California's Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Decline but Long-Term Pattern Persists

Yik Oi Huang lived across the street from the Visitacion Valley Playground.

At sunrise every day, she’d take the one-minute walk past the early-to-mid-20th-century homes to the park where she practiced qigong, a traditional Chinese exercise of coordinated movement, breathing and meditation.

The hilltop playground, with views overlooking the San Francisco Bay, is a gathering place for AAPI older adults like Huang.

But sometime before 7 a.m. on Jan. 8, 2019, the park’s serenity was shattered. As Huang, 88, began her qigong movements, she was dragged by an assailant and beaten into a coma. She was found unconscious and lying in the sand underneath a play structure. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, she suffered a broken neck, among other injuries. Her home was also burglarized.

The targeted attack sent shock waves through the AAPI community a year before the pandemic and heightened media attention on anti-Asian crimes.

“I considered it isolated,” said Sasanna Yee, Huang’s granddaughter, who lives three blocks away and rushed to the scene to see Huang already on the gurney. “And then, going online when the pandemic started and [I] started seeing the videos. I started having nightmares after that.”

“I had my own incident replaying in my head. And then, the videos would replay in my head,” she continued. “That created a lot of difficulties sleeping and so that impact on the nervous system, it’s cumulative.”

 During the pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes in the state soared from 89 in 2020 to 247 in 2021. But in 2022, according to California’s Department of Justice data (PDF), the crimes decreased to 140. The numbers seem to show progress, however, looking back decades to the start of California’s hate crime tracking reveals a more nuanced story. There’s been progress before.

California began tracking racial hate crimes in 1995. In the late 1990s, anti-Asian hate crimes hovered around 150 per year. Then the state experienced a sharp decline in the first two decades of the new century, dropping as low as 19 in 2014. In comparison, last year’s 140 hate crimes are about seven times more than a little less than a decade ago.

While the data showed a decline, recent crimes have been almost as brutal as the one Huang suffered, including six assaults in San Francisco in July.

• On July 3, a 63-year-old woman was killed when she was pushed to the sidewalk in the Bayview as she walked home from work.
• On July 10, an 86-year-old woman was pushed to the ground in the Tenderloin.
• On July 21, a woman, 88, was kicked and thrown to the ground in the Union Square area.
• On July 24, a 68-year-old man was punched from behind in the Excelsior.
• On July 26, a woman, 40, was tackled to the ground in McLaren Park near the Excelsior.
• On July 27, an 81-year-old woman was shoved off the sidewalk and into a lane of traffic in the Fillmore.

Huang passed away a year after being attacked. Keonte Gathron, then 18, was arrested following a string of other crimes. He pleaded not guilty and still awaits trial.

On a recent foggy day on Leland Avenue, locals could be seen sharing smiles and gossip while walking past the cash-only Asian restaurants. A Hispanic grocery store offered pan dulce and reggaeton, and a chic cafe boasted trendy lattes.

Of Visitacion Valley neighborhood’s 41,695 residents, 23,890 are Asian, 52% are immigrants and 51.6% speak AAPI languages at home, according to the 2021 American Community Survey.

Past the local library and a century-old church is Visitacion Valley Playground, which was renamed Yik Oi Huang Peace and Friendship Park in 2022. Older Asian residents enjoy daily strolls with their friends around the field. Children clamber over the multicolor playground under the shade of two unapologetic palm trees.

The neighborhood was Huang’s home for 20 years.

She immigrated from Toisan, China, in 1986 with her husband, moving to San Francisco’s Chinatown. The couple purchased a home in Visitacion Valley about a decade later.

Yee said her Popo — grandmother in Cantonese — used food as her love language, never hesitating to offer snacks and soup. Huang was health conscious. Because of her diabetes, she would make a magic juice of raw potatoes, celery, apples and carrots every morning. She had a rosy, pink complexion with skin that looked and felt like a baby’s bottom, according to Yee.

Huang, who had very little schooling, always had a notebook in hand to write down new words, Yee told KQED. She was an avid soap opera and news watcher. She loved sharing her wisdom with Yee.

“She had pneumonia, and she was hospitalized, and this was only two years to three years before she passed,” Yee said. “She was doing qigong in the hospital bed and she was sharing with me, ‘These are the movements. This is what you do with your breath, how you’re supposed to move your chi.’”

Huang was unafraid of being out early, even in the dark. She was well-known in the area. For more than 17 years, Huang was an ambassador of the Visitacion Valley Friendship Club, serving the neighborhood’s Chinese immigrants by engaging in senior services, voting rights and more. She collected cans to pass on to her neighbors and friends, according to a website made by her family in her honor.

The violence put neighborhoods like Visitacion Valley with large Asian populations on alert. According to the 2023 San Francisco City Survey, Visitacion Valley is among the three San Francisco neighborhoods with the lowest safety rating. Visitacion Valley graded the police a C while the city’s AAPI demographic gave the police a B- overall. Visitacion Valley residents graded their safety a C+. Of all the demographics, AAPI respondents gave the lowest safety ratings.

In the last four decades, experts point to two events that led to a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes: the murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June 1982, Chin, 27, was beaten to death in Detroit by two white auto workers. At the time, Japanese auto manufacturers were gaining market share as the automotive industry in the United States showed signs of decline. The country was also mired in an economic recession.

Lok Siu, a professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, said relations between the U.S. and Japan in the 1990s created a tense environment and a “sense of anxieties” in the country.

To account for the fall of hate crimes — from 180 in 1996 to 19 in 2014 — Siu points to economic growth. From the 2000s to 2010s, China was seen as a marketplace for U.S. products and technologies. Stability and growth were abundant, an atmosphere that made racial targeting less likely.

“There’s no one particular reason that they can draw to say, ‘You are an enemy. You are a danger to us,’” Siu said.

She added that when faced with the possibility of losing jobs or having a company move, “that’s when people start to point the fingers.”

Siu notices similarities between the 1990s and today. She sees similar accusations of unfair trade and economic competition, but the target now is China, not Japan. Another layer is the current political and technological threat from China and increased anti-Asian rhetoric during the pandemic.

“You’re seeing this clustering of fears coming together, anxieties coming together,” she said. “They have an amplifying effect.”

Twenty to 30 years ago, China was seen as a marketplace of U.S. commerce, according to Siu. Since then, the perception of China has changed.

“China has never really been seen as an ally to the U.S.,” Siu said. “In fact, they’ve always had a perception of their antagonism along ideological lines. It was a political threat. Now, it’s an economic threat. Now, it’s both. It is just growing.”

Besides the anti-Asian rhetoric of the virus, Russell Jeung, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, attributed the surge of hate crimes to the increased publicity of anti-Asian hate and the widespread entrance of Asians into different neighborhoods.

“A lot of sociological theories suppose that as there’s increased contact in new neighborhoods, like the Bayview-Hunters Point and like Excelsior,” Jeung, a San Francisco State Asian American Studies professor, said. “There’s higher levels of competition among racial groups and that leads to more racism.”

Jeung, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, said hate crime reporting data is inconclusive and can be unrepresentative of reality.

“It doesn’t necessarily measure the amount of racism or hate, but rather just reflects the capacity for police departments to collect data and the trust of the community to report data,” he said. “Hate crime reporting reflects more how much the community trusts the police as much as it does reflect the amount of hate crimes that were occurring.”

At the start of the pandemic, Jeung and his colleagues looked into secondary data but there was a lack of first-hand accounts.

 “[Starting Stop AAPI Hate] was mostly to collect data that by which we could show there was a crisis occurring and that it needed to be attended to by the government,” Jeung said. “We were astounded by the extent and depth of racism.”

The trauma of Huang’s attack remains for Yee. In 2019, after the assault, her main priority was taking care of her grandmother and family. She created Asians Belong to balance the dialogue about Asian hate.

“I was very active in the beginning, fueled by a lot of adrenaline, channeling my anger and frustration and sadness and grief into activism work, and then burnt out after three years,” she said.

Despite the cruel nature of her grandmother’s beating, Yee chooses to focus on commonality, not separation. She’s led by the fact that her Popo’s first name, Yik Oi, means “abundant love.”

“[You develop empathy by] being in the community, spending time in relationships, whether it’s with people who look like us or don’t look like us, and understanding stories, listening for those common points,” Yee said.

Two years after the attack, Yee hosted Move the Chi for Racial Solidarity at Yik Oi Huang Peace and Friendship Park. At the event, she did qigong just like her Popo.