Atlanta shootings expose fear in Asian-American community

ATLANTA: Asian-American communities were on alert Thursday after a shooting rampage that left six women of Asian origin dead and stoked fears in a population already alarmed by a surge in hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic.

Three massage parlors around Atlanta were targeted Tuesday, before a 21-year-old man suspected of the killings was arrested in southwest Georgia hours later.

"It's heartbreaking," said Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential hopeful who is running for mayor of New York.

"I've been Asian all my life, and I remember -- vividly -- growing up with this constant sense of invisibility, mockery, disdain, a sense that you cannot be American if you have an Asian face," Yang said.

"But this has metastasized into something new and deadly and virulent and hateful," he told a press conference in New York alongside the Black civil rights activist Al Sharpton.

The White House announced that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who were already scheduled to be in Atlanta on Friday, would meet Asian-American leaders to "discuss the ongoing attacks and threats against the community."

Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock, Georgia, faces eight counts of murder and one charge of aggravated assault for Tuesday's attacks, in which six of the eight people killed were women of Asian descent.

He has admitted carrying out the attacks, according to law enforcement, but claims he was not motivated by racial hatred.

FBI Director Chris Wray reiterated in an interview with public radio station NPR on Thursday that the gunman's motive was yet to be fully understood, but the shootings nevertheless struck a chord in a country where hate crimes against Asian Americans have been on the rise.

Chi-Chi Zhang, an Asian-American woman living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, described discussing race and hate crimes with her two young daughters, aged two and four.

"We started to talk about what our escape plan would be if we were to be attacked on the street," she said. "How is that a normal conversation to have with a two-year-old?"

Zhang said that for much of her life she had been taught to conform to the idea of a "model minority" but added that the concept of keeping one's head down was "the reason nobody pays attention to crimes against us."