Blue-collar work. Grueling and tough, not to mention the low-pay.

In New York City there are countless places spread throughout the city with obscure storefronts advertising “Back and Foot Rub.” Most often, the workers are middle-aged immigrant Asian women. 

Greeted by a worker in the entrance, typically Chinese, followed by a dimly lit hall before being crammed into a room with a massage table. A therapeutic experience for $50 an hour and change. 

Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, shot and killed eight people inside three Atlanta-area Asian massage businesses. According to the police, Mr Long, an evangelical Christian, claimed he had a sex addiction and viewed the businesses as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”

Six of the eight victims were female and Asian.  

A day after the shootings, Pim Techamuanvivit, a Thai restaurateur in San Francisco, tweeted, “I can tell you the best way to see the insidious prejudice against Asians, especially Asian women, is to come spend a service with my Thai host, then come back the next night to see my white host working the same position.” A social experiment of sorts, one where only minorities know the result.

In a recent interview about her role in the Oscar-nominated film “Minari,” the 73-year-old South Korean actor Youn Yuh-Jung said of her generation’s immigrant experience in the United States: “We expected to be treated poorly, so there was no sorrow.” 

Asian immigrants often come to America, the country of opportunities, working tirelessly for their native English speaking children to succeed. 

There are two types of Asian-Americas: one that is invisible, the other marginal: either invisible or the model minority: the immigrants who come here for a better future for their children, and the children who everyone aspires to be like: hardworking, modest, exotic and fetishized. 

It seems like people are staring into a zoo. When they walk by, they will flower you with backhanded compliments and treat you like an exotic flower when you are but just a human, you are but just another variation of them. 

In times like this when “evangelic Christian” man shoots up an Asian spa, how are these women surviving? How are they being seen in a world where they are but invisible to others?