Natty Jumreornvong was outside Mount Sinai hospital on the Upper East Side of New York around 11am one morning in February when a man approached her.
“Chinese virus,” he spat out. She told him she was a medical student and tried to walk away, but he followed her, kicked her knee and dragged her across the ground. She called out for help, but nobody came to her assistance. The incident was just the latest and most severe case of anti-Asian hate Jumreornvong has seen over the last year. Last April, a woman with a child spat on her and called her racial slurs. Patients have called her “Kung Flu”, and she’s seen Asian patients with bruises who say someone came and hit them but would not say who, potentially out of shame.
“It’s been going on for a while,” said Jumreornvong, who grew up in Thailand and came to the US for college.
Since the attack in February, Jumreornvong has made a point of speaking out against anti-Asian hate. She wrote an op-ed about her experience, rallied other students to push their medical school to critically look at Asian discrimination and spoke at a rally of New York City healthcare workers against anti-Asian hate.
Such vocal activism is new to Jumreornvong. She recalls “shaking like a leaf” when she was speaking at the healthcare workers rally, and she has received hateful messages online from people for talking publicly about her experiences.
“It’s still all new to me, activism, and I think that’s what a lot of Asian Americans are starting to feel too,” Jumreornvong said. “We’re not really taught to speak out.”
But Jumreornvong said many people have reached out to her saying that her experience resonated with them. “Sharing stories can be really powerful, or else people don’t think [the hate] exists,” she said. Jumreornvong is a part of what has become a massive movement to stop anti-Asian violence in the US as the number of hate-related incidents reached an alarming high over the course of the pandemic. Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition that has been tracking anti-Asian incidents since the beginning of the pandemic, has reported at least 3,800 incidents ranging from being spat on to verbal and physical assault.
While hate-related incidents have been taking place throughout the course of the pandemic, two high-profile, violent incidents in January against elderly Asian men, one of whom died from his injuries, gave momentum to the issue. After the murder of six Asian American women in a mass shooting in Atlanta, many Asian Americans say that the fear of being attacked has hit a breaking point.
The last few weeks have seen dozens of rallies against anti-Asian hate across the country, viral social media campaigns spreading awareness of the issue and over $25m in donations to groups supporting Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) causes.
For many historians and advocates, this mobilization feels like the first time in decades when Asian American activism has been seen at such a widespread scale. The rise in hate-related incidents and crimes, along with the racial reckoning provoked by the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, has caused a broad coalition to form within a diverse racial group.
Asian Americans make up 20 million of the US population and have backgrounds in more than 20 countries in Asia, each with distinct languages, cultures and history. No single ethnic origin dominates the group, and about 60% of Asian Americans were born in another country, according to the Pew Research Center.
Despite their vast ethnic, generational and cultural differences, Asian Americans have found common ground over the discrimination.
“In this moment, you see Asian Americans coming together because we all recognize that shared pain and that shared sense of being othered,” said John Yang, president and executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “We understand what it’s like to be labeled as a foreigner, regardless of whether we were born in this country.”
This experience of racism and xenophobia is something that Asians in America have shared since the 1800s, when immigrants from Asia started coming to the US. The racist “yellow peril” phenomenon is used to describe the fear Americans had concerning Asian immigrants, who were believed to be dirty and ridden with diseases, and their potential stain on the western world. No matter whether a person was Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino, they were regarded as “yellow peril”.
