Triangle-area Asian Americans suffer ‘grief, devastation’ in wake of Atlanta killings

Asian American communities in the Triangle and across the country saw their fears realized Tuesday when eight people, including six Asian American women, were killed at three Atlanta-area massage parlors. A white man has been charged in the shootings.

Chavi Koneru, the executive director of North Carolina Asian Americans Together, said the group first noticed a rise in anti-Asian discrimination in January of last year — as Asian American community events, like Chinese New Year festivals, were being canceled before the coronavirus had been detected in the U.S.

But she said it was in March, when the virus arrived in North Carolina and then President Donald Trump began using terms that linked China to the virus, that the discrimination became more widespread and targeted. Koneru said recent months have seen that discrimination become more aggressive.

“My first response was grief, devastation,” she said about the attacks in Atlanta. “We think of Georgia as part of the South, as close to home — and so this feels a lot more real and a lot scarier in some ways than what was happening across the country.”

Stop AAPI Hate, a San Francisco-based organization that tracks incidents of harassment and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the country, received reports of about 3,800 incidents between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021. North Carolina was not among the states with the most reported incidents, but a Stop AAPI presentation notes, “The number of hate incidents reported to our center represent only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur.”

Of the incidents that were reported, 68% involved verbal harassment while more than 20% involved intentionally avoiding Asian Americans. Businesses and public parks were the most likely locations of discrimination; Chinese people were the ethnic group that reported the most incidents of discrimination.

Jing Lin owns Chuan Cafe, a Chinese restaurant that has been open for almost two years in East Raleigh. She also runs a restaurant in Atlanta.

While she hasn’t had too many problems, Lin said she is “still a little bit scared that what happened at the massage parlors in Atlanta can happen” at her restaurants.

“We’re scared because as the owner we have a responsibility,” Lin said. “We hope our employees protect themselves.”

Lin said her restaurants and the malls where they are located have security cameras. She hopes people will communicate and talk through their problems instead of resorting to violence.

“We should make everything more peaceful,” she said.

Sophia Khotil was born in the Philippines, but has lived in Raleigh since 2007. Khotil has worked for 10 years as a licensed massage therapist, including at Sukho Thai Massage, a Raleigh massage studio, for the past four years.

When Khotil heard about the killings in Atlanta, she said she was scared to see people so close to her profession be killed. She was similarly fearful when Asian restaurants in the area reported several robberies.

“Safety has always been a concern in our business,” Khotil said.

In late February, Hy Huynh, a Duke University global mental health disparities researcher, spoke at a virtual gathering of N.C. Asian Americans Together about Asian American mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic and the spike in discrimination.

Trump’s various racist tropes linking COVID-19 with Asian people, Huynh said, were “a blatant misrepresentation and did nothing to stop or slow down this pandemic. Rather, the language only contributed to the anti-Asian American discrimination and stigma and gave people an excuse to harass, assault and murder Asian people.”

Among the steps Huynh recommended were reporting any acts of discrimination and building a sense of community by seeking out other Asian Americans.

In the Triangle in 2018, an Asian American man named Hong Zheng was shot and killed in the driveway of his Durham home while returning home from the restaurant he owned.

The incident was the fifth time someone had broken into or tried to break into the house since 2015, family members told The News & Observer at the time, and raised concerns about criminals targeting first-generation immigrants.

In 2015, a white man shot and killed Deah Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, 19, in their Chapel Hill home. According to The News & Observer, prosecutors portrayed the shooter, who was not charged with a hate crime, as being motivated by his hatred of their religion.

The case was initially framed as a parking dispute, but the victims’ families pushed back on that strongly, for years insisting the victims’ religion sparked the crime.

After the shooter pleaded guilty, the Chapel Hill Police Department released a statement that said, “The man who committed these murders undoubtedly did so with a hateful heart, and the murders represented the taking of three promising lives by someone who clearly chose not to see the humanity and the goodness in them.”

Asian American discrimination not new

“Words escape me,” said Professor Nayoung Aimee Kwon, the director of Asian American and Diaspora studies at Duke University. Kwon said the violence in Atlanta wasn’t unexpected, but added that “you never really are prepared.”

Kwon emphasized that discrimination against Asian Americans is not new, pointing to the exploitation of Chinese labor in the building of the railroads in the 1800s, and more recent examples like the discrimination and harassment of Muslim and other South Asian communities in the aftermath of 9/11. During World War II, the U.S. government held more than 115,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps. Neither German nor Italian Americans were confined.

“The problem is that these (Asian) communities are always perceived as perpetually foreign — although there have been generations who have always been in this country,” Kwon said.

Kwon said there’s been a building anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment in contemporary times, stemming from trade wars and political rhetoric.

“If you don’t have a basic understanding of the history,” she said. “It’s very easy to hunker down and let your fears and anxieties against people who look different from you take over.”

In addressing the rise in discrimination and violence, Kwon stressed the need for educators to incorporate Asian American history into the classroom. She added it’s important to contextualize the issue within a larger American history — one which includes the historical and contemporary struggles of Black Americans and other people of color, and promotes solidarity across different groups.

To Koneru, the path forward also involves legislative and community change, but said that her immediate focus is on giving the community space to grieve.

And though there’s a history of discrimination against Asian Americans that predates the pandemic, “we don’t want to normalize this,” Koneru said.

She said after the initial grief hit her, her concern became: “Are we now going to be desensitized to these types of hate crimes against Asian Americans in the same way that we are about school shootings and police brutality? Is this just one more event?”

“Or,” she said, “are we going to address this, and do something about it?”