‘This is my home. I’m not going anywhere’: Victims of anti-Asian rhetoric meet in O.C. to show solidarity
Kien Nguyen is a 76-year-old grandmother of six.
She’s petite, with short cropped hair and an easy smile. She speaks with a slow urgency, faster in her native Vietnamese than in English.
Nguyen has lived in the United States since 1975. Her daughter was born here, as were her grandchildren. She’s attended numerous walks to help raise social consciousness and aided in past efforts by her son Tam Nguyen to provide personal protective equipment to healthcare workers.
She even raised $5,000 on her own among her friends and acquaintances to help in the cause because she felt it was important.
So, it hurts, she said, to have been told to go home — home, as in not the Fountain Valley she lives in now, but back to a country that she hasn’t lived in for almost 50 years.
“They said, ‘Stay away from her. She’s got the virus!’ At first, I didn’t know what they were talking about. But they looked at me and they said, ‘Go home!’ and usually, the old [Asian] people, an old lady like me — I just walked away,” Nguyen said. “But, I felt bad and I talked to my friend. ‘This is my home here. What are they talking about?’”
Nguyen’s experience is just one of several incidents that have targeted people of Asian descent in just the last month in Orange County.
In Seal Beach, a Korean American widow received a racist letter just three days after her husband’s funeral on March 22. In Irvine, a 69-year-old Asian man was assaulted by a young man after a skirmish between their two dogs on March 19.
In Ladera Ranch, an Asian family was being harassed by teenagers for nights and neighbors had to step in to keep watch.
And as recently as last week, Ku Klux Klan propaganda was spread throughout Newport Beach and a flier announcing plans for a “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach surfaced.
This all comes just off the heels of the March 16 shooting in Atlanta that took the lives of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.
In March, Alison Edwards, the chief executive of O.C. Human Relations, said preliminary data received by the organization show there have been 40 reports of hate incidents targeting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the last year.
This compares to only four reports of such incidents in 2019.
Nguyen said she was encouraged by her son to speak out against what happened to her, instead of being quiet about it.
“Most of my friends — and they get worse than me — they don’t say anything. They say, ‘We just keep quiet. We’ll stay home.’ Just, you know? Be safe. I don’t feel that way. If I stay home and they tell me to go home, where do I go?” Nguyen said.
“I live in Fountain Valley and I walk [in Fountain Valley Sports Park] every day. That’s not fair for me when they talk to me. It hurts my feelings and it’s not right.”
So she, with the help of her son Tam Nguyen and his friend Ted Nguyen — no relation — organized a picnic in the same park to bring together other victims of anti-Asian rhetoric in a show of solidarity. Among them was Jackie Vu, a 32-year-old veteran whose family owns a nail salon in Riverside.
Vu said she was born and raised in Riverside, but was the recipient of a letter that told her to leave the country because she was Asian American. The worst part of it, she said, was that she couldn’t keep its contents from her mother because she understood every word of it.
“It’s stuff I always try to protect my mom from,” Vu said. “Growing up here as officially [a] second [generation], it really makes a difference on how you have to tightrope your culture and American culture. It just hurt. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, these are words I never want my mom to ever hear.’ It’s one thing to be called certain things in passing. Everybody says things. It’s not OK, but people say it.”
“But it’s written in paper ... it hurts. Having to deal with that and having to explain it in a time and space where we shouldn’t even have to be dealing with it” is painful, Vu said.
Tracy Pham said she and her boys were on the receiving end of an incident a few years ago in Huntington Beach.
She and her two children were crossing the street when a truck drove by, yelling something that Pham didn’t hear before the man sitting in the passenger’s seat threw a soda at them.
Pham said the drink didn’t hit them and she hopes her children don’t remember what happened, but it was disheartening to know that this could happen where she lived, though she’s aware of the city’s racist history.
Pham said her two sons don’t really understand why they could be targeted for being Asian American — a fact that she credits to the immediate diversity of her cul-de-sac and to Orange County at large.
Orange County has the third-largest Asian American population in the country.
Attendees also reflected on the recent mass shooting that took place in Orange, just half an hour away. Four were killed Wednesday evening.
Still, the focus of the picnic was not only to have victims meet, but to have something positive come of it — Kien Nguyen said she spent some of her savings on hiring a skywriter to say “No hate.”
She, Vu and Pham said they aren’t afraid or feel less safe.
“They want to push your buttons and hopefully you’ll move away. But this is my home. I’m not going anywhere. You can push me all you want, but I own a home here. I pay taxes. I have a job in this city, this town. I’m not going anywhere, no matter how bad you treat me,” Pham said.
“If anything, I’m going to be a good citizen and I’m going to give back to this community whether they like it or not.”
Nguyen writes for Times Community News.
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