Growing up in New York City, I learned street smarts early. I kept my head down, my money in my sock and my mind on my business. At 12, I started riding the subway alone, and in high school I commuted four hours a day from Queens to the Bronx. When a classmate was slashed in the face by a stranger at our school’s subway stop, I still took the train home that day, and every day after. It takes a lot to faze me.
And yet, as an American of Korean descent, I now fear for my life and the lives of those who look like me.
The New York Police Department reported 131 bias incidents against Asians last year, up from 28 in 2020 and three in 2019. That increase doesn’t account for last week’s most recent spate of hate: Police officers arrested a man and charged him with assaulting seven Asian women in a two-hour spree in Manhattan during which he allegedly punched or elbowed most of the women in the face and shoved one to the ground.
And of course, not all attacks on Asians are recorded as hate crimes. In the past couple of months, Christina Yuna Lee was followed into her apartment building in the Lower East Side and stabbed to death; Michelle Go was shoved onto the subway tracks in Times Square; and Yao Pan Ma died following months in a coma after he was forced to the ground and beaten about the head in East Harlem. Of these, only Mr. Ma’s murder was labeled a hate crime.
In February, a Korean diplomat was punched in the face near K-Town, the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood where Korean businesses are clustered. In January, Hoa Nguyen was punched several times in the head on her way to buy groceries in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Just this week, a 41-year-old Asian man’s face was slashed on a subway train in Lower Manhattan. All of these attacks were unprovoked. And there were others, too many to name them all here.
“No person deserves to live in fear of physical attacks, but sadly, fear is the state of the union for many in the Asian American community,” Representative Grace Meng of Queens said last week. “Asian Americans continue to be victims of senseless violence, as we are scapegoated for the spread of Covid-19.”
I suspect that many, many more crimes and aggressions against Asians go unreported — in part because of language barriers or immigration status, but also because of a cultural phenomenon that is intuitively understood in our communities. It’s the fear of disrupting our “model minority” reputation. My Korean immigrant parents often told me when I was growing up: “Don’t make trouble. We’re guests in this country.” Never mind that I was born here, and that my parents are Americans, too.
Racism in this country is multifaceted, affecting each ethnic or religious group differently. When Asians are attacked, we’re expected to respond the way we have historically: Stay quiet and keep working, heads down. As so-called model minorities, we excel at masking our pain.
Every Asian in America can recall incidents of verbal taunting or stereotyping, times we’ve been asked to make ourselves smaller. Some have experienced physical aggression or violence. Letting these incidents go unchecked — be they microaggressions or far worse — sends the message that our lives are less valued. Dehumanizing a population in subtle ways emboldens some members of society to attack in more harmful ways.
I’m tired of how Asians in this country are treated — pushed around literally and figuratively. This is why I’ve decided I’m done being your model minority.
Throughout school and my early career, I used to play along with the expectations of Asians. I was grateful for every opportunity, and my parents worked too hard — bagging groceries seven days a week because office jobs were not available to them — for me to mess up. At one job in publishing, I was assigned to the math and science books that no one else wanted; I took all of them on without protest.
Even when I stopped conforming to these expectations, I found that others still wanted me to adhere to the model minority stereotype. I started to realize why my parents had advised me to not make trouble. If I voiced any dissent, I was met with contempt, and aggressively put in my place. Nobody likes it when you play against type.
As the Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen puts it, “Asian Americans still do not wield enough political power, or have enough cultural presence, to make many of our fellow Americans hesitate in deploying a racist idea.”
A paradoxical feature of the model minority is our simultaneous invisibility — when we’re quietly working in the background, head down — and our hypervisibility, when we become easy targets.
I’m tired of feeling terrified. This weekend, at my niece’s first birthday party in Queens — a celebration in Korean culture as big and joyous as a wedding — the table-talk with family and friends was about how scared we are for our elderly parents. We’re frustrated at how quickly non-Asian folks discount the role of race when they have not lived in our skin. We’re tired of being perceived as weak, easy targets, ripe for the pushing. We, especially as Asian women, feel threatened and helpless and silenced.
We’re starting to push back. Asian American female business owners are confronting racist and misogynistic threats from trolls online. In New York City, advocacy groups are calling for citywide action and legislative change to combat bias against Asians and others. Head down and mouth shut is no longer an option, for many of us. We need voices, both Asian and non-Asian, to speak out. We are starting to realize that the bystander effect — seeing something but saying nothing, when we witness incivilities or worse — is as dangerous as the attacks themselves.
On the F train leaving Brooklyn, I recently saw a scuffle over an open seat in which a woman pushed an elderly Asian woman who barely cleared five feet out of her way with both hands. The older woman staggered back. The taller woman took the seat.
I spoke up: “You don’t have to push her.”
Then I looked around the train car, trying to enlist the help of other riders. But they all shuffled their papers or stared into their phones. Nobody met my eye.
Patricia Park (@patriciapark718) is the author of “Re Jane” and the forthcoming novel, “Imposter Syndrome & Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim.” She is a professor in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at American University.
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