I started planning this piece back in May of 2020, when I saw the news that an 84-year-old elderly Asian woman was jump kicked in the face by teens at a bus stop in Minnesota for absolutely no reason other than her looks. When COVID first reached the US, I was consistently seeing my Asian friends suffer from harassment because of it, whether it was from homeless people yelling slangs at them or people making slant-eyed gestures towards them.
To them, we represented the virus. Behind all the protective gear, through the masks, the gloves, they saw what was left - our eyes, and they feared, they hated.
This is not okay.
