When Perceptions Are Fragile But Also Enduring: An Asian American Reflection on COVID-19

A colleague wrote in her e-mail, “People refused to get in the same elevator with me and my family because we are Asians.” A national news outlet reported that an Asian family was stabbed because they were assumed to be carrying the virus. Some days later, there was another news report that acid was thrown on an Asian woman in Brooklyn. Before the CDC recommended that everyone put face masks or covering on to reduce transmission of the virus, as we left our apartments for walks in the neighborhood, we paused a bit, wondering whether putting a mask on would increase the possibility of standing out, whether people might say something to us. We, a psychologist and a psychologist-in-training, who are people of Asian-descent reflect on anti-Asian racism and xenophobia in the era of COVID-19. We wonder about belongingness, and whether our race would put another deep layer of meanings between us and non-Asians, as we social distance with each other. We ask ourselves: When racialized perceptions have been placed on you and people who look like you for hundreds of years, what happens when there is a pandemic?

As of this writing on April 28, 2020, the chart on the nCov2019.live, the coronavirus dashboard created by Avi Schiffman, a high school student in Washington State, has the current number of the COVID-19 cases at over 3,100,000 and over 217,000 deaths worldwide. The number has been rising each day to our collective dismay. Each morning across the globe, people wake to check the numbers with deep fear. We know that this number will be higher tomorrow, and we are terrified.

For some of us, there is more to this pandemic than just the fear of illness, life, and death. In the midst of this pandemic, another lingering fear and dread for people of Asian-descent around the world is about discrimination, alienation, and being targeted. Since the report of the first occurrence of the virus in Wuhan, China, anti-Asian sentiment has dramatically increased globally, and the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center received over 750 reported cases of harassment, discrimination, and racism during the 8 days between March 19 and March 27, 2020, accounting for an average of about 100 daily cases across the United States, and about 1,500 cases in one month since mid-March (Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council & Chinese for Affirmative Action, 2020; Ellerbeck, 2020). According to these news reports, verbal name-calling and taunting were the most common forms of harassment, reflecting and intensifying various forms of racial microaggressions Asian Americans tend to experience in everyday lives (Ong et al., 2013; Sue et al., 2009). In addition, there have also been overt and more violent crimes, such as assaults and stabbing. Furthermore, people of diverse Asian heritage, not just Chinese Americans, have been subjected to racism during this time, and women tend to have faced more discrimination (Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council & Chinese for Affirmative Action, 2020; Chang, 2020). The current president of the United States and his administration referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” or the “Kung-flu” has only legitimized some people’s willingness to use derogatory terminologies (Chiu, 2020). This is despite the World Health Organization’s best practice recommendation that human infectious diseases should not be named after geographic locations (e.g., Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Japanese encephalitis), people’s names (e.g., Cruetzfeldt–Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g., swine flu, bird flu), cultural, population, industry, or occupational references (e.g., miners, nurses), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g., unknown, fatal, epidemic; World Health Organization, 2015). Instead, WHO (2015) recommends utilizing generic or specific descriptive terms, such as clinical symptoms, age group, or severity; causal pathogens; and the year of the first detection.

How do we make sense of this othering and discrimination against people of Asian-descent in the period of COVID-19 pandemic from a psychological perspective? We contend that thinking psychologically about these issues must happen in the context of educating ourselves about history and analyzing social and political power structures. Indeed, epidemics being utilized to target and discriminate against a minoritized group has had a long history. Jewish immigrants were blamed for the typhus outbreak in 1892 and were quarantined, whereas Italians were detained only a short time, even when they were arriving on the same ship (Hoppe, 2018). Placing a “source” for a terrifying situation and scapegoating those who are less alike may serve to locate fear about the unknown and ultimately of death to the “others.” Research on scapegoating suggests that scapegoating others for a negative outcome is related to a desire to reduce one’s sense of guilt and to increase one’s sense of control (Rothschild et al., 2012). In particular, xenophobia in relation to an infectious disease serves an attempt to place “social meaning and responsibility to disease” on the others (Hoppe, 2018, p. 1463). Furthermore, xenophobia could be utilized as a rhetorical strategy to both reassure individuals that they are safe because the pathogen is coming from the outside, and also to increase fear about the outsiders (Hoppe, 2018). As the United States initially worked to close the borders by banning air traffic from certain countries while not attending to the community transmission of COVID-19, the notion of safeguarding Americans from the outside threat has lingered on. In case of a pandemic such as COVID-19, in which there is a fear of an outside virus infiltrating one’s body, making it defenseless, and overcoming it, the image of this unknown foreign pathogen is particularly threatening, both physically and psychologically.

For people of Asian-descent, and especially for Asian Americans, this imagery of threatening foreigners—who look different, who seem to share “strange” cultures and eat “strange” things, who might be “dirty” or “carry diseases”—has existed throughout U.S. history. For instance, during the smallpox epidemic of 1876 in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants in Chinatown were blamed for the cause of the illness. They were described as “unscrupulous, lying and treacherous” and having disregarded “our sanitary laws” (Shah, 2001, p. 1). Furthermore, the public health officials described Chinatown as a “plague spot,” a “cesspool,” and hence the origin of the epidemic, causing a threat to the health and well-being of largely White American populations in San Francisco (Shah, 2001). Other examples include Asian immigrants being seen as carrying Cholera during the 19th century, sometimes calling the illness “Asiatic Cholera” (“Asiatic Cholera in Europe and America,” 1892). Such notion of the diseased and racially different Asians threatening to inflict harm to White Americans, who would otherwise be healthy and safe, is not a new idea risen with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interestingly, the juxtaposition of Asians as the carriers of epidemics appears to go in contrast to the model minority stereotype, another common depiction of Asian Americans, in which Asian Americans are depicted as problem free, hardworking, successful, wealthy, while being apolitical, quiet, and keeping their heads down in order to fit in and succeed at work and in society. As ethnic studies scholars have pointed out, however, one of the ways in which the model minority stereotype functions is by distancing Asian American lived experiences from others, especially by pitting various groups of color against each other (e.g., Asian American vs. African Americans) through making Asian Americans the “model” minority, a notion which was popularized particularly around the time of the civil rights movement (Chou & Feagin, 2010; Wu, 2014). What the current incidents of discrimination against Asian Americans illustrate is not necessarily the complete reversal of the “model minority” stereotype to the “foreigner threat,” but instead the continued representations of Asian Americans as the other who are different—perhaps in a threatening and menacing way or perhaps in an intriguing way, depending on contexts. This fear and mystique of foreignness affect reactions in the U. S. general public. The perception of the model minority, then, could turn rather quickly to the perception of a foreign threat of invasion and harm (Lee, 2020), when it is normative to center White culture and well-being in system-level narratives. This was already illustrated by the Japanese American internment during World War II and is currently being relived through COVID-19.

We return to this question: As psychologists, how do we understand and make sense of the reactions to COVID-19? The pandemic raises questions about human connectedness, relationships, and meaning making. How the individuals, the local communities, and the global communities are connected has a new profound meaning, and these meaning makings are built on what already existed in the society. While we may be tempted to say quickly that we should do our best to connect with each other emotionally and relationally because all of us are connected through the realities of the pandemic, we argue that this urge is another way of distancing the realities of othering and lack of equity, which already existed dormant under the surface. The pandemic only made the underlying issues more visible. Even if some would argue that COVID-19 is an equalizer that could affect all people, the impact of racialization is not erased by a pandemic. All people are not experiencing the pandemic in the same way, because our lived experiences prior to it have not been the same. Similarly, if we were not to attend to the lack of racial equity that existed before the pandemic, an attempt at building authentic connections with each other and living authentically during the pandemic and hereafter would not be possible. Thus, we need to pause the impulse to focus only on connections based on a simple notion of shared humanity. Instead, what is needed is to acknowledge our interconnectedness and the vast differences and inequity that exist among people, and to consider why and how such things have come to be at the structural and individual level.