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For more than a year, Jessica Tran has watched the pandemic — and the anti-Asian racism surrounding it in the U.S. — unfold from her home in Vietnam. 

Tran, a sophomore international student studying photography and film at Syracuse University, has been taking her classes remotely from home since the pandemic began. Still, the news of a deadly shooting in Atlanta didn’t take long to occupy her social media timelines. 

A white man shot and killed eight people — Hyun Jung Grant, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Soon Chung Park — in three spas in Atlanta on March 16. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent.

Anti-Asian racism in the U.S. has a deeply rooted history that can be traced long before the start of the pandemic. But the pandemic has emboldened white supremacists and ushered in a new wave of hatred and violence toward Asian community members, Tran said. 

“Honestly, I feel like I kind of saw it coming, like I kind of knew something like this would happen,” Tran said. “But when it actually happens, still, I was really amazed and shocked about it.”

Police have said it’s too early for the suspect in the Atlanta shootings to be charged with hate crimes, but violence against Asian Americans has increased throughout the pandemic. Roughly 3,800 incidents of racial violence against Asian Americans have been reported during the pandemic, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Female victims made up about 68% of these reports.

International students at SU and SUNY-ESF said anti-Asian racism isn’t a new issue, and for many, it didn’t become a reality until they came to the U.S.  

Maya Goosmann | Design Editor

Tran recalls being harassed in Syracuse before the pandemic because of her identity.

During her freshman year, a take-out delivery driver told her to go back to her country and made fun of her by using Mandarin phrases, even though she’s actually from Vietnam. 

“I think in our Asian community, it’s in our culture in a way to stay silent and not to make a big deal out of something like this,” Tran said. “But even with that culture, we (still) got to the point where we were frustrated and we couldn’t hold it anymore.”

It’s especially difficult for international students to protect themselves when they confront racism, said Weien Chen, a doctoral student from Taiwan studying environmental and natural resources policy at SUNY-ESF. 

“Sometimes you may hear from your peers about certain professors being mean to Asian students, and that kind of situation may apply to every aspect of your daily life, too,” Chen said. “And sometimes you may wonder if that kind of meanness was personal or it was simply because of your race.”

Since some Asian international students were born and raised in a single-ethnic society, the U.S. may be the place they first learn to confront discrimination, Chen said. Some students don’t have experience living in places where disputes about racial equity are so prominent, he said.

“You may want to express yourself and speak out loud more often, or you may want to teach yourself not to discriminate against others,” Chen said. “But (that) kind of stuff was hardly taught back where we were from, so you basically have no choice but to observe and learn from the beginning once you are here.”

The campus community has also experienced anti-Asian hate recently. Notes containing racist language targeting Chinese students were found in at least three SU buildings on March 11, and on Feb. 28, two people reportedly used anti-Asian language toward a student. 

SU also suspended a professor in the fall after he referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan Flu” and the “Chinese Communist Party Virus” on his course syllabus. 

Many SU students have also been working to confront the rise in anti-Asian hate. Anti-Asian hate incidents on campus helped spark a wave of student protests last year, including occupations of The Barnes Center at The Arch and Crouse-Hinds Hall by #NotAgainSU, a movement led by Black students. 

Kimberly Ng, the president of Asian Students in America at SU, and Jana Sunguen Yi, president of the Korean American Student Association, held an Asian Hate Awareness event via Zoom on Friday. 

“I think it was a success, seeing the turnout,” Yi said. “A lot of people were receiving what we were saying and what we were presenting out to them. Seeing all the private messages about the content we were speaking about, it wasn’t just them sitting there, but they were all understanding and engaging with the material we were pointing out.” 

Ng and Yi said their goal was to spread awareness about the discrimination that Asian communities in the U.S. face and to challenge the stereotype of Asian Americans as a “model minority” — a term that holds Asian people up as a reference for other marginalized communities. They also introduced resources to help people understand what to do if they witness or personally experience a hate crime.

“Some of the most vital information is definitely that the racism and racist crimes against Asian and Asian Americans are not new,” Ng said. “It’s always been there ever since the moment Asian people stepped foot in the U.S.”

Published on March 22, 2021 at 11:13 pm

Contact Francis: btang05@syr.edu | @francis_towne