I am not a virus

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has caused many people to be in a state of fear and uncertainty. While there are those that fear the virus, there are also those that fear for their lives. Those that fear for their lives are not because of the virus, but because of the amount of racial attacks against them. A large amount of the Asian population, in many countries, are being threatened, beaten, and treated like non-human beings because they are being targeted as “the cause of the coronavirus.”

This came about when news started spreading of the virus originating from Wuhan, China. With news from the media, it seems that many viewers are missing the key factor that not everyone who had the virus in Wuhan was Asian, or more specifically, Chinese. Due to fear, many people have started to release their inner hatred.

These racial attacks against Asians all had a common saying, “You’re Chinese. You have corona.” Unfortunately, people who have been saying these horrific words were attacking people who weren’t even Chinese. People have become xenophobic. I am Vietnamese but there are people who have looked at me as Chinese because of their fear and ignorance. I truly feel horrible and scared for the entire Asian community because there are people who refuse to acknowledge that not all Asians are the same, but more importantly, that someone’s ethnicity is not connected to a virus.

This is what inspired me to create my final project. As I sit in fear, waiting to be released from quarantine, wanting to walk outside without the fear of being beaten, there is always news of Asians being hurt. The more news there is, the more I cower in fear.

I also gained inspiration from Ta-Nehisi’s work Between The World and Me. His message to his son explaining the wrongs of the world and conveying it in a way that makes people understand what he and others had to endure is what I also wanted to convey, but through images. A sentence that really helped create my project was on page 13. It reads, “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease” (Ta-Nehisi 13). Although it spoke about being black, the sentence resonated with me because it could also be adjusted into how being Asian is today. From my point of view, the sentence means that before all the violence and mistreatment, being black in Baltimore was a time where there were less to no violence and mistreatment. It is similar to how I view being Asian around the world now. Being Asian means to live in a world where there was less mistreatment, at least not as widely spread in the media, before all the hate crimes that are occurring during this pandemic.

Overall, a disease and, or, an illness, is never related to a specific race. We, as people, have brought this disease upon ourselves for lack of proper hygiene and for lack of social distancing, to those who failed to practice it. While there is hope that we may return to society, it will never be the same that it once was.