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My name is Winston Lee.
In the wake of the Cornell 7 affair, I have been caught in the crossfire. One of the seven has the same name as mine, and a number of people have taken to Instagram to send hostile messages to me. One interaction stands out.
About a month ago, a lady (I don’t doxx) first messaged me “u go to cornell?” The next day, out of curiosity, I replied “Yes” and then “Why?” Such curiosity proved morbid as the following flurry of insults and threats, including one of death, ensued:
The lady's half-set grammar represents a literary phenomenon similar to the passion of a kamikaze pilot furiously scribbling his last letter to his family. In contrast to a well-written letter full of ceremonial, pre-set phrases, the lady’s rhetoric was raw, off the dome, and straight from the heart. The repetition of “ugly” as her second-most repeated insult (at my count four, including "fugly" meaning fat and ugly) has me wondering: what if she found me (or the other Winston Lee, I don't know to which she was referring) “handsome”? Would the reprimanding speech have been more or less intense? Does praise and blame have an aesthetic basis? Would Honoré de Balzac be vindicated in his claim, “When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues?”
Regardless of the lady's love or hate for me, it seems she threatened to become the thing she swore to destroy. It was the very crime that Winston Lee was accused of that this lady threatened with me: "I'm [raping] you next just so you know how it feels..." Further, the lady threatened to expose me to employers and blacklist my job prospects. The lady also told me to "go die", taunting later: "so did u kill yourself yet." But, of all of the jarring accusations made, the unspoken one stands out. The hateful messages I received from this lady implicitly accused me of being Winston Lee, a Korean man from Cornell, when in reality I am Winston Lee, a racially Chinese and ethnically American man from Stanford. I was racially profiled as just another Asian man.
While the lady's response sought to outdo the Cornell Winston Lee's Title IX for her own Title VI, her boyfriend chimed in briefly to make the most profound remark of the whole interaction: "im ngl bro you're a chud." The accusation of "chud" is a reference to the online right-wing internet subculture of men marked by romantic frustration, which accusation the boyfriend intended in derogatory fashion. Our white knight revealed the target scapegoat of this affair: marginalized right-wing men. Yet, these chuds themselves oftentimes ironically embrace their identities and sometimes lash out in vicious counter-accusatory fashion against women as a whole. Each faction's particular frustrations escalate in a spiral of increasing hostility while in its wake, the youth are left with the message that cultural and political issues are really just right-wing men and left-wing women's issues, and the great psyop carries on to dispirit the youth from cultivating healthy relationships and vital social lives.
After catching (deserved) strays in this flurry of hostility surrounding the Cornell 7 affair, I concluded the interaction with this lady, not by firing back hostility for hostility, but by sending this meme in response, a simple offering of joy.
