On Jan. 7, the World Health Organization (WHO) identified a nearly inexplicable cause of a growing number of people with infections in the province of Wuhan in China as 2019-nCoV, or the novel coronavirus.
Along with this crisis came public outcry expressed in the form of xenophobic statements condemning the Chinese for spreading the virus. Suddenly, people around the world began making baseless, racially tainted accusations from a deepening well of ignorance, blaming anyone who looks Chinese as the cause of the virus.
In France, the publication Courrier Picard headlined “Yellow Alert” and “New Yellow Peril?” alongside an image of a Chinese woman in a face mask. In a University of California, Berkeley, Instagram account, a post calms its audience, claiming that it’s normal to feel anger and xenophobia toward the Chinese due to the virus. Restaurants worldwide are putting up signs saying “No Chinese Allowed.”
However, perhaps the worst and most pervasive of all: tweets and memes on social media describing 2019-nCoV as a Chinese “degeneracy-created virus” with one user announcing they are ready to “beat up any chink [they] see.”
In this digital age, you can easily find yourself caught in an online echo chamber of xenophobia as racist jokes, blame, and derogatory statements reverberate around you. You may even find yourself internalizing such views—feeling spiteful toward the Chinese for being different, eating exotic foods and thus provoking mass hysteria and global peril.
But let me tell you that these are feelings you must rethink.
Stories
I would like to retell a few stories from China that have been shared online.
Du Hongli’s father is a Korean war veteran. After not being admitted into a hospital for a severe lung infection and hypoxemia, his father noted the irony of being able to survive the battlefield but dying from “bad management of health care resources.”
A grandma from a Wuhan neighborhood noted symptoms of a fever. Because she could not get tested at a hospital, her doctor placed her under quarantine at home. Stricken by the fear that she might infect her family, she jumped off a building.
Helen Chen, a foreign university student, returned home to visit her family for the Chinese New Year. In addition to not being able to return to school, she fears that her family and other Wuhan citizens will face food shortages and lose their modes of transport as many supermarket shelves are already empty and vehicles are prohibited on the roads. She and many others have become indirect victims of the coronavirus.
Chen acknowledges the “unsung heroes” of the crisis, listing the doctors and nurses who “haven’t gone home in weeks,” the voluntary health care professionals from China, factory workers who continue to work in order to produce masks and protective suits, hotels providing free accommodations to health care professionals who live too far away, “chain convenience stores providing free hot meals to hospitals and workers,” delivery men sacrificing their holidays to provide food to those who are unable to leave their homes, and construction workers toiling to build new hospitals.
It seems that while the rest of the world is busy discriminating, criticizing and blaming each other, the citizens of Wuhan are coming together to fight the virus. It’s a testament to the inherent unity in joint suffering.
Not only are feelings of resentment toward an entire race excusatory, hastily generalized and hypocritical, they are also counterproductive in a time when compassion, empathy and collaboration are needed most.
My greatest hope for the new decade is that people will realize the futility and harm in xenophobically scapegoating a race—the Chinese account for over a seventh of the entire planet’s population. Instead, let’s work together as the citizens of Wuhan are doing now.
This is not the first time in history that racism has plagued society, but perhaps it can become one of the last. —CONTRIBUTED