Since the former US President Donald Trump spoke of Covid-19 as the “China virus”, attacks on people of Chinese origin have increased in the famous New York neighborhood. A law should protect them from violence. But does it really help?
The “Kongh Sikh Tong” is an insider tip, normally hardly a non-Chinese guest gets lost in the small restaurant on Bayard Street in the heart of New York’s Chinatown. Nearly a dozen tables are mostly occupied by regulars from the neighborhood, people like Karlin Chan, who has lived here since he was two – in other words, for more than 60 years.
Chan loves the place, he comes here almost every afternoon for a plate of marinated pork loin or fried peppers. But today Chan, a stout Sino-American with snow-white hair, doesn’t really like the food. Because only recently it happened again on the sidewalk directly in front of the door of the “Kongh”: A 55-year-old woman from the neighborhood was innocent on her way home when a man suddenly hit her with full force in the face hit. The woman remained unconscious and had to be taken to the hospital. Fortunately, she made a full recovery.
Much worse than the physical injuries, however, were the psychological consequences of the attack – for the victim himself, but also for the people in the most famous Chinese neighborhood in the USA. “People are scared,” says Karlin Chan. “The elderly in particular hardly dare to go out into the streets.” In New York there is actually a party atmosphere these days, people are enjoying the summer and the easing of the corona pandemic. The parks and restaurants are full, people go to concerts and the movies and celebrate their regained freedom.
In many places in Chinatown, however, there is trepidation. The return of New York life and the proverbial New York energy causes the opposite of euphoria: more people on the street means more fear of assault. For the people in Chinatown, Covid was many times worse than it was for most other Americans. The neighborhood was already suffering in early 2020, some time before the wider population felt the effects of the pandemic. People avoided Chinatown. The then US President Donald Trump spoke of the “China Virus” and thus fueled fears. Many believed they could avoid contracting Covid-19 by avoiding people of Chinese origin. But not only that: the attacks against people of Asian descent also increased.
By the end of last year, the aid organization “Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate” had counted a total of 2,800 acts of violence, 150 percent more than in the previous year. The hate wave peaked in March this year when a man shot and killed eight Asian employees in three massage studios in Atlanta. The rampage sparked a national wave of indignation. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in many US cities. The allegedly tolerant and quiet minority had lost patience. #StopAsianHate has become a hashtag that has been used a million times on social networks.
The new administration in Washington also responded. US President Joe Biden strongly condemned the violence. A new law was swiftly passed through Congress to make it quicker and easier for local authorities to prosecute racist crimes against the Asian minority. But so far this has been of little use. The violence continues. Shortly after the law was passed, a Filipino woman was brutally beaten up in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan. In Queens, a man’s face was cut with a knife. In Pennsylvania, a young Asian man suffering from mental health problems was gunned down by police. It was exactly the kind of police violence that led to a worldwide riot in the case of George Floyd. Overall, violence against people of Asian descent rose again by 164 percent in the first quarter of 2021.
Karlin Chan is not surprised by any of this. “We only get lip service from politics.” An anti-discrimination law is all well and good. But it does not replace the actions that he has missed so far – such as increased police protection in Chinatown. That is why he himself has been patrolling his home district with a group of volunteers for months, offering protection to the elderly on the way home, reporting suspicious persons to the police and intervening himself if need be. “I’m not someone who shies away from an argument,” says the 1.80 meter tall man. But what he cannot do, of course, is to change people’s attitudes overnight. They sit deep. “This country is built on racism,” says Karlin Chan. And he knows what he’s talking about.
In his 60 years in Chinatown, Chan has seen too much to be under illusions. The man who describes himself as a “community activist” has been helping victims of attacks since the 1970s. First-generation immigrants who don’t speak English well “When the cops come, they will be sacrificed a second time. The attackers simply claim that the Chinese started. ”According to Chan, convictions for the perpetrators are rare. Still: Chinatown is his home and he never wants to move from here. “The tourists find it exotic here. But the truth is that it is a slum. ”A quarter of cheap, ailing residential areas and – especially in the pandemic – insufficient protection for people who you don’t want anywhere else.
Immigrants from China have never been welcomed in US history. Chan experienced this in his own family. His grandfather came to the United States as a worker at the turn of the 20th century. He was not allowed to bring his family with him because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only immigration law in the United States that targeted a specific ethnic group. Visits were only possible every few years.
The law was not revised again until 1965. Both Chan’s father and grandfather were alone in the US, the families stayed in China. “Chinatowns in the US were all bachelorette areas,” says Chan. His father couldn’t see his own mother – Chan’s grandmother – once for 30 years.
Chan himself was born in China and came to the United States at the age of two. He belonged to the first generation of Chinese who were allowed to start their own family in the USA. “Racism against Asians,” he says, “was official national policy for 70 years”. So the latest wave of hatred is not a shock to him. “It has happened again and again in American history.”
During World War II, for example, when 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were imprisoned in internment camps. Their ethnic origin was sufficient justification. Few of the internees were born in Japan; most of them belonged to the second or third generation of Japanese immigrants. 1,800 of them fell ill and died in the camps.
In 1982, Vincent Chen, of Chinese descent, was beaten to death with baseball bats in a bar in Michigan. The attackers blamed him for losing jobs in the auto industry because they believed he was Japanese. Chen was born in the Chinese province of Guangdong.
The story of anti-Asian racism in the US did not make Karlin Chan cynical. But he is “cautiously realistic,” as he says. He doesn’t believe that much will change under Biden and his Asian-born Vice President Kamala Harris. Especially not as long as Biden portrays China as the great enemy for the USA: “That doesn’t help us at all.”
But one thing gives Chan hope. “For the first time in my lifetime, Americans of Asian descent developed a self-confidence as a minority.” The young people, second and third generation immigrants, no longer ducked. They no longer do anything to avoid attracting attention, but resisted. “We have always been invisible before,” says Chan. But that is now over once and for all.
