On February 13, 2022, Christina Euna Lee, a 35-year-old Korean American, was killed in a rented apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown, New York. One year later, Brian Chen, her Chinese-American landlord, still remembers that people placed flowers and candles in front of the building to mourn the victims after the accident. It is outrageous that these monuments have been destroyed repeatedly, sometimes even in broad daylight.
“2022 is a very bad year for all Asian Americans. There are many hatred and discrimination against Asian Americans,” Chen told reporters. He felt that it was a very difficult time for all Asian Americans. In the community where he lived, “the fight against Choya continued every day”.
American media once said: “For
The racism of Asian Americans has always been the ugly main line in American history. ” After the COVID-19, some American politicians spread and incited conspiracy theories on a large scale, and Asian Americans became the target of dumping pan. Hate crimes against this group increased sharply. Recently, the United States government has ignored science and facts and introduced discriminatory entry restrictions against China, raising concerns about further exacerbating the problem of Asian hatred in the United States.
This article is reproduced from the WeChat official account “Xinhua International Headline” (ID: interxinhua). The original article was first published on February 26, 2023, with the original title of “Discrimination against Asian Americans is still intensifying – the original sin of anti Asian racism in the United States at the beginning”.
one
“They are too scared to go out”
Jenny H, a Chinese American who is over 60 years old, has lived in San Francisco for 30 years. She used to like to go out, like to do volunteer work, and often chat with strangers on the bus. But now she feels everything has changed.
In recent years, hate crimes against Asian-American groups have increased sharply in the United States. Jenny H has been attacked many times: she was beaten on the face on the bus, causing permanent damage to her eyes, and needs to be re-examined every three months; In 2020, I was knocked unconscious by someone in the subway station, and woke up to find myself fractured… “My lifestyle has changed greatly, and I don’t want to go out,” said Jenny H.
She was physically injured and mentally tortured. Now she can’t go out alone. She needs to be accompanied by relatives, friends or volunteers to see a doctor. In an interview with the media, she also dared not say her full name for fear of being targeted again.
Like Jenny H., many Asian Americans feel afraid in the atmosphere of hatred for Asia. Anthony Tan, a physician who practiced medicine in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York, found that since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, the number of Asian Americans who came to see him decreased significantly. Many people need regular review, but “they are too scared to go out”.
This situation is largely due to the fact that some American politicians use Asian Americans as scapegoats and deliberately incite racism and xenophobia, leading to
The hatred and attacks of Asians have intensified. In an interview with reporters, Xue Haipei, president of the American Chinese Federation, pointed out that the United States has regressed at an alarming rate in combating racial discrimination in recent years.
According to the data of the Research Center for Hate and Extremism at the University of California, San Bernardino, the number of hate crimes against Asians in the United States in 2021 increased by 339% compared with 2020, and the number of such crimes in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other places reached a new high. A report released by the United States “Stop Hating Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Alliance” last October showed that since March 2020, the organization has received more than 11000 reports of incidents of hatred against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, of which one fifth of the incidents are attributed to Asians or Asian Americans by the perpetrators of the COVID-19, lack of income security and other problems.
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The United States enacted the Anti COVID-19 Hatred Crime Act in May 2021. However, according to the data released by the Pew Research Center in May 2022, 63% of Asian-Americans believe that violence against Asian-Americans is still increasing, and more than one third of the respondents are afraid of being threatened or attacked, so they are forced to change their lifestyle. Karen Wang, a Chinese-American from Queens District, New York City, said in an interview with the media during the 2022 US mid-term election that his sense of insecurity had never been so strong. “As an Asian American, I feel more vulnerable to attack.”
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“The ugly thread in American history”
“The predecessors have bravely explored the foundation and prepared for suffering, and the backward should work hard to honor and comfort the heroes.”
In the Evergreen Cemetery in the east of Los Angeles, the United States, there is a memorial wall commemorating the Chinese workers who participated in the construction of the American Pacific Railway. The central black wall is carved with such a couplet in Chinese characters. In June 2005, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Bureau found a cemetery near the Evergreen Cemetery, which unearthed hundreds of human remains, tombstones with Chinese characters and porcelain. According to archaeologists, many of the dead were Chinese workers who built railways for the United States at the end of the 19th century.
In 1863, in order to develop the west, the United States began to build the first railway across the east and west of the United States – the Pacific Railway. About 12000 Chinese workers were recruited to participate in the construction. The number of Chinese workers accounted for 85% of all railway workers. They worked day and night under extremely bad conditions and paved the way in the mountains. Many people died in foreign countries. According to the data, from the end of 1865 to the beginning of 1866, five consecutive months of snowstorms caused frequent avalanches, and more than 3000 Chinese workers who built part of the Pacific Railway were killed. A few months later, the ice and snow melted, and people found that the victims were all wearing single clothes and bare feet. The afterlife of these dead people was left unattended, and was hastily buried by the new Chinese workers.
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Chinese have made important contributions to the development of the United States, but have become the object of exclusion and persecution. At that time, the United States government pursued a policy of racial discrimination, which led to the fact that Chinese could not be buried in the cemetery like white people after death, but only in the wild. In 1871, a group of white people rushed into the neighborhood of Chinatown in Los Angeles and shot and hanged 21 Chinese Americans. In the 1870s, the smallpox epidemic broke out in San Francisco, and Chinese people were falsely accused of being the “culprit”. In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited all Chinese workers from entering the United States, and also prohibited Chinese who had obtained permanent residency from naturalizing as American citizens. This bill was not repealed until 1943.
Xue Haipei, president of the American Chinese Federation, pointed out that the United States has historical sin in the issue of racial discrimination, and the Chinese Exclusion Act can be called the “integrator” of hatred against Asian Americans. This bill is the only law in the history of the United States that discriminates against, excludes and suppresses single ethnic groups, causing great harm to generations of people in China. The United States Congress did not formally apologize for the China Exclusion Act in the form of legislation until 2012.
In June 1982, a century after the enactment of the Anti-Chinese Act, Chen Guoren, a 27-year-old Chinese American, was about to get married. He attended a party in a club in Detroit, but was attacked for no reason. “Because of you XXX, we lost our job.” Ronald Ebens, a white auto worker, cursed Chen Guoren. At that time, the United States automobile manufacturing industry was in a slump, and a large number of people lost their jobs. Detroit, as the industry center, was seriously hit. The United States put the blame on the Japanese auto manufacturers, resulting in a high level of hatred for Asia, and many Asians became victims. Ebens mistook Chen Guoren for Japanese at that time and vented his resentment on him.
Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz chased Chen Guoren all the way and hit him on the head with a baseball bat. Four days later, Chen Guoren died. The court only sentenced the two murderers to three years’ probation and a fine of $3000 for manslaughter. In 2022, when CNN reported on the 40th anniversary of Chen Guoren’s death, the judge who heard the case explained that “they (Ebens and Nitz) are not the kind of people you will send to prison.”
In the American documentary “Who is Chen Guoren?”, American legal scholar Wu Huayang said: “Before the Chen Guoren case, it can be said that there was no concept of Asian Americans.” After the release of the trial results of the Chen Guoren case, the Asian American community in Detroit began to unite, carry out protests and establish civil rights organizations. American media believe that the attack on Chen Guoren and the result of his judgment are a turn of the Asian American civil rights movement
Fold point. In 2022, when Asian Americans held a rally to call for an end to hatred and violent crimes against Asian Americans, they still carried the portrait of Chen Guoren.
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three
“This is a deep-rooted problem”
At the beginning of this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States developed discriminatory entry restrictions against China, requiring passengers flying from China to the United States to provide a negative test certificate for COVID-19 within two days before departure or a rehabilitation certificate for COVID-19 within 90 days. In this regard, Jonathan Lena, a medical professor at George Washington University in the United States, sarcastically said that “the only epidemic prevention effort in the United States is to detect Chinese tourists”, “everyone wake up, the problem is in us”. John Yang, chairman and executive director of the “Asian American Equity Promotion Organization”, said that under the general anti-China environment in the United States, the United States government has introduced discriminatory entry restrictions against China, which has gone beyond the scope of reasonable response to the epidemic and may contribute to the undercurrent of racism in the United States.
About a week after the above-mentioned entry restrictions came into effect, an 18-year-old Asian girl at Indiana University Bloomington was attacked by a 56-year-old white woman with a knife on the bus and stabbed in the head several times. The murderer told the police that her target was “Chinese”, and that she would “destroy our country without one person”.
Ling Huping, an expert on American immigration issues, pointed out in the book “Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of History and Culture” that the violence against Asia has profound historical roots in the United States. Driven by racial prejudice and discriminatory laws and policies, the violence against Asia has appeared since the first wave of Chinese immigrants in the United States, and has occurred repeatedly since then. Li Minjin, an Asian-American writer who grew up in Queens, New York, said in an interview with American media that no matter how high the education level of Asian-Americans and how safe their communities are, they are likely to be insulted, attacked or even killed by Asian-Americans. This is the historical result of the long-term persecution of the Asian-American community.
Some scholars believe that, unlike the discrimination against African Americans, the discrimination against Asian Americans in American society has always been xenophobic. From the perspective of psychological root, the core is to regard Asian-Americans as “forever alien”. American historian Li Yilian wrote in the book “The Creation of Asian Americans: A History” that although the discriminatory laws of the past have been abolished, Asian Americans still have not achieved full equality in American society. Many Asians have settled in the United States several generations ago, but are still regarded as outsiders. “This has led to discrimination in their daily life and has become the target of violence, murder and hate crimes”.
Catherine Chen, a Chinese-American writer and journalist, admitted in her comments that for many years, she had always felt like an outsider in the United States and had no choice but to alienate her ethnic tradition and culture. The Asian-American group was beaten, stabbed or pushed onto the subway track, but “our experience has not attracted attention from peers, nor has it been paid attention to in history textbooks and civil rights speeches”.
In a broader sense, anti-Asian racism is one of the manifestations of systematic racial discrimination in the United States. Like African Americans, Hispanics, aborigines and other ethnic minorities, Asian Americans are the objects of discrimination and oppression by the “white supremacy” in the United States for a long time, either overt or covert, and are also the victims of racial hatred and opposition incited by American politicians for their own interests.
In an interview with reporters, Huang Zhengyu, president of the Hundred People Association of the American Chinese elite organization, said that as an immigrant country, the United States has a history of discrimination and exploitation of ethnic minorities. “Every day, we are fighting the racist statements and behaviors of some politicians and leaders against the Asian-American community, as well as the long-standing stereotypes.”
Zhang Yunhan, a Chinese American who was attacked by anti Asian, believes that racism has always plagued the United States and has been accumulating for hundreds of years. The surge of anti Asian crimes under the COVID-19 is a concentrated outbreak of this problem. “It will not disappear easily, which is a deep-rooted problem”.