Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Sooncha Kim, Young Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels.

These are the names of eight victims who were brutally killed during a shooting spree in three spas in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16. Six of them were women of Asian descent. The suspect, a 21-year-old white man, killed them and blamed the victims and their workplace for his sex addiction.

There was a hollow feeling in my heart when I learned about the shooting the next day.

A police statement about the suspect saying that the attack was not racially motivated kept echoing in my head. Let’s rewind his actions. He targeted Asian-American owned businesses, gunned down six Asian women and two other victims and later rationalized his attack by blaming them for his sex addiction.

I am an Asian woman. When I saw the victims’ names and their pictures, I associated them with me because they too were Asian. Some of them were mothers and wives like me. If I had more money, I would go to spas like I used to back in Jakarta. I could not help thinking that one of the slain women could have been me.

The day after the shooting, a white man punched an Asian grandmother named Xiao Zhen Xie in the eye as she was waiting to cross the street in San Francisco, California. The same man had previously attacked Ngoc Pham, an elderly Vietnamese immigrant, somewhere else.

I was overwhelmed with tears and emotion for the rest of the week. I could not even bring myself to join a monthly meeting at my department that week because I feared I might suddenly cry. I decided to go running the next day because it was so warm outside. My preschooler was playing with my neighbor. I told my husband that I needed to exercise and clear my head, so he stayed at home to watch our baby.

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