Only Asian American in Kansas House feels the wave of hatred in a Russell sports bar
As soon as state Rep. Rui Xu, the only Asian American serving in the Kansas House, stepped into the sports bar in Russell, Kansas, on Friday night, one of the other patrons “starts jawing at us” — menacing him, Xu said in an interview on Saturday night.
We’re printing exactly what the man said, because to do otherwise would be to sanitize the ugliness of the threat.
Xu, who is from Westwood, was in the area to do a Smoky Hills PBS show in Bunker Hill, Kansas. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, he tweeted this account: “Y’all, genuinely I’m pretty shook up right now. We got done with the PBS show at 8:00, it was a good time. I decided to grab a bite to eat and a drink at a sports bar that’s near the motel just to see what the area’s like.”
“I mean, as soon as we walked in” — he and the PBS host — “it was pretty obvious I didn’t fit in for a variety of reasons. I’m in a suit, I’m Asian, I’m the only one even pretending to wear a mask. Maybe that part’s on me.”
(Nope, it isn’t. Sure, he could have changed out of his suit, but why, when he was hungry? He was wearing a mask, though fully vaccinated, to show care for others. And he was clearly targeted for being of Asian descent, since his dinner companion, who was also wearing a mask, did not set the man off.)
“As I’m looking for a table, this dude’s just like, ‘What the FUCK are you wearing? Why the FUCK are you wearing it,’ in a very angry way. I’m pretty nonconfrontational and am just like, ‘Hey man, just a mask, just grabbing some dinner’ and walk by him and find a booth in the back.”
As he walked away, the man said, “He’s probably carrying the virus.”
Once seated, “We can kind hear him yelling behind us but just ignore it. A minute later, he comes in screaming just like, ‘Where the fuck is he? I’m gonna kick his ass.’ He’s pretty drunk I think, which is why he didn’t see me sorta hidden behind a booth. He loses interest and leaves the bar I guess, but for a few minutes there, I was really getting ready to fight or flight outta there. Especially with the Georgia story in the news, I didn’t know how this was going to go down.”
Later, the waitress apologized, another patron bought them a round of drinks, someone said the guy wasn’t even from Russell, and “good people win out in the end.”
But as Xu tweeted later that night, “I’m back in my room now and I guess all I’d ask is check in on your Asian American friends right now and see how they’re doing. I didn’t think I had internalized the Georgia murders, but this incident tonight made it clear that I had. … It’s a scary time out there for Asian Americans right now; it’s not just imaginary slights. Be safe, y’all.”
Olathe saw anti-Asian hate crime in 2018 sports bar murder
It should not have taken this incident for us to write about the fear that Asian Americans across the country are feeling right now, especially after the recent murders in Atlanta, where six of the eight people killed in massage businesses were of Asian descent and seven were women.
Anti-Asian violence has spiked in the last year, and we should have, as Xu asked all of us to do, checked in on our Asian American friends before now, to say we stand with you and against not just the violence and the overt threats, but the kind of casual racism that Xu says he’s known all his life.
“There are lots of microaggressions — getting called Bruce Lee, or hearing ‘ching chong’ ’’ and other “fake Chinese noises.” Moronic, yes, but far from harmless.
When those Dr. Seuss books were pulled by the author’s estate for their racist images, more of the conversation was about “cancel culture” than about why these images needed canceling.
“I grew up in rural Missouri, and you learn to deal with it,” Xu said, usually by laughing it off.
That’s heartbreaking, and it’s on all of us to change that.
One of the things Xu tweeted on Friday, in response to the man’s remark that he probably had the coronavirus, was, “So yeah, thanks to President Trump for all the China Virus discourse over the last year.”
And unfortunately, it wasn’t only the former president who seemed to love to say “China” like it’s a curse word, with an accent apparently thrown in for grins. An official in Manhattan, Kansas, remarked a year ago that there wasn’t a lot of COVID-19 in the state because there aren’t that many Chinese people.
When he was Trump’s secretary of state, Kansan Mike Pompeo called COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has repeatedly tried to blame China for the pandemic, which makes no more sense than blaming Kansas for the influenza epidemic that happened to start there in 1918. The state of Missouri actually sued China in federal court last year.
What Xu just experienced in a bar in Russell is the result of all of the above.
On Twitter, some people suggested that others in the bar should have stood up to the loudmouth. Xu said he’s glad that didn’t happen: “In Russell, Kansas, there’s a pretty high chance the guy was carrying,” and that might have escalated the situation.
But all of us who are bystanders to what’s aimed at Asian Americans on a regular basis do have a duty to intervene.
As the incident was playing out, what Xu was thinking about was not even so much the race-based murders in Atlanta as the race-based murder in a sports bar in Olathe in 2018. That, too, was a hate crime against Asians.
What happened in Atlanta not only could happen here, but already has.
This story was originally published March 21, 2021 at 5:00 AM.