Asian-hate has always been around. I have sadly always experienced it growing up, and the saddest part is that I am not even 100 percent passing for Chinese. Just by carrying my last name around, I have been the target of many jokes, and the more we matured, the more the jokes would get fueled by hate. Almost like a reaction was wanted.

I remember specifically the first time I ever noticed anything was when I was sitting in class and was called on the speaker that I was to leave early. A giant laugh erupts over the class and I just could not understand why. My friend at the time looked over and said, “your last name is just funny.” Which of course were just kids you cannot really take it too seriously, but then the snickers followed me and it was no longer avoidable. They moved on from just laughing and to this day at even MAST I have gotten comments of people just saying “Ching-Chong” and laughing as they slant their eyes dramatically. 

Yes, of course, with a 150 percent increase in Asian-hate crimes in 2020 and the recent shootings, there definitely seems to be a rise in hate towards the Asian community due to the whole pandemic. 

While Trump referred to Covid-19 as the “kung flu” and constantly referred to it as the “Chinese virus,” many Americans seemed to have been encouraged to carry on Asian-hate crimes. Now with the rising rates of shootings towards Asian-Americans, it only seems to be getting worse. It still does not take away from the fact that this racism has always existed, but has just not been expressed.

Asian-Americans have been faced with systemic racism but have been conditioned to minimize it by internalizing what they go through. Cathy Park Hong had previously been on the Sway podcast in April and had this to say:

“We were always treated as guests and that we had to act accordingly and also a lot of the kind of grievances that we did experience were minimized by this country. But also I think we internalized a lot of that minimization. And I think, you know, when you first come to a country, right, like my parents came to this country and as a guest, you’re probably a bit more inhibited about expressing your rage,” Hong said. 

 I feel like she summed it up pretty well in this weird silence we had created about Asian-hate and this focus on survival given to us from parents. It gives in to the idea of “model minority.”  Being quiet makes us less visible which means less hate. The less attention we give to racism, the more we are the “model minority,” which overall downplays racism’s role in our day-to-day lives.

She also mentioned how it is harder to hear about how affected the Asian community actually is due to this language barrier, and how that adds to this silence on how much the community gets heard. Another contributing factor to this silence is how we need to start standing together for this issue. In unity, we will have a stronger voice.

I strongly agree as in our current status many more people have come out in unity to talk about the hate we face and the stronger the community gets the more coverage there is on it. I hope more people start to stand together and start breaking these cycles of silence and hate.