Asian Students Under Assault
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Asian students find themselves under continuous assault in Philadelphia.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the hormone-charged racially-aware atmosphere of high school but a feature I read this week about the anti-Asian hate in a Philadelphia-area high school struck closer to home than I would have liked. It’s not that I grew up in such a volatile setting. If anything, I grew up in a much nicer, much more compliant neighborhood. The one similarity is that I had always felt like I stuck out and the difference being that my peers were not ignorant enough to rashly act out on their fear of the unknown.

At the South Philadelphia-area high school, recent Asian immigrants, just as they would have anywhere else, struggled to learn English. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. As an English major, I know that English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. A hodgepodge of multiple languages, English has so many rules with exceptions that you never really know whether or not a certain construction is correct. For recent immigrants, English as a Second Language classes are required and a comfortable place for them to transition to America without too much of a culture shock. It is a a safe place but in Philadelphia, it’s become a safe haven; a sanctuary to avoid victimization and wanton violence.

With seemingly random acts of violence being enacted on the Asian immigrant population, I can only wonder what steps are being taken to remedy this problem. When an Asian student is deliberately skipping and taking unexcused absences detrimental to their grades in order to avoid needless confrontation, you know something is most definitely wrong. The article spoke of “rumbles” where large groups fought and surrounded small groups of Asian students. It spoke of students that tried to take in as much of the prejudice as they could, but forced to fight back when it got to be too much. It spoke of students that are so sick of the situation that they’re fighting to the limit, every year one fight removed from completely getting kicked out of the school.

I’m not sure how I would handle the situation. I’m not sure if I’d just suck it up and try to avoid confrontation. Maybe I would be a fighter. Violence begets violence. There’s something wrong with the system if something like this can happen so easily for so long a period of time. Hopefully the recent media exposure helps along the process of establishing a comfortable learning community for a growing population. You can’t say so for sure though, so big ups to the students championing for their own rights in the face of an aloof system.