New report highlights dual impact of pandemic and racism on Asian American community

Suzanne Lee was walking toward the Public Garden from her home in Chinatown in 2021 when a white man rolled down his car window and said “go back to where you came from. You brought us this, you brought the virus.”

It’s just one of many racial hate incidents Asian Americans in the area have faced during the pandemic, creating a triple threat of racial prejudice, mental health concerns in the community and economic loss, according to a new report from the Institute for Asian American Studies at UMass Boston.

“President Trump had spoken a lot about the China virus, the Wuhan virus, and there was a whole spate of anti-Asian incidents, violence and just verbal harassment in the streets and in the stores and where people were shopping,” said report author Carolyn Wong, a research associate for the institute.

Fifty four percent of Chinese respondents and more than a third of Vietnamese respondents said people acted afraid of them because of their race, according to the survey. Large percentages of all Asian American ethnicities reported that people disrespected them or were less courteous because of their racial background.

More than a quarter of Vietnamese respondents said they felt threatened or harassed because of their race, and 15 percent of Chinese respondents said the same.

Anti-Asian racism is deeply rooted in American society, dating back to before the original Asian Exclusion Act of the 1880s. But it has risen during the pandemic with anti-Asian rhetoric from politicians, according to Jyoti Sinha, founder of the South Asian Workers’ Center and a professor at UMass Boston. She helped connect Wong and the Institute with workers during the pandemic, and said some people stayed away from Asian restaurants because they were Asian, leading to Asian workers being laid off or losing work hours.

Asian Americans in Boston reported facing slurs and confrontations while commuting to and from their jobs. “They tried to kind of cover their faces and keep their identity hidden to be more protected,” Sinha said. But they had to go to work, buy groceries and go about their lives.

Stop AAPI Hate, a national nonprofit which tracks hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islanders, told GBH News there were 329 such incidents in Massachusetts from March 2020 to December 31, 2021.

With the rise in incidents, Sinha started telling workers to stop going to grocery stores where they might find more white residents who could accost them. “Stick to your ethnic stores for your daily needs and try to go in groups. Don’t engage with any slurs because they will only aggravate the situation,” she recounted telling people. “It’s very difficult, especially for the elderly folks.”

The report is the first to reach out to the Asian American community in the area using a multilingual questionnaire — another recent survey was in English and more broadly focused on pandemic experiences of Boston residents as a whole.

The new survey reached 199 respondents from various parts of Boston, Malden, Quincy, Everett and Cambridge.

Wong and co-author Ziting Kuang also wanted to highlight the financial impact of the pandemic on the lower-income Asian Americans in Greater Boston.

“It’s important because Asian Americans have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in the city. Many people don't know that it's about 29 percent — higher than any other group,” said Wong.

A large portion of Greater Boston Asian Americans with limited formal education and low incomes were hard hit by a loss of work and struggled to pay for food and housing, Wong noted.

Almost 50% of Asian American households make less than $30,000 in income per year. More than half of people in those households reported being very or extremely worried about their rent or mortgage, and 44 percent were very or extremely worried about affording food.

Lee is the president emeritus of the Chinese Progressive Association and said the restaurant industry in Chinatown has been particularly hard hit.

“Businesses have come back up maybe 50 percent,” she said, but the lunch crowd from area business offices has not returned as many workers remain remote and tourists and international student have not fully returned.

Almost 75% of respondents said their risk to COVID-19 increased because their work put them in close proximity to the public.

Overall, Asian/Pacific Islanders made up 8% of Boston COVID cases where the race of the patient is known. Blacks and Hispanics each have accounted for 23%, and whites 34%.

The UMass Boston report suggests increasing funding for mental health services and research on the effects of anti-Asian racism, and socio-economic research on how to help low income workers and businesses in Asian American communities recover from the pandemic.

It also calls for an expansion of social services for people with limited English proficiency, as well as for those who are isolating because of anti-Asian racism, which stops them from connecting to social service providers.