The New Fear for Asian-Americans Going Out in Public
One Saturday earlier this month, after a few stuffy days indoors, my wife and I set foot outside our apartment in Brooklyn to restock on essentials. Me being steeped in COVID-19 news all day for work, I erred on the side of caution: a surgical mask, in case I was a vector, and some gloves, for opening doors and touching things. But my wife, whose parents are from Taiwan, was slightly more hesitant about wearing a mask out in the real world, even though we were walking through the neighborhood in broad daylight. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why, at least not until later that night.
“I wish I could have articulated it earlier,” she said. “But I feel like the mask just makes me more of a target.”
With coronavirus enveloping every aspect of our lives, it’s a particularly fraught time for Asian-Americans, many of whom are grappling with a new layer of anxiety whenever they need to move through the world. My family is Filipino and I present as slightly more racially ambiguous than my wife, but I was nervous that hate crimes against Asians were going to soar when the virus touched down in the U.S., and again when President Donald Trump insisted on calling it the “China virus” during White House press briefings. I was interested in how the spike in anti-Asian sentiment was changing the daily calculus for others. Whether they were having to choose between, say, taking measures to protect themselves from a highly contagious virus versus making themselves appear invisible in public.
Inevitably, some have already argued that “racializing the pandemic” was merely another distraction ripped from the Trump playbook, intended to divert attention from the administration’s countless and preventable failures in a time of crisis. (It’s an argument that I don’t necessarily disagree with.) But anti-Asian racism in the West is nothing new, and with the advent of COVID-19, hate crimes documented by different organizations are on the rise with reported incidents already in the high hundreds. Sometimes, that harassment is intended as a joke (earlier this month, a Florida rapper named 1k_Johnny went viral for chasing an elderly Chinese woman with hand sanitizer), and other times it manifests as actual physical violence (such as when a 44-year-old Korean man was stabbed in Montreal). An FBI intelligence report that was leaked in mid-March predicted as much: “The FBI assesses hate crime incidents against Asian Americans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus disease … endangering Asian American communities.”
I spent the past week talking to Asian-Americans here in New York, the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak and a city that prides itself on its diversity. They described experiencing unusually aggressive behavior that has altered how they go about their daily lives.
One of the more ironic parts of Trump’s insistence on narrowly calling it the “Chinese virus” is how undiscriminating it is against Asian-presenting people of all backgrounds. Some of the incidents were common enough. Tiffany Hsu, a resident of the Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, recalls walking by a man who appeared to be in his fifties on Fulton Street while on her way to Key Food, who loudly uttered “Chinese virus” as he passed her. (Predictably, the president’s cohorts and allies like Kellyanne Conway and Lindsey Graham have argued that the term isn’t racist, even though Trump has since distanced himself from using it.) Her incident was hurtful, but far from singular—the kinds of things Asian Americans are used to hearing—and now she doesn’t go to the grocery store unless she’s with her husband.
YinXia Asia Ng, a half-Chinese woman who lives in Astoria with her husband and two children, was recently called a “gook” by a stranger on the train. And before the schools were closed, her eldest daughter came back after a run-in with two of her kindergarten classmates. “My mommy says your mommy has coronavirus because she’s Chinese,” says Ng. The most disturbing part, she says, was that “the information that these children were getting came from their parents.” When she talked to her daughter’s teacher and the school principal, Ng says she was surprised the incident was dismissed as a one-off. “I just noticed that everybody treats these things as isolated events,” she says. “They kept calling them ‘isolated events,’ like it doesn’t happen.”
Ng wasn’t the only one who felt that authority figures were dismissive of anti-Asian racism. Margaret Paik, a Korean woman who lives in Jersey City, described getting into an altercation with a woman who was following her around and calling her slurs near Penn Station on March 21st. Paik ended up confronting the woman for following her, and the woman ended up punching her. When the Port Authority police ran over, she says they were unhelpful. “One of the cops said to his friend, ‘Is my car okay?’” Paik remembers, realizing that the attack occurred next to a parked police car. “I remember looking at these cops and thinking, you’re not taking this seriously," she says. “But I also know there’s nothing that will change this situation. What’s the worst thing that could happen? She goes to jail for 30 days?” When Paik got home, she realized that the Incident Report Slip was incomplete, and the officers' names and a complaint report number were missing.
New York, like any major city, has a long history of inequality, from “stop and frisk” to housing discrimination. But one of the supposed benefits is the sense of safety you get from being surrounded by people, the “eyes on the street,” as the writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs has put it. For the privileged among us, coronavirus and social distancing have turned some of that upside down, and we’re faced with new questions about what it means to tend to each other. Joy Yoon, a Korean-American writer who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and one-year old child, described an experienced that occurred on Friday, March 13, in Midtown “across the street from Nordstrom Men.” A man on the street “hissed” and threw his drink at her. “I turned around and confronted him, and my husband [who is English] was like, ‘Just don’t do it,’” Yoon tells me. “Because we’ve also been noticing people being a bit more agitated nowadays because of corona and everything, so they’re more willing to be confrontational.” No one on the street intervened, but she and her husband ultimately decided that it was better to keep it moving rather than risk further danger.
"I’ve literally been like, How can I make myself look less Asian when I go out?"
“When we do go out I’m the one who carries the baby,” says Yoon. “It’s weird. But it’s like added protection. I feel like people are less likely to harass me if I have my child with me.”
Across the country, the attacks have already escalated to the point of extreme violence. According to the leaked FBI document, one instance that reportedly took place in Midland, Texas involved “three Asian American family members, including a 2-year-old and 6-year-old, [who] were stabbed.” The suspect said he attacked the family “because he thought the family was Chinese, and infecting people with the coronavirus.”
The coronavirus is revealing old seams, old ideas about the place Asians occupy in the American imagination. There is a perceived adjacency to whiteness, a dangerous notion that works in tandem with the idea that Asian-Americans are perpetual foreigners—that for whatever reason, this isn’t really our home. That we don't really belong here. In fact, when pressed recently on what concrete measures the administration would take to protect Asian-Americans from hate crimes, Trump responded with his typical unconcern: “Well, I don’t know. All I know is Asian-Americans in our country are doing fantastically well. I am very close to them, as you know.”
Eventually, as more people started wearing masks outside while tending to errands, my wife started wearing one too. But I haven’t stopped thinking about something Hsu, the Clinton Hill resident, told me before we got off the phone:
“What’s scary is you wear a mask, you get targeted. You don’t wear a mask, you get targeted. It doesn’t fucking matter,” she said. “I’ve literally been like, How can I make myself look less Asian when I go out?”
America, now the coronavirus world leader, just hit 100,000 confirmed cases—it didn’t have to be this way.
Originally Appeared on GQ
