What will we do for all those little children in Uvalde? By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang As an essayist, I have written about mass shootings, racially-motivated shootings, school and church shootings, police violence, worrying about my children and elders, and the senseless loss of innocent lives so many times, as recently as two weeks ago. But this time, words falter. I feel all written out. Every time, my children are different ages and the details hit differently. I hear people around me saying, “I have kids now, so I feel…” and I am aggravated that they had the privilege of not feeling this way before. I should be kinder. When news programs recite a long list of previous mass shootings, I am aggrieved when the shootings involving Asian Americans are forgotten, including Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, the Korean spas in Atlanta, the FedEx in Indianapolis, the Korean hair salons in Dallas, the Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, Joseph Ileto, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, and others that I have forgotten now, too. When I reread my 2018 post-Parkland essay, I remember how hopeful I felt then at the amazing activism and leadership of young people. I was so proud when my son, who we all call Little Brother and who was in middle school at the time, planned his first school protest. Karthick Ramakrishnan of AAPIData has written that gun control is a high priority issue for Asian Americans and should be considered an Asian American issue. According to AAPI Data, in 2020, 81% of Asian Americans supported stricter gun laws, across ethnic groups, including 91% of Indian Americans, 85% of Chinese Americans, 80% of Korean Americans, 76% of Vietnamese Americans, and 73% of Japanese Americans and Filipino Americans. My children remark darkly about how 2020 was the first time that school shootings decreased – but only because the COVID-19 lockdown sent so many schools into virtual learning. I struggle to find the hope and resolve I always could find before. Then two days after the shooting in Uvalde, students across the country walked out of school at noon to protest gun violence. At Michigan’s Oxford High School, where four students were killed in a school shooting last November, the students walked out and formed an O for Oxford and a U for Uvalde. Little Brother, now a senior, tells me about the walkout at his high school. A national March for our Lives is planned for June 11. Every year at my local Memorial Day parade, a fourth grader reads a poem about World War II, “In Flanders Fields.” This year, it was an especially chilling and powerful call to action to hear a fourth grader read, “We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved and were loved, and now we lie,/ In Flanders fields.// Take up our quarrel with the foe:/ To you from failing hands we throw/ The torch; be yours to hold it high.” What will we do for all those little children in Uvalde?
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