I was grading my students’ final stories when a friend alerted me to the recent news that a man in Atlanta had shot and killed eight people, including six Asian women.  

Fury and grief raged my heart. The crime—following thousands of other reports of harassment and attacks against Asian Americans—struck at one of my greatest fears growing up. For a second, I was a child, afraid to get out of my dad’s car at a truck stop in Georgia during a family trip.

I was raised in suburban Detroit, the adopted Chinese child of two white parents. Taylor, Michigan, was a blue-collar, union town. The population was mostly white. I used to joke that my Korean brothers and I made up