On April 20th, my unhoused friends Hal and Jeremy got married. I was invited to photograph the event, so I of course agreed immediately. The service was short, sweet, and explicitly devoid of religion. Afterwards, Hal and J celebrated their big day at Pan Pacific Park with a number of their close friends, many of which from Street Watch LA. It was a really good day.
Some names were changed to preserve anonymity.
Zan - March 31, 2021
Zan - Early 2020
Earlier this week, I got a text from my best friend’s older brother Jack. He’s working as alumni director for a treatment facility in South Florida now. Before being employed there though, Jack went through that same facility after finding himself addicted to heroin on the streets of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. Jack spent over a year in treatment, but after successfully detoxing and reaching a year of sobriety, he was offered employment there by the owner, Alex, who had also gone through his own battles with addiction and become one of Jack’s best friends.
Six months ago, Zan, one of the friends Jack made during treatment, was body-brokered to Los Angeles. A predatory broker enticed her to make the cross country trip and start a new treatment program on the west coast, but after her insurance dried up, she was forced out of the program and onto the streets of LA. She had no phone, no money, and no support network to rely on. The system that was supposed to help her find stability, used her for profits and discarded her to die.
Months went by without word from or about Zan. Her parents were convinced she had died, until last Saturday when Alex received a call from an unknown number. It was Zan. She was in an apartment complex with men she had met on the street. She was in distress, not fully coherent, but was able to communicate a few key pieces of information before abruptly hanging up. She was in Hollywood, near Vine, and she needed help.
Zan - March 31, 2021
Alex had only been to LA briefly, whatever information Zan gave him didn’t mean much to him, but he knew Jack was familiar with California. So, he asked Jack to reach out to anyone and everyone who might be able to help. After contacting some cousins and old friends and leaving empty-handed, Jack asked his brother Colin if he knew anyone that did volunteer work in the Hollywood area. Colin wasted no time pointing him in my direction.
For background, I’ve spent the last three months as a relatively active member of Street Watch LA. I go to local weekly sweep defenses, I do regular outreach work, I help run org communications, and I generally spend a lot of time at nearby encampments. Coincidentally, I happened to live in Hollywood, so when Jack told me that Zan was “near Vine,” I knew exactly where to start looking. Vine is one of the main locations the Hollywood local of Street Watch frequents because of its large unhoused population and unfortunate placement in a ‘Special Enforcement and Cleanup Zone’. So, when Jack texted me and explained the situation, I knew some of my friends on Vine might be able to help.
20 minutes after receiving the first text, I drove over to Vine and started asking anyone I ran into if they had met a woman named Zan in the past 6 months. I also had a year-old photograph of her that Jack was able to send me, but he was unsure whether such an old photo would accurately portray how she might look after 6 months on the street. At first, the unhoused residents I talked to had no recollection of anyone that went by that name or anyone that looked like the woman in the photograph, but after close to half an hour of searching, one unhoused man told me “Yeah, I saw her on Lexington last night.”
Alex ties Zan’s shoes - March 31, 2021
That first confirmation was followed by another and another and another. All of them were consistent, independent confirmations that Zan had been seen in the area in the previous 24 hours. I called Jack, told him about my friends’ confirmations, and he immediately bought a flight for the next day.
He arrived with Alex late in the afternoon on Tuesday, and stayed out until almost three in the morning looking for Zan at and around the encampment I had been at the day before. He made quick friends with the residents there, but didn’t end up finding Zan that night.
In the morning, while I was on the ground at the weekly sweep defense on Selma and Las Palmas, I saw two men zoom past me on Bird scooters. Jack’s a pretty recognizable guy — he’s tall, muscular, olive-skinned, and heavily tattooed — so it didn’t take long for me to realize it was him and Alex. I yelled out to them, they turned around, and we took stock of just how unlikely it was that we would run into each other unplanned on the streets of Hollywood, but then again, a lot of unlikely things had already lead us to being there.
I let my Street Watch friends know that I was going to peel off for the day so that I could help Jack and Alex with their mission. After introducing them to some of the unhoused residents on Selma, we followed a tip that Zan was in a nearby apartment owned by a man named “sketch”. One of the residents on Selma was able to give us an exact address and apartment number, but unfortunately, it ended up being a dead end.
After an hour, I headed home for work and Jack & Alex went back to their hotel room to rest. They barely slept the night before, so they were visibly exhausted the whole morning. While working, I occasionally texted Jack to see if anything had changed or if any new information had come in, but he didn’t respond. Then, in the mid-afternoon, out of seemingly nowhere, I got a two word text from him: “found her.”
Jack lights Zan’s cigarette - April 1, 2021
Zan in the car - March 31, 2021
Jack and Alex had decided to roll through the same encampment on Selma we had been at in the morning. They wanted to circle back with some of the unhoused folks they met in the morning in hopes someone would have more information. But when they arrived, Zan was there.
Upon seeing Alex and Jack, Zan began to cry, grateful to be reunited with people from her life on the east coast, let alone close friends. As she caught them up with her life since last she saw them, she introduced them to some unhoused friends she had made during her time in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, many of her unhoused friends were the same residents I had been working with for months.
When Zan finished introductions, Jack and Alex drove her to Ross to pick up some clean clothes and then back to their hotel room so that she could shower. In Zan’s own words, so much dirt washed off her body that she “didn’t know if the dark water was coming from the shower or if [she] was bleeding from somewhere [she] couldn’t see.”
Zan looks out the window of the car - March 31, 2021
After Zan showered and dressed herself, Jack told me to ride over to meet her, so I did. Jack met me in the lobby, went out for a smoke, and took me up to his room. Zan was in the bathroom when I first arrived, so I waited sitting on the room’s AC unit, talking to Jack and Alex about just how lucky we were to find Zan so quickly.
When Zan finally did come out of the bathroom, I was struck with just how different she looked than in the few photos I had seen. She was thin, her hair was dyed a bright red-pink, and all but one of her teeth were gone. And when she spoke to greet me, her voice was so thin and forced that it was difficult to understand her words.
We spent about twenty minutes in that room together. Zan talked about her life out in LA, asked about her friends back at the treatment facility in Florida, and occasionally verbalized her urges to use again. Jack and Alex’s own experiences with substance abuse meant that they could effectively communicate why “going for a blast” wasn’t in her best interest and how they would help her overcome those urges.
At one point, Alex asked Zan what she wanted to do, whether she wanted to stay in LA or go back into treatment. It was clear her mind was made up before the question was even asked — she wanted to go to Florida. I asked if I could document our interactions, and everyone enthusiastically consented. Zan even searched in her purse to grab her new sunglasses so that she would look glamorous in the portraits I was taking.
Eventually, Jack mentioned that he was starving, so we headed to In-N-Out and gorged ourselves on double-doubles. While we were sitting outside under one of the restaurant’s rigid red umbrellas, two young unhoused residents recognized Zan and began mouthing “are you okay?” to her. She waved them over, introduced us, and assured them she was doing fine. They left shortly after and we slowly finished our strawberry shakes and French fries.
Alex, Zan, and Jack at In-N-Out - March 31, 2021
From there, we went to Staples to print out Zan’s face sheet because she had long since lost her ID and needed some form of identification to board the flight home. We drove around for a while with the windows down and eventually made our way back to Jack and Alex’s hotel just after sunset. While Alex and Zan went up to the room, Jack and I went around the corner to the local dispensary, bought too much weed, and smoked until we couldn’t smoke anymore.
Alex, Zan, and Jack in an elevator - March 31, 2021
Jack smokes a joint in my car - March 31, 2021
Jack, Alex, and Zan were headed out early the next morning. So, I drove over to them at 7am to say goodbye. We spent half an hour talking about everything that happened in those three days, how unlikely it was that all the pieces fell in place. Zan kept listing all the people she was excited to see back at treatment (and all the others she was hoping to avoid). Time was running low, so the other three packed up, said goodbye, and headed out to LAX in their rented car. They got on the plane, which was a relatively unpleasant and claustrophobic experience for Zan, but got to South Florida without incident.
Zan’s in detox now. She’ll be there for the better part of two weeks as she overcomes her substance dependency, and after that, she’ll go through the larger treatment program for a number of months. She has friends there, her family is now in close contact with her, and she doesn’t have to live on the streets anymore.
In some respects, Zan was lucky. The odds of finding one person in a city across the country with 70,000 unhoused residents are slim to say the least. The majority of unhoused residents aren’t as fortunate. The capitalist system that criminalizes substance dependency and that leeches all material wellbeing from those struggling to overcome it are some of the driving forces keeping those marginalized communities from effectively reintegrating into society. The fact that this success story is unlikely should be cause for concern. Zan’s wellbeing should not have depended on old-friends being in the right place at the right time, the wellbeing of all people should be guaranteed. We were able to find Zan, but Zan should not have needed finding.
Zan smiles as she gets ready to leave for South Florida - April 1, 2021
On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long shot and killed eight people at 3 different spas/massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. 75% of his victims were Asian women. According to Long, his motivation for the shootings was the dissonance between his ‘sex addiction’ and religious beliefs.
This explanation doesn’t quite pass the sniff test.
For one, ‘sex addiction’ doesn’t appear in the DSM-5, the most up-to-date diagnostic catalog of mental illnesses used by psychologists in the United States today. So, there’s doubt in the fundamental existence of the condition Long claims to suffer from.
Even still, it’s important to understand this crime through the lens of sexuality. Regardless of its use as a distraction from more likely motivations, it’s evocation reveals one of those likelier motives: racism.
Throughout the pandemic, the frequency of hate crimes against the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community has dramatically increased in large part due to conservative propaganda directed at shifting blame for the coronavirus onto China and the Chinese more broadly. Donald Trump’s insistence on taking every opportunity to offensively remind the American people of the virus’s country of origin (ie. China-Virus, Kung Flu, etc.) gave the conservative media ecosystem the go-ahead to double-down on existing anti-China rhetoric. This stochastic terrorism campaign unsurprisingly lead to the aforementioned increase in AAPI-targeted hate crimes.
So how exactly does anti-Asian racism factor into Long’s claims of wanting to eliminate sexual temptation?
To start exploring this question, it’s vital to understand the fetishization of Asian women as a form of deep and actively harmful racism.
The infantilization and hyper-sexualization of Asian women is nothing new. Examples of it are littered across the history of the United States in law like The Page Act of 1875 (which claimed to restrict the immigration of prostitutes, but functionally prevented all Chinese women from entering the country) and in media like Full Metal Jacket (which infamously introduced the racially charged phrase “me love you long time” into the cultural vernacular). In all arenas of American life, Asian women were (and continue to be) seen as exotic and submissive sexual beings.
This kind of stereotyping leads directly to the dehumanization necessary to view Asian masseuses, spa employees, and sex workers as the abstract vessels of ‘temptation’ Robert Aaron Long viewed them as. And it is precisely that dehumanization that allows murderers like Long to more easily justify their actions.
After the massacre on March 16, Atlanta police said that it was too early to designate the killings as hate crimes. They were wrong, which isn’t exactly surprising coming from an institution whose primary prerogative is to uphold white supremacy and culturally hegemony at every opportunity.
It’s also not surprising that Robert Aaron Long fits neatly into the demographic most likely to commit acts of racially motivated terror in the United States: white men. In 2015, Dylan Roof slaughtered 9 black church attendees in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2019, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people in a targeted anti-latino attack in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. In 2020, Robert Gregory Bowers murdered 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.
The white population of the United States has long been convinced by shameful history, codified law, and the country’s conservative media ecosystem that they are the rightful inhabitants of this land and the only ones who truly deserve to make decisions regarding the nation’s path forward. So, when that perceived supremacy and unjustified dominance is threatened, white men feel obligated to protect it. And sometimes, protecting it means slaughtering innocent people.
In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement did not just highlight police brutality, it primed the appetites of Americans for transformative dialogue regarding all kinds of systemic racial injustice. Now, we find ourselves confronting the immeasurable harm white supremacy has wrought on the AAPI community. Hopefully, we can use the tools we have gained to eliminate white supremacy in our societal structures and work to alleviate the generational harm it has caused before more tragedies like the massacre in Atlanta happen again.