Friends recount tense encounter on trail
Women say man’s unprovoked comments seemed like a micro-aggression of anti-Asian sentiment
Pamela Ip and Liane Ross have hashed out what happened some weeks ago when they went for one of their usual walks along the trails of Pacific Spirit Park near the University of B.C.
What the pair encountered comes as more Asian residents in Metro Vancouver are speaking up about unprovoked snide remarks or insinuations and scowls being thrown their way since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
An online effort to collect reports of aggressive racist incidents against Asians has evolved to record not only cases experienced by victims, but seen by bystanders. It captured 128 reports between April 23 to May 18, with 87 per cent happening in B.C.
Ip, who is Asian, and Ross, who is Caucasian, were walking in the woods, physically distanced, when a white, middle-aged couple was coming the other way. They moved to the side, and as the couple passed, the man said derisively to them: “Nice social distancing.”
Ross asked what he meant, which led into a back and forth of words, ending with the man, “mumbling and directing his eye contact to Pam and saying something like, ‘You people need to be farther apart’ and he stormed away.”
Ip had just been recounting to Ross a previous walk when she and another friend had faced a jogger who had similarly homed in on her.
“His words might have trailed off, but the message was there to me that he was worried about running past me or having to get around me, not my white friend.”
Ross said she “really strongly felt, there’s no way in hell that if I had been walking with my white husband that would have happened. There’s just no way. And then Pam asked, ‘Has that happened to you since it was declared a pandemic?’ and I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ and she said, ‘Has anyone told you what you need to do or where you need to walk? Have you felt scared?’”
Ip said she feels a “simmering” state of “anticipatory fear” when she walks down a supermarket aisle or is sitting at a stop in her car “that there might be a negative reaction to me standing close nearby” or “will I get the finger or someone will yell something.”
The comments and stares are often described as racist micro-aggressions in that they may not be as overt as physical or verbal harassment.
But to Ip, and others who are speaking up, they feel anything but micro in a city that has a history of discriminating against Asians, but has also become one of the most Asian cities outside Asia.
Ip and Ross are grappling at what to make of it, together as friends.
The backdrop is a spiking number of hate crimes against Asians being reported to Vancouver police in recent months.
Government officials and high profile figures in the city are condemning the situation, speaking officially and personally.
This week, there is a motion going to Vancouver city council citing the impact of COVID-19 and that “people of Asian descent are citing fears of going out for dread of being attacked and (others) are citing fear of being mistaken for being Chinese.”