Senator Mazie Hirano, 70, may look like one of those Asian American elders you see at social gatherings with neatly coiffed hair and lively eyes looking over their spectacles, but don’t let looks fool you. She’s one tough woman.
An excellent article by NPR, titled “The Quiet Rage of Mazie Hirono” destroys the quiet, subservient Asian woman stereotype.
One newspaper columnist calls Hawaii’s senator a “badass.”
“I always was,” Hirono said in an interview with NPR. “I just wasn’t very noisy about it. I’ve been a fighter all my life. I just don’t look like that.”
That’s probably why no one has dared step up to challenge Hirono in her re-election bid this November despite the fact she is fighting stage 4 cancer of the liver. Nothing slows her down.
Since she was diagnosed with cancer a year ago she has been more visible and outspoken. The election of Donald Trump seems to have given her more energy as she battles Republicans on immigration, health care and trade. She has she the “good girl” don’t-rock-the-boat image she was saddled with, thrust upon her by the predominantly White, male Senate and Washington media.
She is the Senate’s only immigrant and its first female Asian American. Until Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth were elected in 2016, she was the ONLY Asian American in the Senate.
Late in the night, she took the floor and said. “Here I am a United States senator, I am fighting kidney cancer and I’m just so grateful that I had health insurance so I could concentrate on the care that I needed rather than how the heck I was going to afford the care that was probably going to save my life.”
She spoke about how when she was first diagnosed, she heard from many of her colleagues across the aisle. “You showed me your care,” she said, fighting back tears. “You showed me your compassion. Where is that tonight?”
As the only first-generation immigrant in the Senate, she’s not afraid to challenge Trump’s immigration proposals. On more than one occasion, she has called Trump, “xenophobic” and a “liar.” “To call the president a liar, that is not good, but it happens to be the truth,” the soft-spoken Hawaii senator told Time recently.
READ the entire NPR article here.
