The Daily - 'I Become a Person of Suspicion'

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Note: This episode contains strong language.As the death toll from the coronavirus rises in the U.S., so do reports of verbal and physical attacks against Asian-Americans, who say hostile strangers are blaming them for the pandemic. Today, one writer shares her story. Guest: Jiayang Fan, a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Ms. Fan’s story is echoed across the country by others who say they have been spit on, yelled at and attacked. Asian-American community and political leaders have tried to comfort their constituents. But they, too, admit to feeling unnerved.Some have turned to social media to share their stories and procure medical supplies in an effort to aid the crisis response.

Jan, do you remember the first time that you started thinking about the backlash in this country against Asian Americans in response to the coronavirus? I had seen on Instagram a friend and a fellow writer documenting an incident in Manhattan where I think he is Korean American and he was told by a stranger to, you know, get away. But I remember reading about that incident and thinking, yeah, I mean, like, that's really terrible that this has happened. But wondering, like, is this a singular incident or is there a trend? As a journalist, and perhaps by my own personal temperament, I'm pretty cautious. perhaps by my own personal temperament, I'm pretty cautious. I don't like to make sensational generalizations that go well on a headline. I feel like I need very convincing proof that something is happening before I call it. And especially as a Chinese American, I wanted to make sure that I was not crying racism before I had the full evidence.

I wonder if it's because if I don't make too big a deal out of it, it won't be fully real. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. I get to the gate at LAX. Home Depot. In an Uber pool. A grocery store, Wegmans.

We were walking from the gym to get in our classrooms. As the death toll from the coronavirus rises in the U.S., Suda reports of verbal and physical attacks against Asian Americans. And a couple of feet away from me, a man was seated, and presumably his wife comes back to sit down and says out loud,

You people, you brought it. You're sick. Fuck China. China is stupid. I ought to kill you. I ought to shoot you. This girl looks Chinese. She must have the virus. I can't sit next to her. Who say that they are being blamed for the pandemic.

A person at the White House used the term Kung Flu. My question is, do you think that's wrong? Kung Flu. And do you think using the term Chinese virus, that puts Asian Americans at risk? That people might target that? No, not at all. I think they probably would agree with it 100%. It comes from China. There's nothing not to agree with. Today.

You know, when the president asks, I don't think they would mind, you know, it being called the Chinese virus. I mind. It did make me feel different and kind of didn't really want to be Chinese because of the coronavirus. Jiayang Fan, a writer for The New Yorker magazine, shares her story. It's Friday, April 10th. Jay Young, can you tell me a little bit about your childhood? Where did you grow up? I was born in 1984 in Chongqing, China.

My mom was a doctor. My dad was a researcher. And he was one of the first batch of scholars sent to the U.S. to bring Western knowledge and technology back to China. So he leaves when I'm about two. So I have very little memory of him. But for my mom and I, life in China feels very serene and comfortable. Whatever sense I have of the outside world, the world beyond China, is very, very vague and incredibly hazy. Like, I'm not quite sure it exists. But I think if one place were to stand out, it would be the United States.

I remember my mom and her friends talking about the show Dynasty, which did telegraph the glamour of the U.S. I like that one. It's a rather expensive fur. I like the mink. That is mink. The sense that this is what an everyday Joe would inhabit. And this is, of course, a soap opera about an incredibly wealthy oil family living in a crazy, gorgeous home and driving along oil fields. So it's actually quite exceptional.

My name happens to be Mrs. Stephen Carrington. I'm not used to haggling over what suits me or what it costs. Well, it was the show and it was also at the time in China what was very popular were these calendars of American families where every member had golden hair, sparkling blue eyes, and perfect bone structure. And they were always smiling with their perfect white teeth. their perfect white teeth. They always were sitting by a perfect colonial house or just out in nature, but, you know,

in front of a park that they look like they owned. And I remember the food that really encapsulated America to me were Cheerios. Cheerios. Yes, Cheerios. I had no idea what they tasted like, but the company did fantastic branding in China.

I remember the picture of the perfect baby on these ads for Cheerios. You know, the round cheeks, the blue eyes, that baby got to have this superior breakfast food that I, in all likelihood, would never get to taste. So there's me, you know, drinking my Chinese porridge and, you know, eating my pickled vegetables and having fantasies about Cheerios, which I learned years later to not be very tasty at all.

They're actually kind of tasteless. To be like the definition of blandness. But in your mind, they are this superior food for this kind of blonde-haired, perfect group of people. Yeah, for superior people, to put it bluntly. I mean, I still remember actually the first time I heard English. I think it might have been my fifth or sixth birthday. My mom might have come back pretty recently from English language training sessions. And she just said the words, happy birthday. That was astounding to me.

It was like my mom was superwoman, that she knew how to say this language that did not sound like a language to me. Happy birthday. I still remember the way the syllables came out of her mouth and the image, which was of a tsunami. There was this tidal wave of kind of one syllable consuming the next one. That to me was very incomprehensible. And I remember the time thinking, I will never learn this language. I have no hopes of ever learning this language, which is probably okay because I only need one language, right? And it's Chinese. But essentially, something happens in the June of 89 that changes my father's fate,

as well as that of my mom and I forever. The noise of gunfire rose from all over the center of Peking. The Tiananmen Massacre. There was a mood of terror in the center of the city and quiet. So the U.S. government immediately makes provisions for Chinese scholars who might need to flee from China. The demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. And that was when my mother and I joined my father in the U.S. What do you remember about first arriving in the U.S.? We land in JFK, and my father is living at the time in New Haven, Connecticut.

And that drive from JFK to New Haven, it is gray and drab-like tones that are not at all what I had imagined. So I keep waiting for the real America to reveal itself to me. So it is a rude awakening when my dad leads us to his second floor studio. There's just a mattress on the floor. And I think it takes me a real, a good minute to realize that this is my new home. And the loss of a language is pretty traumatic for me. How so?

School started a few months later and I could not understand my teachers, my classmates. And repeatedly, my new American teachers ask me, why aren't you talking more? Why aren't you engaging? And those expectations, I think, are hard for me to fully understand. And I feel like I'm walking blind into a game where I don't know the rules. I mean, not only do I not speak the language, I'm bringing pickled fish and rice, and that's not sitting well with other kids at a lunch table. And that's not sitting well with other kids at a lunch table.

All I feel is defeat. Hmm. It sounds very lonely. Yeah. Retrospectively, I think what made me feel most lonely was that I couldn't share those feelings with my mother. And I think for my mother, who worked very low-paying menial labor jobs in the U.S., a drastic step down from her position as a doctor in China, she must have felt as marginalized and as embarrassed by her immigrant status as I do, but in an adult way, but similarly lacking in emotional vocabulary to express those feelings.

What do you mean? Like, I remember going to the mall for the first time with my mother and my mom's favorite pastime was window shopping, just looking at things that she couldn't afford. And I remember one time someone trying to hand her maybe a flyer for some store, and she said, no thanks. But she couldn't pronounce it correctly. but she couldn't pronounce it correctly. So this young man said, no sex? Did you say no sex? No sex? And I think I was like 11 or 12 at the time. I remember that my mother actually just in this embarrassed way, kind of laughed like out of anxiety. Like she wanted it to be okay. laughed, like out of anxiety. Like she wanted it to be okay. She wanted to respond in a way to indicate that she was not offended. But I remember the way that my cheek, just how

hot and red they grew and how I felt so humiliated on my mother's behalf. And that experience feels seared into my brain, not just because of the insult, but because my mother had to swallow her own humiliation. Did you understand, given your age, that this was racism? I mean, how did you process it in that moment? I think I turned over the incident in my mind for a long time after that. I don't think I would

have coded it as racism. I think I almost only understood racism as something that white people inflicted on Black people. I had no idea, I had very little idea of how Asians fit into the landscape of race in the U.S. And I didn't know how to understand incidents in which you were not called a very specific racial slur. Like that, no thanks, no sex. What was that? What was that exactly? I think as an 11-year-old, in my head, I didn't want to be different. I didn't want to be the one lashing out at others for being racist because inevitably that would make me seem even more different.

And I think my mother, you know, my mother was the closest person in my life. But if she had a religion, it would be survival. in my life. But if she had a religion, it would be survival. I learned from my mother not to rock the boat, not to shake the existing system, to basically understand how the existing system works and then to ascend it in some way, to climb the ladder. As long as you fit in better, you will live a more comfortable life here. And that should be the goal. And did things start to get a little bit better eventually? I start speaking better English. I start really enjoying and then falling in love with the English language, something that I thought would never happen. That's really important for me, I have to admit. When that language, English, came to feel like a part of my body, I have to say that felt like a homecoming to me. And how old are you at this point where you're starting to fall in love with the language? I think around maybe 12 or 13. And I'll never forget the first time in sixth grade when I said

the phrase, come on. Like, this sounds silly, but it was only sixth grade when I could comfortably say, come on, to a schoolmate. And I felt very triumphant. As if to say, enough of that, come on. Yeah, exactly. When I could say that, I was so aware of myself saying it. And I was saying it the way that a normal American speaker would say it. And I'll never forget the sense of pride that coursed through me. And there was no one I could celebrate it with, right? Because imagine if then I turned to the classmate who I said, come on with and said, did you hear me? I just said, come on. That would have totally defeated its purpose. But I remember it because it felt like a real Americanism. And they just rolled off my tongue. So in that moment, you finally sort of

feel like you belong. Exactly. But I still see myself predominantly as a visitor and that my existence is pretty probational on good behavior. And if I behave well, I will be able to minimize the number of times that I stick out as someone who doesn't belong. times that I stick out as someone who doesn't belong. But then I started to realize that's not exactly how it works. We'll be right back. So, Jo Young, I wonder if you can tell me about what happened to you recently. So this was in mid-March when there were rumors that New York City would be put under lockdown because of coronavirus. And I wanted to make sure I had enough food in the house ifdegenerative disease and lives in a nursing home close by. I knew that I wouldn't be able to see her for a while.

And I had several errands lined up. One was to take out the trash. One was to mail my rent check. And one was to go a few blocks away to my neighbor's house to pick up a sack of rice. It was around evening time and I had just left my apartment building and I was on the phone talking to my mother's health aide in Chinese. And as I was turning around after putting the trash in the trash bin, this is right in front of my apartment,

I heard Chinese, Chinese, Chinese bitch, fucking Chinese. But it all... Chinese bitch fucking Chinese but you know I don't think I fully believed what I was hearing and when I made eye contact with him he kept speaking

you know you're fucking Chinese and I realized that that I was comprehending what he was saying did not stop him. That was when in my ear, my mom's aide kind of paused and said, are you okay? Is something happening? And I couldn't really speak. I found myself walking down the street.

I think I was still really set on, I need to get rice. But then I found it really hard to continue walking because my legs just felt leaden. Like I really, really wanted to continue walking because my legs just felt leaden. Like I really, really wanted to continue walking. It would have only been a 10 minute walk away for me to fetch that rice. But I found myself coming to a halt. And even I thought if I just kept talking on the phone with my aide, but then I thought, I'm talking in Chinese. Like, who else am I going to offend?

And then I just got off the phone. And once I got off the phone, I felt even more scared because I was so aware of being alone. So this is not embarrassment or even shame in this moment. This is just terror. This is a very real sense of fright that I'm not going to make it to my friend's house to get my sack of rice. Chayoung, we started this conversation with you saying that your instinct, and maybe it's because you're a journalist, maybe it's as an Asian American, maybe it's both, is to minimize these incidents and to be kind of slow to see them as part of a larger phenomenon.

But it sounds like this was different for you. Am I right to think that? Yeah, I mean, this is not the first time I've been called a Chinese bitch. But what was different about this incident was that this man seemed to really mean it. And I wondered, I mean, in retrospect, right? I wondered at the relationship between the sense of conviction in the man's voice, his certainty that he was in the right to point out my Chineseness and to call me a Chinese bitch. Mm-hmm.

And I think about the things that were going on in his day. Like, did he lose his job earlier in the day because of this virus? I mean, does he work in the service industry? Does he have a loved one who has also become a prisoner in a nursing home or hospital. And I think about the way that all those anxieties and rage and sadness might have hardened into something like an instrument, almost a weapon. And I think about me being a surface onto which he could use that weapon and lash out. And I think about the probational nature of my Chinese American existence in a sense that in better times, in normal times, there are certain stereotypes that are cast upon me when I walk down the street.

But in a moment of crisis, when it seems plausible that the country where I was born could be responsible for an unprecedented pandemic, that I become a person of suspicion. And I become someone who it's quite easy perhaps to kind of target all your ire and anxieties. And that maybe gave him temporary relief to be able to identify someone or something as the cause for his hurt and for his anxieties. So what do you do? So I go home, double lock my door, pull out my phone and get on Twitter. Okay. Yes. I describe what happened and I tweet, I wasn't offended. I was afraid. I was worried he knew where I lived. For the longest time, I've been telling friends in China that although racism against Chinese exists in this country, that's not what I feel in a pandemic. I've never felt like this in my 27

years in this country. I've never felt afraid to leave my home to take out the trash because of my face. I want to believe what happened is anomalous and that we're living in extraordinary times and fear can deform us. I wonder now if I should have taken his picture. I wonder what your mother would make of this incident. And I wonder what she would think of the fact that you decided to share what happened to you so publicly. I think if I were to tell her about the experience, she might not fully understand the import of it. She would say, well, were you hurt? And I would say, no. And she would say, well, did you lose anything? And I would say, no. And she would say,

do you feel like this man's going to cut you down and kill you now? And I would say, you know, probably not, no. And she would say, well, why are you even telling me this? Like, what is the big deal here? Or if I were to tell her that I was having this conversation with you, she would say, why make something out of nothing? Right? She would say, why are you crying victim here? Why are you making this into a bigger deal than it really is? Do you want this to be how you're remembered for being that woman who was the victim of a non-incident? And what would you say in this imaginary conversation with your mother? I think I would try in English because I think it would be hard for me to find the words in Chinese to explain the significance of it.

Not on my physical well-being. Help me understand what you mean. I think my mom and I both lived with this fiction that if we could be perfect versions of ourselves, for example, if my mother could pronounce thanks the way that it's supposed to be pronounced. And for me, if I could say, come on, naturally, that had always been the goal of our American existence was to somehow bend ourselves to a shape that America could accept. I never dared to believe that I could actually help to make America better. That was something I never dared to think was possible. But in experiencing this, it made me rethink my role as an American and how even me, even someone who is probationary, that I was in some very, very small way contributing to this country

by pointing out the ways that it's failing itself, making clear the way in which this country still makes me feel ashamed is possibly one way in which I could make it better. And also that's the best version of America. Like in all, you know, in all the conceptions of America that exists in my head, I actually think this ability to call out the worst parts of America to itself, my freedom to do so, this feels to me the most miraculous part of America. But I think all of that would be, frankly, a bit too abstract to my mother. I think her quest for survival has been so concrete and lived, you know.

I'll never be able to repay her for the way that her very concrete existence has paved the way for my more luxuriantly abstract one. But that maybe that's a boundary between us that I've been able to cross. And that no matter how many ways I try to explain it. In what language. If she'll fully understand. But I really needed to make sure. That for my own sake. I could know that this did happen. That this was not a figment of my imagination

or that, you know, in an hour's time or in 12 hours time, I would try to minimize it in my own mind. Thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate it, Jay. Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it, Jay. Thank you so much for having me. I'm still sorry that you had the experience you had. It will be a small experience in what is hopefully a very long and a much bigger one of living in America and being American. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

Majority Leader. Our nation continues to battle the coronavirus pandemic. More than 400,000 Americans have tested positive. Nearly 15,000 have lost their lives. And important public health measures are creating an economic catastrophe. On Thursday, the Labor Department said that another 6.6 million Americans

filed for unemployment benefits in the past week. That means, Mr. President, more than 16 million Americans have lost their jobs in only the last three weeks. A tragedy that is hard to even comprehend. Economists now believe that the U.S. unemployment rate is the worst since the Great Depression. The latest figures put even deeper pressure on Congress to adopt a new round of economic relief for workers. But on Thursday, that legislation hit a roadblock in the Senate. Democrats want to double the size of the bill

by adding hundreds of billions of dollars for hospitals and local governments, which are facing major financial shortfalls. We don't have to divide along the usual lines so soon after we came together for the country. To my Democratic colleagues, please, please do not block emergency aid you do not even oppose just because you want something more. But Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, say that money can wait. Let's continue to work together with speed and bipartisanship. We will get through this crisis together. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester,

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That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.