An essay by Nicole Chan as part of our Laurier Essays Series special feature
It’s clear where the past year’s worth of increased sinophobia has come from. Visibly East Asian people are used to being lumped together and seen (incorrectly) as one monolithic identity; it’s a common experience for us all that extends far before the pandemic started. The difference now is that in the past year, rather than being an annoyance, being seen this way has dangerous consequences. Regardless of individual ethnic identity, East Asians are now seen as scapegoats for sinophobes seeking to vent their anger at having to endure a years-long pandemic.
Like anyone, COVID-19 left me emotionally drained from the lack of normalcy, but encountering sinophobia is an added anxiety that lingers at the back of my mind every day. A project started by the Canadian Chinese National Council to analyze and raise awareness about anti-Asian racism in Canada states that 49% of all cases reported to their website happened in public spaces, streets, sidewalks or parks, while 76% of attacks occurred in the morning and afternoon combined (Kong et al., 2021). The 2016 Kitchener – Cambridge – Waterloo census states that 20% of its population identified as a visible minority (with the two largest groups being South Asian and Chinese), while in the City of Waterloo in particular, the most common visible minority was Chinese, making up 10% of the city’s total population (Statistics Canada, 2016). Both I and my East Asian friends living in the City of Waterloo have heard racist remarks screamed at us in broad daylight on major roads right outside campus; during the start of our school years in 2019, we never had to worry about the possibility of being physically assaulted or spat on if we were yelled at in public. Now, it’s a very real fear that may come true in broad daylight.
In wake of the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes across North America, the Stop Asian Hate movement started in mid-March this year. It made many of us feel seen and it validated our experiences encountering xenophobia, but at the same time, it was devastating to read accounts of attacks and see videos online of East Asian people, elders especially, being assaulted and harassed. On every video I came across of an elder being attacked, I found it impossible not to check the location of the attack, out of fear that it was close to the area where my grandmother lived. Every time an attack occurred even remotely near her, I felt my heart plummet with fear. She’d always told me that racists were cowardly people, so it is unsurprising to me that racists opportunistically choose to attack more visibly vulnerable people. The CCNC’s findings state that 60% of victims in all reported cases of racist incidents and attacks were women, and youth and elders were much more likely to be physically assaulted, coughed at, or spat on (Kong et al., 2021).
The effects of anti-Asian sentiments on East Asian women in particular stem from something that existed long before the pandemic, though. That is the rampant exoticization and racial fetishization of East Asian women, in popular Western media and art – from Cho Cho in Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly to Lucy Liu’s character in Kill Bill (Pham, 2021). While stereotypes of East Asian women like the ‘lotus blossom’ and the ‘dragon lady’ may align with ideals of womanhood instilled in us by patriarchal societal norms – demure, submissive, and sexually tempting – these stereotypes evolved from early fears that Asian women who first immigrated to North America were all diseased prostitutes (Lee, 2018). This perpetuation of the perceived ‘uncleanliness’ of East Asian women only serves to produce events in the present like the Atlanta spa shootings. Though nearly all articles describe the murderer’s crimes as sexually motivated with only speculation towards racial motivation, many women of colour know that in cases like these where victims were fetishized for their race, the two motives are inseparably intertwined.
Racial fetishization is a product of the intersection between sexism and racism, which is a basis for aggression towards women of colour that can range in severity from the overt danger of a mass shooting, to the ambiguousness of a backhanded compliment. To non-racialized people, something as terrible as a mass shooting fuelled by hatred may seem distant or even impossible in places like Waterloo, Ontario. But women of colour everywhere in North America are confronted with microaggressions in day-to-day life that are laced with the same motives of Robert Long. It may seem unproblematic to compliment someone by calling her a ‘china doll’ or to joke about having ‘yellow fever,’ but receiving attention with inherently sexual undertones purely based on one’s race is a sickening and dehumanizing experience. I have East Asian friends who have lost count of the number of times that random male strangers have approached them with the specific phrase “me love you long time” – sometimes before they had even turned eighteen.
As the world moves forward from the pandemic and we start to explore the effects of the pandemic on both the bodies and minds of the general public, it is imperative that we strive to include the voices and experiences of marginalized groups with compassion and respect. North America has come a long way since the invention of the Yellow Peril and other outright forms of racism, but with the rise of the global pandemic, it seems we have taken a couple steps back. To make the Waterloo Region a safer place for everyone, we must all take a stand against anti-Asian hate.
Work Cited
Kong, J., Ip, J., Huang, C., Lin, K. (2021). A Year of Racist Attacks: Anti-Asian Racism
Across Canada One Year Into the COVID-19 Pandemic. Chinese Canadian National Council. https://drive.google.com/file/d/193CdlC8uq623VRlAzoO3ShfDTEutXQi2/view
Lee, G. B. (2018). Dirty, Diseased and Demented: The Irish, the Chinese, and Racist
Representation. Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化. 12. https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.1011
Pham, E. (2021, April 1). Here’s How Pop Culture Has Perpetuated Harmful Stereotypes
of Asian Women. TODAY. https://www.today.com/popculture/here-s-how-pop-culture-has-perpetuated-harmful-stereotypes-asian-t213676.
Statistics Canada. (2016). Census Profile, 2016 Census [Data file]. Retrieved from