She’s been in Yolo County for years. Then COVID hit — and the anti-Asian racism started
It’s a terrible thing when you don’t feel safe in your community. It’s even worse when you fear your fellow residents. It’s worse still when your fear of fellow residents is based on their hatred of who you are, how you look, where your ancestors came from.
This is what it’s like to be Asian American in the U.S right now. This is what it’s like to be Asian American in the Sacramento region right now.
This is what it’s like to be Lisa Yep Salinas, who is Chinese American and has lived in the Sacramento region for 30 years. She’s been cursed and physically accosted numerous times in the last year by people blaming her for COVID-19.
“I’ve never felt targeted for being Asian until COVID-19,” said Yep Salinas, 56.
“I’m a mother, a grandmother, a former teacher,” said Yep Salinas, who now lives in Yolo County.
“Everyone has a mother. You don’t want to beat up mothers.”
Yep Salinas says she has felt beaten up emotionally in the wake of six separate incidents – five at local supermarkets and one at her gym – when women cursed her Chinese heritage and blamed her for COVID-19. She is married to Jesse Salinas, the Yolo County Assessor. Her family is a fixture in Yolo County and so she had a realization: If she could be targeted with her strong support system, imagine what could happen to Asian Americans who don’t have a voice, a support system, the ability to speak out.
No matter who she was or how well off her family was, she was attacked because of her race, a terrible realization for anyone.
One attack last June was particularly disturbing, she said.
“I was going through Costco when a lady swore at me in Spanish and called me (an anti-Asian epithet),” Yep Salinas said. “She tried to hit me with her shopping cart and I had to angle my cart to avoid her. She almost hit another family. It was crazy and what always flashes in my mind is what if it hadn’t been me? What if (the person being attacked) had been a kid? Or someone’s auntie who didn’t have the reflexes to get away?”
In this case, it was particularly hurtful to Yep Salinas that the woman targeting her was Latina because Yep Salinas is married to a Mexican American man and speaks Spanish herself.
Yep Salinas said she has been cursed at by Latinas and white women. The longer COVID-19 shutdowns lasted, the more intense and damaging the attacks became. The first incident was last March, when she said two women – a white woman and a Latina – tried to stop her from swimming in the pool at her gym.
“They were telling me I couldn’t get in the pool,” she said. “The color of my money is green too. I told them to stop bullying me.”
In that case, Yep Salinas reported the incident to the management of her gym and she felt that the situation was handled.
More anti-Asian incidents
But the incidents continued. A simple errand in May to buy eggs resulted in her being cursed and blamed again for COVID-19. “It wasn’t a Karen,” Yep Salinas said. “It was Karen’s mom. She was an older white lady.”
In September, a white woman tried to block Yep Salinas with her shopping cart. When it happened two more times in October, Yep Salinas said she was done.
“It was so surreal and at the same time traumatic,” she said. “I think this has profoundly affected me. I have to be more protective. I used to be the person who did all the shopping in the family but I can’t be that person anymore.”
For months, Yep Salinas said little about her experiences outside of her circle of family and friends. She didn’t feel safe in her own community and the most routine tasks of life seemed dangerous.
When she posted some of her experiences in a Facebook chat with high school friends, she was surprised when one told her that she was a nice person but that he didn’t believe her.
“A lot of my friends responded to him, telling him this is real,” she said.
These incidents are real and they are rooted in California history, both ancient and recent. What triggers anti-Asian racism is not always specific, but it is today.
Yep Salinas was born in Indiana and grew up in Palo Alto. She has a degree in biology from UC Santa Cruz. She is an American, as is her husband and her children. Her connection to China is purely ancestral but – as history has shown – having Asian features can be and has been dangerous in times of great societal upheaval.
Sacramento Congresswoman Doris Matsui was born in a World War II internment camp, where thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and imprisoned after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. Their crime: “Looking” Japanese and being suspected of sympathizing with the enemy.
Chinese laborers of the 19th and 20th Century were horribly mistreated and abused by racist laws, housing covenants, caricatures and violence in California . And now, since COVID-19, anti-Asian incidents are spiking across America.
Earlier this month in San Francisco, an 84-year-old Thai man was killed when an assailant violently shoved him to the ground. Video of the incident is horrifying: Vicha Ratanapakdee was simply walking down the street when a young man runs toward him for no apparent reason and shoves him to the ground. Police arrested a suspect named Antoine Watson, 19.
By the time of the San Francisco incident, Yep Salinas had decided she couldn’t stay quiet any longer. After President Joe Biden signed a memorandum condemning intolerance toward Asian Americans, Yep Salinas began sharing her incident with elected officials in Yolo County.
Last week, the Woodland City Council passed a resolution in support of equal treatment for Asian Americans. The Yolo County Board of Supervisors were poised to pass their own resolution this week. And the cities of Davis and West Sacramento may follow suit.
“This is not acceptable where we live,” Yep Salinas said. “Today it’s me. Tomorrow it could be another target.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 10:39 AM.
