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Three days after US officials first used the term “China Virus” on a national news broadcast, a barrage of anti-Asian attacks began in New York City.
Within hours, two Asian Americans were separately assaulted — the first of such hate crimes in the city for the year and marking a deeply troubling, sometimes deadly trend that continues today.
“Where is your corona mask, you Asian b—h?” a 23-year-old woman was asked March 10, 2020, before she was slugged in the face.
Hours later, a 59-year-old man was kicked to the ground and told, “F–king Chinese coronavirus, go back to your country.”
Before those attacks, not a single hate crime against Asian Americans had been reported to the NYPD in 2020. But by the end of that year, there were 30 — a 900-percent surge from just three recorded in 2019.
And at the close of 2021, the NYPD had its first murder as a hate crime on its hands since 2017 when Yao Pan Ma, 61, died from an earlier assault. That year, the number of racist crimes against Asian Americans skyrocketed to 133.
The data, compiled by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, shows a disturbing rise in crimes against Asian Americans that started during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew increasingly violent as anti-Asian political and online rhetoric fueled the attacks, the analysis shows.
In the Big Apple, which saw more hate crimes against Asian Americans over the past two years than any other US city, the problem is particularly acute — even more so after the horrific Feb. 13 murder of Christina Yuna Lee.
“Our community is in a lot of pain,” Jo-Ann Yoo, the executive director of the Asian American Federation, told The Post.
“But also, we are enraged because this has been happening often, this has been happening too much, and we deserve answers, we deserve to feel a sense of safety in our community.”
A little over a week ago, Lee, a 35-year-old Korean American creative producer, was stabbed 40 times in her Chinatown apartment by a career criminal who followed her into her building.
While prosecutors are still investigating whether Lee’s murder was a hate crime, her family seems convinced it was one.
“Her death is part of an alarming pattern of unchecked, hateful violence against women, namely women of Asian descent and women of color that can no longer stand without consequence,” Lee’s relative, Angela Yujin Lee, wrote on a GoFundMe page that launched Saturday in her memory.
It’s a sentiment shared by Brian Chin, the landlord of Lee’s Chrystie Street building, where her brutalized body was found in the bathroom of her sixth-floor walk-up.
Days after her death, the memorial set up outside the building condemning anti-Asian hate was destroyed by vandals, who smashed candles and tore up a sign that said, “Stop Asian Hate.”
“As an Asian American myself, to deal with [her death] and then to see what they did in the aftermath to her memory, to the legacy of this wonderful, independent, strong woman, it’s awful,” Chin said.
“In the Asian community, we have been screaming about this injustice for months, years, ever since the de Blasio administration — and we have been unheard,” he said.
“This is the consequence of their inaction.”
When hate speech leads to hate crimes
While racism against Asian Americans has deep roots in the US, experts said the recent spike in hate attacks is largely attributable to political rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its origins in Wuhan, China, along with geopolitical tensions with the country.
James Mulvaney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who previously served as deputy commissioner of New York state’s Division of Human Rights, said the use of terms such as “China Virus” and “Wuhan Flu” by elected officials “gave people license to misbehave.
“Anytime you diminish the value of an individual, you increase the likelihood that they’re going to be crime victims,” Mulvaney said.
“That’s why we’re seeing th ings going up, because it’s a short step from hate speech to hate crime, from targeting someone verbally to all of a sudden targeting them physically,” he said.
Professor Brian Levin, director of Cal State’s CSHE, said data repeatedly shows a direct correlation between the use of stigmatizing language and hate crimes.
When public officials, including former President Donald Trump and other politicians, blamed China for the onset of COVID-19, referring to the bug as the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” in spring 2020, hate crimes spiked nationally at the same time hospitalizations peaked, CSHE data shows. Sinophobic language also surged on Twitter.
Similar trends have been measured across other ethnic groups.
After the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent social-justice protests, June 2020 “was the worst period nationally” for anti-black hate crimes since records have been kept, Levin said. And after the first Muslim travel ban was proposed in 2015, hate crimes against the group spiked by 23 percent.
“Whenever there’s a catalytic event … it tends to have a downstream effect on the streets,” the criminologist and former NYPD cop explained.
“We see this all the time.”
The vast majority of hate-crime incidents go unreported, Levin said — and they’re becoming increasingly violent.
After a string of low-level, vitriolic assaults against Asian Americans across the Big Apple in 2020, an 89-year-old Chinese woman was set on fire by two assailants that July.
About eight months later, a 65-year-old Asian woman on her way to church was brutally beaten and told “F–k you, you don’t belong here” as nearby security guards looked on and did nothing.
Fewer than three weeks before Lee’s murder, Hoa Thi Nguyen, 68, was left black and blue after Mercel Jackson allegedly attacked her in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill. Jackson later told police that Chinese people aren’t supposed to be in this country and “they look like the measles,” prosecutors said. Nguyen is Vietnamese.
“The majority of [anti-Asian hate crimes] actually occurred in 2021, not 2020, so I think that’s interesting, it shows the longevity of bigotry once it gets its first push,” explained Levin.
“That’s a rocket ship that keeps going on its own inertia.”
‘Swept under the rug’
Lee’s death came less than a month after Michelle Go, a 40-year-old Asian American, was killed when a homeless, mentally ill man allegedly shoved her in front of an oncoming train in Times Square.
Go’s death has also not been classified as a hate crime, but Asian New Yorkers and advocates said bias motivations can be difficult to prove or easy to conceal – allowing law enforcement to count them as just regular attacks, which carry far lighter penalties.
“There’s more training that can be done for people to understand what a hate crime or hate incident is. Too often, incidents based on animosity towards race are minimized or are swept under the rug,” said John C. Yang, the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian American Justice Center.
Last week, Jessica Corey, the inspector in charge of the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was reassigned one day after ABC New York revealed an Asian American woman was victim-blamed and told she was “exaggerating” when reporting a hate attack.
When Mayor Eric Adams was asked about the incident, he slammed Corey, saying, “I don’t want a leader in that area that starts off with saying why something is not a possible hate crime.”
The NYPD denied the reassignment had anything to do with the incident, and Councilwoman Inna Vernikov defended Corey as having “an impeccable record of combating hate crimes.”
Also compounding the issue are the barriers Asian Americans face in reporting crimes to the police, advocates said.
“You have to have what we call trusted messengers. A uniformed police officer that is not from the community will not necessarily be trusted by that victim, so they will be very reluctant to reveal very private personal information to that individual,” Yang said.
“Layer that into individuals who have immigration problems and other issues, and they will not want to talk to law enforcement.”
Ben Wei, the executive director and founder of Asians Fighting Injustice, said the community feels “demoralized” when it comes to reporting crimes to the police.
“There seems to be a lack of confidence in reporting to police, both from a demoralization standpoint that they won’t be taken seriously but also some fear, especially if you’re undocumented or English isn’t your language,” Wei said.
“You’re very reticent, you don’t know what kind of negative attention you’re bringing upon yourself, you’re scared. People who have been attacked choose not to follow up with police, so we’ve seen that trend as well.”
Yoo, of the Asian American Federation, said the grandmother who was set on fire in 2020 didn’t even tell her family about the crime for several days, let alone the police. She instead first told community groups in her neighborhood.
‘Asians were kind of an afterthought’
In response to the surge in anti-Asian American hate crimes, the NYPD created the Asian Hate Crime Task Force in August 2020 to respond and investigate such incidents. But experts and advocates say the work is far from over, and public perception needs to change.
“The use of the N-word, we know that’s a bad thing. Everyone’s relatively careful about anti-Latino hate. I don’t know that there’s that same sense about Asians,” said Mulvaney, the professor from John Jay College.
“You don’t get the same kind of pushback on being anti-Asian that one might get from being vocally anti-black or anti-Latino.
“If you use the N-word, all of a sudden you’re hit with the reminders of the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow laws. Call someone a ch–k, we don’t have that. We don’t hear replays of the warehousing of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.”
While Mulvaney was with the state’s Division of Human Rights, he worked with the FBI anti-gang task force and the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force to develop anti-bias trainings for Big Apple high schools after a surge in attacks against Sikhs.
“A lot of our curriculum looked at brown people, black people. You know, to be honest, Asians were kind of an afterthought because they were not being victimized at the level others were,” he said. “Now that they are, we take a step back and say, “Hmm, perhaps we should be paying more attention.’
“I don’t know that one — the community — or two — the police — has concentrated historically enough on anti-Asian hate speech.”
Yang said schools need to do a better job of incorporating Asian American history into curriculums to help remove the perpetual notion that anyone of Asian descent is a foreigner.
“We do learn about world history and the different emperors in China perhaps, but we don’t talk about the fact that the United States had the transcontinental railroad, half of which was built by Chinese-American laborers,” Yang said.
“Thinking about how we celebrate the accomplishments of Asian Americans as part of American history is important.”
Khanh Nguyen, whose mother Hoa Thi Nguyen was attacked last month in Brooklyn, told The Post that the seemingly constant stream of assaults against Asian Americans is “sickening.”
“The narrative about hating on Asian cultures isn’t anything quite new. It’s just recently been manifested into physical horrors. I feel like they think they can get away with it,” the son, 42, said by phone.
“On the personal level, you want to see the guy who attacked my mom serve whatever punishment he deserves, as well as get any help he deserves. But on a big-picture policy level, it’s a lot of layers to it. It’s hard to know where to begin the conversation.”
Nguyen said that when his mother found out about Lee’s murder, she shook her head in disbelief.
“Unfortunately, she’s hesitant to go outside,” he said.
“It’s sad. She’s even more hesitant, especially now.”
Additional reporting by Steven Vago, Georgett Roberts, Craig McCarthy and Tina Moore
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