[There’s an economic cost to racism
as business owners reduce hours, shell out for security in the wake of the
Atlanta shootings]
By Tracy Jan
Shock and hurt turned to rage, then
fear. After Nguyen reported the vandalism to local law enforcement and the FBI, police
agreed to step up drive-by patrols. But he and his employees would be left
largely on their own.
Since the March 14 incident, the threats to Nguyen’s life and
business have escalated. Last week, someone wrote “hope it burns down” on the
Instagram account for his restaurant, Noodle Tree. An
anonymous man phoned the restaurant, reciting Nguyen’s home address
with a warning: “We’re coming for you.”
“The threats are getting more
violent, more extreme,” said Nguyen, 33.
Asian American entrepreneurs across
the country are combating a sharp rise in racist threats and attacks on their
businesses that many feel authorities are not taking seriously, even after last week’s shooting rampage targeting three Asian
spas in Atlanta left eight people dead.
[Perspective
| Grief, anger and fear envelops Atlanta’s Asian American community]
Amid heightened fears, business
owners have begun hiring their own security, buying guns and cutting their
hours of operation as well as advertising, among other costly safety measures
that limit their profits — and profile — at a time when businesses are already
struggling, according to Asian American chambers of commerce and other business
organizations.
Asian-owned restaurants, salons and
shops rapidly lost business at the start of the pandemic
because of racial stigma, fueled by President Donald Trump’s repeated
references to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.” Now,
community leaders warn that the racism targeting these businesses could hamper
the country’s economic recovery from the coronavirus-induced recession.
“What happened in Atlanta is a very
extreme example of the threat to human life, and folks have got to understand
that as we try to emerge from covid-19 and try to conduct business, there are
other threats to contend with,” said Lamar Heystek, president of the San
Francisco-based ASIAN Inc., a nonprofit that works with the U.S. Department of
Commerce to develop economic opportunity for Asian Americans and other
minorities. “It doesn’t take an economist to see how that could really dampen
business activity and an economic recovery in which Asian American Pacific
Islander-owned businesses take part.”
Asian Americans owned more than 10
percent of all U.S. businesses in 2018. These firms earned $863 billion in
receipts and employed 5.1 million people, Census
Bureau data shows.
“How is that contribution muted by
hate, discrimination and violence?” Heystek said. “We need to appreciate the
systemic effect of these incidents that range from graffiti all the way up to
death.”
It’s not only businesses in urban
centers like Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York that have become targets
of racial harassment. So have Asian-owned businesses in suburban strip malls
and rural America, Heystek said.
Businesses have been vandalized,
robbed, attacked online in racist Yelp reviews. Employees, regardless of their
ethnicity, have been blamed for the spread of the coronavirus.
At Nguyen’s two-year-old ramen
restaurant, graffiti scrawled on a patio table admonished him to “Go back 2
China.” He is of Vietnamese and French descent.
The racist abuse began after
he criticized the decision in early March by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R)
to rescind a statewide mask mandate that was in place to stop the spread of the
coronavirus.
With the perpetrators still at
large, Nguyen, who is undergoing cancer treatment, said he has never feared
more for his life. The threats come daily now, making him so “paranoid” that he
does not allow people to get within 10 feet.
He had delayed fully reopening
indoor dining because of the lack of police presence — and now must budget
$5,700 a month on private security for the four days a week his restaurant is
open. He temporarily left town. And he reluctantly bought a gun.
“I am personally against guns, but
we had to get one just to protect ourselves now,” Nguyen said. “I can
understand why a lot of Asian Americans don’t want to report these things
because of retaliation and lack of protection. Will it take for me to get
seriously hurt or die for someone to take these threats seriously?”
The San Antonio Police Department
issued a written statement saying “officers continue to provide drive-bys to
the business. We have additionally contacted others in the area to report any
suspicious activity and we will respond accordingly. This case remains actively
under investigation and anyone with information is urged to contact police.”
[Asian
American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus]
Among the most vulnerable are
retail businesses, restaurants and salons whose storefronts open to public
sidewalks. Many store owners have kept their doors wide-open to improve
ventilation during the pandemic. Not only have they recently begun shutting
their doors, they’re locking them and removing cultural signage and decor that
could make them easy targets for people looking to terrorize Asian businesses,
according to business owners and community leaders.
“Right now, the key word is alert,”
said Kevin Chan, 51, owner of Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San
Francisco’s Chinatown, who said he has received threatening phone calls after
he intervened when a customer was attacked in front of
his store. He now locks the gate to his shop at 5 p.m., even though the store
is open until 9.
“To me, we don’t have much freedom
at all,” Chan said. “We have to watch our backs. That’s how I feel right now as
an old immigrant, as an American.”
Employees newly wary of taking
public transportation to work are shifting their hours, asking not to come in
early or work late — fearful of what they may encounter along their commute in
light of viral
videos of Asian pedestrians being violently assaulted.
“We have to start quantifying the
economic effect of hate,” Heystek said. “We cannot ignore this grave threat to
our economy.”
Resentment against Asian Americans
has long existed in this country. They’ve been a frequent scapegoat during economic woes and disease outbreaks, and in
wartime propaganda. Racist incidents today are more easily recorded on
smartphones and shared over social media, contributing to increased fear.
There is no
comprehensive data measuring anti-Asian hate crimes during the
coronavirus pandemic. One in three female Asian American business owners
reported experiencing anti-Asian sentiment, according to a 2020 survey by minority business organizations.
A recent analysis of self-reported
incidents by Russell
Jeung, chairman of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco
State University, who is studying racism and xenophobia during the
pandemic, shows
at least 3,800 cases of harassment and assault against Asians since
March 2020, with more than twice as many women as men saying they have been
mistreated. Most incidents, experts say, are never reported to law
enforcement.
Immigrant business owners whose
instinct is not to report racial harassment to police are instead seeking help
from culturally aligned organizations like ASIAN, Inc.
“What they are saying is, ‘I’m
fearful of opening my doors to the public. I don’t want to put my workers in
harm’s way. If they can hurt a shop in Atlanta, what prevents them from hurting
a shop in San Francisco?’” Heystek said. “Folks have got to feel empowered to
do business in this climate.”
In response, Asian American
organizations are helping small business owners secure funding to install
security cameras that record video and audio, distribute personal security
alarms to employees that can be programmed to call 911, and connect them with
self-defense training.
The National Asian/Pacific
Islander American Chamber of Commerce and Entrepreneurship held an
emergency Zoom meeting last week to discuss anti-Asian hate and the Atlanta
shootings that drew more than four dozen business leaders.
“There are two illnesses attacking
AAPI small businesses: One is covid. The other is hate,” said Chiling Tong,
president and chief executive of the national chamber, who has been fielding
calls and emails from around the country from businesses seeking guidance.
“They are just very scared to operate, especially after the attacks in Atlanta.”
Geri Guidote Hernandez, the
Filipina American owner of Savory Crust, an empanada carryout in a Chicago-area
ethnic strip mall, said the attacks compelled her this week to draw up an
emergency active-shooter plan for her employees, who include her two daughters.
“Growing up, anytime we felt
racism, what do our parents say? ‘Just ignore that.’ So we do it over our whole
lifetime,” she said. “It’s a different environment now.”
In Southern California, the Orange
County Human Relations Commission, which has tracked hate incidents since
1995, recorded a tenfold increase of incidents targeting Asian Americans in
2020 from prior years.
On Tuesday, a Vietnamese American
owned beauty school in Orange County, where a fifth of the population is Asian,
hosted a self-defense workshop for salon and spa workers. Tam Nguyen, president
of Advance Beauty College, started 34 years ago by his parents, said he plans
to also offer workshops on de-escalation, safe confrontation and
the use of Mace. He and other nail-care industry leaders are distributing cards
and fliers listing newly created police hotlines for reporting hate crimes in
Vietnamese and Korean. And businesses are chipping in for private security
guards to patrol Asian shopping plazas.
In Sacramento, Kelly Shum, owner of
Mad Butcher Meat Co., said she started spending $5,000 a month for a security
guard after a customer last spring tried to attack her younger sister, who was
enforcing the mask policy at the door. Shum said she had called police, but she
said they never responded. So she stepped in with a baseball bat to get the man
to leave.
The Sacramento Police Department
said it has no record of a call from Shum’s business at the time of the
incident.
The 28-year-old entrepreneur said
she felt she had little choice but to incur the extra expense to protect her
employees, nearly all of whom are Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant women. Three
of them have quit out of fear.
“Having a security guard is extreme
just to fight off racists,” Shum said. But “so many customers are calling us
‘coronavirus,’ ‘China virus’ and saying, ‘Why should I be wearing a mask if you
people are the dirty ones?’
“No one feels safe. No one wants to
come to work,” she said. The security guard “is literally only here so we can
do our job.”
But that did not stop a car from
waiting in the parking lot for her father to leave the shop and tailing him,
according to footage from a security camera. Her sister, who was also driving
home in a separate car, told Shum that the car tried to run their father off
the road.
In February, a customer left a mutilated cat in their parking lot, invoking
a racist
stereotype of Asians. Shum said her lone White employee volunteered to
dispose of the carcass, aware of the implications of an Asian American being
seen discarding the animal.
“All of us knew what it meant and
understood the gravity of the situation. This was a very obvious hate crime,”
Shum said.
When she posted about the incident
on social media, Shum was aghast that some users defended the man who left the
cat. “People were like, ‘Don’t you guys do that? Don’t you guys butcher up cats
and dogs? Maybe he was on to something?’” she said.
Shum said that even when police
arrived to take a report of the incident, one officer questioned why she
considered it a hate crime. The perpetrator was not arrested, but Shum said he
called the shop to apologize after seeing surveillance video of himself on the
news and said he was “having a bad day.”
“It’s domestic terrorism,” she
said.
Karl Chan, a Sacramento police
spokesman, said the case remains open and detectives are investigating it as a
hate crime.
“In order for a crime to fall under
the definition of a bias or hate related incident a distinction must be made
that the crime/incident was motivated by bias,” Chan said in a written
statement. “One of the ways that officers can make this distinction during the
preliminary investigation is by asking questions that would identify how the
victim perceived the crime or incident.”
[Atlanta
spa killings lead to questions about sex work and exploitation]
Shum, a former Los Angeles
television producer and marketing manager, had returned to Sacramento in late
2019 to take over the butcher shop from her parents, immigrants who came from
China in the 1980s. She had grand promotion plans for the store, which serves a
predominantly low-income community. She built a website and started online
orders and deliveries, to make the shop more accessible.
“We’re now hiding and not promoting
in a way that we want to or used to,” Shum said. “That is so detrimental to us,
but we’re scared of people finding out who we are.”
Shum has removed most of her
mother’s Chinese brush paintings and other cultural decor to make the business
appear “less Asian.” She stopped marketing the business on social media with
photos of a cat figurine waving one paw, a common symbol that Asian-owned
businesses display to bring good luck.
“You have to minimize yourself in
hopes that nobody notices you and attacks you,” she said. “It’s such a
miserable half-existence.”
Last weekend, in the wake of the
Atlanta attacks, Shum thought about hiring extra security to check for weapons
at the door. But she could not afford it.
Andrew Van Dam contributed to this
report.