Orange County Supervisors Reflect On Rise in Asian Prejudice

SANTA ANA, CA — On a walk home from practice while in high school one evening, Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Andrew Do said the neighborhood bullies came at him again.

This time it was worse than usual.

"I was strangled by my fellow high school students and I thought I was going to die," Do said Friday. "And then after I was let go and went home, we decided as a family that all of the boys -- instead of playing after- school sports -- we would sign up for karate to learn self-defense instead."

Do, a refugee from Vietnam, came to Orange County in 1976. He told City News Service that he has seen the ups and downs of prejudice against Asians in the county since then, as he reflected on the rash of anti-Asian hate incidents since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"When I first started living here in Orange County, my brothers and I were picked on and beat up a lot," Do said. "I decided to quit playing high school sports because I didn't want to walk home after practice when I was alone, especially in the dark."

Some of the racism he has experienced has been subtle, too. He said he has felt it while dining out.

"We would walk in and sit there a good 10 or 15 minutes before we get water and another 10 or 15 minutes before even being asked what we want or anything like that," Do said. "Meanwhile, you can see them serving people all around you, the reluctance to make eye contact, for instance. Or if we go out and there's a white person in the booth with us, that person will be talked to and they're friendly and the rest of us will be incidental to that."

Do said he was reluctant to chalk up incidents like that directly to racism, but he acknowledged that they would be hard to explain away without considering his race.

Do recalled another time when his 17-year-old daughter was cited for accidentally activating the high beams on the car she was driving in Tustin. It happened when his daughter took the wheel from Do's wife, Orange County Superior Court Judge Cheri Pham.

"Tustin police pulled her over and cited her for a moving violation with the high beams on," Do said. "She had just gotten her license, maybe for 30 days, so when you stop someone and see here's a young person, obviously a girl who is 17 and just got her license -- how many white girls would have been cited in that situation? How do you explain that?"

Do also recalled another "humiliation" when he was pulled over as a law student.

"In the late '80s if you were an Asian male, you would get stopped," Do said. "Not only will they treat you like a traffic stop, but they will order you out and toss your car. The assumption was if you were an Asian man, you were in a gang. This happened to me when I was in law school."
He recalled being ordered out of his car and told to sit on a curb with his feet crossed and his hands in the pockets "like a criminal."

"Think of the humiliation that comes with a simple traffic stop," he said.

But Do said every ethnic group engages in some sort of prejudice. He pointed out that he volunteered at a Garden Grove church because there was a focus on Amerasian children. "And why did I choose that? Because I felt Vietnamese people were very intolerant of mixed-race kids to the point of being abusive and cruel, so, believe me, racism is not being perceived by me to only one particular race. It happens everywhere."

Do and fellow Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, who is of Japanese descent, are planning Tuesday to sponsor resolutions to condemn racism against Asians and Pacific Islanders and to take what Do characterized as "concrete actions" to "address inequities due to racially impacted policies."

Bartlett told CNS her resolution "touches on the whole anti-Asian sentiment that's out there and how it's truly unwarranted, and also touching on hate crimes in general, whether it's against the Asian community or African Americans or anyone else."

Bartlett was born and raised in Orange County and she said she has also seen the ups and downs of bigotry against Asians, but that it has heightened with the pandemic, which experts suspect originated in China.

"For a period of time things were up and down a bit, but it was settling down to some extent" before the pandemic, Bartlett said. "Everything seems to have risen back up to the surface again, unfortunately."

Bartlett, Do and former Supervisor Michelle Steel, who was recently elected to Congress and is of Korean descent, have been confronted with it often at board meetings. Some public speakers have insulted them with racially tinged remarks that have often taken the form of a resident declaring that the Asian members of the board do not understand American values.

"I know that people are frustrated at the fallout to COVID-19 ... But there are appropriate ways to vent and inappropriate ways to vent and show their frustration," Bartlett said. "But we're just as American as everyone else who was born in America."

Do recalled how one public speaker made an insulting homophobic crack about the bow tie he was wearing at a board meeting.

"That type of language would never be used against anyone else," Do said. "And then there are those comments about the three Asian-Americans on the board not knowing American values and we don't understand the law, even though I'm a lawyer and married to a judge."

One gadfly even purposefully mispronounces Do's name at each meeting to insult the supervisor.

Do believes the spate of Asian prejudice was exacerbated by repeated references to COVID-19 as the "China virus" and other insulting terms such as "Kung Flu."

Do added that "false statements about the origin of the coronavirus in California also did not help."

"I think it started even before the `China virus,"' Do said. "My perception is that things got a lot worse over the last four years. I began to feel a higher level of racial intolerance that started four years ago and then as the rhetoric increased to use expressions like `go back to where you come from' and denigrating other nations, other heritages. That's when I feel that the racism became legitimized and took a stronger foothold in our society."

Don Han, director of operations for the Orange County Human Relations Council, said the organization logged 40 hate incidents directed at Asian victims in 2020, compared to about four annually in the previous three years.

"It started back in January 2020, and as an agency we started noticing there's a rising trend toward this group," Han said. "We said we should pay attention to this for the whole year and we continued to do that."

The agency has been collaborating with Stop Asian Hate and other organizations to address the bigotry. On Thursday night, the council held a "community circle" meeting with about 80 residents and Han was encouraged by the feedback and offers of help.

— By Paul Anderson, City News Service