Anti-Asian Hate: Why this time is different
Anti-Asian racism is nothing new, but there has been a staggering increase in hate crimes against Asian people since the start of the pandemic. To Vivianne Zhang Wei, this wave feels different.
Source: Jason Leung via Unsplash
One afternoon in January 2020, I received a notification from CNN about a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan. Keep in mind that Iran had just launched over a dozen ballistic missiles and almost 50 million acres of land were on fire in Australia, so, a pneumonia outbreak would have seemed comparatively harmless. Chances are, I wouldn’t even have opened the article if my mum and stepdad hadn’t just arrived in China for new-year celebrations.
“What’s this all about?” I WeChat-messaged my mum with a screenshot.
It was a nasty SARS-like virus, she replied, but then reminded me that they were on an island halfway across the country from Wuhan and told me not to worry. There were seven families from Wuhan in their neighbourhood, but they were not allowed in restaurants and had their temperatures taken every day. These all seemed decent reasons for me not to worry, so I just told her to be careful.
Once they had returned to the safety of our home in Sweden, it became increasingly difficult to worry even if I wanted to. Anything related to bats, Wuhan, or Chinese people had become a joke; without giving it much thought, I started sharing the memes too, and when my friends called me a “walking coronavirus”, I laughed along too. It all seemed so harmless anyway.
Little did I know that two months later, that harmless pneumonia outbreak in far-away Wuhan would have developed into a pandemic, and our harmless jokes, into a worldwide surge in anti-Asian hate.
One evening in mid-March, it was my mum’s turn to send me a screenshot and tell me to be careful. ‘Several violent attacks on Chinese students in the U.K.’, the article said. I told her not to worry, but I couldn’t provide a single decent reason why. Why wouldn’t she worry? Why wouldn’t I worry? I was a student in the U.K., and – as a stranger on Birmingham high street had recently reminded me when she sneezed in my face and laughed – I was also Chinese.
That is, I was Chinese as far as a potential attacker would be concerned. Personally, I couldn’t even remember when I had last thought of myself as Chinese. Growing up to Chinese immigrant parents in Sweden, I always found myself in predominantly white schools where it was made pretty clear that “Chinese” was not something that you would want to be. No one said it out loud, but encrypted in the “ching-chang-chong”s and “do-you-eat-dogs”s was always the implication that Chinese people didn’t belong.
The perpetual frustration of this type of “casual racism” is that you never know when it is sufficiently un-casual to be just “racism”. I struggled, because kids can make anything sound quite casual. The slurs rolled off the tongues of my six-year-old classmates with such ease that any reaction other than laughing along seemed like an overreaction, and eventually, I thought that if they were this comfortable joking about Chinese people around me, perhaps they truly saw me as one of their own. Perhaps, I was somehow separate from the Chinese people who we were making fun of – and that, sadly, was good enough for me.
When I transferred to an international school in the U.K. at the age of 15, everything changed, but also, nothing changed. I had never attended a school with more than a handful of other Asians before, and suddenly, a good quarter of my peers were of Asian descent. It was a relief to finally blend in, but anti-Asian racism has cunningly made space for itself at international schools too, UCL included. When there are too many Asians to single individuals out, we are, instead, lumped together as an uninteresting monolith. “The Asians” – by which, they usually mean East-Asians – don’t integrate; “The Asians” excel in maths but have no personality; “The Asians”, I realised, were constantly and unapologetically dehumanised, but I couldn’t find the courage to challenge it.
Instead, I did what I had always done best: suppress everything Chinese about myself to dissociate from the stereotype. At this point, I didn’t even need to try hard; at home, we now almost exclusively spoke Swedish, ate Swedish food, did, well, Swedish things. My Mandarin was of primary school proficiency, and my maths level average, so I realised that when I introduced myself as Swedish, no one questioned it, and I felt so liberated. My friends eventually coined me a “fake Asian” – an identity that I, for the first time, truly felt comfortable with.
This all led me to believe that my little identity crisis had been resolved for good, until that stranger in Birmingham reminded me that it had not. I didn’t make much of the incident at the time, but when I returned to Sweden for the summer, the clues became harder to ignore. There was this elusive change in the atmosphere; suddenly, I felt like a foreigner in what had been my hometown for ten years. I would go for my usual run in my usual park, but every now and then, someone would take an unusually big leap to the side or tug at their collar to cover their mouth.
Was it because of me looking Asian, or simply out of general pandemic-time caution? I could never tell, but I always gave them the benefit of the doubt and wrote it off as my own paranoia. A part of me preferred it like that anyway, because if it was just in my head, then at least it wasn’t real.
But this time feels different. For months now, I have been seeing videos of elderly Asians getting knocked, pushed, pummelled, shoved, slashed, robbed – and it feels different. I woke up one morning and opened Twitter, only to find out that there had been a murder of eight people in Atlanta – six of whom Asian women – and it felt different. It has been anger, pain, hurt, sadness, fear, grief. But also solidarity, belonging. Never have I felt this scared and this proud to be Asian, all at once.
This time feels different – it is different – because I don’t get to write it off as paranoia. Since my mum sent me that text in March last year, nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents have been reported to the non-profit organisation Stop AAPI Hate in the U.S.. In the U.K., we have seen a staggering 300 per cent increase. “I am going to kill all Asians”, the shooter in Atlanta allegedly shouted before opening fire. For the first time, I feel just as Asian as any other victim of anti-Asian hate.
To most of us, seeing the evidence stack up this quickly has come as a shock. But to some, it has still not been enough. In an interview with the Atlantic, the Asian American writer Cathy Park Hong recalled a conversation with a police officer who dismissed the increase in crimes against Asian Americans as “just part of rising crime”. On seemingly every Twitter thread about the attacks, someone will argue that it, really, is “not about race”. In the first press conference after the shooting in Atlanta, an official spoke of the killing spree as the unfortunate result of a white man’s “bad day”.
And it feels just like it did in October last year, when the U.K.’s first female MP of Chinese descent, Sarah Owen, called a debate on anti-Asian racism – and besides the Minister, who had to be there, not a single Conservative MP showed up.
“Where are her colleagues? There are six seats empty on her side,” Owen’s voice trembled into the unfilled room. “I know that this is Westminster Hall and it is supposed to be less political, but what message does that send to our communities?”
I know all too well what message it sent, because it is exactly the one that I am so used to, and so tired of, sending myself: “you’re probably just overreacting”.
Many of us have found protection in denial, in silence; we have taken our parents’ or grandparents’ advice that respect is best earned by biting the bullet and working harder, and I think it’s important that we don’t blame ourselves for it. Speaking up is really hard. And when you finally speak up only to feel as if you are shouting into the void, it is so tempting to retreat back into silence.
But this time is different, because it’s not just about self-preservation. We joke; we brush things off; we say that it really isn’t that deep, but we don’t realise that these coping mechanisms only save ourselves, at most. When racism turns really ugly, it targets the most vulnerable in our communities: our elderly, our women, our low-wage workers. When racism turns really ugly, we rely on a coherent, collective narrative to prove it.
To whoever needs to hear it: this is a time to document and confront the anti-Asian racism that we face, but also a time for introspection. I am so grateful to those who have been standing up against anti-Asian racism all along, but we, collectively, historically – and some of us, individually – have not been the best at acknowledging it when we have seen it. Let’s stop downplaying our experiences ourselves, and hopefully, it won’t be long until others follow.
If you experience or witness a hate crime or hate incident at UCL you can report it anonymously using this form. Here, here, and here are some great lists of resources for learning more about anti-Asian racism and how to take action. I will just add three pieces that I have found especially helpful and relevant myself:
“We Need to Talk About Asian Hate”: A 70-minute documentary about anti-Asian hate in America today and historically, narrated by Eugene Lee Yang from The Try Guys.
“This is What Anti-Asian Hate Looks Like in the UK”: A report about the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.K., written by Angela Hui for Vice UK.
“Covering Asia and Asian Americans”: A terminology guide for journalists covering stories about Asia and of Asian people, created by the Asian American Journalists Association.
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