On The Enduring Legacy of Dr. Amy Chang
Four
lab
benches
constitute
the Chang Lab in the Molecular,
Cellular and Developmental Biology
Department at the University of
Michigan, and Dr. Amy Chang —
or Amy, as she prefers to be called
— knows every single crevice and
corner of them in the same sort of
comforting familiarity that comes
with knowing one’s home. Amy can
often be found bustling around her
lab long after the sun has set, tending
to her painstakingly cultivated yeast
cells, a gel waiting to be run, a fussy
serological pipette, while maybe
reading a New Yorker cartoon or
that week’s issue of The Washington
Post in slivers of downtime. More
importantly, these lab benches are
Amy’s ultimate domain, and she
gives every single one of them a
kind of remarkably unrestricted
love not always seen within the
rigid confines of scientific academia.
Watching Amy work is like watching
a seasoned artist in action; she flits
from one task to the next with a
methodical tenacity, all while telling
me about the new crockpot she
bought, her beloved son Tim or how
joining a sport is one of the most
important things a scientist can do,
because it teaches you how to win
and lose. Her workspace is strewn
with bottles of buffers and growth
mediums, tubes of cells, scrawled
dates and a stopwatch on constant
detail, and mostly a kind of beautiful
unorganized chaos that no one but
Amy has seemed to grasp an innate
understanding of.
To inherently make sense of the
complexities of Amy’s lab and her
life’s work, it’s important to start
with Amy first. After all, a lab is an
extension of the scientists operating
it. Amy, a New York native, graduated
from Harvard University with a
degree in biochemistry, received
her doctorate in cell biology from
Yale
University
and
completed
her postgraduate training at both
Yale University and the Whitehead
Institute
at
the
Massachusetts
Institute
of
Technology.
After
sitting down with her last week, I
also learned she was a fan of “Pride
and Prejudice” and found a Buddha
statue at a long-closed consignment
shop that she still thinks about often
when approaching her research.
Amy’s foray into science began
with a long commute from Queens,
N.Y., to The Bronx High School of
Science and was heavily influenced
by her scientist father, who nudged
her from the ground up to pursue a
career centered around the pursuit of
scientific discovery. Ultimately, Amy
told me that what she loves about her
job lies in something much deeper
than the coursework she had pursued
at the Bronx High School of Science,
Harvard, Yale or M.I.T. Rather, it
lies in the highly intimate, physical
and voracious nature of her work.
You see, research is invigorating,
groundbreaking,
dynamic
and
ever-changing; more importantly, it
seems research is a career path that
works in perfect tandem with Amy’s
committed,
hands-on,
intuitive
approach to life. Because Amy just
seems to know when her yeast cells
are in need, when the culture she
grew them on lacks just the right
amount of glucose or leucine or when
their time in the incubator is up, even
without the guiding hand of a clock.
Amy is a daughter of immigrants
and the only woman of color on
faculty in her department. And
being a scientist at one of the
biggest, highest funded research
powerhouses in the country — the
University of Michigan — comes
with its own unique set of challenges.
Scientific discovery is cutthroat,
in that dutifully researching the
same metabolic pathway out of
love for years is simply not enough.
Competition is stiff, and studying
that metabolic pathway requires
money, space and ultimately power.
According to Amy, “you feel a lot of
elbows” on your way to the top. In
likening research to the principles
of business, Amy said, “you have
to sell yourself” — a practice of
which Amy is a veteran. Her work
has completely redefined the way
academia
views
endoplasmic
reticulum stress response as well
as mechanisms of protein folding
capacity. And ultimately, her findings
are trailblazing, profound and very
much reminiscent of Amy.
Though young Amy had other
ambitions too: her dreams consisted
of one day being a violinist, and she
has a soft spot for studio art. In our
conversation, she lamented about
what could’ve been had she carried
out those aspirations instead. But I’d
like to counter that Amy is an artist
in her own right, because the work
she does every day is art, in its own
unique, pioneering, Amy-esque way.
SARAH AKAABOUNE
MiC Columnist
A journey through
my journal
A lunch date on September 2,
2019. A class skipped on January
21, 2020. A Zoom meeting on
February 17, 2021.
Years and years, days upon
days of experiences compressed
into several bullet points on a
notes application. Ever since
I was young, I’ve found solace
in
journaling.
During
my
early years of high school, a
particularly troubled time in
my life, I recall drowning in the
judgments of others, allowing
the
discriminatory
attitudes
of other people to affect my
own identity — to control my
narrative. Back then, I relied on
the act of expressive writing to
help me take back that narrative
and rewrite my own story in
a way that was constructive,
truthful and looked at the whole
picture. Fast forward to today,
deep into an ongoing global
pandemic with no discernible
end in sight, the continued act
of journaling has sustained me
throughout
these
especially
uncertain times.
But what is it about this mere
act of what Jose´ van Dijck
would describe as “writing the
self as mediated memory” that
gives way to such productive
potential? Evidently, the health
benefits of expressive writing are
extensive. Van Dijck claims that
autobiographical writing allows
us
to
construct
“continuity
between past and present while
keeping an eye on the future.”
In other words, we write so we
remember, and by remembering
we allow ourselves to realize
and keep in touch with our true
nature. In a study by Daniel
L. Schacter and five others on
“The Future of Memory,” his
group’s findings suggest that a
link between “remembering the
past and imagining the future”
allows us to simulate future
events with greater specificity
and improves our ability to
emotionally
regulate.
When
we have an accurate account
of our past experiences — what
we’ve done, who we’ve seen,
where we’ve been — we’re able
to better imagine what our
anticipating circumstances will
be, even in the face of adversity
and uncertainty. The sheer act
of writing in a journal reinforces
our thought patterns allowing
us to develop healthier coping
mechanisms.
I’ve personally experienced
this myself. Journaling over
the years has gradually helped
me understand my perspectives
towards life and the subtle ways
they shift over time. It’s helped
me recognize my values, my
attitudes and my beliefs frozen
in the context of time and place,
and prevented me from falling
victim to hindsight bias. I look
back on past experiences, good
and bad, and am able to accept
what happened for what it was
holistically. Sometimes we feel
compelled to lie to ourselves, to
forget or deny events and actions
in our pasts in order to feel
better about who we are in the
present. I strive to subvert this
by cherishing even struggles,
and looking for what I can learn
in the pain, since it is often
our suffering that takes us to
where we need to be by forcing
us to become better and make
progress.
KARIS CLARK
MiC Columnist
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Read more at
MichiganDaily.com