Julie Kang, 30, said she was first verbally assaulted in December, when coronavirus cases were just beginning to surface in China. A man walked up to her in the middle of downtown San Diego, got in her face, and called her racial slurs. It took a moment for her to register what happened, she said, and she tried to shrug it off.
A few weeks later, a man in a walker lunged at her while she was walking down the street and also spewed a racial slur, Kang said. The man cackled as he walked away, leaving her shocked and angered.
Then on March 9 — the day San Diego confirmed its first Covid-19 patient — the aggression against her escalated. As she was walking toward her car, she said, a woman yelled a chilling threat: “Go back to China or I’ll shoot you myself!”
“I haven’t been harassed for my race for years and years. It’s been a really long time so it felt like it came out of nowhere,” she told me. “This last one made me a little bit angrier because of how these people were making me feel. They were making me feel small,” she said. “I felt unsafe, even in my own community where I walk every single day.”
Article submitted by, Great Gazoo.
