How It Feels to Be a Problem

Photo credit: Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash

For being an Asian-American who has lived in many places as one of the “outsiders,” (including Asia and America, I might add) I’ve experienced my relatively small share (thankfully, I guess?) of conscious racist incidents over the years.

But my own personal COVID-19 story started when I began facing disconcerting bouts of implicit discrimination related to the virus.

I teach at a university in Colombia where, a few days after the first case of COVID-19 arrived in the country, a student reported me to the administration for allegedly coming to class sick and coughing. Did I cough? Well, yes. Sometimes your throat gets dry when you’ve been lecturing for hours on end. Was I sick? No. But that apparently didn’t matter to the administration, who told me to stay at home without bothering to ask. I would have been happy to oblige if all of my colleagues had been asked to do the same, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the request, as I am the only professor of Asian descent at the entire university, and the only one, as far as I know (and I asked everyone I knew), who was asked to stay off campus.

A poll by by Cifras y Conceptos in Colombia published in April of 2020 asks: “Of the following groups of people, who would you NOT like to be neighbors with?” Venezuelans top the list at 69%, and Asians who come from China come in second place at 42%. [It should be noted that most Colombians do not differentiate between Chinese and other East and Southeast Asian people.]