The Hidden, and Untold, Stories Behind the Rise in Anti-Asian Violence
To uncover the multiple layers of harm that Asian Americans have endured during the pandemic, look to the peripheries
At the end of last August, my mom and I were discussing how she was going to get back to my parents’ home in Long Island. She had been living with my sister in New England for the better part of the year, an overextended stay due to the pandemic, and was feeling unsettled. She wanted to see the doctors she had grown familiar with over the past few decades — like her dentist in Flushing, Queens, who, like our family, is also Taiwanese.
As we went over plans, my mom, uncomfortable with the idea of us driving several hours on her behalf, suggested that she “just take the train.” She assured us that she would be fine for the four-hour journey, suggesting that she would wear makeup and cover up to disguise her face. She didn’t want other people on the train to identify her as Asian.
In her late seventies, my mom falls within the population with the second-highest mortality rate for Covid-19. It doesn’t escape me that at the height of the pandemic, her paramount concern was violence fueled by racism, rather than a highly contagious virus. When I recall this conversation, I sometimes think about her demeanor. She was calm and unemotional, as if she were casually offering a practical suggestion.
Our conversations over the past months had circumvented the topic of racism, focusing instead on more mundane horrors, like the fact that my dad was still going to restaurant lunch buffets and his insistence that they continue exercising at the community gym. I am not sure if such conversational omissions were intentional, but for my mom, violence is not new.
One of the earliest memories my mom shared with me was of losing her own mother and two brothers in a bombing when she was only a year old. She grew up with limited knowledge of the historic significance of this tragedy, and it was only recently that I pieced together from a Wikipedia entry the possibility that these deaths were part of the largest aerial raid on Taipei during World War II, orchestrated by the U.S. Air Force. During her life in the United States, my mom has encountered abuse and mistreatment inside and outside the home. As a teenager, I remember a receptionist at the gynecologist’s office complaining that my mom could not speak English, simply because of her accent. Racism and misogyny are interwoven into my mom’s immigration story.
As anti-Asian violence has grown more conspicuous over the course of the pandemic, numerous Asian American public figures have underscored how racism is not new for us. While the virus clearly did not invent anti-Asian racism, it is crucial to understand that shared experiences of racism have not erased persisting social inequalities within and among our communities. One of the central goals of the AAPI COVID-19 Project, which I lead in collaboration with 11 other researchers, is to uncover the multiple layers of harm that Asian Americans have endured during the pandemic. For this effort, disaggregating experiences with attention to social difference is key.
The tragic shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis illustrate that many of the conditions that have made workers more physically exposed to the illness, such as working in close proximity with other people and interfacing directly with the public during the pandemic, have also made them more vulnerable to racial violence. Ethnicity, citizenship, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and age all fundamentally impact how Asian Americans experience and navigate racism.
Asian American activists and organizers, including CAAAV, the Asian American Feminist Collective, and Red Canary Song, have urged us to reject expanded policing in the name of protecting Asian lives. Elena Shih, a sociologist and expert on immigration, sex work, and human trafficking, has documented the terrorizing impact of police raids on Asian massage workers, who fear arrest, abuse, and deportation. These realities compel us to imagine better solutions for anti-Asian violence, as well as require us to rethink what we mean when we discuss this violence, long rooted in imperialism.
For Asian Americans, managing risks around violence and the virus cannot be decoupled from each other.
In March 2021, AAPI COVID-19 Project researchers christina ong and Amy Zhang published a report based on preliminary findings from 40 interviews we conducted over Zoom between June and October 2020. Our findings so far reveal that Asian Americans constantly negotiate their behaviors, including decisions around risk management, within complex webs of racial and ethnic identity, financial status, family health concerns, immigration status, and employment. For Asian Americans, managing risks around violence and the virus cannot be decoupled from each other.
One participant, Jennifer,* a Vietnamese American graduate student in her early twenties, expressed concern for her parents, who own a small grocery store selling Asian and African foods and household items in their neighborhood. She told us that despite the clear physical risks, her parents had decided not to implement a policy of requiring customers to wear masks. Jennifer said, “Because my mom’s heard of a lot of stories where things go wrong, like customers don’t want to wear masks and fight — or even worse.”
Political scientist Karthick Ramakrishnan, who is also the founding director of AAPI Data, says that anti-Asian racism has created barriers for public health. Fears of racist attacks have made many Asian Americans reluctant to leave their homes and seek care, contributing to underscreening of Covid-19 and, ultimately, disproportionate mortality rates within these communities.
The threat of racial violence only compounds Asian immigrants’ struggles navigating the health care system, which is challenging enough during “normal” times and particularly intimidating during the pandemic. Another interview participant, Rose, a nurse practitioner in her mid-thirties, works at a community clinic in New York that primarily serves clients who are Chinese immigrants (many of them undocumented). Rose fears that the pandemic will only widen the gulf of unequal access to medical care.
Clients who don’t speak English as their native language frequently struggle with feeling inadequate, and the herculean task of navigating information during the pandemic only amplifies these anxieties. Rose is worried that some measures that have become essential during the pandemic, such as telemedicine, overlook older patients. “My older patients who are coming in for gynecology, they need somebody in front of them that explains things to them,” she tells me. “We can’t do telemedicine with older patients. It’s just very difficult for them to get online, if they have internet at all.”
Rose and other health care workers we interviewed described the weight of confronting racial violence that exacerbates the stress of their work on the front lines. A Chinese American woman, Rose has dealt with racism on public transit before the pandemic. In the wake of rising anti-Asian racism, however, she finds herself feeling hypervigilant. Racism itself is not shocking, but as she puts it, “I was scared it would happen again in a more violent way.”
Eun, a recent college graduate based in Boston who identifies as a Korean American, described abusive comments people made on his way to work at a hospital. “People would just yell things like, ‘Oh, it’s because you eat bats that you’re here! You’re gonna kill more people coming here!’” Eun had been hired to work in medical research, but at the start of the pandemic, administrators temporarily reassigned him to the hospital’s intensive care unit. He recounts the military analogies the administrator used and describes how he felt “voluntold” to accept this new role. Although the administrator presented Eun’s “redeployment” as a choice, they also warned him that saying no might lead to professional repercussions.
The pandemic had overwhelmed Eun’s hospital, despite its status as home to one of the largest research medical programs in the country and connections to prestigious universities in the region. The hospital’s caseload of Covid-19 patients surpassed the number of ventilators it had in-house, requiring the hospital to get different ventilators that had not yet been connected to the facility’s main system.
Amid this influx, staff needed to fill this gap by monitoring the machines manually. Separated by barely six feet of distance and a sliding glass door, Eun spent his eight-hour workdays “listening” to the ventilators. Over the course of his two and a half months doing this work, he recalled six to seven separate incidents of harassment.
The pandemic has imperiled the lives of many healthcare workers on the frontlines and within this calculus, Asian American healthcare workers have faced disproportionate losses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in September 2020 that among healthcare workers with Covid-19, Asian and Black healthcare workers had a higher rate of mortality. While making up only 4% of nurses nationwide, Filipino nurses comprise 31.5% of all nurse deaths from Covid-19. For decades, Filipinos have been the largest immigrant group to work in nursing in the United States.
Eun described the toll of these health risks on his family and other loved ones. Prior to his reassignment, he had considered requesting to work remotely so that he could return to his parents’ home to help them during the pandemic. Eun’s parents are in their mid-sixties, an age bracket that has a higher statistical likelihood of infection, hospitalization, and death from Covid-19.
Our mistake would be in believing that the definition of anti-Asian violence is limited to the tragic acts that appear most visibly, omitting the stories that remain sidelined by design.
During this period of working in the ICU, Eun isolated himself from his parents and temporarily separated from his girlfriend. The experience was lonely for Eun. Conversational omissions compounded the physical distance. Eun immediately called his parents after learning about his reassignment. They knew Eun was still within a six-month probation period for new hires and acknowledged that he’d had “no other choice.” He needed money to live, and as small business owners in New York City, Eun’s parents could not provide a safety net. They chose not to voice their fears over his physical safety, instead encouraging him to “just keep your head down, do your best.”
It was only after his reassignment, during the summer, that Eun and his family were able to have a candid conversation. Eun told me that he saw Korean culture and masculinity as a part of this silence, saying, “I think part of it has to do with this idea of, like, silence is strength. This idea of if you don’t show emotion or you don’t show this sign of vulnerability, then you’re the strong one. You’re the one who can handle more things.”
My mom is now fully vaccinated, a huge relief to my sister and me. I don’t know when she will feel safe from the threat of racial violence — or if that will ever happen. In fact, I don’t know if my mom has ever expected to feel safe in her life. Perhaps expectations of safety are a privilege that those who live with violence rarely take for granted. What we can expect are broad consequences connected to these experiences of unsafety.
Rose suggested that even with a vaccine, her patients are “going to be afraid of going to see health care providers for years to come.” Such challenges emerge amid systemic government defunding, such as former President Trump’s expansion of the so-called global gag rule on abortion, which disproportionately penalizes undocumented immigrants, working-class people, and women and other people assigned female at birth.
As numerous activists and scholars have pointed out, anti-Asian violence is not new. It is the foundation for the U.S. empire and central to some of the most exclusionary aspects of our immigration system. As Asian Americans respond to the crisis of racial violence as a collective community, we must look back toward this history while expanding our views in the present to see from the peripheries. This endeavor requires us to remember how many of those who endure violence on a regular basis may not always speak out — because they have normalized their trauma, they fear the repercussions of speaking up, or a combination of the two. Our mistake would be in believing that the definition of anti-Asian violence is limited to the tragic acts that appear most visibly, omitting the stories that remain sidelined by design.
*Editor’s note: All participants’ names have been changed to protect their identity.
The AAPI COVID-19 Project is a collective project housed within the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and a partner of UNESCO’s International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities (ICCAR). The members of the team are Jason Beckfield, Rachel Kuo, christina ong, Jackie Leung, Catherine Nguyen, Vivian Shaw, Kara Takasaki, Cynthia Wang, Mu Wu, Amy Zhang, and Liwei Zhang.
We are currently recruiting participants for one-on-one interviews about experiences about work and labor, family, health, community, and political advocacy. We’re looking to hear from people of all genders and political orientations who may identify as Asian immigrants and/or Asian Americans, including those who identify as multiracial. Participants must be over 18 years old. To participate, please fill out our preliminary survey.
