Confronting Anti-Asian Discrimination During the Coronavirus Crisis (original) (raw)

An eastern asian man walking alone while groups of strangers shout and stare.

As the coronavirus outbreak sweeps through New York City, it brings with it a rising tide of anti-Asian sentiment.Illustration by Dadu Shin

Wednesday, February 26th

I’m doing a Q. & A. event with an old friend, Cathy Park Hong, to help launch her new essay collection, “Minor Feelings,” which is subtitled “An Asian American Reckoning.” “Minor feelings” are the ones that Asian-Americans have—the ones that go unacknowledged because they exist outside the black/white racial binary. (During the Democratic debate in South Carolina the night before, for example, candidates brought up “the black vote” and “the white vote,” but I strained to catch any mention of an “Asian” vote.)

Cathy’s book pinpoints the racial ambiguities and injustices that I’ve never fully addressed in my own writing, and the fierceness is energizing. The event, at a bookstore in Brooklyn, attracts a warm, receptive audience. Standing-room only. Lots of Asian faces, but not exclusively. I’m bowled over by Cathy’s smarts and fire. Afterward, I put on my black Buffalo Sabres cap (I’m self-conscious about my hair, which needs a cut) and talk to some writer friends. I’m happy the event went well and I’m happy to be socializing—I hardly ever go to events in the fall and winter, when I’m always shuttling my sons to hockey practice. I hate to leave.

Outside the bookstore, I talk to my friend P. He says the London Book Fair might be cancelled. The Bologna book fair was already cancelled. The virus can travel three feet, P. says. That’s news to me. We both take a step back and laugh. I could see it as a scene in “Waiting for Godot.”

Thursday, February 27th

My wife and I are finally closing on an apartment we’d had in contract since September. It’s been a half-year low-level nightmare that kicked off when the couple (young, white, “hip”) who signed a contract for our place got cold feet and demanded we lower our price. “It’s a buyers’ market” was something we heard a lot. (I kept thinking: Would they have done this to a white family? I wonder if this fits Cathy’s definition of a minor feeling.) But now it’s done. We’ve got the keys. It’s been so long we’ve forgotten what the new place looks like. The fridge is clean but they’ve left a few beverages: Vitamin Water, ginger ale, and two bottles of Corona.

Friday, February 28th

On Instagram, someone posts a photo of a book I don’t know. The epigraph comes from Thomas Wolfe: “Life is strange and the world is bad.” I’ve been thinking of Wolfe since reading a 1937 novel, “East Goes West,” by a writer named Younghill Kang, who escaped Japanese-occupied Korea in the early nineteen-twenties. Kang became friends with Wolfe, who led him to Maxwell Perkins, who published Kang’s two novels. An early scene in “East Goes West” sticks out: newly arrived in America, Kang’s narrator is homeless, and a New Yorker tells him to try Chinatown. “Where all the Chinee people live. Ain’t you Chinee?” In the nineteen-twenties, there were barely any Koreans in the U.S. The narrator says, “I couldn’t make him understand about Korea.”

I drive H., my younger son, to hockey practice. The team has a pizza party afterward. The kids are having so much fun, but it’s an enclosed space, no hand sanitizers in sight. H.’s going to get sick, I think.

Saturday, February 29th

I look at a piece I filed on January 7th, a survey of science-fiction movies of the nineteen-seventies. The coronavirus had been identified in Wuhan, in December, but had yet to be named a global health crisis. (The first mention of it in my e-mails isn’t until February 7th, in an e-mail from my friend and fellow long-suffering Sabres fan, the poet Mark Nowak, about how the virus is affecting hockey-stick production thanks to supply-chain disruption.) I wrote in my piece:

The plagues begin in the East. In Cornel Wilde’s No Blade of Grass (1970), news footage of starving Chinese, riots in India, and skeletal babies—Third World Problems—is crosscut with a heaping banquet in London. The disease affecting all plants has already spread from Asia to England, and food rationing and anarchy are around the corner. The strange disease in The Omega Man that turns Americans of all races chalk-white—a de facto melting pot—is a result of a conflict between China and Russia. The West is not to blame. The problem comes from somewhere else.

I didn’t include any reference to the growing unease over the coronavirus. It still seemed too distant.

I think about “Severance,” the 2018 novel by my friend Ling Ma. It imagines the arrival in America of Shen Fever, a zombie-making plague from China. I’m hoping to meet up with Ling when she comes to New York next month. Good line: “Either Shen Fever was no bigger issue than the West Nile virus, or it was on the level of the Black Plague.”

Sunday, March 1st

At the rink at 6 A.M. for H.’s local hockey tournament. First game’s at seven, but Coach wants everyone there an hour before. 6 A.M. means I wake up at 5 A.M. The experts say that to keep your immune system strong, you need to get enough sleep. I’ve been washing my hands so much they look like driftwood. There’s no Purell to be found anywhere.

Awaiting the start, I check on the latest coronavirus news. Before Trump took office, when he was a bloviating candidate in a bloated Republican field, I found his ramblings both abhorrent and weirdly fascinating. I had a document where I cut-and-pasted his circumlocutions and obsessive repetitions. To read (rather than hear) them was to summon some garrulous Don DeLillo character. (I participated in a 2017 DeLillo symposium at the New School, in which a scholar noted their overlaps—to begin with: “They’re both named Donald.”) Today I read that Trump said, “Our country is prepared for any circumstance. We hope it’s not going to be a major circumstance, it’ll be a smaller circumstance. But whatever the circumstances, we’re prepared.”

That evening, H. is sick, as predicted. I go out for medicine, but things are picked over at Rite Aid. Everything left feels a bit off-brand: chewable grape-flavored ibuprofen, a raspberry-flavored vitamin-C mix. Moms with strollers crowd the aisles, all of us looking for things that aren’t there anymore.

Monday, March 2nd

H. running a fever. Hope it’s just a cold. I’d been planning to go to my office this week, to work on my unfinishable novel, but sick kid means I stay home. I reread a draft while H. plays FIFA 20 on the Switch and watches soccer videos. For lunch, I go to the corner deli and get him a bagel with cream cheese and a small Tropicana orange juice. Vitamin C doesn’t do anything against the coronavirus, but maybe it will help with his regular cold. We eat our lunch on the roof, and we talk in the sunshine. He’s happy and I’m happy.

Tuesday, March 3rd

I take Y., my older son, to hockey practice. One night in December, I’d parked the car and walked him to the rink, then went to a coffee shop to work on the unfinishable novel. Half an hour later, my phone rang. I couldn’t recognize the distraught voice on the other end as my son. The head of the program got on the line and told me to come to the rink at once. Turned out that another kid’s father (white) had berated Y. during warmups, claiming he’d slashed his son with his stick. He followed him off the ice, screamed and swore at him. The various accounts are confusing. At some point he said he would call the cops. The coaches stepped in; he was instructed to leave. The dad was banned from the rink until the end of January.

At the beginning of February, I overhear someone at the rink saying in chummy tones, “So you’re finally back.” It’s another dad (white) talking to the guy who must be the dad. I surreptitiously take a photo and send it to my wife, W. This is the guy who screamed at Y.

At the time, I kept thinking, Would he have treated a white kid that way?

Now I think, Does the coronavirus outbreak make it seem O.K. to shout at an Asian kid?

Tonight I see the dad again, from afar. In the past few months, I’ve played over scenarios in my head. I should shake his hand, say, “No hard feelings.” But no—let him make the first move. Watching him, I think, He doesn’t think he did anything wrong.

Wednesday, March 4th

H. is better and back to school. Spring break is coming up. The Delaware tournament looms large in his mind. He’ll be totally healthy by then. My wife will drive him there, while I take Y. to his tournament in Philadelphia. A divide-and-conquer sort of weekend.

Thursday, March 5th

W.’s birthday. I draw her a card, a New York skyline with arrows pointing to the various places we’ve lived over the years. The boys each write a little note, signing off, “your favorite son.”

There’s an article about a staffer at a Brooklyn assemblywoman’s office who shared a message on Facebook advising people not to frequent Chinese businesses in the city, claiming that the proprietors could be carrying the virus from having gone to China for the Lunar New Year. I can’t believe people sometimes.

I spend a few hours decluttering, in anticipation of finally moving to the new apartment. I post four times to Instagram, a series I call “Marie Kondo vs. _____.” Today’s possible victims: my Village Voice reporter’s notebooks, the sheet music to “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” and a copy of an unpublished book I wrote twenty-two years ago—a manuscript that only exists as a printout, not on e-mail, in the cloud, anything but paper. The posts get a hundred and twenty-four, forty-two, and a hundred and eighty-seven likes, respectively.

To judge from Netflix and best-seller lists, clearly a good number of Americans are positively inclined toward Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” In the American mind, then, Japanese are clean, and the Chinese, with their weird, disease-incubating wildlife markets, are dirty. I don’t know where Koreans stand. The sleek, androgynous K-pop groups like BTS scan as “clean.” Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is a mix of the immaculate (the Parks in their sleek modern house) and grimy (the Kims in their fumigated hovel). When “Parasite” won the Best Picture Oscar, I screamed—never in my life would I have imagined a Korean filmmaker winning the prize, even someone as great as Bong Joon-ho. That was less than a month ago. Now South Korea was grappling with the largest coronavirus outbreak outside China, thanks in part to a secretive Christian cult, and it’s as if all that national pride has been replaced by panic and embarrassment. Somehow “parasite” and “virus” feel related.

My family—including my parents, sister, and her boyfriend—had planned on making a big pilgrimage to Korea at the end of June, when Y.’s school lets out. It would have been the first time there for my wife and kids, and the first time in nearly forty years for my sister. With my dad finally retiring, at eighty-four, the time seemed ripe. The trip is looking less likely by the day.

Friday, March 6th

My college alumni magazine arrives. The cover story is “Pizza! Our undercover experts rate New Haven’s pies.” On Instagram, I caption it “Slow news month.” It gets a hundred and two likes.

E-mail from the director of the day camp where H. will be for part of his spring break. She says that they are excited, but also aware of coronavirus concerns. There will be plenty of hand sanitizer. Anyone who feels sick should stay home.

Saturday, March 7th

Sunshine. Excited to meet some friends, L. and H., for dinner. L. suggested an Indian place in Harlem a few weeks back. At 12:30 P.M., L. touches base, saying she has a slight cough, possibly caught from a colleague who attended a conference out of the country. This is enough of an out for all of us. When to reschedule? We look at April. We look at May. Everything will be O.K. by then.

Sunday, March 8th

Y.’s last indoor soccer game at Chelsea Piers. I drop him off, then go park the car. When I enter the Field House, the guard at the turnstile tells me I have to register with the guy at the computer. I go to tell him my name and a (white) woman hisses, “I’m in line.”

Get an e-mail that H.’s upcoming day camp is cancelled due to “concerns over the _COVID_-19.”

Monday, March 9th

H.’s school is cancelled for two days. Moving to “virtual learning” on Wednesday. What does that even mean for fourth graders?

I’m anxious about the impending hockey tournaments in Pennsylvania and Delaware. I look up state-by-state statistics on the spread of the virus. Delaware has zero cases. But the teams will be coming in from all over. I wish the organizers would cancel.

For the first time ever, I drive to my wife’s office to pick her up after work. She usually takes a cab or the subway. But she wants to minimize the health risks—she’s a physician—and she says she can feel something in the atmosphere, a mounting dislike of Asians.

Tuesday, March 10th

Breakfast with Jane and Jenny. We greet each other with elbow bumps, which I’ve read about but haven’t done before. The campus where Jenny teaches has cancelled classes and is working out a way to do virtual learning for the next few days before spring break. What happens after that?

Jane’s a poet, visiting from London, originally bound for the A.W.P. conference in San Antonio. It wasn’t officially cancelled, but people stayed away in droves, especially upon hearing that a cruise passenger who’d been quarantined at a nearby Air Force base had been released too soon and went to the mall. I ask Jane if she’s felt threatened in London lately—I’d read at least two accounts of East Asians in England being assaulted by people invoking coronavirus. Jane says no, she hasn’t heard of anything yet. Knock wood. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m on my phone too much, reading the New York Post, in the past my source for videos of Chinese deliverymen getting attacked in vestibules.

The sun is out, and the conversation turns to warmer things. I hear about Jenny’s latest projects, Jane’s new apartment. It’s so nice to catch up. We sit in triangle formation, slightly less than three feet apart. After we all elbow-bump goodbye, I head to the subway, a bounce in my step.

H. is at a friend’s place for the afternoon, so I set out for my office to work on the unfinishable novel. Feeling buoyant after our conversation, amped from my second coffee of the morning, I don’t listen to a podcast or try to figure out 23-Down—I’m just thinking about how to end the book. For the past few months, I’ve had a last line in place for the book. Maybe, maybe it’s the work of an afternoon to reach it, once and for all? Crazy confidence! Jane has published three books of poetry, Jenny more than a half-dozen academic works and novels.

I exit at Twenty-eighth Street, cross Seventh Avenue. Feeling good. The usual swift path. I glance left at traffic, scoot by the magazine kiosk so festooned with graffiti I wonder if it’s a project of students from nearby F.I.T. Then I hear it.

“Get the fuck away from me.”

I slow down. Turn my head. A young black man, gold-rimmed glasses, neatly if too warmly dressed for the unseasonable weather in a knit hat and parka.

“Excuse me?” I ask. “Are you talking to me?”

I come to a stop, glare at him. What do I want here? He keeps walking, swearing, his face in a tight snarl: “Yes, you, fucking Chinese motherfucker, don’t fucking get me sick. . . .”

At this point I lose track of his onslaught, as I go into attack mode: “Fuck you—I’m not sick.” The air explodes with F-bombs. This guy—already I think of him as My Racist—still isn’t looking at me. He trudges on, swearing, and through my rage I study his face for a second. He’s full of hate right now, but maybe also confusion. Is the Chinese guy supposed to talk back?

He’s younger than I, his outfit more put together than my pushing-fifty hockey-dad getup: old jeans, older baseball cap. My Racist appears to be off to work, backpack on one shoulder and coffee in hand—or could he be a student?—but going out of his way to shit on me. He’s still cursing me out, and I’m still sputtering in anger—“Really? You’re saying this to me? You don’t even know me!”—as if this logic will make him stop, bow low with hat and hand, and say, “Apologies, good sir, I was gravely mistaken.”

It looks like I’m taller than he. There’s that. But you don’t want to get into something physical—or do you, Ed? (I’m having a sort of out-of-body experience at this point. Time seems to stop.)

This was going to happen and you knew it. My wife was right. She’s been dreading the Delaware tournament partly because of the viral risk, but also because, in these heightened times, there’s a chance kids on the other team will say something nasty to H. I don’t want to be overprotective. But now is different. Now feels dangerous.

As I pass the Chase bank, I speed up, stop, take my phone out of my pocket, reverse the camera, and snap a picture of him, making sure to capture half of my face. Evidence—for what? The act enrages him, and he unleashes another stream of hate, but it’s like I want more. Bring it on. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I would have switched the camera to video. But to what end? I’m not sure what I want, just that I want something. He’s walking fast but I’m still a few paces ahead. In a few seconds, our paths will diverge and this guy will go on with his day. And I will stew. As I storm off down Twenty-seventh Street, I scream, “You’re a fucking racist! A fucking racist!”

Surely everyone on the street who is witnessing this altercation has instantly grasped my side of the story. Any second now, they’ll jump to my defense, start berating My Racist. But of course they don’t. The dudes hanging out by the pizza place, the young women waiting on Uber by the fancy hotel—it’s not that remarkable, seeing two people yelling on the street.

I storm into my office, put my stuff down, wash my hands. And then I do what I must have known I would do the instant I pulled out my phone. I post the picture of My Racist on Instagram. I’m furious as I thumb out a caption:

I’ve read accounts of anti-Asian racism in the wake of the coronavirus, so I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. This well-dressed, sane-looking guy told me to get the fuck away from him, though I was nowhere near him. It was ugly. I don’t think he expected me to say anything; it made him even more infuriated when I responded. He kept swearing at me. It was pretty bad. Minor feelings or major? This is on 27th and Seventh. It’s going to get worse.

For the next couple of hours, I go back and forth between the unfinishable novel and the picture of My Racist. His mouth is open in mid-insult. My big head in the foreground cuts off the last two letters of the Chase bank’s awning. Only a sliver of my face is visible, just one eye, and I’m shocked at how sad I look. The likes and comments pour in. Usually I fastidiously like each comment, clicking on the heart next to it, but I’m paralyzed.

One good thing: in a small bowl on top of a filing cabinet, I find a half-empty travel-size bottle of Walgreens hand sanitizer. This stuff is liquid gold. It expired in July of 2018, but I use some anyway.

On the subway back, I sit between two passengers. The man to my right—white, older—ostentatiously wraps his silk scarf over his mouth.

At six-thirty, I drive to my wife’s office to pick her up.

Wednesday, March 11th

As of this morning, the Instagram post featuring My Racist has two hundred and seventy-five likes. Friends and fellow-travellers I’ve never met in real life register their outrage, and some send warm D.M.s of sympathy. I appreciate it all. Maybe this was what I wanted: some acknowledgment that what happened was fundamentally wrong. Sound a warning. But I also remind myself that this is why I quit Facebook and Twitter shortly after the election: I no longer wanted to add to the endless clamor of legitimate grievances. Later, I delete the Instagram post.

The W.H.O. upgrades _COVID_-19 to a pandemic. For H.’s stay-at-home schoolwork, he’s written part of a story involving a grotesquely fat narrator who meets a rich guy named Donald, who is in fact Donald Trump. There’s some free-floating confusion about Trump in our household, since my in-laws, who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, were coming around to Trump as of last summer—because he was tough on China, an existential threat to their native Taiwan. (They’ve since soured on him again because of his response to the virus.)

Rink again. Last practice of the season for H. It looks like Delaware is still on. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of getting sick or getting punched. Maybe both will happen.

I read the Daily News on my phone and a headline stops me cold: “ ‘Where’s your coronavirus mask, you Asian b---h!’: Asian woman punched in Midtown hate crime: cops.” For a second I think, Was it My Racist? The first was on Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, less than a mile from where My Racist made himself known: an Asian woman got attacked, while her female assailant screamed at her. The victim, I learned a day later, was Korean. In the second incident, a fifty-nine-year-old Asian man was kicked in the back, near East 103rd Street, by a guy shouting “F--k you, Chinese coronavirus!” Maybe it’s safer in Delaware.

One of the teams for Y.’s Philly tournament is coming from Loudoun County, Virginia, which has just closed its schools. I keep checking both tournament sites for updates, e-mailing the organizers. Seems like they’re holding out on cancelling as long as possible. No one wants to believe that things are really changing.

At a nearby table in the rink’s café, some hockey moms chat about the virus. I wear headphones and try to cancel. I imagine them looking at me, but when I lift my head from my phone I see that’s not the case. Next, I’ll be hearing voices.

I send the news of the two beatings to my sister, in order to spread the misery. “This is sickening,” I write.

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