In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, an outbreak of racism has followed close behind.
On Twitter, New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan has described what happened to her recently when she went to take out the trash while talking on the phone in Chinese in New York City.
Fan says that she moved to let a man pass by her on the sidewalk. “FUCKING CHINESE,” he yelled in response to the gesture.
“Yea, I’m talking to you, Chinese bitch,” Fan quotes the man as shouting at her. “UR FUCKING CHINESE.
The man didn’t seem drunk or mentally ill to Fan. She was rendered speechless as he continued to look at her.
“I wasn’t offended. I was afraid. I was worried he knew where I lived,” she writes. “I decided not to go fetch the bag of rice a few blocks away even tho I don’t know if lockdown is coming & what that means for my grain situation. It doesn’t seem worth it.”
“I’ve never felt like this in my 27 yrs in this country,” Fan continues. “I’ve never felt afraid to leave my home to take out the trash bc of my face.”
“I want to believe what happened is anomalous and that we are living in extraordinary times and fear can deform us.”
Extraordinary times, indeed. The coronavirus outbreak has sparked so many racist and xenophobic episodes that there is now an entire Wikipedia page devoted to the subject.
The US section is particularly lengthy and includes incidents like a Korean woman in NYC being punched in the face for not wearing a face mask and another woman in the subway who was wearing a mask being beaten up by a man who called her “diseased.”
