“I’m afraid to sneeze or cough in class because I’m Chinese,” said my adopted daughter Lucy, counting the cost to American race relations of China’s novel coronavirus.
Lucy and her sister Grace, also born in China, had come home to Chicago from their universities in the US Midwest so that we could celebrate the lunar new year as a family, just as we did when they were growing up in China. But as we got ready to go out for a festive meal, my girls were less focused on their “red envelopes” (new year cash from parents to kids) and more transfixed by a TikTok video that had gone viral of an Asian woman eating a bat, the animal blamed as the source of the virus.
That video, it turns out, wasn’t even shot in China but the damage has been done: there’s been an outbreak of anti-Chinese memes on social media. My girls say they feel blamed for the virus, purely because of their ancestry. “It’s become an excuse for anti-Chinese rants about the weird foods that Chinese people eat,” Lucy said.