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Brian Chin didn't leave the building for 72 hours after the event. He wasn't sleeping. The man didn't eat. He arrived at the apartment complex at 6 a.m. on February 13 after getting a call from a tenant. There was a chaotic scene with the street in front of the building blocked off. Chin was allowed inside, but no one told him what was happening. The sky was dark outside. There was snow on the ground. A cop silenced the building after an alarm blared inside. The officer told Chin that there had been an attack.
Chin has watched the tape so many times that he has memorised the time stamps. A man she didn't know was following her after she got out of a car. He followed her up the stairs and pushed his way in. When police arrived, they couldn't get into the apartment until a tactical team arrived, after neighbors heard Lee's screams. Lee was dead when they arrived. She was found in the bathtub with dozens of stab wounds on her torso and the man who followed her was arrested and taken outside.
According to Chin, the officers initially couldn't tell she was Korean American because they didn't know she was African American. Chin felt like he snapped when they said she could be Lee. He had a kinship with Lee, who died when she was 35, because they both attended Rutgers as undergrads. She passed him in the hall, the last time he saw her. Assamad Nash, a 25-year-old Black man who lived in a homeless shelter nearby and was part of a group that Chin said he frequently saw using and selling synthetic cannabinoids, was also recognized by Chin. Chin realized that the crime he was talking about was pointless.
The two Chinese women who ran the bodega on the ground floor had been robbed many times. The community of unhoused people in Chinatown had always been tense, but now those living on the street were prone to violence. Everyone used to just leave everyone alone. Everything spiraled out of control over the last year or two. There was a new breed of aggressive people in Chinatown.
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The article is in New York Magazine.
Chin is a trained psychologist, a former Army reserve, and a teacher in Harvard's extension program who helps teach a class on the "psychology of diversity." He doesn't think of himself as a political person. He said his family has lived in and around New York since the 1930s and bought the building in the early 1970s. His family kept a low profile because they were Asian. A month before Lee died, an unhoused man pushed a 40-year-old Asian American woman in front of a subway train in New York City. He said that the new type of violence was a new type of racism against Asian people.
He wasn't the only one who drew this conclusion. Asian America can feel vague, lumping together different types of people. In the past, a kind of social invisibility has been considered one of the few unifying qualities. On February 2, 2020, a man called a woman a "diseased bitch" and punched her in the head, the first widely reported attack in New York. Progressives counted hundreds of news stories about similar assaults and confrontations around the country by late March.
You didn't have to be Chinese to be targeted. Reports of verbal harassment, public shunning, and physical attacks flooded in when the news- tracking effort became an organization called Stop AAPI Hate. Asians and non-Asians alike went from calling it "xenophobia" or "racism" to "anti-Asian hate" or even "Asian hate" as a result of the name catching on as a #. A lot of Asian Americans started referring to attacks on Asian people as hate crimes.
A lot of people said don't worry about it. Everyone will remember this. I don't want it to go away.
Hate crimes have become a political talking point. Chin is one of the people who blames the bail reforms and the Manhattan district attorney for criminal-justice reform. The election saw voters in the city's Asian neighborhoods swing to the right due to concerns about public safety. The Chinese American voters who were alarmed by the rise in violence were appealed to by the organizers of the recall effort. Asian American business leaders called for more police patrols after being attacked. After a white man killed eight people, including six Korean and Chinese immigrant women, at spas in Atlanta, Asian American civil-rights organizations cheered. The legislation was bipartisan and meant to strengthen relationships between law enforcement and AAPI communities. According to Senator McConnell, discrimination against Asian Americans is a real problem.
Chin is a democrat He believes that bail reform has made the city less safe, but he doesn't care about electoral politics. Chin and the many Asian Americans like him are at odds with the civil-rights activists who believe that measures such as rolling back that reform and putting more police on the streets will have a disproportionate effect on black Americans. Anti-Asian violence is being used in a backlash against what people see as liberal or progressive, which is being used as a code word for black people. There are other political agendas being marshaled through the anti- Asian violence conversations.
The death of Lee was declared a hate crime by Asian American activists. The murder of a CNN correspondent was tied to the Atlanta killings in an op-ed. The politics of self-protection was starting to take hold as a sense of grievance began to take hold.
Chin's office is in the basement of the building. On the sixth floor, just outside Lee's former apartment, he had set up a small altar with an orange resting on a metal stool.
A lot of people said don't worry about it. Everyone will remember this. Chin wants it to be remembered. That night had a profound effect on me.
Before the Pandemic, Manhattan's Chinatown had already undergone rapid change, becoming a more white and wealthy area. The neighborhood was still filled with Asian residents and businesses, but they were not immune to the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Chin was cautious before Lee's murder. He told me that he had seen an unhoused man defacing a mural outside of his building. I was trying to get him. He turned and said, 'Fuck you, chink.' He said that he was sprayed by a can of pepper spray. I was just a raging man. He was afraid that it was not working. I shot him with a taser after chasing him down in the subway.
I wasn't sure what to think. Do you keep a taser with you? I spoke.
That's right. Chin agreed that it was absolutely true. You should carry one as well. The man fell down the stairs after Chin tasered him. The NYPD officers in the station said they couldn't find him. He was able to escape into the subway.
The man hitting Chin with the pepper spray was a hate crime, according to Chin. He said that everyone is scared because they are seeing things like this. Criminals are being protected more than people at the moment. The conviction was strengthened by Lee's death.
People left messages in her name at flower-strewn memorial in Chinatown after her death. An exhibit in her memory was commissioned by the Eli Klein art gallery. A memorial tree was planted in the park because of the $400,000 raised by her family on a Go Fund Me. The family of Lee did not want to be interviewed.
By this time, the District Attorney had announced that Nash had been charged with murder, first-degree robbery, and first-degree rape. He wasn't accused of a hate crime. A hate crime is a crime motivated by bias based on a victim's race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender. A sentence enhancement for a hate-crimes conviction can lead to more time in prison. Hannah Yu is the chief of the hate-crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney. One aspect of her job involves explaining to Asian American victims why their cases may not be prosecuted as hate crimes, a charge that would require evidence of explicit animus towards the victim's perceived identity, such as a shouted slur or a pattern of targeting people of the same race Yu wouldn't discuss Nash's case specifically, but said that sometimes there's just no evidence and we have a very scared and hurt victim. She said that most of the time, they don't say "I know you feel that there's no reason why you were victimized other than your race or how you appear."
In response to attacks on Black Americans, federal hate-crime laws were passed in 1968. According to a 2020 FBI report, hate crimes against Black Americans have risen by 40 percent in the last year. The report of hate crimes against Asian Americans increased by 77 percent. Many people don't go to the police after an attack and police departments don't submit their numbers. Most of the states do not have laws governing how to train police to recognize and report hate crimes. Most perpetrators of physical harassment of Asians are white, but the data is limited, according to researchers. A survey done by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes against Asians in 16 of the country's largest cities had increased between 2020 and 2021. Black Americans were more likely to be targeted than any other group.
Critics of the hate-crime framework argue that, rather than preventing attacks, it serves to prop up the power of police and prosecutors. Governments are failing to take bias-driven attacks seriously because of the difficulty in proving a hate crime. In the first three quarters of the year, AABANY found that the NYPD made less than 100 arrests for attacks against Asian Americans. The Manhattan district attorney's office disagrees with AABANY's methodology and says the number of hate crime convictions has gone up to eight. Karen Kithan Yau is a lawyer and former member of the AABANY anti-Asian-violence task force. Words need to be exchanged frequently. It doesn't happen with crimes against Asian Americans. Laws need to be changed.
After being in a coma for three months, the 61-year-old Chinese woman named GuiYing Ma died of her injuries in February. Perez was charged with murder and manslaughter, but the attack wasn't labeled a hate crime. Yau thinks the decision to charge Perez with hate crimes didn't take into account the other assaults. A lot of the prosecutors don't care. He is going to go in for the rest of his life. She asked what more she wanted. It is a recognition that the impact on the community is real.
There is a person named Hannah Yu.
Karen Yau is a person. The photos were taken by Alex Lau.
Yau is a former community activist and works at a law firm that specializes in workers' rights. She reads books about the injustice of the criminal legal system in her spare time, such as Bryan Stevenson's memoir, Just Mercy, about his work with poor and marginalized clients. During her time at AABANY, she led a project that helped survivors of anti-Asian violence. Yau was avoiding eye contact on the subway and carrying a panic button because she was afraid. She said she was trying to balance the need to hold people accountable for the harm they have done with not promoting overpolicing in certain communities. I keep thinking about it.
I think about that as well. I have spent the past few years walking around the city with a heightened awareness, one that I have questioned the validity of even as I felt it in my body. One of my Asian friends sent me a text saying, "Shouldn't it be #StopHating Asians?" More prickly Asians with sharp edges are needed. We joked that we would prefer to remain unseen after reading the op-eds written by other East Asian professionals begging for people to see them. Was it not part of the problem? We were cynical that any of the solutions at hand would amount to much, as politicians and celebrities blared out calls to "stop the hate" and Asian Americans armed themselves with guns.
We might have made jokes because we were worried. Our feeds were flooded with news stories about and videos of attacks. When a woman pulled a stun gun on me at a grocery store in Brooklyn, the man who screamed at my friend in Queens, and when we coughed in public, we all got strange looks. I started wearing a lanyard with a panic button around my neck after buying it last year. My aunt in San Diego, who for years had been part of a dance troupe with some of her Taiwanese American friends, told me that they had canceled their outdoor gatherings. My mom was worried that her mask would make her a target.
Questions of safety were linked to those of policing and mass incarceration. The call to defund the police was a moral imperative that I joined in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Long-term safety meant reducing the need for police and prisons with well-funded public schools, a stronger social safety net, affordable housing, and a dismantling of the structures that determine who gets to live a dignified life. A complete transformation is needed if the roots of anti-Asian violence are important. Next to the day, these beliefs were hard to reconcile. The people wanted to feel safe.
Community-safety patrols, programs that pairs volunteers with people who don't want to walk alone, began springing up in New York City's Asian neighborhoods. At a time when the housing crisis in New York was getting worse, some residents began demanding less shelter for the unhoused in their communities. The activists pointed out that unhoused people were responsible for some of the most widely reported attacks, including the deaths of Lee, Go, and 61-year-old Yao Pan Ma. A homeless shelter on Grand Street is close to Chin's building. Providing housing and medical care to unhoused people would improve community safety according to those in favor of the shelter. Plans for that shelter were canceled in May. A union issue is said to have been a factor in the decision.
Shelters tend to be clustered in poorer neighborhoods and many housing advocates say the city should focus on creating permanent housing instead. In a city with tens of thousands of homeless people, there is still a dire need for them. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, more than half of the shelter population is black. The fact that fighting shelters, criticizing bail reform, and pushing for harsher sentencing, all of which are likely to have a direct effect on many poor Black New Yorkers, have been painted as practical solutions to anti- Asian violence seems to contradict the calls for solidarity that gained visibility during the racial-
Some Asian Americans were using hate-crime discourse to avoid dealing with anti-Blackness, according to the scholar. She admitted that she was hesitant to join in because she was worried that it would make people think that we are living through a crime wave and need to solve it. She isn't saying there aren't efforts to steer the ship in a different direction. There is a way that it is assumed that Asian Americans will be pro-policing and not fully challenge it.
The attacks on Asians have made Nopper think more carefully about things like riding the bus. She said that she lives in a city where she is very visible. Do you understand what I'm talking about? I have to find a way to get back and forth. Outreach to the elderly and volunteers who will escort you home are some of the initiatives that she praised. She said that some are being run by people who don't identify as slaves. They are trying to keep Asian people safe without partnering with the police.
I heard about new self-defense classes for Asian Americans while I was at the pepper-spray event. I went to one in Chinatown in April. While other Asians were enjoying a nice spring day, a few of us were learning how to fight back. The teacher stood in front of us and showed us how to use tools like tactical pens and flashlight to stun an attacker in a style of self-defense he invented. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt with the phrase VIOLENT PROBLEMS REQUIRE VIOLENT SOLUTIONS, BECOME THE SOLUTION written on it.
If we can't run away, we do this training. He said that it was easy to get killed. He said the goal was to increase your chances so you can survive a few seconds longer for your escape or maybe you can finish him off.
The Dragon Combat Club was founded in April 2020 byZhang and a friend, who wanted to teach self-defense against violent racists. The day I did martial arts for fun was once upon a time. I need survival so I can survive.
The PhD student is from Queens. The cycle of condemnation by elected officials and endless social-media posts promoting a vague sort of awareness, only for another incident to make the news, was what inspired him to start DCC. No one is going to protect Asian Americans. There are references to "boba liberals" and "blue-check Asians" in DCC's posts, and they're not the only ones. He saw his own message as simple.
If we can't run away, we do this training. It is easy to be killed.
A group of strangers harassed Zhang's fiancée, calling her "coronaviruses" while she was walking on the Lower East Side. When he shared what happened with a fellow Asian, they told him he didn't know enough about white supremacy. They gave me a bunch of articles that I needed to read in order to do better. He said that the discourse wouldn't be about how Asians are affected. The discussion is about the mental health of the person who is committing the crime. Our mental health has never been a priority.
He gathered the ten of us in a circle and handed each of us a flashlight, which we practiced using to stab an attacker. He had used a pen to fight off an attacker. We practiced grappling together. I was with a young Chinese American woman, and we took turns pushing each other's arms, and later on, I was with a man from Vietnam, who was training me to escape a choke hold. We were told to keep our hands up because we would be hitting each other. He had us face off with him at the end of the session to demonstrate the skills we had learned. He pushed me to the ground after I began grappling with him.
The creation of the Dragon Combat Club was the subject of three memoirs written by the man. Hundreds of people have been trained by DCC. I know where you are coming from. Many valid reasons exist. We are getting stabbed in our own homes, in our own bathtub 40 times, if you are using that to promote action. "I said so." That is discrimination.
I put the tactical flashlight into a drawer when I got home that night. The group Chinatown Block Watch gave away a can of pepper spray, but it was pushed into a corner. I used to carry a canister in my purse. Carrying it made me paranoid and it wasn't empowering. It was like a pebble in my shoe, a constant reminder of the potential for violence and a fear that had become counter productive.
On a senior-citizen-discount day in January, a 67-year-old woman walked to a grocery store just two days after the death of another woman. She was punched in the face several times by a man who did not warn her. A person stopped to call the police when he ran off. Mercel Jackson was arrested by the NYPD for the attack. According to police investigators, Jackson told them that he hit her because he didn't like how Chinese people looked and that he thought Chinese people looked like diseases. It hurt to cough or move her neck for a week afterwards.
I went to visit Khanh and his mother at their apartment in Clinton Hill after taking the self-defense class. She knitted a sweater for her grandchild while Khanh typed on his computer. After the war, she and her husband and child fled Vietnam in a boat. They stopped at a refugee camp in Indonesia. They arrived in the US in 1981. After their daughter was born, her husband got a job at the snack-food factory while she was still in school. Their lives were full of small pleasures, like saving money, buying a house, and sending their kids to college. She moved to New York to live with her children after her husband's death. Since her attack, she had been transformed online into a figure activists call "Grandma", and an illustrator drew her image as a cartoon with a bruise on her cheek. One person commented that majorities are blacks who target Asians and those who deny it are oblivious. The end of that is what it is. "You own this." was written by another person.
Jackson was charged with assault and hate crimes by the Brooklyn District Attorney. Jackson could have spent a long time in prison if he had been found guilty of a felony. What do you want to see happen? I asked if he wanted him to go to jail, and he said he didn't want him to. She wasn't upset by the comments Jackson made. She was able to forgive him. She said that someday she might make mistakes and be forgiven.
I talked to her again several months later. She was asked if she wanted Jackson to serve a short sentence or if she wanted him to get mental-health services. She made a choice. I told him to take medicine to make him feel better. She said that it would make him feel better and that he would live a better life after he was out. He could be angry if he was in jail. I don't want him to be that person. Jackson was eligible to go through the Mental Health Court, which would place him in a mental-health program as an alternative to incarceration, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney.
She admitted that she was more hesitant when she saw a black man walking towards her. She said that you don't know who is good. She walked all the way to the waterfront and back before she was attacked. She doesn't want to take the subway alone but she has started venturing out again. Her daughter gave her pepper spray and urged her to carry it but she didn't have it with her when she was attacked. She didn't think it would have been helpful. She said it happened so quickly.
I went to visit Brian Chin again. Chin took it upon himself to clean up the neighborhood since Lee was killed. In an effort to discourage people from loitering, he gave out pepper spray to his tenants and removed the building's awning. He would file a police report whenever a small memorial to Lee was vandalised. He was concerned that the drug problem was getting worse and that local seniors were at risk for crimes of opportunity, which he said could be called a hate crime.
A few days after I met Chin in the spring, New York governor Kathy Hochul passed the state budget, which included a limited repeal of the bail reforms and an expansion of the law that allows judges to mandate mental health treatment for people with mental illness. While some feel the statute forces people into unwanted treatment and unfairly assumes that those with mental illness are prone to violence, Asian American activists had called for this change after the death ofMichelle Go, and both Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams had championed it. The budget includes a provision that makes it a crime to commit a hate crime if you're an adult. Chin thought he might have played a small part in Hochul's decision after meeting her at his building after Lee's death.
Chin bristled at the idea that fighting a homeless shelter in a city where the majority of unhoused people are Black is itself a form of racism. Anyone who lived in the area would support his efforts. limousine liberals don't have any experience with what we've been dealing with We're the victims at the end of the day. He told me how traumatic Lee's murder was, how even the cops who were there seemed shaken, and how he had been hounded by journalists begging him for the video. The New York Post was able to get it. Chin did not deny that he would have done this.
Chin felt like he could have done something to prevent the murder. Why did this happen was the most striking thing to me. What happened when Christina was just walking home? He said that the most haunting thing was that. It is not possible to blame society. Governmental agencies can't be blamed. You can't fault the police. If I had kicked out the crew that was dealing drugs that this guy was a part of, I think I would be more responsible for the situation. I was paying attention to that. It made me feel like a dark place for a while.
We walked out of his building. Kids were walking with their parents as a vendor hawked Zongzi. Chin said, "This is nice here." He looked at the park and said it was bad. He warned me that I shouldn't go there at night. He said I should avoid Delancey Street as well.
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