Xiao Zhen Xie San Francisco Asian woman, 76, attacked by man in his 30s, defends herself, blooding the man and sending him to hospital in latest episode of anti Asian hate crime.
‘This bum, he hit me.’ Those are the words a 76-year-old Asian woman defiantly uttered after beating back a man who attacked her along the streets of San Francisco, leaving her much younger assailant bloodied and taken to hospital.
Xiao Zhen Xie became the latest victim in a surge of attacks on Asians in the Bay Area when the man, who appeared to be in his 30s, punched her in the face with no provocation as she stood on a sidewalk Wednesday morning, KPIX 5 reported.
Video posted on Twitter shows the battered woman holding an ice pack to her black eye and wielding a stick she apparently used against the man, seen handcuffed to a stretcher.
The elderly woman who was left with two black eyes, discussed her ordeal from her senior retirement home in San Francisco, with her daughter Dong-Mei Li interpreting.
Xie said she was ‘just waiting at a traffic light’ when the un-named suspect suddenly punched her by her left eye.
Just came upon an attack on an elderly Asian woman on Market Street San Francisco. Effort I got more details pic.twitter.com/5o8r0eeHE2
— Dennis O’Donnell (@DennisKPIX) March 17, 2021
‘You bum! Why did you hit me?’
‘Very traumatized, very scared and this eye is still bleeding,’ Li told KPIX 5. ‘The right eye still cannot see anything and still bleeding and we have something to absorb the bleeding.’
Xie, who has lived in the city for 26 years, said her immediate instinct was to fight back when she was attacked while waiting at a traffic light at Market Street and Charles J. Brenham Place around 10:30 a.m.
‘She found the stick around the area and fought back,’ Li said, adding that her mom still can’t see out of her left eye and has not managed to eat after the senseless crime.
‘As you can see, she is extremely terrified,’ Xie’s grandson John Chen told KPIX 5. ‘She’s terrified to even step out.’
O’Donnell, the KPIX 5 sports director, shot video of the chaotic scene when he walked by.
‘You bum! Why did you hit me?’ Xie yelled in Chinese to her assailant as he laid on a stretcher according to captured video.
‘This bum, he hit me,’ she told the assembled crowd as she raised the stick and sobbed. ‘He hit me — this bum!’
Asian hate crime
Police did not disclose a motive for the aggravated assault and it was unclear whether the victim’s race had anything to do with the incident, which comes amid a spike in anti-Asian attacks in the US.
A GoFundMe account set up to help with medical expenses by Thursday afternoon had raised, $309,963 raised of a $50,000.
The episode occurred a day after 21-year-old Georgia man, Robert Aaron Long allegedly shot and killed eight people — including six Asia women — at three Atlanta-area spas.
San Francisco police said an 83-year-old Asian man also was a victim Wednesday morning and that an unidentified 39-year-old was being investigated for both attacks, KPIX 5 reported. Follow up reports indicated the alleged perpetrator being the same man. It remained unclear what incited the attacks as the assailant’s name for now remained unknown.
According to the social organization Stop AAPI Hate, attacks against Asian-Americans increased by 150% in 2020. The group received nearly 3,800 reports of hate crimes across the United States from March 19, 2020, to February 28, 2021, according to a national report. About 11% of the incidents involve physical assaults while verbal harassment accounted for 68% of the reports.
The uptick in violence against Asian-Americans coincided with the start of the coronavirus pandemic – which also coincided with pronounced anti Asian rhetoric, including former President Donald Trump blaming China for the contagion, seemingly as an appeal to his ‘nationalistic’ supporters as the ‘China virus.’
