Submitted by an anonymous student

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected many active small restaurant owners and workers in my community, it has also brought an unprecedented increase in violence, discrimination, and racism towards Asians. For me, COVID-19 has forced my in person school activities and sports competitions to be cancelled and friendships to be transported to text messaging or video calls.

Before COVID-19, I used to wake up at 7 am, and arrive at school before 8 am. After classes, I would go eat lunch with my friends, and go to swim practice. When I came home, I ate dinner and went into my room to do homework. Now, I wake up at noon and sleep at 4 am. While teachers tried to teach classes the same way as they did in school through zoom, it’s been much harder to stay focused and motivated without being surrounded by my classmates. The hardest thing I’ve had to cope with was essentially doing nothing (for months); the absence of in person communication with my friends and the lack of routine in my everyday life was bearable, but very difficult.

In many ways, the negatives of the pandemic clearly outweigh the positives. But while our lives were altered in ways that we could never imagine before the pandemic, there have definitely been some positives: I’ve been able to spend more time with my family and pick up some new hobbies.

Unfortunately, racial incidents against Asian Americans have increased at an unprecedented amount as anxiety and fear about the pandemic continues; usually this anti-asian sentiment is spread online. For many years, social media platforms have been used as a means for people to express their emotions and opinions on current events, but during the pandemic, social media platforms have not only been used to help counter prejudice against Asian Americans, it has also been used to discriminate against the Asian community. Since the beginning of the pandemic, hashtags such as the “China Virus” or the “Kungflu” have gone viral on the internet. The spread of messages and posts like these further exacerbates the anti-Asian sentiment and contributes to acts of direct violence against Asians.

One incident against Asian-Americans that struck me the hardest was when a gunman targeted multiple spas and massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia, killing 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian women. The gunman, 21 year old Robert Aaron Long, a white man, confessed to the shootings, and told authorities that he suffered from a “sexual addiction” and saw the spas as a temptation that he wanted to eliminate. I was particularly disappointed and shocked when the authorities did not regard the incident as a hate crime, but simply stated that Long just had a “very bad day.” Rhetoric like this further reinforces the harmful stereotype of Asian women being fetishized, causing violence against Asian women to be overlooked. I think that anti-asian sentiment and violent attacks like these definitely need to be addressed in society.

I also encountered my first case of verbal racism when I went to Hawaii in April with my family. As my mom and I were about to leave the beach near our hotel, a white woman, who appeared to be drunk, started chasing my mother and I. We were terrified, and instinctively, we ran away and the woman chased us for a good couple minutes. She started shouting racial slurs at us, telling my mother and I to “go back to our country” and blaming us for spreading the “Chink disease.”

One explanation behind the rising anti-Asian sentiment during COVID-19 could be because of threat perception, and this particularly reminds me of Robert G. Lee’s “Fu Manchu Lives! Asian Pacific Americans as Permanent Aliens in American Culture.” Lee described how Chinese immigrants are inherently foreigners in America, despite how Americanized they become. Lee cites cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas, who once stated that “when things are out of place, fear of pollution will arise.” For example, soil is regarded as “fertile earth when on the ground,” but “is polluting dirt when on the kitchen table” (Lee 163). I think this analogy can be used to describe the ongoing pandemic and explains why Asian Americans are perceived as threats even more now than ever. Lee uses Douglas’ observation to allow his readers to visualize how the presence of Orientals can create a sense of confusion and disorder in society: the mere existence of Asian-Americans in a society dominated by whites disrupts the social structure and provokes a sense of anxiety. When these social boundaries appear to be threatened, people start to pay more attention to differences in culture, which often leads to mockery of traditions and rules in our culture.

A prime example of threat perception is also shown in American movies and literature, both of which reinforce the “yellow peril” stereotype. Lee lists Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat and D.W. Griffin’s Broken Blossoms shows how even assimilated asians were inherently dangerous, cruel, and brutal. Paul Muni in Broken Blossoms could transform a white girl into a prostitute because his mere presence was enough to cause moral decay in everyone that he intimately interacted with. Being preoccupied with these “positive” and “negative” stereotypes about Asian further reinforces and legitimizes racial discourse in our community. In order to fight the issue of asian-hate and xenophobia, some small measures that we can each take in our daily lives include reporting hate crime incidents to platforms such as Stop AAPI Hate and the Stand Against Hatred, support the victims of hate crimes and their families through donations, and volunteer to protect elderly Asians by chaperoning.