When leaders call COVID-19 the “China virus,” it harkens back to decades of state-sanctioned discrimination against Asian Americans.
Danny Satow stands with her grandfather, Eisaku "Ace" Hiromura, who served in a Japanese American combat unit in World War II, and her grandmother, Haruka "Alice" Kikuchi, who spent the war imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in California. Satow, a physician assistant in Washington state, was walking home in April when someone threw a full water bottle at her and called her a racist slur. The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the racism against Asians in America that continues today.
Danny Satow was walking home from a stroll around her neighborhood in Federal Way, a suburb just south of Seattle, when a heavy object slammed into her chest. A car whizzed by and a disembodied voice yelled a racial slur against Chinese people. The car melted into the rush of traffic, and Danny leaned over to pick up the liter of water that had hit her. Her collarbone stung, but she told herself it didn’t matter, she was fine. She stood still on the sidewalk and tried to channel her grandmother.
Growing up in New York, Danny rarely felt bigotry because of her Japanese heritage. But in the house she shared with her grandparents in Brooklyn, the past engulfed her imagination.