Go back to China: Racist misogyny in America

The other night, my wife and I set off on our usual late-evening walk in the  predominately-white suburb of Henderson, Nev., just outside Las Vegas.

As we walked down the driveway, she turned to me.

“I have this nightmare,” she said, “that someday soon someone is going to be standing here, firing bullets into our house.”

I tried to soothe her fears. We live in a safe middle-class neighborhood, I reasoned, and can walk the streets in comfort, even at night.

Then I stopped myself. I didn’t get it.

I’m white, a pretty big guy, who stands over 6-feet-2.

My wife is Asian, petite, nearly a foot smaller.

She was born in Beijing and has lived in here as a U.S. citizen for years. She is the bravest woman I have ever met. She left her homeland as a younger woman, her English imperfect, betting on a better life in America.

She stands her ground, and brooks no bullshit, from me or anybody else.

And yet today she is afraid. She talks of buying a gun to defend herself.

Despite our false PR narrative about being a nation of immigrants, America has never been welcoming when it comes to people of different skin color or creed. In recent years, the cities have been merely bearable for people of color, while rural areas have festered as immigrant No Man’s Lands.

Get stopped by a rural cop DWA (Driving While Asian) or DWM (Driving While Muslim) and you’ll see what I mean.

Being Asian in America is even worse now, one year after the coronavirus pandemic swept our shores. This month, in the latest nadir in a long sickening series of rock bottoms, a white man opened fire at three Atlanta-area spas, killing eight people, including six Asian women. 

One was a newly-wed bride getting a massage with her husband. Another was a proud Chinese-American business owner.

Asian-Americans — especially woman — have been spit at and verbally belittled from sea to shining sea, even in places like San Francisco, a culturally-diverse city where the Chinese have established a rich and enduring culture.

Studies detail this newest era of American ugliness. A coalition that tracks racism and discrimination against Asian Americans in the last year alone received nearly 4,000 firsthand complaints.

So, why all the seething, vitriol and hatred?

For one, growing economic competition between the U.S. and China has led to a scapegoating of not just Chinese, but all Asian Americans. Asians are soulless and inscrutable. They take our children’s places in our nation’s finest collegiate institutions.

For decades before that, the phony American red-carpet included fetishism and unwanted sexual come-ons, not just because people like my wife were women, but because they were Asian women. 

Another 2018 report detailed how Asian American women are objectified and hyper-sexualized in media and popular culture, depicted as “faceless, quiet and invisible, or as sexual objects.” 

Because everybody knows Asian women are submissive partners, right?

Tell my wife that and you’d better duck.

Then, just when things seemed to be at their racist worse, along came what many Americans call the “China virus” and “kung flu.” Asian women were no longer just temping us, now they were getting us sick.

And then there’s America’s favorite past-time: gunfire and murder.

When it comes to racially-motived mass shootings, American society conveniently gives troubled white men a pass. Following the attacks in Atlanta, a white police captain stood before a podium and said the accused gunman -- who is white, 21 and admittedly sexually frustrated -- had been having “a really bad day.”

Police said it was “too early” to determine if racism was at play. 

Oh, really?

He just wanted to stamp out sexual temptation in his life, so he goes out and kills Asian women?

It's just racist misogyny, American style.

The whole cesspool of hatred makes me once again realize my privileged status in this country. I am male, white and able to defend myself. I have wandered the world without having to worry about my well-being.

My whiteness, my maleness, my Americanness, would keep the jackals at bay.

As an Asian woman, even here in America, my wife enjoys no such protections.

And, for that, I am frankly ashamed.

I’ve always tried to joke away the racism against Asian-Americans, as though humor could blunt the tip of the poisoned arrow.

Years ago, when I first began dating my wife, we walked out of a bar in Saint Augustine, Fla., at midday. The sunlight hit our eyes and I took her hand. As we passed, two young men watched us, gaping.

I was white, holding hands with a woman of color. For them, Mississippi Burning wasn’t just the name of a movie.

I joked that I planned a "My Cousin Vinny" trip from Atlanta to New Orleans via the backroads of Alabama and Mississippi, just to see the looks on the faces of the small-town cops who might stop us along the way.

It really wasn’t funny then and it’s certainly not funny now.

Last year, when COVID-19 hit, my wife and I took walks near our place outside San Francisco. Whenever we passed any white people, I wanted to ask her in an overly-loud voice, so they all could hear, “So, honey, what part of Wuhan are you from again?”

I didn’t, of course, and now I’m glad.

My wife has proven that she can take care of herself.

Years ago, she had a run-in with a white motorist who swiped her parking space. She challenged him and as he pulled out, he said, “Why don’t you go back to China?”

This was not Wheeling, West Virginia; this was San Francisco.

But my wife played it cool. “Why don’t you stop being a redneck?” she said, with saintly restraint.

At the time, my Chinese in-laws were visiting from Beijing. We took a trip to Yosemite and I one afternoon walked into a restaurant chockfull of white people.

I kid you not, the place went quiet; you could feel the tension.

We got a table and when we left, my wife’s coat lightly brushed against a woman sitting behind us. She turned and seethed, her face a rictus of hatred, demanding an apology.

My wife was about to say something, but I cut in. And let me tell you what I said was not pretty. My poor in-laws stood there, not understanding a word.

Now my wife and I are watching a series on HBO called Warrior, a story set in San Francisco in the 1880s, when white settlers openly discriminated against a new wave of Chinese immigrants, many of whom had helped build the transcontinental railroad.

But the Chinese get theirs, mainly through ass-kickings inflicted with some slick martial arts moves. My wife laughs when the ugly loud-mouthed racists get their just comeuppance.

Me, too, quite frankly. It’s nice to see a little justice in America.

Unfortunately, HBO is not reality. 

Whites who physically and sexually harass Asian American women, let alone slaughter immigrants for the color of their skin, are not getting the just punishment they deserve.

Once again, white society is letting them off the hook.

After all, they’re just having a bad day, right?