The dramatic increase in reports of anti-Asian hostility in the US over the past year - and especially the reports of brutal physical attacks - is disturbing, disappointing, and sad (although to be fair, it was all of these things even before the increase). If you are an Asian-American, has this caused you to change your behavior lately? Are you more concerned for your safety when you go out in public than you used to be? Are you going out in public less often than you used to? Avoiding crowds and/or certain areas that you used to go to?
Or have you resumed living your life pretty much as you did pre-pandemic?
It hasn’t really changed things for me. I still go walking around, traveling, alone, etc. as much as before, no change in habits.
But a few months ago, my mother had to get her car’s windshield replaced after someone attacked it with a rock or some such object in the parking lot while she was shopping. She suspects it was done for anti-Asian motives, but we can’t be fully sure.
What a country we live in where we hope one day your mother’s windshield will be smashed and she can assume it was a random act of vandalism instead of racist hostility.
I live in the Bay Area, and I saw 2 colleagues who are Korean-American for the first time since shutdown. They’re pretty suburban as in, they bought a house up in the hills, they work in tech and have never felt insecure or unsafe until now. They mentioned that they and their Asian colleagues no longer take public transportation. They haven’t been harassed personally, or so they told me.
Of course their offices are on Market St in San Francisco, just re-opening now, where the downtown is FULL of people who don’t have a roof over their head, and a lot of petty crime and muggings, laptop thefts, car break-ins. So the anti-Asian violence just adds a new wrinkle to what was there already.
The only thing my (Chinese) wife has mentioned that might qualify as anti-Asian hostility was an incident about a year ago when she went to a grocery store and she sniffed at a bundle of parsley (she wasn’t sure if it was parsley or cilantro). A woman next to her reacted as if she was spraying nerve gas all over the produce aisle.