For Asian Americans, it’s been a year of fear
Melody Tan was walking along Brays Bayou one afternoon last summer when a white man on a bike swerved at her and yelled something in fake Chinese.
The 29-year-old doctoral candidate was startled, then angry. Daily walks became more stressful than calming. Her anxiety mounted with escalating reports of harassment, verbal abuse and attacks against Asian Americans. Last March, a teen stabbed a man and his young children in Midland because he reportedly thought they were Chinese and spreading the virus. Tan texted the article to her Singaporean and Indonesian parents, begging them: Be careful.
A year of dread, anxiety and stress from shouldering dual pandemics — coronavirus and racism — culminated Tuesday in the Asian American community’s worst fear when a gunman killed eight people in three Atlanta-area spas, six of them Asian women. Tan stopped scrolling when she saw the news on Twitter. Her blood ran cold.
“It was just a matter of when,” Tan said. “The community has been speaking up. We knew this was going to happen. This was the end result of all of these subtle
or less explicit forms of racism — they were all leading up to this.”
While authorities have not said whether race motivated the Atlanta mass shooting, the killings come on the heels of a wave of violence and hate incidents targeting Asian Americans. The news reports rattled exhausted communities across the country.
Officials have recorded no increase in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans in Houston or Harris County, but community leaders said the national incidents, including horrific attacks against Asian American seniors in San Francisco and New York, have stoked fear. Anti-Asian American sentiment has soared during the pandemic, Houston community members said, describing stories of online attacks, racist remarks and verbal harassment.
“The virus is our enemy, the common enemy of mankind,” said H.C. Chang, president of the Houston chapter of the OCAAsian Pacific American Advocates. “We should collectively do something against it — not point fingers, not scapegoat.”
In response to the Atlanta shooting, the Houston Police Department and Harris County Sheriff ’s Office are increasing patrols in Asian American neighborhoods where people are on edge, though police said there are no credible threats.
In the last year, nearly 3,800 hate incidents were reported across the country, according to a report released by Stop AAPI Hate hours before the Atlanta shooting. The organization, formed early in the pandemic in response to xenophobia, said verbal harassment and shunning account for the majority of reported incidents.
Nearly half of the reports were from California while Texas ranked fourth. Roughly 68 percent of reportees were women and 42 percent were Chinese, the organization said.
‘We’re easily scapegoated’
In April, shortly after the Midland stabbing, hostility struck closer to home.
A woman verbally assaulted employees of a Vietnamese restaurant in a Houston parking lot, telling them: “Get out of our country.”
At the same time, Republican congressional candidate Kathaleen Wall launched an ad in Houston’s media market with a false claim: “China poisoned our people.” Former President Donald Trump referred to the coronavirus in racist terms.
Meanwhile, Houston’s Asian American residents were fighting the pandemic alongside the entire city. Members of the Chinese Community Center raised funds, distributed personal protective equipment and delivered hot meals to front-line workers, said Chi-mei Lin, the organization’s CEO.
“We care and we want to be part of the solution,” Lin said. “We don’t want people to see us being the problem — we are not.”
Anti-Asian sentiment is nothing new in this country, said Debbie Chen, a leader of the national Organization of Chinese Americans and member of the group’s local branch. But the pandemic has exacerbated the problem. Politicians chose divisive, inflammatory and irresponsible language to describe the virus, giving people permission to falsely blame Asian Americans for the country’s plight, she said.
“Asians have always been perceived or portrayed as either the model minority or the perpetual foreigner,” Chen said. “So we’re easily scapegoated.”
When the pandemic struck, people needed an outlet to channel their emotional frustration as they confronted job loss, economic despair, sickness and grief, said Chang, the same group’s chapter president. Misguided by political rhetoric, people chose to direct their anger toward Asian Americans, he said, resurrecting a sentiment that has darkened the country’s history for centuries.
“Unfortunately, that is a chapter within our history that we thought went away, only to find that it was not really very far from us,” he said.
The surging hostility created underlying fear among Asian American communities, with many people altering their schedule or habits to avoid falling prey to racial harassment or attacks. Seniors stayed home instead of enjoying fresh air, Lin said, afraid they would be vulnerable while walking in the park.
Chen, the community leader, said she spends extra time circling parking lots when shopping. She looks for a spot close enough to her destination that people would see her if anything happened.
Sometime last year, Lin’s organization hosted a Zoom webinar to address concern about school bullying. Parents were worried that classmates would point fingers at their children, call them names or shun them from the lunch table.
Lin, who grew up in Taiwan and immigrated in the ’80s as a student, dedicated her career to working in human services, making an effort to care for those in need through various nonprofits.
“It’s very sad and disheartening to see what’s going on under the pandemic,” she said. “It’s the caring, the love that we want to share. Somehow it got twisted.”
Prevalent harassment
Clad in scrubs and a mask, Dr. Charles Chow was walking from his parked car to his front door one night after work when a white man unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse punctuated by obscenities, anti-mask rhetoric and the vague, othering words: “You people.”
Chow, a health care provider, realized with shock that the yells were directed at him. He chose not to engage, scrambling to unlock his door and get inside his home in a west Houston neighborhood. The man, who was walking a tiny white dog, circled back down the block and kept screaming.
“The disturbing part is that I’m assuming he lives in the community,” Chow said. “He’s one of my neighbors.”
Chow informed neighborhood security of the verbal assault but never heard back. He did not see the aggressor again. It was unclear whether the attack was racially motivated, Chow said.
Incidents of verbal harassment, racial comments, shunning, bullying or dirty looks targeting Asian Americans are prevalent in Houston. Often, the stories go unreported because they do not rise to the level of a criminal offense. Even if an incident would prompt a criminal investigation, some victims do not come forward due to fear of retaliation, cultural stigma or language barriers, community leaders said.
“I can only imagine incidents like that are far more frequent than what we read about in local news,” Chang said.
This month, a group Zoombombed a conference hosted by the national chapter of Chang’s organization in celebration of multicultural women’s heritage. Attackers hurled racial remarks, he said.
Last summer, Emmett Schelling was reaching for cheese at Trader Joe’s on South Shepherd when a white woman yanked her son away from him and stormed off. She told the child: “Those people are dirty.”
He was thrown off, wanting to believe he had misheard her.
“What I look like does not elevate or increase my chances of having this virus any more than you,” said Schelling, a Texas transgender rights advocate.
Adopted from Korea by a white family in rural Ohio, Schelling said he grew up navigating a world in which kids tugged at their eyelids and called him mean names. He was never racially harassed in Houston before.
To avoid similar situations, Schelling started shopping at H Mart, a Korean American supermarket in Sharpstown. Besides, there was an upside: Customers and staff, mostly Asian American, were much better at following pandemic safety protocols.
He said he feels sad for the Trader Joe’s customer’s child, who looked like he was old enough to remember the comment and likely has Asian American classmates and teachers.
“I don’t believe this is who the city is in any form, I really don’t,” Schelling said. “My hope is that it gives us an opportunity to see where we’re more connected than disconnected and move through it together.”