Going out during a global pandemic was always going to be risky, but over the past year, a sharp increase in racist street harassment is compounding this risk for myself, and many other Asian Australians around the country.
By now, COVID-related racism is a familiar headline. According to research by the , over 30 per cent of Chinese Australians have experienced offensive name-calling in the past 12 months and most of them felt that Australia-China relations contributed to those experiences.
This initially caught me off-guard: why should I, an Australian, be exposed to verbal harassment because of Australia’s relationship to another country? After all, Australia is my home: it is where I grew up as a child, and where I choose to live as a young adult. Indeed, more of us are growing up in Australia nowadays. But now, I feel like this latest wave of anti-Asian racism is based on increasingly inaccurate assumptions about who we are and where we come from.
Verbal street harassment is a common way these assumptions are expressed, and in isolation, these incidents can feel fleeting. In my case, a passing car, a rolled down window, ‘chink!’ screamed from the window. However, the sheer volume of verbal abuse documented across the community over the past year suggests this problem is deeper than one case at a time: it is pervasive and it is cultural.
A published by the Asian Australian Alliance last year contains hundreds of stories of Asian Australians being told to ‘go back where we came from’, to self-isolate with our own people, to quarantine in our own countries.
These stories are common among my friends. Vanessa Wong was born in Melbourne, but her appearance has exposed her to numerous incidents of anti-Asian harassment.
“Recently on Sydney Road, these two huge guys made a beeline for me out of nowhere. One of them came up to me and said, ‘ni hao!’ over and over again, then the other was like, ‘I’ll pay you to give him Chinese lessons’,” she said.
“I was upset because they assumed I was Chinese, but also because I have to feel afraid all the time when I’m in public alone.”
These forms of harassment build on an existing library of assumptions about Asian people and where we come from, particularly the idea that we must come from somewhere that is not here. Whether or not we do, our appearance is often misrecognised as foreign.
Wong said, “Dudes will always try to hit on me with, ‘Ni hao baby, where are you from?’, and I’ll be like, ‘Here. Literally here.’”
A 2020 survey found that people of Asian, African and Middle-Eastern origin face negative a high level of negative opinion. Source: OJO Images RF
Last year, the Scanlon Institute’s ‘’ report found that 60 per cent of Australians believe too many immigrants are not adopting Australian values. Wong’s story raises the question of whether this is actually tied up in race rather than culture. Like many Asian Australians who grew up here, she is culturally no different from her peers, but assumptions about her ‘foreignness’ persist because of her appearance and no amount of integration can change that.
Asian Australian women are also bearing the brunt of COVID-related racism. Sixty-five per cent of the respondents to last year’s Asian Australian Alliance survey were women, and more than 75 per cent of their experiences happened in a public space, including sidewalks, parks and shops. Stories like Wong’s are all too common.
A communitarian response to street harassment might take the form of bystander intervention, which suggests can make a significant positive difference. Intervention does not have to mean confronting the perpetrator there and then: it can also look like starting a conversation with the person being harassed, creating space for them to move away, or asking if they are okay.
In Wong’s case, after her encounter on Sydney Road, a person in a nearby store approached her to express empathy: they too had experienced racism at work earlier that day. Their boss told them their handwriting looked foreign—“he thought it was because they were so used to writing in Chinese,” Wong said.
“Those lived experiences are powerful because we can connect with other people through them. It can suck, but we’re taking control of the situation in that way at least.”
