Aggie Yellow Horse’s son had just turned 1 when she saw the news in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic about an Asian American family, including a 2-year-old, being attacked and stabbed at Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas.
The suspect had targeted the family because he believed they were Chinese and spreading COVID-19, the FBI said, an early case in a growing wave of hate initially set off in part by racist conspiracies about the coronavirus.
The attack hit a painful chord for Yellow Horse with her young family, so when the second-generation Korean-American professor was offered a chance a few weeks later to volunteer with the San Francisco-based Stop AAPI Hate project, she jumped on it. Her work involves reading the stories sent in by community members, filtering out trolls and cleaning the data for analysis.
The reports — more than 6,600 of them collected by STOP AAPI Hate — document a stream of troubling incidents: The Concord 8th grader who was “teased and humiliated” by students who called her “kung-flu,” a racist term for the coronavirus popularized by former President Donald Trump. Someone walking down the street in San Francisco who was approached by a man who yelled “Go back to your country” before spitting in the victim’s face. And in San Jose, a resident reported a convenience store near their home was tagged with an anti-Asian American message and an expletive.
“It’s not only that some of those stories are so horrific, but I think in some ways they remind (me) of my personal lived experiences with racism, xenophobia or oppression,” Yellow Horse, a professor at Arizona State University, said. “Seeing stories that I also could relate to I think was really difficult.”
Yellow Horse is one of a number of researchers and volunteers who have been working to collect, document and report on incidents of hatred against Asian Americans nationwide. The work, many of them said, can be painful and traumatizing, seeing their siblings and parents, even themselves, reflected in stories of abuse, assault and discrimination. But it’s also provided opportunities for solidarity across the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, they said.
“Having done it for some time now, I do realize there’s some value in reading those stories,” Yellow Horse said. “I do think that I feel less alone or isolated with my own experience.”
Russell Jeung, the San Francisco State University professor who co-founded Stop AAPI Hate after reading news stories about attacks against Asian American elders, said he quickly realized he needed to be more emotionally open to the stories he was collecting.
“I’m more stoic and I thought that might help, but now I’ve realized, no, I think I’m being traumatized as well,” he said. “Rather than being stoic and non-emotional, I think I’m trying to actually acknowledge and deal with the pain and try to heal from it.”
For Jeung, that has meant going to therapy, something he never thought he’d do. A person of faith, he’s also turned to prayer, as well as running, to foster more empathetic responses to traumatic incidents he’s now exposed to on a daily basis. He starts any presentation he’s invited to with a moment of silence for victims of racial violence, sharing his struggles to understand how to move forward.
Still, reading the stories every day and seeing reports of elders attacked or harrassed is an emotional roller coaster.
“I have the anger at our elders being attacked. I’m really sad about American society that produces such hateful people,” Jeung said. “And then I’m heartened by the Asian American community’s response and the support of our allies.”
Being too emotionally distant is a relatable concern for Sruti Suryanarayanan, a research and communications associate at South Asian Americans Leading Together. That group was founded amid a wave of anti-South Asian racism after the September 11 terrorist attacks and works to track instances of racist violence and hate.
‘It can feel like you have to be a bit distant from the work to be able to … just to look at numbers and locations and to kind of map that out,” Suryanarayanan said. “And for me, the piece that’s been most painful is actually when I enter that state of mind and when I failed to recognize that these are actual, like, siblings of mine in the movement.”
For many, sharing their stories and having vindication that the attacks are based on prejudice can in itself provide some healing, said Helen Hsu, a psychologist at Stanford University and past president of the Asian American Psychological Association.
“Western psychology has tended to focus on the one person in therapy, but actually worldwide, communal healing is very much the norm,” Hsu said. “Data shows things like being believed, having people offer support, is very healing.”
A recent report by Stop AAPI Hate found that Asian Americans who reported their incident of hate or discrimination were less likely to experience race-based traumatic stress.
Suryanarayanan, who uses they/them pronouns, recounted how they also felt the most energized when exercising the power of community. They recounted how East Asian and Vietnamese activists they work with reached out after the shooting in Atlanta where several Asian American women working at massage parlors were killed. The activists asked how the Sikh community handled the aftermath of a 2012 shooting by a white supremacist at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wis., that left seven people dead.
“After Oak Creek, what did the Sikh community do to feel protected? And how can we recreate or use those strategies here?” Suryanarayanan remembered the East Asian activists asking. “That’s a type of healing that I think both honors pain and looks towards compassion and growth, and a day in which scars are gone.”
