Kiwi Wongpeng was stopped at a traffic light in the suburb of Cleveland when a man stopped beside her and motioned for her to lower the window.
“Get out of my country – that’s an order!” he shouted from his truck. After a pause, he added: “I’m going to kill you”.
It was not his first contact with racism. But she had never heard anything so direct and violent until last April, when cities across the country were closing in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The man, she believed, must have mistaken her for Chinese and blamed the virus that originated in Wuhan, China.
“I was afraid not just for myself, but for my community and for Asians across the country,” said Wongpeng, 34, whose family immigrated from Thailand to the United States 20 years ago and runs a Thai restaurant.
His rising sense of hatred is borne out by data. In a survey of police departments in 16 major cities across the United States, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, a research office in Cal State San Bernardino, found a total of 122 anti-Asian hate crimes last year – an increase of 149% over 49 in 2019.
Totals increased in 15 of the 16 cities, with New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle and San Jose experiencing the most significant increases and the highest rates in at least five years.
Chinese and Korean restaurants vandalized with anti-Asian epithets and stereotypes – “stop eating dogs,” said the graffiti in a New York noodle shop. Elderly Asian-Americans were pushed out into the street in broad daylight. And a Burmese refugee and his children who were attacked by a man with a knife.
The increase in anti-Asian crimes occurred when the total of hate crimes against all minority groups fell by 7% – from 1,845 to 1,717.
Brian Levin, director of the Cal State Center, described the growth of hatred as “historical significance for our nation and the Asian American community”.
“Opinion polls, derogatory online activities, harassment and criminal data converged to show a widespread spread and increased aggressive behavior towards Asian Americans,” he said.
The increase is almost certainly related to the pandemic, which originated in China and has fueled broader concerns about the threat that the country’s growing economic and political power poses to the United States.
President Trump went on to call him a “Wuhan virus” and rebuked critics who feared he was stirring up anti-Asian sentiment as “politically correct”. A recent Pew survey revealed that China’s negative views in the U.S. have reached an almost 20-year high.
In New York, where the number of anti-Asian hate crimes jumped from three to 28, all but four were related to the coronavirus.
Many of the 2020 incidents in New York – and across the country – occurred in the early days of the pandemic, when fears escalated.
In February of that year, an Asian American woman wearing a face mask at a Manhattan subway station was kicked and punched by a man who called her “sick”.
In March, an Asian-American man walking with his 10-year-old son was followed and hit on the head by a stranger who attacked him for not wearing a mask.
In April, an Asian American woman in the Bronx was attacked on a bus by a woman and three teenagers who hit her with an umbrella and accused her of starting the pandemic.
“There is no doubt about it: all Asians feel extremely vulnerable because the attacks have definitely increased,” said Don Lee, a community activist in Brooklyn. “The harassment, the push, the push.”
The most comprehensive national data on hate crimes comes from the FBI, which defines them as crimes “against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by a criminal’s prejudice against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity. “
The FBI, which relies on voluntary submissions from law enforcement agencies, is not expected to publish figures for 2020 until November. But all indications suggest it will be a record year for hate crimes against Asians.
While most of what is known so far comes from the main police departments that released their own data, Levin said that some of the worst anti-Asian hate crimes have occurred in smaller cities – including the attack on the Burmese refugee and his two children.
Last March, Bawi Cung, 34, was shopping at Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas, when a man grabbed a knife from a nearby shelf.
Cung was stabbed in the face, his 3-year-old son was stabbed in the back and his 6-year-old son was stabbed in the face.
A Sam’s Club employee intervened, attacking the suspect, 19-year-old Jose Gomez, who was indicted for hate crime and attempted murder and is awaiting trial.
“Gomez admitted, he confessed to trying to kill the family,” said Midland Dist. Atty. Laura Nodolf. “He thought they brought the virus here and were trying to spread it” and that “all Asians must be from China”.
“Most people think of hate crimes, white sheets, white hats, chasing someone who is of African descent,” she said. “This is an entirely new dynamic.”
Police department data does not include harassment, which is much more common, but is not considered criminal.
Stop AAPI Hate, a tracker supported by Asian-American advocacy groups, recorded 1,990 incidents of anti-Asian harassment and 246 cases of assault in the 10 months after its launch in March 2020.
Manjusha Kulkarni, cofounder of the crawler and executive director of the Asia Pacific Policy and Planning Council, said that Trump’s rhetoric around the coronavirus was partly to blame.
“In a recent analysis, we found that a quarter of the incidents we tracked included a perpetrator using Trump-like language,” she said. “Things like ‘Wuhan virus’, ‘China virus’, ‘kung flu’ and ‘go back to your country'”.
The victims that Stop AAPI Hate tracked were mostly Chinese-Americans – 40% – and Korean-Americans – 15%.
“That and the victims’ statements tell us that people are probably targeting people they believe are from China. COVID-19 did not start in Korea, ”said Kulkarni. “But racists are not always accurate.”
Mari Cobb, a 26-year-old immunology and genomics research lab technician at the University of Chicago, said she watched with dismay when the hatred hit her. Her mother is Japanese-American and her father is white, what she said is how people generally see her.
In January of this year in a Taco Bell, she was refilling her glass in the soda machine when a man approached her.
“The oriental touched the dispenser!” he screamed. “Stop her! She started it all!”
The reference to COVID-19 was clear.
Cobb later shared his story on Instagram, and eventually it was featured on standagainsthatred.org, a testimonial site recently launched by the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
“As I grew up, my mom told me it could happen,” said Cobb. “But I think my white privilege has prevented me from experiencing much.”
In an era of growing activism against racism, she said the concern should not be limited to the black and Latino communities.
“There has been an increase in the number of people trying to become actively anti-racist, and I think that’s great, but I also think that you need to include Asians in this conversation.”
Times staff writers Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Minneapolis and Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.