As soon as the Covid-19 epidemic spread outside China in February 2020, Professor Russell Jeung suspected what awaited the Asian community in the United States. Dean of the Department of American-Asian Studies at the University of San Francisco, he opened a site to collect testimonies from victims of racist incidents: Stop AAPI Hate (AAPI or Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a term that refers to the community Asian and Pacific Americans). The flood of stories has it “Horrified”. Insults, threats, harassment. “We had to create a special category for people who had suffered sputum or intentional coughing”, he says.
What the academic hadn’t planned – but “It was sadly inevitable”, he said – it is because hatred would go so far as to kill. In Oakland, San Francisco, New York, octogenarians were victims of attacks in the street. In Atlanta, six women – four of Korean origin, two of Chinese origin – were killed on March 16 by a 21-year-old who attacked three Asian massage parlors. The emotion was intense, but the attacks did not stop.
Knife attacks
On May 2, in the middle of Manhattan, a woman hit a young Asian woman with a hammer after asking her to remove her mask. On May 4, in San Francisco, 84-year-old Chui Fong Eng was attacked with a knife at a bus stop on Market Street, and her lung was punctured. The assailant, Patrick Thompson, 54, was arrested on parole after treatment for mental illness following a scissor assault at a homeless shelter.
Asian Americans have seen other dark times. In the 1980s, resentment against the Japanese automobile claimed the life of Chinese technician Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death in June 1982 near Detroit, Michigan by a Chrysler foreman and a laid-off worker. In 1992, the Los Angeles riots, following the acquittal of the police officers responsible for the beating of Rodney King, left more than 2,200 Korean shops looted and set on fire. Collective memory is peppered with painful historical references: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in 1942 after Pearl Harbor. Even the Titanic in 1912 did not suffer any exception. Six of the survivors were Chinese. When they got to New York, they were kicked out.
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