By Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent
Campaign finance lawyer April Reign launched the hashtag #OscarSoWhite in 2015. This past Sunday, the Oscars featured the most diverse pool of nominees in its history.
Media strategist William Yu inspired the movement #StarringJohnCho in 2016 to protest the lack of Asian American leading men in Hollywood. This fall, Simu Liu will become the first Asian in a starring role in a Marvel movie-Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings.
Now in 2021, a single mother of two set in motion #RedMonday, a call for Asian Americans to engage in a one day consumer walkout on Monday, May 3 to protest anti-Asian hate. She hopes to have the same sort of success Yu and Reign achieved.
“Seeing everything that was happening in the world, I just felt like I needed to step up and do something, you know, that no matter who we are bigger, small, you know, prominent for, you know, minor, you know, we just needed to say something,” Red Monday organizer Sophally Tun told AsAmNews.
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Tun came to the United States at the age of two from Cambodia with her family prior to the end of the Vietnam War. She said her father saw the “writing on the wall” and got the family out. They ended up settling in Tennessee. She said she doesn’t recall seeing another Asian face growing up. She currently lives in Maryland not too far from the nation’s capitol.
She’s perhaps one of the unlikely people to be leading a social movement. Unlike Yu, who already worked in marketing and Reign, who has since become a media strategist, Tun has little social media experience. Her following on Facebook consists of a small group of about 40 people- mostly relatives and close friends. She works in the food service industry at a cafe that caters to mostly wounded military veterans.
Yet she’s managed to gain the support of Unapologetically Asian, a community of 5,000 Facebook users empowering Asian Americans to “change the conversation about belonging in America.”
“We said we would amplify anything they tagged us in,” said an Unapologetically Asian administrator about the group’s support for Red Monday. “We are grateful for the community we’ve built on social media and feel it’s important to use it to give visibility to those in the Asian American community aiming to make change.”
Now she’s convinced AsAmNews to write an article about her fledgling, but slowly building campaign.
She described the Atlanta spa shooting as something that “hit home” with her. She finds it unbelievable that a White man fetishized Asian women and decided to get rid of the sexual temptation by killing them.
“I just I found it unfathomable. You know, I mean, the fact that these women, you know,we’re fantasized, you know, and shot because, you know, I mean, I, you know, it just really upset me,” she said.
She doesn’t see her one day boycott hurting anyone. Tun assumes people will just do their shopping for the week another day. What she wants to do is to spotlight the economic power of Asian Americans and see the community unite and make a statement.
“We need to make a statement, we need to, to let the world know, that we’re not just going to tolerate being abused and discriminated against. That’s not the world that I want my kids to grow up in.”
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Boycott only non-Asian businesses, right?
Actually she says all businesses. It’s more symbolic than anything else. She realizes one day of not shopping on a Monday will make a statement, but doesn’t feel it will really hurt any businesses.