A United Front

At a moment when the world is finally celebrating racial diversity, violence against Asians during the pandemic has nullified all progress in one fell swoop. Where did we go wrong?

- Zabrina Lo. Portraits

It was just another spring day in New York City. Hardly had Viveca Chow Hung-ka, a Hong Kong-born and raised Broadway musical actress, stepped onto the subway platform when she heard someone calling: “Chinese girl, Chinese girl, hey! Chinese girl.” She stepped into the crowd, seeking safety in numbers, but her tormentor, a woman brandishing a cane as if it were a weapon, followed her.

“She could have pushed me in front of the train or hurt me with her cane,” Chow recalls thinking. “I analyzed my situation: do I confront her, or do I make peace and get out of this alive?” Not even two months later, Chow and her boyfriend Matthew Poon experienced a similar confrontation in the subway when a hooded man stared at them with open hostility for six minutes. “I grabbed my pepper spray so fast and held it,” Chow says. When she discussed the incidents with her parents in Hong Kong, she says, “their immediate reaction was asking me to put on make-up to hide my Asian face, because I’d be safer if I were white”. Chow was shocked. “There was so much shame in that sentence, where we couldn’t even be who we were because we might get killed for our skin colour,” she says. “These people could punch or kick me. They could have a gun. That is what is so scary about America.”