With brushes and posters, skates and skateboards, the Bay Area showed support on Saturday to Asian communities that have been the victims of an increasing number of hate crimes.
In San Francisco, several hundred people packed the upper floor of Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square at noon for a community art event and a demonstration designed to give Asian Americans and supporters a safe place to express their pain and anger. Many in the crowd displayed hand-made posters: “Respect everyone’s grandmother”, “Hate is a virus” and “Asians belong”.
Others took pots of bright watercolor paint and brushes and painted butterflies and messages of peace, concern and resistance in the square to counteract the terrible violence that hit the country and the bay area. The crowd tiptoed around the freshly painted messages.
Corri Uyeda, 29, from San Francisco painted a bright blue “Pride of Hapa”, using the word to designate a person of mixed Asian descent. She said she attended the event because she felt the need to get up.
A resident of Chinatown is with the Asian American and Pacific Island community of San Francisco at a rally in San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square.
Mike Kai Chen / Special for The Chronicle“I’m sick of seeing people like our grandparents being beaten on the streets,” said Uyeda. “As someone who has learned to grow up and keep his head down, don’t make a noise, I’m tired of doing that. We need to start appearing to our people. “
Uyeda recently joined a Chinatown security and neighborhood watch patrol.
At the top of a raised planter in a corner of the park, the speakers urged the community to support and care for each other.
Sasanna Yee, one of the organizers, spoke about the pain she has suffered since her 89-year-old grandmother, Yik Oi Huang, was beaten in 2019 at the Visitacion Valley Playground. She died in 2020 of her injuries, her family said.
“I show up several times to be with the community for healing,” she said. “I know I can’t handle this pain alone.”
Yee, who formed a group called Asians Belong, also started a campaign to rename the park where his grandmother was attacked, Yik Oi Huang Peace and Friendship Park. The petition is at www.change.org/yikoihuang.
On January 28, in the Anza Vista neighborhood in San Francisco, an 84-year-old Thai man, Vicha Ratanapakdee, was taking a morning walk when someone pushed him and he fell and hit his head on the sidewalk. He died two days later.
In Oakland’s Chinatown, about 80 people entered Madison Square Park late Saturday afternoon for a skateboard in solidarity with anti-Asian violence. A candlelight vigil was also planned for Pak Ho, 75, from Hong Kong, who died last week after being robbed and mugged at Adams Point, north of Lake Merritt.
People skate or cycle during a rally to support Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders at Madison Square Park in Oakland.
Yalonda M. James / The ChronicleSimilar rallies have been scheduled across the country and in other cities in the bay area, including El Cerrito, Daly City and Brisbane.
In Oakland, the racially diverse crowd started their protest in the streets. Some wore T-shirts with the words “Sk8 against hate” or carried signs bearing the names of Ho, Ratanapakdee and the eight Atlanta victims shot to death on March 16. Six were of Asian descent.
“We have a large skate community here and we wanted to do something,” said Ashley Silva, 29, who is Filipino and Hawaiian and helped plan the event. She and her friends chose to skate to “cover more ground and receive more attention,” she said.
As the group descended Ninth Street into the heart of Chinatown, drivers honked their horns and pedestrians raised their fists in the air and shouted support.
We Skate and Lake People Skate are planning a similar event at San Jose City Hall on Sunday at 2pm.
Anti-Asian violence has been on the rise across the country, encouraged by former President Donald Trump, blaming the “China virus” for the pandemic and using other racist epithets. These attacks hit the Bay Area heavily.
Ho’s death has been preceded by a series of robberies and robberies in Oakland’s Chinatown since the beginning of the year. In San Francisco, three older Asian Americans were brutally beaten recently in the city center. Danny Yu Chang, a 59-year-old Vallejo travel agent, was walking through Market and Montgomery streets on Monday when he was hit from behind, rendering him unconscious and unable to see with his left eye. A day later, an Asian-American man, 83, was attacked on Seventh and Market streets. While the attacker fled, he assaulted a 75-year-old Asian American woman, who reacted.
Michael Cabanatuan is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @ctuan