Never-ending harassment

“If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.”

—Salman Rushdie

 

By Alex P. Vidal

 

AFTER hurriedly disembarking from the Queens-bound F subway train in the Delancey Street-Essex Street Station past 2 o’clock in the afternoon March 18, I approached the two New York Police Department (NYPD) cops as they entered the main door of the subway turnstile, used in subway systems and other mass-transit systems to check patrons' tickets.

I told them “I needed help” and narrated I experienced another harassment (my second in six days) from an emotionally distraught man minutes earlier inside the train while on my way to Queens from Brooklyn.

“Are you hurt? Do you need a medical attention?” asked one of them.

“No, I’m OK,” I quickly retorted. “I’m just worried that the man might attack me again if he sees me before I reach my destination.”

I told them the incident happened when the train had just passed by the York Station and there were two other passengers aside from me and the assailant.

I said I wasn’t supposed to be in that station but I needed to avoid the  unidentified toughie; my final destination would be at the 74^th Station on Roosevelt Avenue, Queens. 

“You mean it happened in Brooklyn?” asked the same cop. “I would advise you to stay here (he pointed to the small office outside the turnstile) and wait for the next train. There’s nothing we can do now as we can’t chase him if he’s on the train that left and where you just came from.”

I knew that York Station was part of Brooklyn, but I had no idea that Delancey Street-Essex Street Station was already part of Manhattan.

I waited for about eight to 10 minutes for the next F train and followed the cop’s advice.

 

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After taking the incoming F train, which had more than 20 passengers, I managed to reach the 74^th Station unscathed. 

As of this writing, I was planning to write anew NYPD Commissioner Dermot Francis Shea regarding the incident.

On March 12 evening, or several hours after I experienced a scary verbal harassment from an angry man who mistook me for “a Chinese” on board the F train bound for Coney Island in Brooklyn, I e-mailed Commissioner Shea to report what happened.  

After several minutes, I received this reply: “Your City of New York Correspondence Number is  #1-1-9742727. Thank you for contacting the City of New York. Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate agency for review and handling.”

It seems it’s no longer safe to take the subway train as long as there is a pandemic. 

Some ignorant and hateful individuals think the Chinese brought the coronavirus in the United States.

Every now and then, stories of harassment and acts of violence have been reported these past weeks. Most of the victims were Asian Americans, and the hatred toward the “China Virus” has gone from bad to worse that some people seemed no longer interested to openly tackle the subject matter.

The subway system is the main public transportation system in New York. It is one of the oldest and largest public transportation systems in the world (in terms of number of stations). 

With some 5.5 million riders on a given weekday, it is one of the primary modes of transportation for the majority of New Yorkers and tourists. 

The system is operated by a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

When will the harassment and bigotry stop? No one knows.

Let’s continue to protect ourselves at all times, as I used to counsel the two prizefighters inside the ring before the bout.

 

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In the lengthy introductory essay of For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand argues that America and Western civilization are bankrupt, and that the cause of the bankruptcy is the failure of philosophy: specifically, the failure of philosophers and intellectuals to define and advocate a philosophy of reason.

In the subsequent selections, culled from her novels, Rand presents the outline of her philosophy of reason, which she calls Objectivism. 

These excerpts cover major topics in philosophy--from Objectivism’s basic axioms to its new theory of free will to its radical ethics of rational egoism to its moral-philosophic case for laissez-faire capitalism.

For the New Intellectual contains some of Rand’s most important passages on other philosophers, including Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. 

Many of its selections also develop Rand’s unprecedented critique of altruism—the notion that our basic moral obligation is to live for others.

Why do Rand’s novels contain often-lengthy philosophic speeches?

Because the speeches are crucial to the story: to advancing its plot and capturing the characters’ motivations. 

Rand’s goal as a fiction writer was to present her conception of the ideal man. 

But her view of good and evil differed so radically from others that she had to originate her own philosophy.

“I had to do it, because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher . . . .”

The speeches are “necessarily condensed summaries, because the full statement of the subjects involved is presented, in each novel, by means of the story. The events are the concretes and the particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract summations.”

Both together are needed to make her vision of the ideal real.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two dailies in Iloilo)

I’m ‘luckier’ than those killed

“Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.”

—James Russell Lowell

 

By Alex P. Vidal 

 

I STILL consider myself “luckier” compared to those members of Asian community murdered in Atlanta on March 17 in another wave of hate crime perpetrated against Asian Americans amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic.

The massacre in Atlanta occurred five days after a lunatic man verbally abused me on F train bound for the Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York City at 11 am on March 12 for being “a Chinese.”

The bloody carnage in Atlanta happened almost a month after another Filipino-American, Noel Quintana, 61, was slashed across the face from cheek to cheek inside the L subway train while on his way to his job in Manhattan.

It’s not safe to be an Asian nowadays while there is still a pandemic. We still need to be extra careful in public and shouldn’t lower our guards down.

Quintana, who had been in a confrontation with another man while the two were riding on the train, claimed the emotionally disturbed man was kicking his backpack and when he asked him to stop, the suspect attacked him and fled when the train stopped at First Avenue and 14th Street.

Unlike Quintana, I wasn’t harmed but was a little bit frightened visibly.

I didn’t react violently and, thank God, I managed to “escape” unscathed physically.

I realized maintaining a calm mind amid difficulties was one way of surviving an imminent danger inside a public transportation.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has finally beefed up its presence in Asian-American communities in the wake of an Atlanta shooting spree that targeted Asian massage parlors and left several dead.

Mayor Bill de Blasio labeled the attacks an act of “domestic terrorism” on March 17 and said the victims were murdered “simply because of their ethnicity.”

 

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“Beyond education and beyond speaking out, we also need to use the strength of the NYPD to protect our Asian-American communities,” de Blasio said. 

“There is today a major deployment of NYPD counterterrorism forces in communities around the city.”

The suspect in the Atlanta shootings that killed eight people at Atlanta-area spas, Robert Aaron Long, has denied having a racial motive for the attacks and blamed an “addiction to sex.”

Long has been charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.

Cherokee County officials announced on March 17 afternoon that Long, 21, has been charged with four counts of murder and one count of assault in the shooting involving three women and two men at Young's Asian Massage. 

He has also been charged with murder in Atlanta, where four other women were killed in two separate attacks.

Police said the suspect has confessed to the crime and told officials about a "temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate." 

They said it is too early to determine if he'll be charged with a hate crime.

Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. 

Long claimed race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, police said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.

Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out," Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said, after noting that the suspect indicated to investigators that he has a sexual addiction.

 

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The group Stop AAPI Hate said it has received nearly 3,800 reports of what it describes as hate incidents—including verbal harassment and physical assault—since the COVID-19 pandemic began last March. 

In the aftermath of the Atlanta-area attacks, officials in cities such as New York and Seattle said they would boost law enforcement's presence in Asian American communities.

On March 17, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta issued a statement saying that although details are still emerging, the broader context of racial tension in the U.S. cannot be ignored.

"While anti-Asian violence is woven throughout our nation's history, the Trump administration's relentless scapegoating of Asians for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has increased" those incidents, said the advocacy group, which is an affiliate of a national organization.

"We're calling on our allies across communities of color to stand with us in grief and solidarity against racist violence in all its forms," said Stephanie Cho, the Atlanta group's executive director.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two dailies in Iloilo)

One year of ‘viciousness’

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

By Alex P. Vidal

 

BETTER late than never. 

It’s been a year since the “vicious” attacks on Asian Americans during the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic started and U.S. President Joseph Biden has finally addressed the nauseating issue by denouncing it, something his predecessor, Donald Trump, failed to do.

Had Mr. Trump did earlier what Mr. Biden had done on March 12 when the Democratic President condemned what he called as "vicious hate crimes" committed against Asian Americans since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, calling such acts "un-American" and demanding they stop, there would have been lesser violence against Asian Americans even if the pandemic became a global terror.

Mr. Biden’s rage was both necessary and needed as hate crimes perpetrated against Asian Americans became alarming these past weeks that they almost became the albatross in his administration’s full-throttle campaign to eradicate the virus through massive vaccinations.

"Too often, we've turned against one another," Biden said in his first primetime address, detailing the progress made in the fight against Covid-19.

 

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The Democratic President decried "vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated" over the pandemic, which originated in China.

"At this very moment, so many of them, our fellow Americans -- they're on the front lines of this pandemic trying to save lives and still, still they're forced to live in fear for their lives just walking down streets in America," Biden said.

"It's wrong. It's un-American. And it must stop."

Quoting activists, Agence France-Presse reported that broader anti-Asian discrimination has been fueled by talk of the "Chinese virus" from former president Trump and others.

Racial motivation is hard to establish in many cases, but reported anti-Asian hate crimes more than doubled from 49 to 122 last year across 16 major US cities including New York and Los Angeles -- even as overall hate crime fell, according to a California State University study, reported the Agence France-Presse.

The report looked at events categorized as criminal in nature and showing evidence of ethnic or racial bias, using preliminary local police data.

It reportedly aligns with another study from the Stop AAPI Hate advocacy group showing more than 2,800 incidents of racism and discrimination -- including non-physical forms -- targeting Asian-Americans and reported online across the United States between March and December last year.

 

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USA Today noted that incidents of hate incidents against Asian Americans have risen markedly during the pandemic. 

Recent attacks, including multiple violent attacks on elderly Asian Americans, have sparked outrage and activism in the Asian American community and spurred lawmakers and organizers to respond to the threat.

"Racially motivated violence and other incidents against Asian Americans have reached an alarming level across the United States since the outbreak of COVID-19," a United Nations report released last year found, citing sharp rises in vandalism, physical assaults and robberies against Asian American people, businesses and community centers.

During his first week in office, Biden issued a memorandum condemning racially motivated violence and harassment against Asian Americans, directing federal agencies to develop methods to investigate and counter such racially targeted attacks.

In February, Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Asian American vice president, spoke out on the matter, stating the administration was taking steps to address the spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

"Despite these increasing acts of intolerance, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have made our Nation more secure during the COVID-19 pandemic and throughout our history," a White House's statement from January stated. 

"The Federal Government should combat racism, xenophobia, and intolerance against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and should work to ensure that all members of AAPI communities—no matter their background, the language they speak, or their religious beliefs—are treated with dignity and equity."

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)

 

Why we are being targeted

“The hardest thing I had to overcome in life? I think racism. That’s so difficult because I don’t think anyone can ever understand it. It’s not that people don’t want to understand it, but they don’t want to touch it.”

—Herschel Walker

By Alex P. Vidal

 

BASED on what I have personally experienced and heard from the news and from fellow Asians in New York, attacks on Asian-Americans in the United States have accelerated during the pandemic and were reported to be skyrocketing once again after a brief “silence.”

The harassment and violence were reportedly fueled by misinformation, the rhetoric of former U.S. President Donald Trump and “a history of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States.”

The recent spate of harassment and violence against Asian-Americans, most notably in California and in New York City has prompted many Asians to consider how they can take action when they encounter anti-Asian discrimination in our community.

Asians living in the United States have been dealing with two frightening viruses: COVID-19 or coronavirus and its mind-boggling variant and racism since 2020.

It’s a common knowledge that coronavirus originated from Wuhan in China and more than 500,000 Americans have died as of March 9.

Some non-Asians think human beings with squinty eyes or even those afflicted with Microphthalmia (small eyes) are from Asia and, henceforth, could be carriers of coronavirus.

It’s not hard to notice some irate non-Asian characters plant dagger looks at our direction especially after we make a mistake of slightly sneezing or coughing while inside the bus and subway train.

 

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And even if we aren’t sneezing and coughing, some paranoid non-Asian passengers sometimes refuse to sit beside us, in front of us, or stay and stand near us—or in a distance where they feel they can be easily zapped by an air of mucus expelled from the mouth and nose in case somebody will sneeze or cough. A fellow Ilonggo, 57-year-old Mario Lena of Bankers Village in Jaro, Iloilo City, had experienced this recently.

But if they are the ones who happen to sneeze and cough, we don’t complain; we don’t make a mountain out of a molehill; we don’t stare at them like they’re descendants of Thanatos, the son of Nyx and the personification of death.

No coronavirus-tagging. No hateful glance. No malice. No problem.

 

 

-o0o-

 

 

We all sneezed and coughed—people of all races—occasionally even before coronavirus became a worldwide terror, but nobody gave a hoot even inside the public transportations then.

It’s only when coronavirus started to kill in America that the level of enmity and prejudice toward Asians living in the U.S. developed  alarming uptick.

Not all sneezing actually can be associated with coronavirus.

It can have causes that aren’t due to underlying disease like cold exposure, bright lights, irritants such as pepper, or having an object stuck inside our nose.

We are thankful though that the New York Police Department (NYPD) Hate Crimes Task Force has started investigating a “racism” incident (that’s how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority described it) on N and L trains mostly in Brooklyn where an angry straphanger sprayed a male Asian passenger with air freshener after verbally attacking him.

A video on Twitter has detectives investigating a possible hate crime.

The video shows the altercation on the N train in Brooklyn, with the angry straphanger yelling at the man to move away from him—an apparent act of discrimination based on the man’s ethnicity.

 

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The Asian community has seen an increase in racist incidents against them since the outbreak of COVID-19, which began in China.

“I don’t want him under me!” the man is heard exclaiming in the expletive-laced video. “Tell him to move!”

The subject of his tirade was an Asian man who appeared to be minding his own business on the train, and said nothing back to the man during the rant, and didn’t move.

When the passenger doesn’t do what the enraged man told him to, the man sprays the air freshener Febreze in his direction for about 15 seconds.

Those who are motivated by racism and hostility must be reminded and educated that not all Asians living in the United States are infected with coronavirus (COVID-19).

It’s not a sin to sneeze and cough in public as long as we take precautionary measures, or as long as we cover our mouths with handkerchief or mask.

That Asian man attacked in the N train didn’t even sneeze and cough.

We Asians are being judged by the shape of our eyes.

 

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We read in a Time report by Cady Lang that “racial violence against Asian Americans often goes overlooked because of persistent stereotypes about the community.”

“There is a stereotype and an assumption that Asian Americans have class privilege, that they have high socioeconomic status and education, and that any discrimination doesn’t really happen or feel legitimate,” says Bianca Mabute-Louie, a racial justice educator. 

“There are these assumptions about ways that Asian Americans have ‘succeeded’ in this country.”

Mabute-Louie cited the pervasiveness of the model minority myth as a large contributing factor to the current climate. 

That false idea, constructed during the Civil Rights era to stymie racial justice movements, suggests that Asian Americans are more successful than other ethnic minorities because of hard work, education and inherently law-abiding natures.

“This contributes to erasing the very real interpersonal violence that we see happening in these videos, and that Asian Americans experience from the day-to-day, things that don’t get reported and the things that don’t get filmed,” she surmised.

 (The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)

Oops! I did it again

“Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.”

—Coretta Scott King

 

By Alex P. Vidal

 

AS an Asian, I am guilty of being the No. 1 violator of the unwritten rule among Asian Americans in the United States, particularly in New York City nowadays: “Don’t sleep while inside a subway train.”

Mea culpa, I fell asleep for a few minutes on my way to Brooklyn morning on Friday, February 26. It’s a good thing I was safe.

And, oops, I did it again on my way back to Queens past noontime.

We have been supposedly warned to be careful while in public, especially inside the bus and the subway train now that hate crimes involving Asian Americans have soared in these past weeks.

I travel from Queens to Brooklyn vice versa via subway train four times a week and my travel time normally takes one hour and 15 minutes from 90^th Station in Queens to Avenue I going Coney Island in Brooklyn. 

After 10 to 15 minutes of each travel, I usually fall asleep as most passengers do. I wake up about five stations before my final stop.

Not anymore since three weeks ago after a 61-year-old Filipino passenger Noel Quintana, who looked like Chinese like me, received almost 100 stitches after he was slashed across the face by another passenger on the New York City subway on February 3.

Most of us have been alerted that Quintana’s case could be linked to the upsurge of hate crimes perpetrated recently against mostly Chinese nationals referred to as “Asian Americans” in the media.

Quintana was riding the L train to get to work in Harlem when a man walked by and kicked the tote bag that the Filipino worker had set on the train floor, according to a New York Daily News report.

When Quintana confronted the man after he noticed his bag being kicked again, the man took out a box cutter and slashed Quintana across the face from cheek to cheek.

 

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None of the passengers reportedly came to Quintana’s aid.

He got off the train, and was only able to get help from a ticket booth attendant who called 911.

Quintana was taken to Bellevue Hospital for treatment. He survived.

The assailant was able to flee when the train stopped at First Avenue and 14th Street.

The New York Police have released images of the man and are asking the public’s help to find him. 

The assailant was described as between 20 and 30 years old, wearing a black mask with a Louis Vuitton logo, a black North Face jacket, red bandana, and light-colored sneakers.

Quintana’s experience is among the latest reported subway attacks in the city, and in a series of troubling violence against older Asian American individuals across the country.

In Oakland’s Chinatown, a viral video shows a suspect forcefully pushing a 91-year-old man to the ground. Actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu are offering a $25,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest in the attack.

In late January, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, who was originally from Thailand, died from injuries after Antoine Watson, 19, knocked him to the ground while on his morning walk in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco.

The number of hate crimes with Asian-American victims reported to the New York Police Department jumped to 28 in 2020, from just three the previous year, though activists and police officials say many additional incidents were not classified as hate crimes or went unreported.

According to the New York Times (NYT), Asian-Americans are grappling with the anxiety, fear and anger brought on by the attacks, which activists and elected officials say were fueled early in the pandemic by former President Donald J. Trump, who frequently used racist language to refer to the coronavirus.

 

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In New York City, where Asian-Americans make up an estimated 16 percent of the population, the violence has terrified many.

“The attacks are random, and they are fast and furious,” said Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the Asian American Federation, a nonprofit network of community groups as quoted by the NYT. 

“It has stoked a lot of fear and paranoia. People are not leaving their homes.”

“The xenophobia and violence is compounded by the economic fallout of the pandemic and fears of the virus, which dealt a severe blow to New York’s Asian-American communities,” reported the NYT.

“Many of the attacks do not result in hate crime charges, because the police need evidence that identity was the motivating factor, like an audible racial slur, a self-incriminating statement or a history of racist behavior by the attacker.”

Two attacks on people of Asian descent have led to hate crime charges in New York, so far this year.

Police said another appeared to come on February 25, after a 36-year-old man was stabbed near the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan and taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The authorities initially said they would pursue hate crime charges, but on Saturday they had settled on several charges, none of them related to hate crimes, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation as reported in NYT.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)