ATLANTA — Filmmakers Gina Kim and Titi Yu watched with increasing horror as Asian American hate crimes spiked in 2020 into 2021 after the pandemic began, with many people blaming China for the start of COVID-19 and extending that to people of all Asian descent in America.
Then on March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long went to three spas in two different cities in metro Atlanta and killed eight people including six women of Asian descent. Many in the Asian American community in Atlanta banded together to hold rallies and support the victims’ families as well as counteract narratives from people like a Cherokee County police officer who showed empathy for the protagonist.
“We thought March 16 was an inflection point for Asian Americans finding their voice,” Kim said, though she noted that the groundwork had already been set by Asian American activists to galvanize people into action. In Georgia, a group called Atlanta Korean American Committee Against Asian Hate quickly formed. U.S. Congress that summer passed legislation designed to more forcefully investigate hate crimes.
The result is a documentary for PBS that comes out Monday at 9 p.m. ET on PBS called “Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day in March.”
The filmmakers spent months on the ground in Atlanta interviewing everyone from reporter Janice Yu, who reported on the story for Fox 5 (WAGA-TV) at the time, to Stephanie Cho, who ran Asian Americans Advancing Justice at the time, to B.J. Pak, a Korean American attorney who represented some of the victims’ families.
The grief of many of the interview subjects were feeling remained raw months later. Yu said many broke down on camera.
“It was so personal for all of us,” Yu said. “I felt like in a way they were surrogates for what the larger community was feeling at the time... It was almost cathartic to have them express such deeply felt emotions.”
Victoria Huynh, senior vice president at the Center for Pan Asian Services, in the documentary dabbed tears from her eyes as she spoke: ““You’re in a state of shock. This can’t be in Atlanta. I think it was in the middle of the night and I’m just laying there and I started crying. You see this happening in your own community... I see my own mom. She’s in the nail business.. The women we know now, their ages and their stories. They’re people like my mom.”
Sarah Park, a Gwinnett County Asian American activist, was still processing her emotions when the documentarians talked to her. “I don’t want to feel weak because we work so hard collectively,” she said tearfully.
One of the documentary’s emotional ballasts is Robert Peterson, whose mother Yong Ae Yue died that day.
“We had multiple conversations with him,” Kim said, and it took time for the documentarians to get him to cooperate after he had already done so many interviews. But once they had him on camera, he provided them cogent context for what happened.
“We really appreciated his candidness,” Yu noted.
“He was so broken and devastated,” Kim said. “I can’t imagine having to go through that and have it replayed again and again on the news.”
As for the crime itself, Peterson said in the film, “I felt it’s an example, a symbol of what the small microaggressions and racism toward Asians could lead to.”
He later noted: “It’s hard to live in my mother’s house, seeing those memories, knowing she should have been home that day and expected to come home that day.”
Much to his frustration, the FBI chose not to call this a hate crime, saying it wasn’t racially motivated. Pak in the doc noted that identifying anti-Asian hate crimes can be difficult given the lack of a pervasive hate symbol like a noose for Blacks or a Nazi symbol for Jews. The perpetrator blamed sex addition but he chose not to shoot up random strip clubs but specifically Asian-owned spas in two different counties.
Even without the hate crime designation, the prosecutors in Cherokee County in July 2021 negotiated a plea deal with Long, who received four consecutive life sentences for the murders that happened there. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is seeking the death penalty for Long’s two shootings in Atlanta that left four others dead, setting the stage for what could be a lengthy, high-profile trial.
Nonetheless, the filmmakers felt this was an important subject to address at a national level. They cited a recent study released by Leading Asian Americans United for Change and The Asian American Foundation, that showed 20% of Americans said Asians were at least partly responsible for COVID-19, up from 11% a year earlier.
‘”As Asian American filmmakers, we want to be able to tell our own stories,” Kim said. “That was important for me and for my son’s generation and future generations. This will be a history lesson for them. Atlanta is a microcosm of what is happening across the country.”
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IF YOU WATCH
“Rising Against Asian Hate,” 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 17, on PBS
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