Racism is a virus

2005. My friends and I had just finished our morning lectures. We were famished. Let’s go for a pub lunch, one of us had said. We all agreed. As we stopped at the traffic light, a car drove past; the driver wound down his window and threw an egg that hit and splattered on the three of us. At least the egg wasn’t rotten, I remembered thinking. It was my first year at university, and my first year living in the UK.

2005. End of the first university term. I got my Biology exam paper back. I scored 50%. Your English is so poor that I gave up marking it, the lecturer wrote, next to my name. There was no sign of any marking.

2009. I was working in retail. The moment I stepped out of the staff room, one of my white colleagues would promptly spray the room with an air freshener. It smelled of garlic. I hadn’t had garlic for a month.

2015. I was working in a hospital. I walked into a patient’s room to ask him about his condition. Where are you from? London, I replied. But where are you really from? I was originally from Malaysia, I told him. He pressed his palms together and bowed to me. Namaste. Even though I was neither South Asian nor a Hindu. Do you pay tax? He proceeded to ask. Are you planning to retire back home when you’ve earned enough here in the UK?

2016. During my usual hospital ward duties, I entered a patient’s room to speak to him about his treatment. He looked at me and said, I want to talk to someone who can speak proper English. I hadn’t even said a word.

2018. A different hospital. I was trying to explain to a young patient’s dad about his son’s treatment. He paid no attention to what I was saying, so I asked him if everything was okay. I want to speak to the person in charge, he said, pointing at my colleague behind me. She was white.

2020. I walked into a local convenience store to collect my online shopping parcel. The man behind the counter looked at me. You... China? Coronavirus? He chuckled.

I used to consider myself lucky for not having been the target of aggravated racism because I have not been the subject of a racially-motivated physical assault since the egg-throwing incident. But I was wrong. Racism is racism, physical or not. Hearing about the recent issues surrounding the increase in Asian hate crimes from my Asian counterparts has forced me to re-evaluate my stance. As I write this, I am recalling all the incidents that have happened to me over the years. Not only am I shocked that I could remember most of them, but I am also ashamed of myself for normalising these behaviours by not speaking up or speaking out. By turning a blind eye to what is going on, I have allowed racism to stay.

It is in our culture to not make a big fuss about things. There is a Chinese saying that goes, “turn big problems into small ones, and small problems into no problems at all” (大事化小，小事化無). We tend to, by nature or nurture, handle conflict through peaceful resolution, and sometimes it means not fighting back. To us, this is not timidity: it is picking one’s fight.

But now the fight has been brought too close to home, so I am choosing to face this issue head-on. Racism against Asians is an undercurrent that has always laced our society, guised as harmless comments and ‘good-natured’ jests. Coronavirus has torn through that veil and allowed racism to rear its ugly head.

Even though various experts have reported on the inevitability of a global pandemic due to factors such as climate change, increased mobility, deforestation, tolerance towards racism has allowed people to shift the blame onto easier targets, in this case, Asians. It is easier to point fingers than accept individual responsibility for joint efforts to fight a common cause: the pandemic.

It pains me to say that it took six Asian women’s lives to wake me up to the presence of racism, a disease still very real in a world that is increasingly connected but also progressively divided.

In a world seeking to better the human race, racism should have no place in our society.

The question is not: what shouldn’t I do? It should be: what can I do?

#HateIsAVirus #StopAsianHate

FURTHER READING

• Time Article: How to Help Fight Anti-Asian Violence

• Stop AAPI Hate National Report

• Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino Fact Sheet: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2020

• Healthline Article: Anti-Asian Racism, Violence, and Virus-Blaming During the Pandemic: We Need to Talk About This

• Time Article: The Atlanta Shootings Fit Into a Long Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence in America