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

Mar. 17—When the COVID-19 pandemic hit North Carolina, Chutikan Hoover, a Thai massage therapist in Raleigh, said one of her employees no longer felt comfortable being seen in public.

Her employee, who is Chinese, feared the impact of the rhetoric of some politicians, including then President Donald Trump, which associated her nationality with the spreading virus.

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 spas. A white man has been charged in the shootings.

"I feel bad for the victims, the Asian women — who are victims, who are innocent in the situation," Hoover told The News & Observer. She and her husband, Scott, opened the licensed Sukho Thai Massage studio in 2012.

Scott Hoover, who is white, said he has "become more concerned for her safety, seeing how people are targeted across the country."

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 when the virus arrived in North Carolina in March and Trump began using terms that linked China to the virus, 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 and 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.

Triangle businesses, residents worried about violence

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 in Atlanta could 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 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.

"Being Asian and an immigrant to the United States, we know how hard people work to fulfill the American dream and for this to happen to the Asian community, this kind of shakes us up," she said. "They were probably mothers and sisters and aunts and friends of people and it's terrible that they were taken away."

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

'It's gotten worse'

Lawrence Yoo, a pastor at Durham County's Waypoint Church, said he felt heartbroken and fearful when he first heard about the shootings in Atlanta.

"I actually called my parents as soon as I heard about it, and made sure they weren't going out in the next couple days," he said.

In New York, California and other parts of the country, elderly Asian and Asian American people have been the targets of violent assaults in recent months.

Yoo said he's also worried about his wife, who is a pediatric dentist, and members of his congregation who own businesses. He worries that people might see them as targets.

Near the start of the pandemic, Yoo said he was driving when another driver opened their window to hurl racial slurs at him.

"It's something that we've dealt with as a community for a long time, kind of quietly," Yoo said of the violence and discrimination. "Lately, it's gotten worse."

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 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.

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 anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment has been building 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."

Kwon stressed the need for educators to incorporate Asian American history into the classroom. She said it's important to contextualize the issue within a larger American history — one that includes the historical and contemporary struggles of Black Americans and other people of color, and promotes solidarity across different groups.

Triangle acts of violence

In 2018, Hong Zheng, an Asian American, 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 explanation 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."

In the aftermath of the Chapel Hill shooting, some legislators and community advocates called for the state to adopt stronger hate crime legislation. Under current North Carolina law, hate crimes are treated as misdemeanors, and do not include attacks on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Bills to strengthen the state's laws and provide felony provisions have been introduced in the General Assembly in recent years, but they have consistently failed to make it out of committee.

To Koneru, the Atlanta murders and the discrimination of the past year further emphasize the need for this legislative change. She said NCAAT will continue to advocate for such change, but that in the immediate future her 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?"

Vigil to mourn victims of racial violence

North Carolina Asian Americans Together, a nonprofit that advocates for the civil rights of Asian Americans in the state, held a vigil over Zoom on Wednesday night to mourn the people killed in Atlanta and other victims of violence against Asian Americans.

Heidi Kim, director of UNC's Asian American Center, spoke about how stereotypes against Asian Americans divide members of the community.

"These stereotypes really constrain us," Kim said. "They divide us from each other within the Asian American community, and they divide us from other Black, indigenous and people of color in this country who have also suffered and suffer the same kind of racist attacks."

State Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, the first Indian American elected to the General Assembly, said at the vigil that he will reintroduce the Hate Crimes Prevention Act this week. He will hold a press conference on the reintroduction of the bill at the N.C. General Assembly Thursday at 10 a.m.

The bill never received a hearing when it was first introduced in March 2019, he said. The bill would strengthen existing protections and add new ones against hate crimes based on sexual orientation and ethnicity.

The bill would also require the State Bureau of Investigation to collect information on hate crimes from local enforcement. It would train law enforcement officers and prosecutors on how to enforce prosecution against hate crimes.

"We hope that the bill will serve as an opportunity to begin to have a conversation in the General Assembly," Chaudhuri said. "It's going to be really incumbent upon us to try and lift and push for this bill."

Kim said while the attacks in Atlanta and across the country are devastating, there is hope to be found in the history of anti-Asian violence across the country.

"We have suffered these attacks for decades, really centuries, in this country, but we also know that we have risen above," Kim said. "We are resilient, and that, I think is an equally important lesson to take away from this history."

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