On my walks through pre-pandemic Shanghai in late September 2019, around every corner I stumbled upon everyday scenes of older people’s integration into the fabric of the city and community life.
People with full heads of gray hair rode bikes and sat in front of storefronts, chatting with neighbors and eating meals from large metal bowls. An old woman whizzed by in a motorized wheelchair alongside scooters in the street. At Fuxing Park, grandpas tended to grandchildren and older men bounced spinning disks in a game of diabolo.
After three days of walking around Shanghai’s teeming streets, I rested my weary feet at Jing’an Sculpture Park. An old man glanced at me writing in my notebook and struck up a conversation in English. He’d studied English in the United States and wanted to know how old I thought he was. 70, I guessed. He threw his head back and smiled. 85. He lived nearby and came to the park every day.
Asian elders in America are vulnerable
Such postcards echo similar scenes in Asian neighborhoods across the United States. They remind me of older men smoking, chatting and sipping warm beverages in a plaza near San Francisco’s Japantown and a trio of elders gathered for morning calisthenics in North Beach’s Washington Square. They spark sweet memories of the elders I saw before the pandemic who danced at Portsmouth Square in Chinatown, reminding me that I’ve not danced with my hula class in a year. Many Asian American and Pacific Islander elders in my hālau modeled aging with joy, smiling as they danced through aches and pains and weathered the loss of relatives and friends.
Demonstrator on March 13, 2021, in Los Angeles. (Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP)
Public outings carry extra danger for Asian people, with a spate of recent attacks targeted against Asian elders that have resulted in racial trauma, injury, and death. In the Bay Area, viral videos showed the senseless killing of an 84-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee, thrown violently to the ground in San Francisco. Days later, another video surfaced of a 91-year-old man also shoved in Oakland’s Chinatown. Other violence against Asian elders has involved robbery, such as the ambush of a 67-year-old man in San Francisco laundromat and 75-year-old Pak Ho robbed and killed in Oakland during his morning walk last week.
Volunteer escorts have sprung up to assist Asian elders, along with other DIY community safety efforts such as hiring private armed security guards and providing shopkeepers with air horns. But they aren’t a cure-all, and public safety depends on sustained government support and commitment.
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These attacks haven’t occurred in a vacuum but have intersected with rising violence and economic insecurity. Desolate cities and empty retail spaces from businesses that haven’t survived the COVID pandemic mean fewer “eyes on the street,” increasing danger for everyone, but especially Asian elders who may be perceived as vulnerable. Decades of structural racism and community disinvestment have exacerbated the pandemic’s acute economic devastation and increasing gun violence across the country.
Russell Jeung, San Francisco State University Professor and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, has pointed to community disinvestment in areas with Asian residents, “We live in multiracial neighborhoods with high crime rates and in these neighborhoods everybody is attacked, everybody is vulnerable…on a day to day basis in these high crime neighborhoods, pretty much every racial group is a target. We need more opportunities and more resources in these under-resourced communities like mine.”
‘Bullets flying by your house’
Re-imagining community safety doesn’t mean flooding streets with police officers. It does mean investing in jobs, educational opportunities, health care and affordable housing that make healthy communities, and programs to promote public safety such as non-police community ambassador programs and violence reduction efforts targeted towards young people.
In Oakland, pandemic closures of schools and community spaces have hampered community violence prevention programs. Recently, for the first time in a year I saw teenagers doing football drills on a gleaming new field at Fremont High School, benefiting the school’s mostly Black and brown student body. I felt safer witnessing this small but important step forward.
“Even if you’re not directly impacted, having bullets flying by your house is traumatic,” says Loren Taylor, a city council member representing East Oakland. Last month I experienced this trauma during a quiet Sunday afternoon interrupted by the firecracker sound of spraying bullets across the street from my Oakland home. No one was harmed, but as I watched police officers place at least 10 yellow evidence markers near bullet casings, I worried about the Chinese grandmother who often sits with her grandson on the porch of their intergenerational home two doors down. Fortunately, she was safe.
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Racism and violence are twin public health crises that require a response as urgent as our investment in COVID vaccine development. Living in a fortress is not a solution, nor should we expect anyone to restrict their activities and movement due to fear and racism. In this tense time we mustn’t lose sight of public acts of interracial solidarity, such as rallies against anti-Asian violence. We have a collective interest in safe public spaces and communities free from racial harm.
When vandals destroyed treasured cherry blossom trees outside San Francisco’s Japanese Cultural Center in January, I reflected on how much we have already lost to hate. The community raised funds for replacements, but unless we root out the seeds of hate, we will be replanting trees and mourning lives needlessly lost for generations to come.
Stacy Torres, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at University of California, San Francisco.
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