Over the past year, as disturbing videos of attacks on Asian Americans across the country went viral amid the COVID-19 pandemic, UC Riverside researcher Sunny Shao noticed a message circulating widely on WeChat, the app that is a cornerstone of digital life for many Chinese Americans. It notes how the Mandarin translation of “Asian American” sounds nearly the same as the one for “silent American.”
“The slogan is, ‘We should stop being the silent American — we should speak up and tell our story,’” Shao said.
Three days after a gunman killed eight people, six of them Asian-American women, at spas in and around Atlanta, communities in the Bay Area and across the country voiced fear, frustration and anger Friday.
The mass shooting followed numerous reports and videos of Asian Americans being beaten, pushed, robbed — and in San Francisco, killed — by attackers and came as the nation marked the first anniversary of lockdowns prompted by the pandemic. The spread of the virus, which first was reported in Wuhan, China, appears to have led to a surge in anti-Asian violence, which many believe was further fueled by racist rhetoric from former President Trump.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Atlanta to meet with community leaders Friday, while Gov. Gavin Newsom did the same in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Harris, the first vice president of South Asian descent, said that everyone has “the right to be recognized as an American. Not as the other, not as them. But as us.
“For the last year we’ve had people in positions of incredible power scapegoating Asian Americans,” Harris said, “people with the biggest pulpits, spreading this kind of hate.”
Stop AAPI Hate, a project of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University and the group Chinese for Affirmative Action, said this week that it had received reports of 3,795 incidents of racist abuse targeting Asian Americans since last March. About 500 of those incidents happened in the first two months of 2021.
In the Bay Area, a wave of attacks in Oakland’s Chinatown, including a shocking video of a 91-year-old man being shoved to the ground by an assailant, drew national attention in February. In January, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant, died after he was shoved in a similar attack in San Francisco. Prosecutors last week filed hate crime charges against a man who sexually assaulted a woman at San Jose’s Diridon Station while yelling “(expletive) you Asians.” And on Wednesday, another viral video rocketed out of San Francisco showing a distraught and injured 75-year-old named Xiao Zhen Xie, who had fought off an attacker on Market Street.
Other traumatic incidents don’t make the news: When she was walking with her husband earlier this year at UC Riverside, Shao said someone threw a bottle at them, jarring her sense of safety on the campus where they live.
The Stop AAPI Hate report, which was released the day of the Atlanta shootings, included a report from a person in Cupertino who said customers and employees kicked them out of a store, saying, “You Chinese bring the virus here.”
Edward Lau, the manager of a San Francisco Chinatown tea and herbal products store, said he has noticed a drop in customers in recent weeks, with many older Chinese shoppers worried about going out or coming to the city in the wake of attacks.
“They ask us whether we can send (orders) out to them by mail,” Lau said.
He believes the incidents stemmed from Trump, who frequently referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”
“That has lots of impact,” Lau said.
Flanked by community leaders at the Chinese Culture Center in San Francisco on Friday afternoon, Newsom also linked the recent spate of attacks to a century and a half of racist policies, including the 1875 Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act a few years later. Both laws blocked Asian immigration to the United States and had their roots in California; Newsom called them a “scar” on the state and country.
More recently, Newsom recalled how his appointment of Heather Fong as the first Asian-American woman chief of police in San Francisco drew racist rebukes from within the police department.
“We have to be mindful of the incredible damage that has been done,” he said, and “hold those accountable who are the quiet perpetrators of hate.”
Assemblymember David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said he plans to introduce a bill asking the state Department of Justice to track “hate incidents,” racially motivated attacks that may not clear the legal bar of a hate crime.
“We know there are thousands of incidents that are occurring every day that are absolutely wrong,” Chiu said.
Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, said at the same news conference that she welcomed efforts to better track that data.
“These are traumatizing events — these are events that at our core make us feel unsafe,” she said.
But Choi also said she wants to see solutions to the violence that are focused on education and public health and based on work from within the Asian American community. She was particularly wary of making the Department of Justice, the state’s law enforcement agency, responsible for tracking hate incidents.
More-polarized debates about how to address racist and violent incidents have been playing out on WeChat, said Shao, who studies social media and political mobilization as a doctoral candidate.
Some commenters have sought to tie the crimes to criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement — highlighting the Oakland Chinatown attack and another in San Francisco, which involved Black assailants — arguing that calls to overhaul policing and reduce funding for law enforcement have made them less safe. Others respond that such a view will only fuel racist systems that oppress both Black and Asian Americans.
The wave of attacks, Shao said, “has been an awakening process — in a good way and in a bad way.
“We need to do more on bridging those disparities and helping people to know each other,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
