By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Six women dead in different spas, all of Asian descent. This was the latest in a series of violence against Asian Americans. The violent attitude against Asians in America escalated since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Obviously, this was fired up by the peroration of then President Trump encouraging the White Supremacist illusion. The worst part of this is that many Filipino-Americans started thinking that they were also white that they became die-hard pro-Trump.
The anti-Asian sentiment had been brewing for a very long time. This is the reaction to the fact that Asians in many ways were beating the white Americans in so many respects, in their own game, in their own backyard. And the natural reaction of the incompetent and uneducated among the Americans was to be violent.
Just before the murder of the said six women there was a Chinese-American young man on CNN who was complaining about seeing the words “Go back to China” painted (rather, vandalized) on his business establishment. This happened right after he required his employees to wear face masks. His parting words in the program were good. “He won’t backdown.”
This situation partly illustrates the situation. The Chinese man was the boss, and obviously those who wrote that he should go back to China were his underlings who were resentful of being inferior in the business hierarchy. Being inferior is surely hard to swallow, particularly if you have a baseless superiority complex.
And the Asian Americans had been rubbing it on the face of the white Americans for decades already. More than two decades ago, there was this article in Newsweek about how Asian-American were making it in the USA. It often started among Asian-Americans landing on the top of their classes in Ivy League schools. And so there was that advice circulating then in Harvard University that if a white American student went to his Match or Science class and saw that many of his classmates were of Asian descent, it would have been best for him to drop out, as the class standard would have been high considering the highly intelligent Asian-Americans.
The article traced one reason behind that—the dedication of Asian immigrants to work hard in providing for their kids and in assisting them in their education while they were still young. In short, hard work and close family ties were thought of as very big factors.
Because of their being hardworking, in many ways, Asian-American families were generally better off than their American (white or black) counterparts. They also sacrificed a lot for the better future of their children.
This was summed up best by a Korean-American woman who was operating a convenience store during one of those violent riots in L.A. in the 90s. A black rioter was about to smash the glass wall of the store when the Korean-American woman suddenly appeared in front of him pointing her finger on his face, and then shouted, ”In America, if you don’t have it, you did not work for it.” Perhaps, greatly embarrassed, the black rioter sheepishly ran away.
With the onset of the pandemic last year, the differences between the economic status of the average Americans and the Asian-Americans became quite stark. The latter were in a lot better situation—being better educated and more resilient– and so the jealousy among the white and black Americans started fermenting. . . . and came to a boil when they found themselves in really challenging situations.
With this dire situation, the obvious choice for the Asian-Americans should be that one of the Chinese-American earlier mentioned here— to never back down.**
