Xenophobia in the Time Of Corona

However, this article reflects this initial reaction from the west, and to re-write this whole article would not only be a disservice to this particular moment in history but also fail to address what xenophobia during the nascent phase of this pandemic looked like. In addition, many may  feel “this topic is no longer relevant”.  While it is true that Asians are no long seen as the sole primary carriers of COVID-19, the xenophobia and racism that the asian community is facing has not ceased; the same racist misconceptions are still at the heart of it all. For this reason, we are choosing to publish this article as is as we feel its message is still as relevant as ever.

A month ago, I contracted dysentery, a very unsexy disease you most likely read about in your grade school history books. Famous deaths by dysentery include, but are not limited to: King Henry V, Desiderius Erasmus, Jane Digby, and Nathaniel Bacon. Being the millennial that I am, I naturally took to social media and shared a story on January 29th 2020 about being severely sick. Seconds later, a white male slid into my DMs: “Everytime I hear an Asian person is ill, I get coronavirus chills”.

During my illness, I also had many encounters with emergency medical personnel. One such occasion, a paramedic looked at me and after asking me if I had gotten drunk or taken recreational drugs the night before, said: “You don’t have that weird Asian disease do you? You haven’t been in contact with any people who could have had it, have you?” I shouldn’t even have to put this into words but it’s obvious this question would not have been asked if I was white.

Scapegoating 

As of now, this virus has spread to 170 locations in Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, Europe, South-East Asia, and the Western Pacific. Any human on this earth is just as likely to be carrying the virus as any other human being. And yet the list of first hand accounts of abuse against those of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent due to COVID-19 has grown so long it has garnered its own wikipedia entry.  

While the initial outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, China, it is the epitome of false equivalency to assume all Chinese people are infected. It takes an even bigger leap from rational thinking to assume anyone of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent is infected – and it is even more absurd to assume East Asians and Southeast Asians have a monopoly on COVID-19 infections.  

The US currently has the highest number of COVID-19 cases at 142,746. Italy and Spain’s deaths have overtaken China. China’s cases have seemingly peaked. Based on the “logic” racists cling to, they should be just as wary of Americans, Italians, and Spaniards if not moreso. And yet, a quick google search of xenophobic and racist incidents related to COVID-19 only brings up incidents related to those of East Asian and Southeast Asian decent. Curious, no? 

While the initial outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, China, it is the epitome of false equivalency to assume all Chinese people are infected. It takes an even bigger leap from rational thinking to assume anyone of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent is infected – and it is even more absurd to assume East Asians and Southeast Asians have a monopoly on COVID-19 infections.  

Asian restaurants have also been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 – not due to government-enforced lockdowns but the irrational fear of transmission via Dim Sum. In fact, in Italy, Asian restaurants are losing business, a bar outside of Trevi fountain has a notice put up banning customers from China, and a music school located in Rome has urged students to avoid going to class due to the rise of racist incidents. This racist logic has extended into the medical sphere as well, with parents at the Royal Children’s hospital in Melbourne refusing to let doctors and nurses of “Asian appearance” treat their children. 

False equivalency, then, has given racists new ammo to sling in the direction of people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent. In the past, bullets came in the form of mocking Asian appearances, ‘ching-chong-chinging’, or assertions that all Asians eat dog meat. Today, new bullets take the shape of assuming anyone with Asian features is a carrier of COVID-19, out to offend or endanger the general public simply by existing in public spaces. 

This new form is unquestionably even more alarming. Why? Because ‘Ching-chong-chinging’ an East Asian or Southeast Asian person is overtly racist and cannot be masked as anything else; this new ammunition is far more insidious.

Now, racists feel that there is a justifiable reason behind their words and actions. But here is the tea: their racist views pre-exist COVID-19, and packaging their “hate” as concern for their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others seemingly grants them permission from themselves to be racist, while simultaneously removing any agency or accountability for that racism. 

Not all asians are from China

I might be dating myself here, but does anyone remember that episode of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” where Drew Carey slipped and referred to Africa as a country and not a continent?

The racist tendency to view Africa as a monolithic landmass made up of a singular culture speaking a singular language similarly extends to the West’s racist perception of Asia as well.

However, there is one big difference. East Asians’ and Southeast Asians’ monolithic status extends OUTSIDE of South Asia and Southeast Asia and to the West where those of us raised outside of Asia are still seen as eternally foreign – our home synonymous with our ethnic origin. 

Today, new bullets take the shape of assuming anyone with Asian features is a carrier of COVID-19, out to offend or endanger the general public simply by existing in public spaces. 

Case in point: When I studied abroad in England during university, I encountered an older English gentleman in a pub who praised me on my level of English fluency. He was trying to be complimentary, but what he really did was demonstrate how Asian-ness and Western-ness were mutually exclusive in his eyes.

To him, I was foreign (but in no part due to my Americanness), and he was unable to comprehend the idea of a Korean woman being raised in America and speaking English as her mother tongue. (If I had told him I was also adopted and raised by two extremely Jewish New Yorkers, his head would surely have exploded).  

Further evidence of this perception? The classic “but where are you really from?” question that every western-raised South Asian or Southeast Asian has heard at least a bazillion times in their lifetime. It’s also evidenced by the lame pick up lines that rolled off the tongues and out of the mouths of slobbering white men trying to pick me up in bars: “I LOOOOVE bonsai trees,” “Sushi is my favourite food,” “I love Chinese calligraphy,” – my identity forever intrinsically linked to this imaginary and indivisible Asian culture despite the two of us standing in a bar in Upstate New York and my obvious American accent. 

So how does this relate to the current racist attacks surrounding COVID-19? 

From its inception until now, I have had the same probable chance of catching ‘corona’ as your average white person. I have never been to China and haven’t been in close contact with anyone from Wuhan within the past 4 months. I am also not Chinese. 

There are of course ethnically Chinese people who have also never been to China. But I raise this to prove the point that anyone who looks remotely Asian is vulnerable to xenophobic abuse by strangers. This is due to the racist assumption that anyone of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent is not only Chinese, but foreign. 

Compound this with pre-existing racist attitudes about Chinese people being unhygienic and partaking in barbaric food culture, as well as the aforementioned false equivalency of all Asians being carriers of COVID-19, and it’s safe to say 2020 has given birth to a whole new form of so-called ‘Yellow Peril’.   

From its inception until now, I have had the same probable chance of catching ‘corona’ as your average white person. I have never been to China and haven’t been in close contact with anyone from Wuhan within the past 4 months. I am also not Chinese.

There is one particular Asian country that has garnered positive attention in the media as of late – South Korea. Alongside China, South Korea is the only other country thus far which as been able to flatten the curve. Experience with the 2003 SARS epidemic certainly helped. News outlets like The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and others have all written articles discussing the outlier and have attributed South Korea’s “success” to the country’s pro-active and no-nonsense approach to fighting the spread of COVID-19 through “swift action, widespread testing and contact tracing, and critical support from citizens”. 

But East Asians and Southeast Asians are not being mistaken for Koreans en masse; the news and social media continues to be full of xenophobic and racist attacks against East Asians and Southeast Asians. Praising all Asians as resourceful Koreans would still be problematic and a benevolent form of prejudice up there with “All Asians are good at Piano and get straight A’s”. But this illustrates the fact that racist attitudes about those of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent run so deeply, the positive actions of a neighbouring country in Asia has little to no impact on the level of xenophobia and racism being hurled in the direction of “all those Chinese people.” 

The media is not helping

Unsurprisingly, great swathes of the media and certain right wing politicians are doing nothing to curb the xenophobia. Shocked? You shouldn’t be.

Despite a general global trend to move away from disease-naming conventions that can stoke racism and xenophobia, Donald Trump, other conservatives like Secretary of State Mike Pompero, and conservative news outlets in the US continue to refer to COVID-19 as the Chinese Virus or the Wuhan Virus.

Trump has also referred to COVID-19 as the Kung-Flu. I shouldn’t have to unpack the myriad ways in which this phrase is problematic, but I will. 1: This plays on a tired racist trope that all Asians know Kung-Fu. 2: Packaging racism in a pun reminds us how often racism against people of Asian descent is “just a joke, man calm down”. 3: Labelling an illness which results in pneumonia as a flu is just plain irresponsible.  

So who IS to blame for COVID-19?

There is no one to “blame” for a pathogen. “Blame” is an unproductive tool often hijacked for one’s own political agenda. However, understanding the origins of a pathogen can be helpful in understanding what caused it and how it spread- and inform strategies to prevent further outbreaks. It is also important for assigning culpability to those who may have knowingly mismanaged the situation. 

I am not an infectious disease expert nor a scientist, and even if I were, new information surrounding COVID-19 is being introduced daily. But here is what we do know so far: (Spoiler alert: the virus was NOT made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered.)

According to Kristian Andersen, PhD, and associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, COVID-19 originated through natural processes. On the 31st of December of last year, the Chinese authorities alerted the WHO (World Health Organization) of an outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus, now known scientifically as SARS-CoV-2, also more widely referred to as COVID-19. After being introduced to the human population, COVID-19 has been able to spread from human to human and by humans coming into contact with contaminated surfaces or objects.

There is no one to “blame” for a pathogen. “Blame” is an unproductive tool often hijacked for one’s own political agenda.

Andersen and his colleagues agree on two likely scenarios for the origins of COVID-19. The first scenario sees the virus evolving into its current pathogenic state through natural selection in a non-human host and then jumping to humans, much like previous coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS. Researchers have proposed bats as the most likely carrier of SARS-CoV-2 based on SARS-CoV-2’s similarity to bat coronavirus. With this being said, there are no documented cases of direct bat-human transmission as of yet, meaning there would have to be an intermediate host involved between bats and humans. The second scenario sees a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumping from animal host to human and evolving into its current state within the human population. As of now, either scenario is just as likely as the other.

Countless news articles have pinpointed Huanan wet market as the origin of the virus after a 61 year-old man, who has been reported to have been a regular shopper at the market, was the first person to die from the virus. Such markets are known as wet markets because vendors often slaughter animals directly in front of customers. Emily Landon, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Chicago Medicine has stated, “that means there’s a lot of skinning of dead animals in front of shoppers and, as a result, aerosolizing of all sorts of things.“ 

However, this idea was challenged in January of this year after Chinese scientists found that the first reported case of COVID-19 had no link to Huanan wet market. Based on new data, the first human infections would have had to have occurred in November of last year, if not earlier. While it is unequivocal that proximity to animals increases the possibility of zoonotic diseases, at this point in time, exact origins of COVID-19 are unknown.

We can safely say COVID-19 originated in China in no deliberate action of any one Chinese individual. The Chinese regime’s management of the outbreak is another issue entirely. 

It is public knowledge that the Chinese government deliberately attempted to cover-up the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. This suppression of information and unwillingness to contain the virus played a huge role in the spread of COVID-19 in the crucial first weeks with deadly consequences. Eight Chinese doctors who were trying to alert others of the outbreak were denounced on national television as rumourmongers. In addition, the Chinese government ordered the police to crack down on them. One of the eight doctors, Li Wenliang, caught the virus himself and died – causing public outrage. Law professor Xu Zhangrun wrote an online essay stating “The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance.” It was immediately banned. Xu has since been placed under house arrest, barred from social media, and cut off from the internet. Wuhan’s lockdown was only instituted by the government on January 23rd, months after patient zero became infected. As of today, there are 492,056  cases of COVID-19  and 22,175 confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 worldwide.  

An Important Distinction

The Chinese government has mismanaged COVID-19 from the start and should be held accountable. Why is this important? Because “a government is not a race.” 

There is a HUGE and VERY IMPORTANT distinction between the Chinese people and the Communist Party of China. It is one thing to criticise a political regime. It is an entirely other matter to assault an Asian woman on the street wearing a face mask, whilst calling her a “diseased bitch.” A person of Asian descent and the Chinese regime are two entirely different things that should not be conflated. 

These are difficult times and many of us have been affected firsthand by the virus – we have lost loved ones, become ill ourselves, lost jobs, and question how we will pay our bills when so many businesses have been forced to shut. 

It is one thing to criticise a political regime. It is an entirely other matter to assault an Asian woman on the street wearing a face mask, whilst calling her a “diseased bitch.

As the situation developed from an epidemic to a pandemic, there have been multiple governmental failings across the world. But singling out “the Asians” as the disease ridden monolithic other is an altogether different kind of virus that must be stopped- and unlike COVID-19, we already have the ability to do just that.   
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Original artwork created exclusively for YEOJA Mag by Katia Engell. For all COVID-19 related articles click here.