From insults to assaults, Akron Asian Americans reflect on racism in wake of Atlanta shootings

Alice Xu remembers why she stopped packing her lunch for school every day in elementary school.

The other kids called her traditional Chinese sesame noodle dish "poop noodles."

As she got older, she found more ways to shed her heritage, trying to outrun the stereotypes that inevitably followed her. She focused on the humanities, staying away from STEM fields. She played soccer and tried to avoid speaking Chinese around any of her peers. 

"I believed that if I didn't fit into the Asian stereotype that no one would see me as different because of my race," she said. 

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But now, Alice, a 15-year-old Hudson High School sophomore, is seeing her differences differently. 

She's vice president of an Asian youth group at her school and helped decorate the school for Lunar New Year and Diwali, a festival of lights. 

She's also seen recently how her differences can be dangerous. 

Alice, like many in Akron and around the country, was deeply saddened by the death of eight people in a shooting spree March 16 in Atlanta. Alice saw herself in six of the victims, who were women of Korean or Chinese descent.

"This was the first time I really knew of someone who looked like me being murdered out of hate," Alice said. "And that really shook me."

It shook Akron's Asian American community deeply as well, several within the community have said over the last week. 

Though police in Atlanta have downplayed the role race may have played in the gunman's actions earlier this month, many have seen the shooting as an escalation of the violence and race-based hatred they have witnessed, and been the targets of, for years. 

The event spurred an outpouring of grief in the Asian American community, but along with that, a sharing of personal stories. Many said they were sharing their stories for the first time. 

"For Asians, part of the issue with discrimination is it being relatively invisible, and also it being relatively unknown," University of Akron Law Professor Brant Lee, who is Asian American, said.

Because the focus in discussions of racism are often on other groups, he said, there can be an internal debate about voicing concern, that "we can't complain against this because other people have it worse," he said. "So it never gets full daylight."

With the events of this month, and a younger generation of kids like Alice ready to embrace their heritage and openly talk about discrimination against them, that may be starting to change. 

'Is this ever going to stop?'

The Atlanta shootings happened on a Tuesday. By Thursday, Lee, a race scholar who is also the law school's assistant dean for diversity and social justice initiatives, noticed his Facebook feed was filling with grief and personal stories of discrimination.

It helped him work through his own feelings in the wake of the violence. 

"I was just feeling despair," he said. "Like, is this ever going to stop, is anyone ever going to understand what it's like?"

He saw an immediate need for the community to find a way to come together. So on a day's notice, Lee put together a public online vigil hosted by the university that Friday night. 

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Seeing solidarity at the vigil, even online, and even from people outside of the Asian American community, was much appreciated, he said.

"I have appreciated people just standing up, saying, 'We care,'" Lee said.

Lee opened the event with the necessary context of the history of Asian American discrimination. 

"This isn't a single event that we are commemorating or mourning or angry about," he said. "This is just the end of a whole long line of history."

Several people also shared their stories, ranging from microaggressions to assaults. 

One story came from Madhu Sharma, the executive director of Akron's International Institute. Sharma is South Asian, of Indian heritage. 

In 2019, Sharma was walking her dog on a path in Stow when a woman rode by her on a bike and spit in her direction. Sharma said she initially brushed it off, deciding it was probably a coincidence. But then the woman came back. 

"She spit at me again," Sharma said. "This time it hit me. And she told me to go home."

The incident happened, she said, about two weeks after then-President Donald Trump had told four United States congresswomen of color to "go back" to the "totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Only one of the four congresswomen is an immigrant.

Sharma said she did not report the incident on the bike path but told a few trusted friends.

"Asian Americans, we have a tendency to seek to erase our pain of marginalization by staying silent," she said. 

But she hoped that was changing, and that personal stories would help combat the narrative that the problem isn't big enough to receive attention. 

"I believe it's really important for us to give voice to our experiences," she said. 

Fear of reporting incidents 

Sharma said she also wishes she had reported the incident, if only so that crime data would reflect it. 

"To report it to police might actually have captured the data that there's an increase of hate that's really connected to the speech that comes out of our leadership," she said. 

That increase, she said, also is tied to the coronavirus pandemic, and the use of derogatory phrases like "China Virus" and "Kung Flu."

"When COVID came to the U.S. it became the tool that was used to really vilify and heighten the stereotype of Asians being disease-ridden and dirty," Sharma said. "We're so often either the model minority or the dirty, smelly diseased."

Elaine Tso, CEO of Ohio advocacy group Asian Services in Action Inc., or ASIA Inc., which has offices in Cleveland and Akron, said often, Asian Americans are hesitant to report crimes against them, for various reasons. 

"Forever, parents tell Asian children, 'Go under the radar, just do your work, work hard, don't make waves, and you will be successful,'" Tso said. "That's the message that parents tell their children. So it's kind of cultivated this way, that Asians, even when confronted with horrible, horrible interactions with others, they're just less likely to react perhaps in the same way that other communities might."

The fear of reporting, she said, sends people "even more into the shadows." It also means police data is likely significantly off. 

San Francisco-based Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, tallied nearly 3,800 such incidents from March 2020 through February 2021.

Early in the pandemic, Tso said cases were reported to her agency of Asian kids having rocks thrown at them "while someone is yelling 'coronavirus.'"

Their parents, she said, wanted to report it to the agency so someone would know, but she did not know if police reports had been filed. 

But Tso said it can also be difficult to convince a police officer taking a report that a crime was clearly racially motivated. 

Earlier this month, windows were smashed at ASIA's former office at 730 Carroll St. in Akron. The building is vacant, but Tso said it still had a sign out front that was in Chinese. The report of the incident, filed by the building's owner, does not indicate any racial component, but Tso said the vandalism felt clearly targeted. 

"We have seen a greater reporting to us of racially motivated criminal acts," Tso said. "However, that's not how it's documented by law enforcement. That's something that worries me, that's something that I think harms the community overall."

Akron police Lt. Michael Miller said the department has not had an increase in reported cases of hate or race-related crimes against Asian Americans. A request for data filed Friday is pending. 

Miller said it can be difficult to clearly identify a motive in a crime. 

"Without it being abundantly clear, sometimes we're left wondering," he said. 

While there is "room for growth," he said the department has done work in the last couple of years around informing officers of the need to explore the possibility that race was a motivation in a crime. All police reports have a box where an officer has to answer yes or no to whether a crime had an element of hate bias. 

'I still have that paranoia'

The reaction of law enforcement to the Atlanta shootings, particularly immediately following, added to the trauma for Asian Americans, said Lee, the Akron law professor. 

Soon after the shooting, a sheriff captain and department spokesman in Atlanta said the shooter suspect had a "bad day." Law enforcement also was quick to say that the suspect had denied that race was a factor. 

Lee said to him and so many others, the shooting felt "so clearly targeted" at Asians, and at Asian women specifically. 

"Then for the immediate response of authorities to say, 'Oh yeah, but this wasn’t about discrimination against you,' it sort of encapsulated the whole experience of having your discrimination being invisible and unrecognized generally," Lee said. 

Lee said his own experiences include questions from people asking him where he's from — San Francisco — to complimenting him on how well he speaks English. 

The harassment from strangers, he said, is what worries him the most. 

"Things don't have to happen to you very many times in order for it to affect how paranoid you get about it," he said. "Suddenly you're walking around wondering what that person thinks, and that person thinks. And is that person going to say something."

It can cause him to tense up when someone approaches, he said, even if the majority of the time, it's to tell him his shoe is untied. 

"But I still have that paranoia, because you just don’t know where it’s going to come from," he said. 

After giving a presentation about race, Lee said sometimes someone comes up to him to say they have a similar experience, and that his story is just the standard immigrant experience, and that "it will get better."

"I'm a fifth-generation American," he said. "How many generations is it supposed to take?"

Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet.