Asian American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus Across the country, Asian Americans have reported a sharp increase in verbal abuse and physical attacks

Asian American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus

Across the country, Asian Americans have reported a sharp increase in verbal abuse and physical attacks

Lucy Li tries not to let fear dictate her interactions with patients as she makes the rounds in the covid-19 intensive care unit. But the anesthesiology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital cannot erase the memory of what happened after work at the start of the pandemic. 

A man followed the Chinese American doctor from the Boston hospital, spewing a profanity-laced racist tirade as she walked to the subway. “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?” Li recalled the man shouting. “What is wrong with you? Why the f--- are you killing us?”

Stunned at first, then relieved she was not physically attacked, Li is now saddened and angered by the irony that she spends her days and nights helping save lives. Her work inserting tubes in patients’ airways has grown riskier since the coronavirus emerged — each procedure releasing droplets and secretions that could carry viral particles.

“I’m risking my own personal health, and then to be vilified just because of what I look like,” said Li, 28, wary that one of her patients, too, could harbor such prejudices. “I try not to think about that possibility when I’m at work taking care of patients. But it’s always there, at the very back of my mind.”

Lucy Li outside her home in Boston on May 14. A man shouted a racist rant at Li after she left work one night during the coronavirus pandemic. (Olivia Falcigno/For The Washington Post)

Across the country, Asian American health-care workers have reported a rise in bigoted incidents. The racial hostility has left Asian Americans, who represent 6 percent of the U.S. population but 18 percent of the country’s physicians and 10 percent of its nurse practitioners, in a painful position on the front lines of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. Some covid-19 patients refuse to be treated by them. And when doctors and nurses leave the hospital, they face increasing harassment in their daily lives, too.

Asian Americans have experienced a sharp increase in racist verbal abuse and physical attacks during the pandemic, with the FBI warning of a potential surge in hate crimes against Asians as the coronavirus death toll mounts and stay-at-home orders are lifted.

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“People are worried about transmission of a disease that they associate with foreignness and Asian faces,” said Grace Kao, a Yale University sociologist. “Nothing erases what we look like.”

There is no comprehensive data measuring anti-Asian bias during the pandemic. An analysis of self-reported incidents by Russell Jeung, chairman of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University, shows a steady rise in reports of harassment and assault against Asians since mid-March, with twice as many women than men saying they have been mistreated.

Hengky Lim, a nurse practitioner from Indonesia, works on the coronavirus front lines at two ERs in the Los Angeles area. Two patients have left the ER rather than receive treatment from him, saying they didn't want to be treated by an Asian. (Photo by Hengky Lim)

Jeung, who is researching racism and xenophobia amid the pandemic, said a multilingual website set up by his department in a partnership with civil rights groups to document anti-Asian harassment has recorded more than 1,800 reports since its March 19 launch. Victims said they were spat on, stabbed while shopping, shunned for wearing masks and barred from entering ride-hailing vehicles.

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Some academic experts on race say President Trump’s rhetoric around the virus and China has contributed to the rise in racial harassment. For weeks, Trump deliberately referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” despite guidance from public health officials to avoid attaching locations or ethnicity to a disease. He has since tweeted that Asian Americans are not to be blamed for the virus’s spread.

“Words matter. People are making that close association between the virus and Chinese people because he insisted on using that term,” Jeung said.

During a media briefing last week, Trump lashed out at CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, who is Chinese American, telling her to “Ask China!” after she questioned him on why he insisted on making testing a global competition at a time when so many lives are being lost. Jiang previously tweeted that a White House official had called the virus “the Kung-Flu” to her face.