Surge in anti-Asian hate crimes raises fears in Southern California

For several weeks last April, Garden Grove resident Linda Nguyen didn’t leave her home.

She worked remotely. She ordered her groceries and food online. She didn’t take walks in the neighborhood. What Nguyen says “paralyzed” her was not the coronavirus. It was the fear that she, like many other Asian Americans, would be physically attacked by someone who might mistakenly blame her for the pandemic.

“The fear that someone would physically hurt me was very real,” she said.

By April 2020, said Nguyen, who is Vietnamese American, she had already experienced several hate incidents. It started in her workplace when a couple of colleagues looked her in the eye and said the words “China virus,” a moniker popularized by then-President Donald Trump, who blamed China for causing the global pandemic. Next, she was ridiculed by two people standing behind her in the checkout line at a Target store.

“There were a couple of times when I was stopped at a red light when I saw cars inching closer to me,” she said. “At this point, I was scared for my safety. I didn’t want to be outside.”

Surge in anti-Asian sentiment

Anti-Asian hate crime in the 16 largest cities in the country jumped by 149% in 2020, according to an analysis of preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. The first spike in hate crimes occurred in March and April 2020 amid an increase in coronavirus cases and negative stereotyping of Asian people related to the pandemic, according to the report, released Tuesday, March 2.

The spike in anti-Asian crimes occurred during a year when hate crimes overall declined by 7%, the report stated. Trump’s rhetoric linking China and Asia to the pandemic is connected to the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020, said Brian Levin, director of the CSUSB center.

“What we’re seeing is the effect of a combination of a catalytic, fear-inducing event (the pandemic) along with conspiracy theories and invective from the president,” Levin said. He pointed out that on March 23,  2020, Trump spoke about being tolerant toward Asians during a news conference. On that day and at least a couple of days after that, there were no anti-Asian hate crimes in Los Angeles or New York, Levin said.

“That’s illustrative of the strong correlation between the bully pulpit and hate crimes,” he added.

The increase in anti-Asian hate crime was the highest in New York City, which saw a ninefold increase in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the CSUSB center’s report. Four other U.S. cities saw anti-Asian hate crimes more than double in number, including Los Angeles, which reported 15 (up from seven in 2019), and San Jose, which reported 10 hate crimes (up from four the previous year).

The group Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks hate crimes and hate incidents against Asian Americans, reported 245 incidents of hate in Los Angeles County against Asian Americans between March 19 and Oct. 28, 2020. A majority of those incidents, about 76%, involved verbal harassment. The group documented about 2,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans nationwide over nine months in 2020.

Levin drew the distinction between hate crimes — acts that could be charged as crimes, such as assaults or vandalism — and hate incidents, such as verbal harassment. While offensive speech is protected, he said, bona fide threats are not.

Violent crimes against Asian elders

Violent crimes against Asian Americans have also recently made the news. Last month, in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Denny Kim, a 27-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran, was knocked to the ground and berated with racial slurs, LAPD officials said. Kim suffered facial injuries including a broken nose.

In the Bay Area, community members have formed groups to chaperone older Asian Americans after recent violent hate crimes targeting elders.

In January, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai grandfather, was taking a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood when a man ran across the street and violently shoved him to the ground. Ratanapakdee died of a brain hemorrhage. In Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood, police said a man violently shoved three unsuspecting people on Jan. 31, injuring them all, including a 91-year-old man.

Such violence against elders has induced fear and great sadness in Southern California’s Asian American community as well, said Don Han with OC Human Relations, which tracks and responds to hate crimes countywide. Orange County is already on track to see a tenfold increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020.

For many Asian Americans, elders are venerable, said Han, who fled Laos with his family in 1980 and came to the U.S. as a refugee.

“I think about the elders as those people who brought us here to build a better future, a foundation for our lives,” he said. “For them, being attacked is like being traumatized over and over again. Many of us who fled oppressive regimes view America as our home. But these hate crimes are making us feel like we’re being rejected all over again.”

That ‘sinking feeling’

In Southern California, Asian Americans of different national origins have been victimized. Nadia Kim, a professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University, said she was crossing the street in a marked crosswalk in her Culver City neighborhood in June 2020 when a driver ran a red light and nearly hit her.

“He then looked right at me, put his hand over his mask and laughed at me, mockingly,” said Kim, who is Korean American. “He flipped me off. I was in shock. To this day, I’m afraid to walk outside my house. I look around, just to make sure.”

A couple of months before that episode, Kim said she was with her daughters, then 9 and 5, at a coffee shop. A waiter, seeing her approach, leapt out of her way.

“It bothered me that my daughters saw it, especially the older one,” she said. “I had this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach because you can see the seeds of inferiority germinate within her. I had to have a talk with her, which was really hard.”

Racist rant caught on camera

Irvine resident Hannah Li said she had a frightening encounter with a man who threatened to “punch her in the face” in the parking lot of The Marketplace in Tustin. Li believes he was lashing out after she complained to a Sephora store clerk that he was not wearing a mask and was standing too close to her at the checkout line.

After he threatened her verbally, Li pulled out her cell phone and recorded him going on a racist rant, which she later posted on social media. The 39-second video shows the man telling Li to go back to China and stay there and then calling her a “stupid (racial slur directed at Asian people).” As he’s leaving, the man can be heard saying: “Stay home, and thanks for giving my country COVID. Have a great day.”

Li, who is Chinese American, said she made the video public because she wanted to create awareness about hate incidents.

A similar rant caught on camera at Torrance’s Wilson Park went viral in July, prompting a coalition of Asian American groups to call on the state to establish a task force to investigate hundreds of anti-Asian incidents since the pandemic began.

“Asians usually tend to keep quiet because we don’t want any trouble,” Li said. “Most people won’t record it. They won’t even repeat what happened to them because they’re afraid of retaliation or worried about their employment prospects. But we need to speak up.”

Recording the man on her cell phone was the only thing that made her feel safe that day, Li said.

“I understand freedom of speech,” she said. “But what happened to me that day was very wrong. If I don’t expose this, people will continue to get away with this stuff without facing any consequences. It’s not right.”

Neighbors stand up against hate

In the community of Ladera Ranch in South Orange County, neighbors rallied around a Chinese family harassed by area youth, guarding the home against possible harm, said Joyce Sanchez, hate crime prevention specialist at OC Human Relations.

Haijun Si told Sanchez that the youth would loudly knock on the front door, throw rocks, ring the bell while yelling racial slurs, or awaken Si’s two young children at night. Si told Sanchez he and his wife would take turns to stay up at night and keep watch.

“He told me that it was extremely stressful and hurtful for him to see his children being exposed to insults and bad language,” Sanchez said, adding that the last such incident occurred on Feb. 13. The incidents stopped when neighbors began to take turns to guard the home. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department is now investigating.

History and education

Asian Americans have been “historically invisible” as a race in America, often caught between being “unassimilable aliens and a model minority,” said Edward T. Chang, professor of ethnic studies and founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at UC Riverside.

“This feels like de ja vu all over again,” he said, remembering Korean store owners who were attacked during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man who was killed in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1982 by workers who resented competition from Japanese automakers.

“People forget about our history in this country,” Chang said. “Asian Americans become visible only when there is a need for scapegoating. This has been a consistent pattern.”

It’s time for Asian Americans to speak up against hate and injustice, something the community has been hesitant to do in the past, he said. But that has changed now with more Asian Americans engaged in civic life, and a younger generation that is more politically savvy.

“We are also victims of racism,” Chang said. “We need to find ways to build relationships with other communities of color while safeguarding our own rights. We need to make sure our voices are heard.”

Chang said hateful behaviors should be made unacceptable.

“A majority of what is happening to Asian Americans is being categorized as hate incidents, which means they cannot be prosecuted,” he said. “We need to demand that they be prosecuted as hate crimes.”

Education is crucial when it comes to preventing hate crimes and hate incidents, said Eastvale Mayor Jocelyn Yow, the youngest woman of color at age 25 to become mayor of a California city. She is the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a Malaysian immigrant.

“We need to educate an entire generation of kids about Asian American history and experience,” she said. We are not a monolithic community. We are a very diverse community.”

Yow, now 26, and mother of a 9-month-old, said parenthood has made her more grateful for the community’s elders — those people who have been under attack in the most recent wave of violent hate crimes.

“We have to stay humble, and know how far those who came before us have come, and how hard they’ve worked to get to this place,” she said. “It’s something I don’t want my child to take for granted.”

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