‘It Just Stays With You’: The Corrosive Health Effects Of Decades Of Anti-Asian Violence

Town Manager Lisa Wong at Winchester Town Hall. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Fear opens with the front door for Lisa Wong. It walks her down the street, and it follows her into the grocery store. Fear is a strange voice calling out from a passing car. It lurks around every corner. Fear is in her Zoom calls when she works as town manager of Winchester. That fear has a history. She recognizes it. When she looks at her own face, fear is a question written in yellow.

“Is somebody going to do something? Say something?” she wonders. “Because it does happen. It’s so common, and we see it in the news. These everyday actions become a potential setting for harm. That fear already exists, and it’s just heightened when things like this happen.”

Her fear sharpened after a white man shot and killed six Asian women and two other people inside Asian-owned spas in the Atlanta area on March 16. But it was with her long before that incident sparked a nationwide conversation about anti-Asian hate crimes.

Read the rest of the story at WBUR’s website.