‘We’re not taught to speak out’: Asian Americans find their voice amid rise in hate
Natty Jumreornvong was outside Mount Sinai hospital on the Upper East Side of New York around 11am one morning in February when a man approached her.
“Chinese virus,” he spat out. She told him she was a medical student and tried to walk away, but he followed her, kicked her knee and dragged her across the ground. She called out for help, but nobody came to her assistance.
The incident was just the latest and most severe case of anti-Asian hate Jumreornvong has seen over the last year. Last April, a woman with a child spat on her and called her racial slurs. Patients have called her “Kung Flu”, and she’s seen Asian patients with bruises who say someone came and hit them but would not say who, potentially out of shame.
“It’s been going on for a while,” said Jumreornvong, who grew up in Thailand
and came to the US for college.
Since the attack in February, Jumreornvong has made a point of speaking out against anti-Asian hate. She wrote an op-ed about her experience, rallied other students to push their medical school to critically look at Asian discrimination and spoke at a rally of New York City healthcare workers against anti-Asian hate.
Such vocal activism is new to Jumreornvong. She recalls “shaking like a leaf” when she was speaking at the healthcare workers rally, and she has received hateful messages online from people for talking publicly about her experiences.
“It’s still all new to me, activism, and I think that’s what a lot of Asian Americans are starting to feel too,” Jumreornvong said. “We’re not really taught to speak out.”
But Jumreornvong said many people have reached out to her saying that her experience resonated with them. “Sharing stories can be really powerful, or else people don’t think [the hate] exists,” she said.
Jumreornvong is a part of what has become a massive movement to stop anti-Asian violence in the US as the number of hate-related incidents reached an alarming high over the course of the pandemic. Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition that has been tracking anti-Asian incidents since the beginning of the pandemic, has reported at least 3,800 incidents ranging from being spat on to verbal and physical assault.
While hate-related incidents have been taking place throughout the course of the pandemic, two high-profile, violent incidents in January against elderly Asian men, one of whom died from his injuries, gave momentum to the issue. After the murder of six Asian American women in a mass shooting in Atlanta, many Asian Americans say that the fear of being attacked has hit a breaking point.
The last few weeks have seen dozens of rallies against anti-Asian hate across the country, viral social media campaigns spreading awareness of the issue and over $25m in donations to groups supporting Asian American and