Asians fight to have racist hate documented

LOS ANGELES — Jeongyeon Lee was walking from her car to a McDonald’s in La Habra recently when she heard someone nearby say “China” or “chinita.” She turned around, confronting two men sitting in the parking lot.

Speaking in Spanish, they called her “chinita cochina,” which translates in English as dirty little Chinese girl.

“I told them, ‘I am not Chinese, I am Korean,’” and they responded with another racial slur, Lee said.

Lee, 49, who majored in Spanish in college, was shaken, and she thought about recent disturbing stories in the news about hate-motivated attacks against Asian Americans. She reported the March 11 incident in Orange County on a portal that Radio Korea, a Korean-language station in Los Angeles, had created the day before.

In the wake of last week's shootings at three Atlanta-area spas — leaving eight people dead, six of them Asian women — many advocates hope that the national focus on a rise in hate crimes and incidents against Asian Americans will empower more people to report their experiences and lead to better access to government resources for victims.

“Right now, we have to speak up,” said Lee. “I really think we have to get involved and elevate our voice and make this issue a big priority.”

Anti-Asian harassment and violence has surged across California since the beginning of the pandemic, often rooted in the misconception that the Asian American community is at fault for the global spread of the coronavirus. The virus was first identified in Wuhan, China.

In San Francisco earlier this month, an assailant repeatedly struck a Filipino Chinese man in the face as he was heading back to his office from a lunch break in China

town — breaking bones and bruising his eyes. In Oakland in January, a man walked up behind a 91year-old man in Chinatown and violently shoved him to the ground.

Suspects have been arrested in both cases.

According to a report presented to the Los Angeles Police Commission in March, there were 15 antiAsian hate crimes reported in the city in 2020, compared with seven in 2019, marking a 114% increase. There were also nine hate “incidents” — encounters that don’t rise to the level of a crime — compared with seven in 2019, police said.

The day of the Atlanta rampage, the advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate released a report documenting nearly 4,000 racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nationwide that had been reported during the pandemic.

Issues with data collection among law enforcement agencies have made it difficult to capture the full scope of hate crimes.

A 2018 California state auditor report, for example, found that policing agencies had misidentified some hate crimes as hate incidents and weren’t conducting enough outreach to encourage the public to report potential crimes.

Connie Chung Joe, CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles, named a variety of challenges that inhibit reporting, including language barriers, fear of retaliation, mistrust in the police, immigration status, and shame for being humiliated.

“I’ve had people say to me that I’m scared report it because I’m scared I won’t be believed,” she said.