For Asian Elders, Shopping for Food Is Self-Care
Recent violence has been aimed at Asian seniors while they are doing the most essential of business: buying groceries
Before working from home became the new normal, I looked forward to going into my office in San Francisco on Wednesday mornings. At lunchtime, I would walk a few blocks to a vibrant farmers market at United Nations Plaza to buy a bunch of gai lan or a bag of tangerines. The square hummed with a babel of languages. Vendors sold Buddha’s hand citron next to purple shiso leaves, alongside tamales and pumpkin pies.
That’s why the recent images of attacks on elderly Asian Americans have hit close to home. In one video, a gray-haired Chinese woman, her eyes swollen and purple, held an ice pack to her head. Seventy-five-year-old Xiao Zhen Xie was at a corner on Market Street in San Francisco at 10:30 a.m. when she was punched in the head. A few minutes earlier, an 83-year-old Vietnamese man was attacked nearby while buying vegetables.
Such videos have become numbingly commonplace, but these particular images were a punch to my gut. Not just because the crimes were so horrific, but also because I recognized the streetscape. It was right by my beloved farmers market. As with many of the attacks on Asian American elders, the…
