On COVID-19 and Racism Toward Asian-Americans

I don't remember the first time that I knew I was Asian, but my mom tells me it went something like this: I emerged smiling from my kindergarten classroom, equipped with my hot pink Hello Kitty backpack. Parents clustered outside, waiting to pick up their kids after a day of counting by tens and drawing potato-heads we thought were portraits. My mom greeted me in Korean, her native tongue. Suddenly aware of my classmates and the stares of their parents, I declared to the eyes around me, "I don't know what she's saying."

I don't remember this moment. But I know now that it made me feel other. I thought that rejecting my mother's tongue and making sure that these strangers knew that I spoke English would dye my hair and bleach my skin. I could claim the whiteness of my dad, and my mom could be other.

In elementary school, I was again reminded that I was other. A warm summer evening, the kid next door tugged at the corners of his eyes and asked me if I was Chinese. I chased him across our front yards, pinned him to the ground. He was beneath me, but still smiling, spat "Ching chong."

Several times in middle school, I was asked if I ate dogs. Once, just for kicks, I said yes, and watched shock stretch the features of my classmate's face.

At a high school track practice, I struck up a conversation with some sprinters. A curly-haired, lanky kid I recognized from my grade asked me where I was from. I explained to him that my dad was in the military, so I recently moved in from New York. "Oh, so you're an American citizen?" he probed, surprised. I wanted to scream at him. I was born in North Carolina, of course I am a citizen, I am an army brat, how much more do you want. I said nothing.

I am American. But sometimes, in my country, I am a perpetual foreigner.

*

My mother has lived in the United States for over twenty years. She renounced her Korean citizenship so that she could claim an American one. Her entire family still lives in Korea. She speaks English fluently and raised my sister and I mostly in English. Every day for the past month, she read the COVID-19 news in English and Korean, parsing through CNN updates, New York Times articles, and Korean newspapers to prepare for what her family might face. 

My mom is Korean, but she is as American as I am. Yet in our country, the perpetual foreigner stereotype chains her to different, to must be Chinese, to must have coronavirus, to other. 

On Friday, she went grocery shopping-- her first trip out of the house in a week because we are social distancing. At the store, an elderly white woman scolded her for touching a bunch of bananas. Another covered her face with her shirt as she walked past my mom. While waiting to check out, my mom noticed customers leaving space around her, but remaining close to each other in line. 

When my mom told my sister and I, we exploded. That's so racist, that's disgusting, let us go to the grocery store next time, we'll tell them. My mom just looked at us. "It's not new."

*

The perpetual foreigner stereotype is the idea that no matter how a person of Asian descent strives to assimilate-- finding work, speaking English, forgetting culture -- they will never be truly American. Historically, this mold was abused to set neighbor against neighbor, paint caricatures of Asians with yellow skin and buck teeth in popular media, and send Japanese-Americans to internment camps. The perpetual foreigner stereotype pervades and shackles. It sentences American citizens to an endless life of other.

The spread of novel coronavirus has made clear that another ugly disease infects America: racism against Asian-Americans.

As my friend walked with her classmates across a Pennsylvania college campus, a driver stopped and yelled at her, "If you have corona, go back to China." White House press correspondent for CBS News Weija Jiang shared that a White House official called COVID-19 the "Kung-flu" to her face. 

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In California, a movie poster for the Disney flick Mulan was defaced to read "toxic" and "made in Wuhan". In Manhattan, an Asian woman was punched in the face by an attacker who said, "You've got coronavirus, you Asian [expletive]."

These instances of discrimination and violence represent just a few of the countless cases of hatred that have afflicted America. San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies Department found more than 1,000 reported instances of xenophobia against Chinese-Americans alone between January 28 and February 24. This statistic is not representative of the unreported cases that occurred within this window and after it, every word and gesture and punch that told Asian-Americans, go back to your country, you don't belong here, you are other. 

When a U.S. senator of our country says, "China is to blame because [of] the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that," he spreads the same poison that ailed the student who giggled "Ni Hao" behind my back when I visited my high school French teacher and the boy who told my younger sister, "You're a chink but you're hot." He says, you are not us, you are foreign, you are to blame, you are other.

When the President of the United States of America insists on calling the novel coronavirus the "Chinese virus" despite the dissent of the World Health Organization, he exposes the nation, my country and my mom's country, to the epidemic of racism. 

He plagues us with the idea of the perpetual foreigner. He defiles us as scapegoats spreading a foreign disease that is a foreign problem, the fault of a foreign country. I see the symptoms of his discrimination in the eyes, inflamed by judgement, that followed my mom at the grocery store, in the voice, harsh and accusatory, that chased my friend at her college campus, and the mindset, fueled by frustration and hatred, that consumes assailants hurting fellow Americans in the name of mitigating coronavirus.

The outbreak of discrimination towards Asian-American people is not novel. It is a strain of the perpetual foreigner stereotype that has festered, untreated, for years, and will continue to ravage our population without advocacy and cultural change.