Asian Americans in Atlanta fear for their safety after spa shootings

Angela Jiang was getting ready to go to sleep when she received a text message around midnight Tuesday from a community leader she used to work with at a local Asian American advocacy group in Atlanta, asking her to join a call the next morning about shootings that were happening in the area.

This was the first Jiang had heard about any shootings, but she knew right away that whatever was happening must be affecting the Asian American community. The 24-year-old, who grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Gwinnett County and now lives in the city, began searching online for more information and quickly realized that some of the shootings had taken place at spas just five minutes from where she lives.

Not only had people been killed right in her own neighborhood, at businesses she passes by regularly, but as Jiang continued combing through the initial news reports, it became clear that “the majority of the victims were Asian women.”

“I just remember crying myself to sleep that night,” Jiang told Yahoo News.

For the next couple of days, Jiang said, she felt “very depressed, but also just unsafe” and afraid to leave her house. Walks around the neighborhood had been a cherished part of her daily work-from-home routine, but now she found herself debating if she should go out at all.

This sense of insecurity wasn’t new. Over the past year, as racially charged rhetoric about the origins of the coronavirus have triggered rising reports of discrimination, harassment and violent attacks against Asian Americans around the country, Jiang said she has become increasingly aware of her identity as an Asian woman — and the particular dangers she faces because of it.

Those feelings, Jiang said, were “definitely exacerbated by the shootings,” which left eight people, six of them Asian women, dead at three different spas in the Atlanta area.

She’s not alone. Yahoo News spoke to a number of members of Atlanta’s Asian American community, most of them women, who said that they too are on high alert in the aftermath of Tuesday’s deadly rampage.