I celebrate these powerful women — these warriors, fighters, and silence breakers.

I support them. Especially those who suffer in silence – whose numbers go uncounted, whose stories go untold.

Violence grows in the shadows. And these shadows have grown longer in recent years, darkened by a pandemic of hate, isolation, fear, and bigotry. 

That is why I rise.

I rise tonight to affirm my commitment to light, to justice.

I rise tonight to denounce the darkness — the hate, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.

I rise tonight to say my actions are merely a down payment, not the final sum:

A new racial justice bureau. A new office devoted exclusively to community. New guidance and resources for law enforcement to tackle hate. New teams to take down those who traffic in human bodies as we empower survivors.

These actions, they are not a “job well done.” They are not yet to be celebrated. They are the first steps in a much longer fight I am here to wage as our state’s chief law enforcement officer.

Because at the California Department of Justice, we know our work is not yet done until all women — and those of all genders — know the true meaning of safety.

Until all our mothers, all our sisters, and all our little girls live beyond the shadows of violence.

Until society fully recognizes the most ultimate strength our world will ever know: the strength of the woman. The strength I know as Cynthia. Mia. Reina. Iliana. Magali. And Lisa.

Tonight, I rise for them. And all who embody the feminine. I celebrate them. I cherish them, and I proudly say: I fight for them.

Thank you.

I rise against Asian hate.

During my college freshman year, 8 Asian college students were on a bus, going to a semiformal dance, when Feona Lee & Marta Ho felt spit in their hair. For 45 minutes, the students were attacked, spat at, subject to racial epithets.

What was so upsetting wasn't just the attack itself, but the fact that their known attackers - star football players at their college, were never brought to justice. That started my path to activism.

When I was in my 20s, I discovered a woman close to me was in an abusive relationship. I learned for the 1st time about domestic violence, which is why I joined Partners Ending Domestic Abuse and authored laws to address DV as a legislator.

In early 2020, when the first reports of COVID came out, I reached out to two friends, who like me, were Asian elected officials representing our respective Chinatowns, in San Francisco, New York City and Boston. We were all seeing a rise in anti-Asian hate in our Chinatowns, even before a single COVID case was diagnosed in the US. But when we publicly raised the alarm, because they were women, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and NY Assemblywomen Yuhline Niou were subjected to racist and sexist attacks, where I was not.

In 2021, for a few weeks, America focused on 6 Asian women murdered in an Atlanta spa. But over the last 2+ years, there have been over 10,000 documented incidents of anti-Asian hate - 2/3rds of all victims of anti-Asian hate have been women.

In the California Legislature, as the former Chair of the API Legislative Caucus, my colleagues and I championed the largest state investment in the country to combat anti-Asian hate, $156M for victims and programs to make us safer. But our work is not done.

As 1st Asian San Francisco City Attorney, I pledge that I will do everything within my power to combat anti-Asian hate. We must end the violence.

I wanted to express my deepest outrage, my love for Asian women and the Asian community  and my deepest solidarity.  To express outrage that many here in SanFrancisco and around the country are afraid to leave their houses. And that Asian women In the crosshairs of hypersexualization and racism, face more aggression but are believed less. Out of the 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate between March 2020 and March 2021, 68 percent were by women. 

Attacks on Asian women reveal deeply-rooted race and gender biases that exist beyond an individual level. 

So often when we see suffering, we become paralyzed in not knowing how to respond. We either shut down and ignore it, or attempt to belittle it or think we have to rescue those who are hurting. Listening helps. Being present helps. Spending the time to know who people are- to see them, and cherish them, to move past stereotypes or projection, to erase all previous narratives-to not oversexualize Asian women or blame Asian people for a virus, to not make assumptions based on racist narratives.

I wanted to know something about the women who were murdered. So for tonight I spent hours reading their stories. I read about their work and their dreams and their families and their generosity. I read about how they were murdered and how these terrible acts of violence impacted their dear families.

I read about GuiYing Ma, 61 (Gee Ying Ma) a grand mother, sweeping the sidewalk for her landlord who said later that Gui Ying Ma and her husband were the poorest people at his mothers farewell ceremony and yet they gave the most 300 hundred dollar. GuiYing, GuiYing Ma sweeping the sidewalk when a man bashed her head in with a stone. Her husband  Zhanxin Gao. (sangsin) crying and screaming, about the loss of his wife of four decades.

"She's a very, very good person and she's also a very outgoing individual. She's someone who is always willing to help others," Gao said.

 "My dear, my beloved, please stay on. I want you to be able to stay on. I want you to be able to go back to China with me. I want you to stay strong and be with me."

 Xiaojie Tan, (chinese showshya) 49, of Kennesaw; aka Emily, as she was known to most, was supposed to celebrate her 50th birthday on Tuesday, March 16. Her daughter Jami Webb had planned to celebrate with a fresh strawberry cream cake. Instead, Webb was forced to spend the day planning Tan's funeral. Tan was one of the four victims of the shooting rampage by Robert Aaron Long at Young's Asian Massage parlor, which Tan owned. 

Daoyou (daoyo) Feng was also killed in that mass shooting with six other people. She had no family in the US. Her funeral was coordinated by a local organization called the Atlanta Chinese American Alliance  which started a crowd funding page to pay for her funeral expenses. One hundred people, all of the strangers attended to the funeral to show their love for her. Feng grew up in a rural town in China, Liangdong where her parents worked hard to provide for their four  children. They were illiterate, never went to school and invested their small earning in education so their children would have better opportunities. But when her father died Feng was forced to drop out of school and help on the farm. She only made it to third grade. Feng left home when she was 14, ventured to Shanghai and big cities.

She worked on assembly line and textile factories. Then heard there were better opportunities in the states. She knew little Engish and had no friends or family in the US. But she wrote a letter to her mother saying she needed to go to find a way to pull her family out of poverty. She sent money every two to three months to her mother. Never married or had children. Her dream was to return to China and open a beauty salon.

Hyun (chun) Jung Grant, 51, was an elementary school teacher in Korea before coming to the US, according to her son. Grant was identified by the Fulton County medical examiner’s office as one of the victims killed in the Atlanta shootings on Tuesday.

Randy Park, one of Grant’s two sons, said that his mother was killed at Gold Spa. He and his mother were “very close”.

“I could tell her anything. If I had girl problems or whatever. She wasn’t just my mother. She was my friend,” he reportedly said.

Park also said that his mother loved “dancing and partying” and that “She would always try to convince me to go out. She loved going to clubs. She loved Tiesto. She was like a teenager.”

Yong ae Yue was also killed in Atlanta, said her most precious moments were the ones “she spent with her children and grandchildren, nurturing them to be the young men and women they are today”. The Norcross resident was a mother of two sons and a Buddhist.

Yue’s son Robert Peterson said his mother “fed all my friends Korean food, took them to Korean karaoke, and did no harm to anyone”. “Losing my mother is one of the hardest things I have ever experienced and all because of hate,” he continued.

Christine Yuna Lee 35 years old stabbed 40 times in her bathroom after a man followed her home.

Ms. Lee was a Rutgers University graduate and worked as a senior creative producer at Splice, an online platform for digital music, a company spokeswoman confirmed. She had also worked on photo and video campaigns for brands such as Marriott International and Equinox, according to her website.

Michelle Go, a former San Francisco Bay resident who was pushed in front of a train and Circa 1994, she attended American High School in Fremont, where she was a member of the Honor Society as well as a cheerleader. She graduated in 1998. She would go on to study economics at University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a degree in economics in 2002. She then worked at Ferguson Plumbing Supply in Pasadena, California, as a customer service and sales representative.[2] In 2010, she obtained a Master of Business Administration from the New York University Stern School of Business where she worked at Barclays Capital, before joining financial firm Deloitte, where she worked in mergers and acquisitions.[2]

She served the unhoused  particularly the elderly she was part of a buy nothing group a bartering and gifting online community that encourages recycling. 

These are just a few of their stories.

I can’t bring all the women here tonight but I can bring the desire to know them, to make them real-- you can go and read about them, hold them in your heart, value their lives.

Let me close with the words of Anouk Yeh from her brilliant piece she wrote in refinery 29.

During online school, white classmates ask me my thoughts on the Atlanta victims, wondering specifically what I thought about the fact that they worked in massage parlors. These questions are as pointed as the stares Moy must have endured; I feel like I’m being asked to pour tea for an audience of zoo-gooers. 

On the street, a man rolls down his window and yells at me: “Ni hao, baby. I would love a piece of that.” I feel like I have an exhibition sign tacked to my back; I wonder what it was like to be one of the women who was force-purchased from a catalogue, unable to hide from unwanted sexual advances. I log onto social media and see the voices of Korean femme organizers being drowned out by articles about Atlanta’s “happy ending” massages, and it feels like I — like every Asian woman in America — am screaming inside our glass boxes, only nobody can hear us. Nobody wants to. The rest of America just sits and watches from outside the exhibit, free to come and go as they please.

The  centuries-long commodification of our bodies has forced us to inherit hyper-sexualized and overly submissive stereotypes that we never would have chosen for ourselves — but history bore us into this exhibition box. 

So where do we go from here? Although it’s hard to dismantle centuries of calcified caricature, what isn’t hard — what shouldn’t be hard — is focusing on the humanity of each Asian woman targeted by white supremacy, of telling their stories, of telling our own.

This means honoring all eight of the victims of the Atlanta massacre outside of a lens of residual imperialist violence, and remembering them for who they were in life. Remember them not for their connection to white supremacy, but for the way they lived and the way they loved; remember them for the way they cooked jjigae stew and watched Korean dramas. Remember them for the way they always welcomed customers new and old with a smile and open arms; remember them for the way they were willing to leave motherlands behind in hopes of forging a better future for their loved ones. 

This rhetoric also extends to ourselves. During times of increasing anti-Asian xenophobia, it is extremely important that we, as Asian women, hold close all the joyous and nuanced parts of our identities. Oversimplification is the first step towards dehumanization, so proudly claiming every facet of our personal identities is a radical act of protest — especially in a nation that has only ever allowed Asian women to take up one single, objectified narrative. We boldly claim every facet of our identity when our humanity is questioned by a stranger yelling slurs through a car window or reducing an entire social justice movement down to stereotypes, we know that this is not the total of who we are because we have already self-defined who we are.

Nuanced and compassionate storytelling, after all, is the best way of restoring humanity to a community that has historically been violently denied it.

I am here tonight to tell the stories of Asian women who we have lost their lives to this terrible hate and violence, to honor Asian woman who love and work hard and live with profound generosity and heart and humor. 

Good evening, everyone. I see many friends. A shout out to my JCRC colleagues – we just came back from an intense 10-day trip to Israel to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shout out to our dear friends at V-Day especially V who flew all the way from New York and V-Day executive director Susan Celia Swan and her team. I see members of the Filipina Women’s Network, former cast/crew members, Vagina Warriors, elected officials and community leaders and many many supporters from AT&T, Wells Fargo, the Warriors, SF Giants, United Playaz, Gabriela, Malaya, SOMA Pilipinas, ISFFA.

Thank you for joining us for the Filipina Women’s Network’s last and FINAL SHOW after 15 years of producing this show here at the Herbst Theatre and taking our message to New York’s Skirball Theatre and the Philippine Consulate, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, M Hotel in Las Vegas, the Intercontinental Hotel in Toronto, Renaissance St. Pancras in London, Westin Vendome in Paris. We started here at the Herbst Theatre and it is so appropriate that we’ll sunset the show in this beautiful theatre.

It just seems like it was yesterday when I met V at a conference in New York in 2003. She had just returned from a trip to the Philippines where she met the Filipina Comfort Women* survivors. She promised to write a special monologue so the world will know and won’t easily forget the stories of the comfort women.

At the time, V inspired me to put on “The Vagina Monologues” in our community. The Filipina Women’s Network was still in its infancy, and I thought, surely our members would appreciate the funny, quirky, sad, thought-provoking, hopeful and happy stories about vaginas!

I was genuinely surprised at the response: FWN members canceled their memberships in protest of the TVM production. When news about our all-Filipina TVM production began to be shared, members of the Filipina/Filipino American community in the Bay Area condemned FWN for daring to put on a show about vaginas and pukis (Tagalog word for vagina). I became the Vagina Lady, the PUKI lady, the woman who openly utters the words vagina and puki in conversations at community events.

Around the same time, the murder of 22-year old Filipina Claire Joyce Tempongko by her boyfriend in front of her two young children was big news of concern in San Francisco. Claire did everything she could to get help — she reported her boyfriend’s abuse, she filed a restraining order, she called 911 on that fateful night. But San Francisco, the police, our community, failed her.  APILO and all the domestic violence advocates and agencies rallied to overhaul the city’s systemwide response to domestic violence.

With Claire’s murder as our wake-up call, the Filipina community rallied and stepped up to talk publicly about vaginas and pukis with The Vagina Monologues shows. Claire’s murderer is still in prison, denied parole recently.

After 15 years — with 31 TVM productions (6 in the Tagalog “Usaping Puki”) in 3 countries, over 700 FWN members, casts and crews from local Filipinx communities and over $250,000 raised to benefit local agencies and shelters helping women, educating communities about domestic violence and fighting back against abusers — FWN, our members, our community casts and crew, volunteers, allies, partners, friends and family will make final curtain call this year.

We are sunsetting a show that has emboldened women like me to walk out of abusive relationships, claim back their lives and embark on their journeys to recovery. With all our gratitude, reverence and love to the incomparable V, The Vagina Monologues has changed the countless lives of women and children and sparked communities to bring to light, end the shame and actively fight violence against women and girls.

I am deeply grateful to the hundreds of brave women and men who have participated as cast members, the behind-the-scenes crew who made the shows flawless, the many sponsors, advertisers and contributors whose support made the shows happen in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Las Vegas, Toronto and London.

Maraming Salamat (thank you!) to the late Bernardo Bernardo, Elson Montalbo, and Bettina Yap, our first directors, Ken Marquis our long-time director, and the precious, Al Perez, art director of both the show and the V-Diaries: Anti-Violence Resource Guide since 2004.

Most especially, thank you to V for her encouragement, guidance, advice, love, support, friendship and belief in me; Susan Celia Swan, V-Day executive director, and Franklin Ricarte.

This is FWN’s last and FINAL show. Thank you for joining our celebration tonight. Mabuhay! Distinguished guests, I present to you FWN’s FINAL SHOW of “The Vagina Monologues”!