Exposing nation’s lengthy contagion of xenophobia.

Coronavirus fears expose nation’s chronic contagion of xenophobia

They have settled themselves in large colonies through the residence parts of the city, bringing with them their vices and their filth.”

A couple of years ago, I read these words aloud for the filming of a History Channel documentary about America’s immigrant heritage. I was surprised to find that the description of San Francisco’s Chinese community retained enough sting to bring tears to my eyes. It was printed in the Oakland Herald nine days after the 1906 earthquake, but it still has power.

As the author of a book about American Chinatowns, I have a discomfiting sense of deja vu as I witness the continued scapegoating today of Chinatowns and their residents. In the early 1900s, the bubonic plague was blamed on San Francisco Chinatown’s “distillery of contagion,” even though the disease was actually spread by rats; white business owners in Chinatown were exempt from quarantine. Now we have the novel coronavirus, first appearing in China but with no actual cases tied to any Chinatown, and its associated fears have emptied the neighborhood of visitors.

A little over a week ago, hundreds of San Francisco residents and officials marched in Chinatown, holding signs that read, “Fight the Virus, NOT the People.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited restaurants and other businesses there in an effort to support the community, and to separate the epidemic from race.

Across the country, discriminatory attacks against Asian Americans — an attack on an elderly man in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, an assault on a woman wearing a surgical mask in the Grand Street subway station in Manhattan, the harassment of two men who were denied rooms at a Super 8 and a Days Inn in Indiana — have increased. But that’s not all.

More people are amplifying President Trump’s racism, anti-globalism, and germophobia with subtly pernicious acts of their own. In an airport lounge at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport last week, a young woman was asked by a group of three men to move farther away due to their coronavirus anxiety. She texted her father about the exchange, who posted her note on Twitter: “‘I told them, sure, I’d move, but I’ve never been to China and that their racial profiling is what’s hurting this country.’ ”

Asian American friends and family shared stories of recent encounters with strangers that left them wondering. Was there a reasonable cause for the bank teller to ask, “Are you from China?” Or for the grocery clerk to inquire, “Did you eat at a Chinese restaurant lately?” My brother told me about an Uber ride on a bone-chilling winter evening, during which the driver rolled down his window and left it open the entire time. Maybe my brother was just being paranoid. Or maybe he was primed for this moment from the time last year when a woman shouted at him on the street, apropos of nothing: “Go back to Asia!” (True story.)

“There are two viruses hitting us: the coronavirus and xenophobia,” said Norman Fong, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center and a parish associate at the Presbyterian Church in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He told me that people’s avoidance of the neighborhood demonstrates the fear not just of Chinatown, but of Chinese people.

“That’s been the history of our country,” Fong said. “And bigotry is catching.”

Similar panics have affected Chinatowns in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and elsewhere, with many restaurants reporting that business has plummeted by more than 50% in the past month.

We know these things are happening, but I wanted to dig deeper: What is the psychology behind this pervasive irrational tendency to conflate coronavirus in China with all people of Asian heritage everywhere? And what could we do to treat it?

A primary driver behind this behavior is the level of uncertainty, Vaile Wright, a clinical psychologist and director of clinical research and quality for the American Psychological Association, told me. People have different tolerances for uncertainty; the lower the tolerance, the more threatening and dangerous a new situation can appear to be.

“When knowledge is uncertain, people often turn to social consensus to figure out what the truth is,” she explained. “You have people who are seeing inaccurate stories that are degrading to Chinese people and Chinese culture. And then it makes them feel somehow justified with namecalling and xenophobia. It makes them feel like they have some control — even though they don’t.”

The repetition reinforces the message. We tend not to question whether the source of information is reliable, Wright added. Compound this false information with a general lack of health and medical literacy, she said, “and it is very difficult to correct once it’s out there.”

I realize that it’s not just the coronavirus that’s contagious. It’s our fears and feelings about everyone and everything else, piggybacking on this news, spreading further and planting itself deeper into our psyches than any virus ever could. When it comes to this outbreak, I wonder if this accompanying psychological epidemic isn’t the most frightening and insidious symptom of all.

How to fight it? Ironically, the decisive arrival of the coronavirus in the U.S. might help on this front. It is no longer about them and us, but about each other. It’s here, on a cruise ship docked at the Port of Oakland. As the parent of school-age children, I receive regular emails about cases of strep throat, flu, and lice in the community. I don’t doubt that one day soon I will receive an email about the coronavirus. The once-distant global epidemic is now a local one, too. It will come to live on doorknobs, touchscreens and elevator buttons near you, and it will infect people you know — regardless of race or ethnicity.

“There is no American exceptionalism in exposure to coronavirus,” Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said last week. I’ll add that there is no exceptionalism within America itself, either. As a responsible citizen, I will continue to wash my hands, exercise common sense, and take steps to protect my family and the larger community. And I’ll hope that science and transparency in knowledge will prevail, in the interests of the many and not of the few and privileged — just as they eventually won out in San Francisco’s Chinatown, more than a century ago, to successfully eradicate the plague.

Fong reminded me that in our immigration story there are always two Americas: America the Beautiful, and America the Ugly. “We are all going to have to face this particular issue,” he said. “But it is a conscious decision to not let the ugly side take over.”

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