Stop stalking me!

The resilience I’ve built up over many years can be momentarily obliterated with a few racist words

A woman verbally assaulted me and called me a slur while I was waiting for the bus at LaGuardia airport. I’d decided to take public transportation to save myself $60 cab fare and to reduce the carbon footprint I’d just left behind by flying to NYC instead of taking the train.

At the bus stop just outside the terminal, I stood where I thought was the end of a line, then quickly discerned there was no line. The amoebas group shifted and changed shape as more passengers arrived. Several minutes after the bus was scheduled to have arrived, I stepped toward the curb and craned my neck to look for it down the road.

A woman suddenly appeared from out of nowhere and shouted, “Stop stalking me! You’re following me! Every time I move, you move!”

Startled out of my inner ruminations on the logistics of getting to where I needed to go on this unfamiliar route, I slowly backed away from her and stammered, “What … huh … I wasn’t ….”

She cocked her head as she waved and said, “Byeeeee China,” then emitted a vague ching chong sound.

If she hadn’t added the racist bit to her rant, I would have shrugged it off as a funny story about stereotypical New Yorkers negotiating space in a crowded city.

The racism, the whole incident, rattled me, though. My first thought was, what had I done wrong?

The feeling of unbelonging from a lifetime of major and minor racial aggressions had conditioned me to take up as little space as possible, to shrink, to not draw attention to myself, to not demand my right to exist in the world as a human minding my own business. I’m extra polite and extra aware of my presence in public, so as never to offend, so as always to give the very best impression of people who bear an Asian face. How I got close to her enough times for her to believe I was stalking her without any awareness on my part baffled me.

Thinking you’re being followed can be a sign of mental illness, though, so I didn’t want to escalate the situation. I ignored her by staring at my phone as she wandered away.

I did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. I repeated the mantra in my head as I struggled to figure out what had happened.

My indignation grew as I watched her make jovial small talk about the bus delay with a group of White people. Once the bus arrived, I observed her politely ask another Black person for help lifting her bag and then thank them with cordial words. Mental illness had not hindered her from kindness and socially acceptable behavior to non-Asian people in the same crowd of people.

I replayed the scene in my head over and over and languished in self-doubt and insecurity for hours, then finally played only intermittently over the next few days. By the end of the weekend, I’d looked at enough art and spent enough time with dear and brilliant friends to dissipate most of the negative emotions. I reasoned, too, that people who lashed out with such venom were usually tortured by their own emotional wounds. I eventually felt some compassion for her.

No matter how much I have learned about human social psychology, though, and no matter how much self-knowledge I have gained, even a brief moment of contempt can obliterate some of the resilience and confidence I have painstakingly acquired over the years. Not too long ago, that assault would have devastated me and emotionally derailed me for days. Fortunately, I now have better coping mechanisms and much stronger social support that mitigates the harm that people can inflict. Still, she’d done some damage to my psyche and I’d wasted time and emotional energy that could have been directed toward positive things. The woman at the bus stop had harmed herself, too, and had wasted her own emotional resources.

I’d heard stories of people with Asian faces being pushed onto train tracks or their faces cut with a knife. I had not been physically injured so I was grateful for that. To not suffer physical injury at the hands of our fellow humans ought not be the best we can hope for, though. Every one of us deserves to live in a world in which we feel belonging and safe, in which we are free to achieve our potential, in which we flourish. Including the woman at the bus stop.