The recurring association of Chinese Americans with the ideas of being dirty or illness-ridden is inextricably tied up with xenophobia

Harassment toward Asian Americans has spiked in the last year: According to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that’s been tracking these reports, over 2,800 incidents were documented in 2020. And more recently, a wave of violent attacks against elderly people has renewed focus on this issue.

These incidents — which include everything from getting shunned at work to physical assaults — have been wide-ranging.

In February, a 27-year-old Korean American man was assaulted in Los Angeles and targeted with racial slurs. Last winter, a 16-year-old student in the San Fernando Valley was beaten so badly by his classmates that he had to go to the emergency room. And this past March, a restaurant in Yakima, Washington, was vandalized with racist language.

The reports to Stop AAPI Hate describe other forms of harassment, too, including getting spat on at a restaurant and verbally attacked at the park and being refused service at different establishments. “I was in line at the pharmacy when a woman approached me and sprayed Lysol all over me,” one account reads. “She was yelling out, ‘You’re the infection. Go home. We don’t want you here!’”

Among these attacks, there are notable patterns: Women were more likely than men to say they were targeted, several assaults involved children, and harassment was more likely to occur at retail stores and pharmacies since people have been limiting their activities during the pandemic.

“So many of us have experienced it, sometimes for the first time in our lives,” says Manjusha Kulkarni, the executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, a group that helped set up this tracker. “It makes it much harder to go to the grocery store, to take a walk, to be outside our homes.”

This rise in anti-Asian harassment has occurred as the US continues to grapple with Covid-19, and it follows months of xenophobic rhetoric by former President Donald Trump, who frequently used racist names for the virus and associated it with Asian Americans.

The broader uptick in racism, however, isn’t just fueled by the pandemic. Although the uncertainty of the outbreak — coupled with the former president’s rhetoric — has amplified it, this prejudice is rooted in longstanding biases toward Asian Americans that have persisted since some of the earliest immigrants came to the US generations ago.

“I think this surge is [driven by] the rhetoric that political leaders have been using ... but I don’t think we would have seen the spike in anti-Asian bias without a pretty strong foundation rooted in the ‘forever foreigner’ stereotype,” says University of Maryland Asian American studies professor Janelle Wong.

The “forever foreigner” idea Wong references is one that’s been used to “other” Asian Americans in the US for decades: It suggests that Asians who live in America are fundamentally foreign and can’t be fully American. Enduring tropes that have associated Asian Americans with illness and the consumption of “weird” foods, which have reemerged in relation to the coronavirus, are among those that play into this concept.

The revival of these stereotypes and the recent spike in harassment are having a pointed effect: They’re forcing a reckoning about the existence of anti-Asian racism in the US.

The current xenophobia is built on deeply rooted racism toward Asian Americans
Racism toward Asian Americans goes back a long time.

In fact, it was enshrined into law when some of the earliest generations of Asian Americans were immigrating to the United States in the 1800s. The Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, two of the country’s first immigration laws, were designed explicitly to bar Chinese American laborers from entering the country because of widespread xenophobia and concerns about workplace competition.

These laws — along with others that made it impossible for immigrants to reenter the country if they visited China — were among the earliest that tagged Asian American immigrants as foreigners who didn’t belong in the US. “Whereas in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof,” read the first lines of the Exclusion Act.
In addition to limiting immigration, the act guaranteed that Chinese Americans could not become US citizens for decades. “Very early on in the history of this country, Chinese Americans were seen as a group of people we wanted to keep out,” says Yale sociology professor Grace Kao.

And immigration policy wasn’t the only place where such discrimination was apparent. As illnesses, including smallpox and the bubonic plague, spread in the late 1800s, San Francisco’s Chinese residents were repeatedly used as “medical scapegoats,” according to San Francisco State public health researcher Joan Trauner.

When the city grappled with a smallpox outbreak in 1875-’76, for example, officials blamed the “foul and disgusting vapors” — and “unwholesome” living conditions of Chinatown — for fueling it, according to Trauner. Even after the epidemic continued following the city-ordered fumigation of all the homes in Chinatown, the blame persisted.

“I unhesitatingly declare my belief that the cause is the presence in our midst of 30,000 (as a class) of unscrupulous, lying and treacherous Chinamen, who have disregarded our sanitary laws, concealed, and are concealing their cases of smallpox,” city health officer J.L. Meares wrote at the time.

Similarly, when the city encountered cases of the bubonic plague in 1900, one of which was detected in Chinatown, San Francisco attempted to quarantine roughly 14,000 Chinese Americans who lived in that part of the city. At one point, city officials proposed sending Chinese residents to a detention camp where they could be cordoned off from other members of the public, though a circuit court rejected this plan.
In both cases, the vitriol toward Chinese Americans was driven by explicit racism, a fundamental lack of medical knowledge, and pushback toward the influx of Chinese laborers competing with white workers for job opportunities. Policy prescriptions were actively informed by assumptions that Chinatowns were a “laboratory of infection,” Trauner explains.

“A common trope in American popular culture was that the Chinese ate rats and lived in filthy, overcrowded quarters,” says Princeton University history professor Beth Lew-Williams. “In the 19th century, San Francisco routinely banned Chinese from public hospitals.”

The recurring association of Chinese Americans with the ideas of being “dirty” or illness-ridden is inextricably tied up with xenophobia — and as Nylah Burton writes for Vox, it’s an association that’s been used to “other” many people of color, including Mexican Americans and African Americans.

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