In San Francisco, 84-year-old Rong Xin Liao was violently kicked off of his seated walker, falling headfirst, blacking out, and needing to be hospitalized for four nights.
In San Francisco, an 84-year-old man named Vicha Rantanapakdee was violently pushed onto the ground, and he died two days later.
In Flushing, Queens, a 52-year-old woman was shoved by a white male outside of a bakery shop and hit her head against the newsstand box.
In Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, a 36-year-old Chinese man was stabbed in the back by a stranger.
In Atlanta, eight individuals were murdered, six of whom were Asian women: Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue.
Those are just a few of the Anti-Asian attacks that have occurred in recent years. The rates of Anti-Asian crimes have increased drastically, by 150% in 2020 in New York City and Los Angeles. But I keep thinking: those numbers are the crimes that are actually reported.
The violence directed towards people of Asian descent has always been happening, but only some of the crimes are reported to the police and by news media outlets. Some crimes aren’t reported because of the language barrier, which prevents Asian victims from explaining the situation, and the fear of the police, who won’t even believe them because of how they look. If the police officers cannot understand what Asian people are saying, they don’t take the time to understand, and the incident gets forgotten. My mother tells me a story of one of her friends who couldn’t find the correct words to explain a situation, and the impatient police officer sided with the other person who does speak English, leaving the Asian person helpless. After she told me this story, it angered me. Why didn’t the police officer take the time to understand? Where were the resources for people who can’t speak English well in the United States?
Recently, the crimes have been targeted at the elderly Asian population in various cities, such as San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles. The crimes are unprovoked, and the assailant targets the elderly man or woman of Asian descent, whether through stealing money or deliberately injuring or murdering them. The assailants treat their victims without compassion, and it’s evident that the elderly Asian people are seen as disposable to others. The elderly cannot fight back physically, and the attackers know that. From the recent media coverage, elderly Asian people are afraid to walk outside because they could be attacked just because of their race. I wonder if the attackers ever stop to think about: would they do that to their own grandmother or grandfather? Do they have any compassion left in them?
Asian women have also been targeted. The majority of the victims of the shooting at three spas in Atlanta were Asian women who had their lives violently robbed because the shooter had a “sex addiction” and saw the Asian women working at the spas as his temptation. Professor Wendy Lee, an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Skidmore College, emphasized that “sex work is work” and the need for justice for the victims. Professor Lee points to how the stigma of sex work has diminished the worth of sex workers. She introduced me to the Red Canary Song, a grassroots initiative of Asian & Migrant workers working to decriminalize sex work and fight for “justice and police accountability” for massage parlor workers by giving them legal representation. The women who were killed deserved so much better. They deserved to live their lives. They deserved to see their children grow up. The shooter, whom I won’t name because of the pain that he has inflicted, took away so much.
Randy Park, the son of Hyun Jung Grant, who was one of the victims, has set up a GoFundMe page called “In memory of HyunJungKim to support my brother & I,” for donations to pay the bills, food, and to sort out the legal matters and his future living situations for him and his brother.
The racist air that permeates the world has always been affecting women of Asian descent. In Isaac Chotiners’ Q&A article, “The History of the Anti-Asian-American Violence,” he speaks with filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña. Tajima-Peña spoke about how the “seed of the Atlanta shooting goes back to the Page Act, in 1875 […] the headliner for the Chinese Exclusion Act. That’s where Chinese women were really targeted, because they were seen as prostitutes. Some did come in as prostitutes, but it fed this whole idea of the sexualized Asian woman.”
Tijmia-Peña’s point connects to the abundance of ways that Hollywood hypersexualized Asian women. For instance, in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), the Vietnamese sex worker says, “Me so horny,” which worked to create an Asian fetish and casted them as sex objects for the soldiers. Tajima-Peña says, “There was always this Orientalist Fantasy” which was prevalent in past Hollywood films.
Moreover, Hollywood has propelled racist stereotypes in their films. In Sixteen Candles (1984), the Asian foreign exchange student named Long Duk Dong is ridiculed throughout the movie as unpopular. The movie deliberately casts him as the foreigner and out-of-place with the sound of the gong appearing every time he was on screen. Additionally, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Mickey Rooney plays Mr. I.Y. Yunioshi. He was a white man playing a Japanese character. Let that sink in. It was completely offensive, and Rooney used his version of a Japanese accent, he wore fake buck teeth, and squinted his eyes. He wore “yellowface” in the film.
This racism wasn’t limited to Hollywood, though: on June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American man, was beaten to death by two white auto workers because they blamed him for their unemployment due to the increase in Japanese auto manufacturers. Chin was targeted because of his race, but the two men who killed him didn’t go to jail. However, Chin’s death sparked Asian American activists to fight out against the injustices. Chin wasn’t treated as a full person, and he lost his life.
The history of discrimination and trauma has occurred within the Supreme Court ruling in 1854 with People v. Hall, which denied Chinese people the right to testify in court because they were consider “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown; differing in language, opinions, color, and physical conformation.” Asian Americans faced legal attacks under the Chinese Massacre of 1871 occurred in Los Angeles, the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which restricted Chinese immigration into the United States, and the Japanese Internment Camps during WWII in which Japanese people were imprisoned, died from the trauma, or were murdered for trying to escape.
Based on the history of Anti-Asian sentiments and recent events, there is a pattern of crimes against Asians and Asian Americans that have always been occurring.
Racism. Microaggressions. Violence. Brutal murders. All have been happening everywhere, even in our very own communities. The names of those who have been murdered or attacked in the news shouldn’t be just glossed over or brushed aside because the racism against Asians and Asian Americans is destructive. We have to get to work to get justice for those who were murdered and to dismantle the racism against Asians and Asian Americans.
It’s time to speak out. Because it’s not okay. It never was, and it never will be