Discrimination against Asian Americans hurts unity


“Chinese virus,” my neighbor muttered. 

My parents were in our driveway, walking back from the mailbox when our neighbor felt compelled to reduce them to a disease. I didn’t know anything about them except for the silver “USC Alumni” license plate frame on their car and their now apparent distrust of the Asian American family who had lived across the street from them for years. 

This incident happened nearly two weeks ago — the last straw in a chain reaction of stressful events that have plagued me since USC first declared its move to online classes. With the coronavirus outbreak, both my parents lost their jobs, my twin sister and I left our respective college campuses and our lives now revolve around anxiety-ridden news updates. Morale is low as we wait for a federal stimulus package check that may take upward of several weeks to arrive, and quarantine feels like a futile prison. 

Yet life stumbles along as I try to muster enough motivation to engage in my Zoom classes (one of my lectures featured a particularly graphic incident of Zoombombing, where an unknown person spewed racist epitaphs including “Wuhan virus,” which felt like another personal attack against my Asian identity). I use daily runs in the park as a legal excuse to get out of the house. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but every time I venture outside, I see lingering stares and extra-concerted efforts at social distancing. I try to come to terms with the fact that I am now seen as an even greater threat in this already paranoid reality. 

I had considered myself lucky to have grown up in Seattle. My family and I, until now, had never experienced any blatant forms of racism, and I valued the seemingly open-minded community we lived in. 

But now, that racism is taking the center stage.

As a low-income student who currently relies on a combination of University grants, Pell Grants and a work-study job to pay for school, it hurt me to see my parents’ work hours gradually be reduced until they finally had to file for unemployment. I faced a similar dilemma with my own on-campus job until USC thankfully continued pay for student workers until the end of the semester, regardless of whether or not they’re able to work remotely.

But the sudden loss of the rest of the spring semester is slightly less universal. I’m grateful to USC Housing for not immediately evicting everyone following the transition to online classes, but the fear of potentially being stuck in Los Angeles with domestic flight reductions — as well as the implied message that those who could would have to leave campus eventually — propelled me to pack up as much as I could and book a painfully expensive flight back home. My departure from USC felt abrupt and disappointing but was still significantly better than my sister’s four-day notice from Vanderbilt University to pack everything up and move back across the country before she was kicked out of her dorm. 

Home gave me some much-needed rest during spring break, but as Zoom classes started the following week, I immediately found it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork. Watching the number of coronavirus cases exponentially rise every single day and wondering how I would be able to pay for tuition next semester as the global economy veered toward another recession occupied my mind, and papers and midterms were knocked down my priority list. It’s difficult to focus on an academic future when the present already appears so suffocatingly bleak. 

But even with all these problems in mind, what occupies my mind the most is the fact that my identity, despite my adherence to quarantine orders, still labels me as someone to blame for it all. I’ll admit that I’ve been sheltered from previous encounters of racism, but my realization that it’s finally occurring now comes as our collective trust is fracturing — even members of my supposed Trojan Family have now decided that my race poses a threat to them. 

Maria Tsiao is a freshman majoring in narrative studies and minoring in education and society and Chinese. She writes her story from her desk in Bellevue, Wash.