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Tanny Jiraprapasuke’s first encounter with pandemic-fueled racism happened just days after U.S. health officials had confirmed the novel coronavirus was in the country.
On Feb. 1, 2020, while she was the only Asian-American passenger on a late-night train in Los Angeles, a male rider honed in on Jiraprapasuke and unleashed a 15-minute, expletive-laced tirade, blaming Chinese people for the virus.
Each time he used the phrase “China virus,” the man got angrier, says Jiraprapasuke, who is a Thai-American writer. At one point, she says, he started pacing toward her and swinging his arms in her direction. When she tried to make eye contact with nearby male passengers to subtly signal for help, each one looked away.
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“I really felt trapped in that moment,” says Jiraprapasuke, 46, who then started filming the man on her phone until he left the train.
Read more: How the Pandemic and Anti-Asian Violence Spurred 2 States to Change the Way They Teach History
Once she was safe, Jiraprapasuke had no idea what to do. Should she call the police? The man didn’t physically harm her or threaten to hurt her, so what would she report? She felt endangered and singled out because of her race, but was what she experienced a crime?
Two years into the pandemic, and a year after the fatal shooting of six women of Asian descent during an attack on two Atlanta-area spas, thousands of Asian Americans who have been verbally abused by strangers still have no better clarity than Jiraprapasuke did that night. Unlike the Atlanta spa shootings—which Fulton County prosecutors say should bring an enhanced sentence reserved for hate crimes, and which called attention to other physical attacks against Asians—verbal harassment remains harder to categorize. But it is growing, affecting how countless people go about their days as they live in fear of an encounter like the one Jiraprapasuke endured.
From March 2020 to December 2021, there were more than 6,800 cases of…
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Source : time
