Grief can be like an ocean all-consuming and unpredictable in its symptoms. Collective grief is like an ocean if a cloud of fog suddenly descended on it: deep and violent but obscured, somehow not fully accessible.

For the past few days, Ive felt the cloud of the collective grief that has consumed many others across the diaspora after two separate California shootings left 19 people, most of them of Asian descent, dead. This is similar to the grief we experienced after the Atlanta shootings in 2021, when six Asian women were murdered across three spas. And yet this time, theres something fundamentally distinct that has complicated our grief. In both instances, the alleged shooters were Asian.

This information provokes a double loss of sorts a loss of innocent lives and another type that is much more abstract. For AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] people proximally and relationally removed [from the shootings], this could be an ideological loss the disruption of the notion that we could feel safe from shootings within our own AAPI enclaves, Josiah Teng, a New York City-based psychotherapist, tells me.

At first glance, the identity of a perpetrator should not diminish our feelings around what they did his background doesnt, in any way, change the outcome of the shootings themselves. But what it does do is send many of us into a state of emotional paralysis. What do we do with the knowledge of what feels like an unfathomable betrayal, that in both instances, the alleged killers were people who were weaved into the fabric of the communities they destroyed?

Most Asians I know feel that these were indeed hate crimes, in the sense that it made existing in an Asian American body feel more precarious. But all over the internet, Ive seen other people, well-intentioned and otherwise, point out the identity of the shooter to quell the distress that many of us are feeling. But the shooter was Asian himself.

What they are really saying is that the shooter was like us, so he couldnt possibly be against us. But what they dont understand is how profoundly this deepens our fear. Violence, especially the white supremacist American kind, is easy for any marginalized person to understand. Weve all experienced versions of it and are aware of its ability to metastasize into something bigger. Being made fun of for the smell of our school lunch would naturally lead to accusations that COVID-19 was a product of our filth. Being fetishized would lead to a man killing Asian women for their perceived sexual deviance.

Again, white supremacy is horrific yet predictable. That is also why for many of us, these recent mass shootings elude coherence. I am sad because I know people who look like the shooter. I am sad because were not supposed to do this to anyone, and much less to each other.