Growing up in New York City, I learned street savvy early on. I kept my head down, my money in my sock, and my mind on my business. I started taking the subway alone when I was 12, and in high school I commuted four hours a day from Queens to the Bronx. When a classmate at our school’s subway stop was punched in the face by a stranger, I still took the train home that day and every day after that. It takes a lot to throw me off the hook.
And yet, as an American of Korean descent, I now fear for my life and the lives of those who resemble me.
The New York Police Department reported 131 bias incidents against Asians last year, up from 28 in 2020 and three in 2019. That increase doesn’t explain last week’s most recent wave of hatred: Police officers arrested one man and accused him of assaulting seven Asian women in Manhattan in two hours during which he reportedly punched or elbowed most of the women in the face and pushed one to the ground.
And, of course, not all attacks on Asians are registered as hate crimes. Over the past few months, Christina Yuna Lee was followed to her apartment building on the Lower East Side and stabbed to death, Michelle Go was pushed onto the Times Square subway tracks, and Yao Pan Ma died months later in a coma after being pushed to the ground and onto the floor. hit in the head in East Harlem. Of these, only Mr. Ma’s murder was labeled a hate crime.
In February, a Korean diplomat was punched in the face near K-Town, the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood where Korean businesses are clustered. In January, Hoa Nguyen was hit several times in the head while on her way to run errands in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill. Just this week, a 41-year-old Asian man had the face smashed into a subway in lower Manhattan. All these attacks were unprovoked. And there were more, too many to list them all here.
“No one deserves to live in fear of physical assault, but unfortunately, fear is the state of the union for many in the Asian-American community,” Queens Representative Grace Meng said last week. “Asian Americans continue to be victims of senseless violence because we are the scapegoat for the spread of Covid-19.”
I suspect that many, many more crimes and aggressions against Asians go unreported – in part because of language barriers or immigration status, but also because of a cultural phenomenon that is intuitively understood in our communities. It is the fear of disrupting our “model minority” reputation. My Korean immigrant parents often told me growing up, “Don’t make trouble. We are guests in this country.” It doesn’t matter that I was born here and that my parents are also Americans.
Racism in this country is multifaceted and affects each ethnic or religious group differently. When Asians are attacked, we are expected to respond as we have in the past: keep quiet and keep working, head down. As so-called model minorities, we excel at masking our pain.
Every Asian in America remembers incidents of verbal ridicule or stereotyping, times when we were asked to make ourselves smaller. Some have experienced physical aggression or violence. If we let these incidents go unchecked – be they micro-aggressions or much worse – the message is sent that our lives are less valued. Dehumanizing a population in subtle ways encourages some members of society to attack in more harmful ways.
I’m sick of how Asians are treated in this country – literally and figuratively pushed around. That’s why I’ve decided I’m done being your model minority.
During school and my early career, I played along with the expectations of Asians. I was grateful for every opportunity, and my parents worked too hard—packing groceries seven days a week because office jobs weren’t available to them—to mess it up. A publishing job assigned me the math and science books that no one else wanted; I took them all without protest.
Even when I stopped living up to these expectations, I found that others still wanted me to stick to the stereotyped minority model. I started to realize why my parents advised me not to get into trouble. If I expressed a dissenting opinion, I was greeted with contempt and aggressively put in my place. Nobody likes it when you play against type.
As Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen put it, “Asian Americans still don’t have enough political power, or cultural presence, to make many of our fellow Americans hesitant to introduce a racist idea. “
A paradoxical feature of the model minority is our simultaneous invisibility—when we work quietly in the background, head down—and our hypervisibility, when we become an easy target.
I’m tired of feeling terrified. This weekend, at my niece’s first birthday party in Queens – a celebration in Korean culture as grand and joyous as a wedding – the table conversation with family and friends was about how afraid we are of our elderly parents. We are frustrated at how quickly non-Asian people ignore the role of race if they have not lived in our skin. We are tired of being seen as weak, easy targets, ripe for the push. We, especially Asian women, feel threatened and helpless and silenced.
We’re starting to push back. Asian American female entrepreneurs face racist and misogynistic threats from trolls online. In New York City, advocacy groups are calling for citywide action and legislative changes to combat prejudice against Asians and others. Head down and shut up is no longer an option for many of us. We need voices, both Asian and non-Asian, to speak out. We are beginning to realize that the bystander effect – seeing something but not saying anything when we witness indecency or worse – is just as dangerous as the attacks themselves.
On an F train leaving Brooklyn, I recently saw a scuffle over an open seat in which a woman pushed an elderly Asian woman who could barely be cleared out of the way with both hands. The older woman drew back. The taller woman took a seat.
I said, “You don’t have to push her.”
Then I looked around the train car and tried to enlist the help of other riders. But they all shuffled their papers or stared into their phones. Nobody looked at me.
Patricia Park (@patriciapark718) is the author of ‘Re Jane’ and the forthcoming novel ‘Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim’. She is a professor in the MFA program in creative writing at American University.
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