Masked by racism
In a united States roiled by protests about white-on-black brutality, asian americans face a different kind of hostility.
“YOU are the most selfish (expletive) people on the planet.”
I jerked my head to the left, where I saw a neighbour glaring at us from his driveway while unloading groceries from his trunk.
“Where’s your (expletive) mask?” he said. “Unbelievable.”
My jaw dropped. I had just walked three blocks home with my toddler and my dad in our mostly empty Los Angeles neighbourhood because my kid had thrown a tantrum in the car.
And we had forgotten our masks. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti had recently ordered face coverings any time we left home, not just when we entered essential businesses.
I pointed out my house to the neighbour to explain how close we were, just a few doors down from him. He cut me off.
“I don’t give a (expletive) where you live, and I don’t give a (expletive) what your reason is.”
Then my dad jumped in. “Sorry, sir, we forgot our masks. I’m sorry, sir.”
Still, the man didn’t soften. “You should be sorry. And you should make her be sorry, too,” he gestured toward me. After a few more agonising seconds, he dismissed us.
Our neighbour’s mask, by the way? It was off his face, hanging loosely around his neck. All the better to shout at us.
As a health care reporter, I had covered America’s evolution on masks as Covid-19 spread across the globe. In January, I wrote an article about why Chinese immigrants insisted on wearing surgical and construction masks in the United States, even though it went against official health recommendations at the time. In February, I wrote about Asian families in
California clashing with schools over whether their children should be allowed to wear masks in class.
At that time, Asian people wearing masks were targets of verbal and physical abuse. Attackers saw masks on Asian faces as signs of disease and invasion; people were punched and kicked, harassed on public transit, bullied at school and worse.
Now, of course, masks are the norm. And they’ve become more than just personal protection; they are symbols of courtesy and scientific buy-in. They have, to some extent, also become political signifiers. In a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation (which researchers healthcare and US policy issues), 70% of Democrats said they wear a protective mask “every time” they leave their house versus 37% of Republicans.
After our verbal beat down, my dad and I walked home stonefaced and then retreated to our separate rooms to nurse our wounds.
I have no idea if the neighbour’s comments had a racist undertone. But it felt like the times in my childhood, first in New Zealand, then in a Bay Area suburb in San Francisco, when I had seen my Philippines-born parents, stunned and silent, get dressed down or humiliated by angry, callous white people. Now it was my three-yearold daughter’s turn to see me dumbstruck.
As I began telling my husband the story, I started crying so hard that I got a headache. After my tears came reflection, and an attempt at empathy.
My neighbour was obviously scared. He was older, and potentially more medically vulnerable. His trunk had been packed with overstuffed shopping bags – probably enough food for weeks, to avoid leaving his house.
He had just come from the grocery store, an enclosed space full of things and people that could potentially infect him. I understand the stress that comes with shopping during the pandemic.
Like many of us, my neighbour could be struggling with how to live in mortal fear of the coronavirus. And for him, at least that morning, that struggle got the better of him.
Later that day, I wrote the neighbour a card introducing ourselves. I apologised for making him feel unsafe and acknowledged that he was right about the masks. But I also said he had unfairly used us as a target for his fear and frustration, and I told him I was shocked and saddened he would treat a neighbour with so much hate. I haven’t heard back from him.
My dad spent the rest of that morning praying that the man didn’t get the coronavirus – lest he blame us and all Asians, forever.
Since that day, no one in my family has left the house without a mask on their face, and I’m anxious to train my daughter to wear one, although she resists it the way she has refused hats and headbands in the past.
We can’t stop noticing that most other exercisers and dog-walkers in our neighbourhood – all white – fly past us without them. They don’t seem to worry about getting caught on the wrong side of whatever America happens to believe about masks on any given day. But my family can’t risk it.