Korean Americans React To Anti-Asian Hate Crimes | Street Interview

hey everybody it's kate from asian boss by now most of you might be aware of the mass shooting in atlanta in the u.s that claimed the life of six asian women four of whom were of korean descent the issue of anti-asian hate crime in the us is something that has to be addressed especially in the mainstream media all we can do as a small media company is try our best to give voice to the people who are in the affected community today we're going to talk with a group of korean americans who live in korea about their experiences living in the u.s are they surprised about the latest tragedy let's find out so where you from in the states and why did you leave the us and come to korea so i'm from arizona phoenix arizona and i left about a year ago i got to korea because my family actually lives here and when covid kind of hit america i realized that like people were not going to start wearing masks and that was going to get really bad and i actually experienced a little bit of discrimination during that time so i was like man it might be just better for me to get out of here so i'm from anaheim hills california it's a very small suburb located near disneyland and then in high school i went to high school in virginia and then college in arizona so i went to i lived in places where you didn't have a lot of koreans and i would say the reason i left america is just because i wanted to find myself and i was kind of sick of not just being a minority but kind of feeling like i didn't have a voice i am based in the san francisco bay area and i just came out here to write out the pandemic things were getting really bad we were going in for multiple lockdowns by the time i came out here and i just came to visit family for an extended period of time i grew up in new york city lived in seattle for like 20 plus years i've been really involved in like the non-profit community and so the spike in hate crimes especially what's happened in atlanta has been incredibly devastating for not just me but a lot of my friends back home and why did you decide to leave the us and come to korea it's just a couple of reasons one is the pandemic and the u.s was just not handling the pandemic well at all and the fear of getting infected the fear of anti-massacres and people that just and then the violence right and that you know not to the level that we've seen lately but definitely i've seen you know a lot of my friends in like southeast seattle where i live uh getting harassed by people on the train on the bus you know elders getting like shoved and so i thought it'd be a good idea to come back to the place where i was born and get away from the us for a bit so let's talk about the latest tragedy which happened in atlanta what was your initial reaction to that i was absolutely devastated but you know just like the the level of hate and like the spike i think like the new york times the new york city police department said that it's like a 1900 percent increase in asian hate crimes from this last year to this year so i'm not surprised but i am horrified i was very very shocked because up until this point i hadn't heard of any murders or any shootings of asian americans and i have a lot of family in atlanta so it kind of made me think like what if one of my family members was killed or assaulted and yeah i just can't imagine what a lot of the families are going through it just felt like the whole asian american community was attacked instead of just a just another hate crime it hit more at home because of my asian heritage my initial reaction was frankly it was this resignment where i just i read about it and i thought it was only a matter of time is what i thought and i just felt very deflated i just i felt so just i felt so beaten up when i read this news i thought wow i knew this was coming one of the mothers that were killed they created a gofundme for the kids and then it's just really heartbreaking because you know like growing up with a single mother and then now that single mother is killed and it's like two young kids that have to basically you know live on their own without their without any parental guidance and then i mean luckily the gofundme i'm sure will help them a lot financially but just to see that kind of tragedy happen to young children is like really sad i would say when the police officer came out and he said that it was just a bad day that kind of made me angry and not only me it made my friends angry it made people just connected together with the asian american community angry because it's a hate crime no matter how you look at it i was pretty horrified to read the police's response about him the the perpetrator having a bad day trying to dismiss it as something that's not a hate crime even though clearly he had acted upon a preconceived notion that you know asian women run a massage parlor and had targeted that place this wasn't an isolated incident for asian people asian elderly people females have been targeted to why is this happening all right now i do have an idea that um when donald trump trump was the president and he spun very toxic rhetoric about the coronavirus being china virus that sort of emboldened people who are already leaning on racist ideas to take violent action against people of color and i think because of the rhetoric that the coronavirus is a china virus asian people were targeted unfairly this pandemic has really shaken up america economically and mentally and emotionally and i i know people are stressed out and i know when there's a crisis we naturally want to blame someone or we want to have a cause and so to me it makes sense that in america there are some people who would just naturally under stress want to say this has wrecked my life my job my family my school my home let's put it on the asians i think there's a certain narrative out there that uh the virus is you know an asian thing and and there's a lot of people who are stressed out cooped up at home having difficult uh times economically so they're possibly looking for somebody to blame asians we could take advantage of them in the workplace you know on the street we can make fun of them in school you know i mean i feel like i experienced it myself i think it's partly because a lot of people in the states view asians as meek maybe soft and easy to walk over because you know the stereotype is that we're polite we're the model minority so i think when these racists see those targets they say somebody i can attack without a fear of a consequence a vulnerable minority that maybe most of the media still doesn't care about in my opinion and i think they just made the perfect targets for these attacks so how was your time in the us have you been in subject of racism i immigrated in 1976 i was three years old and i remember going through up in the 70s and 80s in new york and new jersey and getting a lot of like asian hate in terms of like you know this the c word i don't know if i could curse her but like you know being called [ __ ] or [ __ ] before this period of history i think a lot of the stuff i got was a lot more what we call microaggressions hey your english is really good or where are you from and it's like i grew up in new york it's like no no but where are you from like what part of new york it's like so like stuff like that or like hey do you know kung fu or like can you help me with my math homework i grew up in a very small town in the midwest of the us and as a child and as a kid and as a teen there were lots of racial comments usually that i was chinese and someone telling me i'm chinese which was always very ironic to me because i'm not there's one in particular that i remember there was a classmate in grade school and he always used to have like baseball hats and he always used to tell me that i'm the only one in the classroom who can't have one because my face is flat and he would always say you're chinese your face is flat you're chinese and they would make um he would make then you know the gestures about my eyes then as an adult i lived in much bigger cities in the us and i experienced lots of races in there but the difference from when i was a kid was now i was an adult in a big urban city and i was experiencing racism with my employers with my co-workers and with my bosses i've actually know and heard of two people who are within my network not my friends but my friends friends who have been assaulted and none of those crimes were reported in the media and i thought it was a big big issue i wanted to tell my friends don't walk around alone and you know they're actually attacking people in these towns where a lot of koreans live in the community and um a group of them are jumping people saying thanks for bringing corona and sending these kids to the hospital so how do you respond when you encounter racism what's the best thing to do i think society just kind of taught us to really stay silent about it i don't really know exactly how i would respond but if anyone around me such as my siblings my family members ever went through it i mean i would do anything to just explain the situation to really help them to understand like this is just not right like this is not a joke anymore um like these are human lives these are human emotions people's feelings and their identities are being destroyed just through these actions and through these mindsets so yeah if someone's being violent towards you it's hard to meet that violence with kindness right you can't like you can't hug someone trying to punch you right it's very difficult to do that me meeting that person with the same ignorance and violence is not going to change that person's perspective about me so i know that's not the correct thing to do but of course you know my natural reaction is anger but you know at my age now i'll try to be understanding of the person but there's always a line you can't cross where if it turns physical then you know there's only so much you can do if it turns a physical or my life's in danger of course i'm gonna defense my defend myself as best as i can there was a time in my life even just a few years ago especially if it's happening in a workplace or with a boss where i would be much more resigned and i'd be like there's nothing i can do but then i realized that because so many of us take that approach that's why nothing changes and so after some experiences in chicago i realized this it doesn't serve anyone to be silent about it so if something happened to me today in the united states i would be saying a lot of things yeah when i'm confronted with racism there's a lot of different options i take right sometimes it's to ignore it uh am i gonna put myself in danger et cetera if i like confront it but a lot of times if i confront it it's really about hey you said this thing and can you tell me why you said it i've done this a dozen times but each time i do it like your heart rate gets up right you feel like sweaty you feel anxious because you don't want to confront people you don't know what the reactions are going to be but it's usually about like i try to ask like hey what is what did you mean when you said this and keep it within like the things that they said and not assume what they say when i was younger i would just laugh it off and maybe even trade a joke of my own to somebody and say not something not to mean but you know try to go a little back and forth but now as i've gotten older and experienced more things and seeing what's going on all you can really do is just either walk away or try to engage the person in a conversation and try to maybe educate them but that doesn't always turn out so well i think the best thing to do is maybe after the situation cools down and you have some time if you have the opportunity to speak with that certain person again just to let them know in on an intimate level that what they said really hurt you and why these things aren't okay to say i think words really do matter growing up i didn't think i would be so impacted by all the racism and aggression i experienced but i realize now as an adult it's really traumatized me in a way and it's affected who i am and also affected my life decisions and what i want to become can you see yourself going back to the united states in the near future i'm a little scared but yeah a lot of my friends are asking why i want to come back so soon because of the violence and i'm not going to lie i'm nervous to go back because at the start of the pandemic i was also subject to um an assault incident i was actually driving and i was coming to a stop at a four-way stop and this guy didn't stop but he slowed down he rolled down his windows and he spat in my direction like onto my car and it was a really hot day and i'm just really glad i didn't have my windows rolled down but that was really shocking you know and another time i had witnessed someone being attacked like from afar i wasn't nearly close enough to do anything about it and a bunch of people rallied around that person but i had seen that all at the onset of uh the first lockdown in the bay area so um yeah when i read about these incidences of the news so often it doesn't make me feel that great about going back home man that's a hard question um yes but if i'm being honest like the stuff that's going on recently that i see does play into my decisions sometimes but it's not the determining factor because i live in america most of my life so i still don't look at it as like a place where asian people can't live but i definitely gonna be more cautious when i go back more than i was before before i moved to korea i will go back to america someday sooner probably than later and i feel like if i do go back now would actually be a better time now would be a better time because now is the time where asian americans are starting to voice their opinion and i can become a part of that movement and also not only that but because they're voicing their opinion i feel like people would be open to treating us better you know now that they know of the problem in itself what do you think is the best way to address this how can things get better i think america and the media they're doing a great job i think everyone's doing a really great job um people are like having interviews like this or using their platform social media celebrities are doing all this to spread awareness and i think just more and more of this publicity people really sharing about it putting on the news not really putting under the covers like it was before but addressing that asian hate crime is an actual serious issue i think that'll really help change the mindset of a lot of people at the end of the day like overall um i don't think violence is the answer um to solve any problem in this world right now um we really gotta come together and uh try to try to just do better um i think that there's just gotta be progress first we're addressing the issue at hand doing interviews like this and then second i think organizing talented respectful people to to use their platform to spread the awareness educate younger kids yeah i would talk about even from the beginning when asian americans first came to the united states they were brought in as cheap labor they were used to break unions they were given really harsh immigration laws so that only specific people can come just like all the chinese workers that came and built the railroads which is like a huge part of america's infrastructure and the ability to like build their economy they weren't allowed to bring their wives over right and so and when they were finished with the railroad railroad the only jobs they were given were what they thought was feminine jobs washing dishes cooking cleaning laundry and so even from then the way the the japanese americans have been treated with world war ii and been putting concentration camps just because of their heritage you know there's a long history of the page act the chinese exclusion act there's all these things in united states history policy that has been built to like denigrate asian americans asians and so i would say hey look at the history let's talk about what's happened and then these are actually like long-term policies have been around for a long time and this is not just a new thing the other thing is to just do what you can in terms of taking action whether it be you know grabbing a coffee with somebody who you recently spoke with who doesn't understand it and who denies its existence whether it's trying to engage that person or whether you're giving your time and volunteering to efforts that are doing community outreach or serving a portion of the population that really needs help or donating your money um and uh you know posting about it on social media and spreading the word there are a lot of different things that we can do to address the issue [Music] you

Channel: Asian Boss

Views: 290,779

Rating: 4.8987064 out of 5

Keywords: Asian Boss, Asia, Stay Curious, asian hate crimes, stop asian hate, we need to talk about, california, atlanta, atlanta shooting, racism, equality, asian american, korean american, united states, korea, seoul

Id: MeczD3_DjTo

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Dhchfbgvhfvvg]

Somehow watching this reminds me of Japanese American. I see a lot of Koreans in my area but has anyone seen any Japanese American around lately?

[u/lmfao605914]

They should interview korean people to spread awareness.

[u/AncomDotCom]

Finally, Asian Boss asking some real questions about Asian issues instead of another, “What Do Japanese Girls Think About Japanese Porn?” or some other stupid bullshit like that.