Coronavirus has made me challenge the racism I internalized about my own community

What a conversation with a fellow Chinese-American taught me

The virus originated in Wuhan, which is now on lockdown (Rex)

I get a sick feeling in my stomach before checking the news these days. And it’s not just because Trump is still president. As the coronavirus spreads and headlines multiply, my anxiety about racism grows, too.

“A woman who looked like she was from the Mainland coughed on the train yesterday,” my friend exclaimed as my favorite shrimp and walnut dish came out at Chinese New Year dinner recently. “Now I’m scared I have coronavirus.”

She and I are both Chinese-American, raised in Brooklyn, New York. We’ve been best friends since venturing to a liberal arts college together in Texas. She was an Asian-American Studies and History double major; I majored in Anthropology. In 2015, we travelled to China to eat our way through the country. All signs point to us being worldly and educated and definitely not racist.

And yet, scanning the banquet hall that night, I wondered if any of these people were from Wuhan, where the virus originated. I started to question how clean my chopsticks were, what strange animal might have been in the soup I just ate, and why no one was wearing masks. Or would everyone wearing masks be scarier? I couldn’t decide.

In the 1800s, rhetoric about “yellow peril” led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring Chinese immigration to the US. This was after thousands of Chinese people performed backbreaking work for little pay to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Japanese-Americans were placed in internment camps out of xenophobic assumptions that they were spies during the Second World War. Last year, I sat elbow-to-elbow in a San Francisco restaurant with a young white man who was telling his friends that the Chinese kids he taught were “dirty people.” At a wedding that same week, another man asked me if I ate dog.

Growing up, stereotypes filled me with shame. In classrooms, I rarely participated because I thought people who looked like me were supposed to be quiet. I repeatedly claimed that “I’m not good at math” when peers told me I had to be because of my ethnicity. I laughed at my own grandparents when they spoke Chinese because I knew that according to white people, it sounded weird. I never learned the language for this same reason, and as a result, I never had a full conversation with my grandparents. Now that they’re gone, I have shame about that, too.

In most ways, Asians experience a less fierce form of racism than most groups of color in America. We don’t get shot at for a traffic violations or separated from our families at the border. We’re now even represented on the Democratic presidential debate stage. But when a virus pops up halfway around the globe, we’re not allowed to forget that it’s part of who we are.

Since coronavirus hit the news, there have been signs outside some businesses barring Chinese people from entering. Memes are going viral about people throwing away their household products because they’re made in China, and multiple media outlets have been forced to confirm that you can’t catch the virus from mail. Wilson Tang, owner of Nom Wah Tea Parlor in New York’s Chinatown, reported a 40 per cent decline in business from previous years. Likewise, the New York Times reported that “at restaurants in Manhattan’s Chinatown, workers and owners said business had dropped 50 to 70 per cent in the last 10 days.”

“I’m afraid to cough in public,” my friend said that same night at Chinese New Year dinner, “I don’t want people to think I have the virus.”

She isn’t alone. I have that thought every time there’s an itch in my throat now.

I can’t eradicate the hate surrounding this pandemic. But I can be honest that it lives inside of me, too.

Sitting at dinner, I took note of that old familiar feeling of shame. But I didn’t let my fears stop me from trying every dish on the table or oogling over a chubby tot drooling onto his bright red Lunar New Year outfit. I joked with my friend that she was being racist, and we moved on.

I let racism prevent me from knowing my grandparents well before their deaths. I won’t let it stop me from enjoying the beauty of the community they gave me now.