In August 2020, I wrote an article about the rise in racism against Asians. Today, I am writing about the same topic—clearly, nothing has changed. In fact, things have taken a turn for the worse.
On Tuesday 16th March 2021, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, shot and killed eight people at two Asian massage parlors in Atlanta. Six of these eight people were Asian women. Their names were Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Julie Park, and Park Hyeon Jeong.
The attack was clearly racially motivated, and with anti-Asian hate crimes on the rise, there is no denying that their race was a clear factor. Long had told the police he had a ‘sexual addiction’ and had carried out the shootings to eliminate his ‘temptation’. He had launched these attacks as some sort of vengeance; the exact words of the police were: “The parlors represented a ‘temptation he wanted to eliminate’.” A hate crime is not a form of poetry. There is nothing beautiful about his sick and twisted fetishization of Asian women. Long’s former roommate said that he had spent time in rehabilitation for sexual addiction last year, and another said that he was a “deeply religious person—he would often go on tangents about his interpretation of the Bible”. Would God have approved of this? I certainly hope not.
Long also reported that he had ‘relapsed’ and ‘gone to massage parlors explicitly to engage in sex acts’, which is what led to this attack. Instead of seeking more help, he chose to take eight innocent lives. Many Asian-Americans are also frustrated with the police’s statement of the incident: “He (Long) was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope; yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did” as if that justifies his actions at all. American police constantly push the narrative of the ‘troubled white man’. Yes, Long had mental issues, but this does not excuse him from being a terrorist. If a Muslim man did the same thing, the media would not hesitate to label him, yet some right-wing media even congratulated Kyle Rittenhouse. Not a single news story has labeled Long as a terrorist yet.
Now let’s unpack the words that the police and Long himself used to describe his motive. Long said he had a ‘sexual addiction’ and the shootings were to eliminate his ‘temptation’. These words just confirm the fact that this attack was not only a racist assault but also a violent rampage against (Asian) women. The extreme hypersexualization of young Asian women has always been a stereotype portrayed in many iconic films. In Mean Girls (2004), female Vietnamese students were depicted as hypersexual even when they’re underaged. The 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket, also reinforces the idea of Southeast Asian women as sex workers—considering that this was the only representation Asian women had in film, it pushed the stereotype even further.
Another problematic issue highlighted in this is the childlike portrayal of Asian women that the media drives, especially in pornography. The stereotype of Asian women’s ‘exoticness’ and ‘oriental-ness’ paints them as sex objects. Unlike white women, Asians do not have the ‘damsel in distress’ narrative to protect them. Yellow fever is not a compliment. Having an Asian fetish is not something to brag about.
Attacks against Asians are not new. In 2020, anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150%.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, examined hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities. They found that while such hate crimes in 2020 decreased overall by 7%, attacks targeting Asian people rose by nearly 150%.
From 2019 to the beginning of 2020, overall hate crime rates declined, but with the new COVID-19 outbreak, racist attacks have been rising rapidly. The FBI warned the U.S. at the start of the pandemic that they expected a surge in crimes against people of Asian descent. What’s shocking is that this was expected—it just goes to show how normalized this behavior is in society. Asians are so generalized to the point where we expect and even accept the violence inflicted upon an entire demographic of people. The Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council released an investigation saying that from March to May 2020 alone, over 800 COVID-related hate incidents were reported from 34 counties in the state of New York. These were only the ones reported to police stations or associations—imagine how many of them went unreported. The statistics are outrageously high, so why isn’t this issue getting more coverage and discussion?
Within the 800 racist attacks reported, a few of them stood out the most, almost all of them in Western countries. On January 28, Vichar Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant living in San Francisco, unfortunately, passed away from a brain hemorrhage after being violently shoved to the ground. He was just taking his daily morning walk when a man across the street attacked him; the media still hesitates to label the attack as racially motivated.
In Chinatowns across the entire country and even in other Western areas, dozens of Asian-owned restaurants or stores have closed down or have been vandalized not only because of the inadequate business but also because racists associate these shops with the virus. They link an entire demographic of people with a virus; just because someone is of a certain ethnicity does not mean they carry with the virus. COVID does not come with race. There shouldn’t be an association with that. But these attacks came long before the Coronavirus outbreak. In 2017, an 83-year-old Korean woman was assaulted; the attack went viral on the internet. Witnesses say the perpetrator repeatedly yelled “power is power”, the n-word, and “white power” before fleeing the scene. It can’t be denied that the attack was racially motivated.
The UK is also a culprit of this awaited racism. A 23-year-old Singaporean man, Jonathan Mok, of Chinese ethnicity was studying in London when he was punched in the face, leaving him with a severe eye injury. “The guy who tried to kick me then said, ‘I don’t want your Coronavirus in my country’, before swinging another sucker punch at me, which resulted in my face exploding with blood (from my nose),” wrote Mok. Mok sued the perpetrator, who pleaded guilty, and came out to various news sources to speak out about his incident. “I’ve studied in London for the past 2 years and every year, I am subjected to racist remarks (whether innocent or made with malice),” he wrote. “To those people who told me that London isn’t racist, think again.”
For too long, our communities’ cries of help have not been heard. It’s frankly quite sad that members of the Asian community have to be murdered in order for our stories to gain traction and for the world to finally listen. We are not the punchline of a racist joke. Asian women are not objects for someone’s fetishization or gratification. We are not ‘exotic’ and we’ve definitely had enough. Racism is rooted in ignorance—the world as a collective community should be trying to eliminate this for all races alike.
Our ethnicity is not a virus, but racism and hate are.
*Cover photo illustrated by Julia Tabor