A slap followed by a flurry of punches, all to the face of an Asian man being held from behind, as seen in a viral video on Twitter shared by Asian Crime Report on May 30.

The incident took place in Fulton Street station in Manhattan, New York City, on May 27. The person who shot the video claimed in the New York Post that the violence was actually vigilante justice, as he was told the Asian man tried to sexually assault a woman on a train.

The Asian man, who ended up with a swollen jaw and bruises to the head, rejected the accusations in an interview with the Daily Mail. The 42-year-old married father, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that he was held against his will and had no idea why he was attacked.

"I don't want people to see me like I'm an animal, like I'm a savage. I'm not!" the man told the Daily Mail.

The New York Police Department is still investigating the details of the attack, but said that no allegations of a related sexual assault were received.

Acts of violence against Asian Americans are not new. On March 16, 2021, a white man killed six women of Asian descent in a shooting spree at three Atlanta spas. On March 14 this year, a 67-year-old Asian woman was knocked down, punched, stomped and spit on by a Black man in Yonkers, New York. On April 12, a 79-year-old Asian man suffered first and second degree burns over his back and neck after a man set his shirt on fire in Honolulu's Chinatown. On April 24, another elderly Asian woman, 69, was randomly punched by a man as she was crossing the street in Manhattan.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the anti-Asian sentiment has continued to grow in the U.S. The number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the country jumped by 339 percent in 2021, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. Nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents were reported in the U.S. between March 19, 2020 and February 28, 2021, data from the Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Hate coalition shows. Thirty-six percent of Asian Americans have changed their daily routine due to concern over being threatened or attacked because of their race, according to a survey by Pew Research Center.

Behind the hatred

Shirley Ng, a Chinese American who grew up in New York City's Chinatown Manhattan, said former President Donald Trump's racist rhetoric toward Asians directed lots of hate toward the Asian American community. Racist remarks that blamed China for the COVID-19 pandemic have made many Asian American businesses and individuals targets of anti-Asian hate crimes, Ng said.

In a survey conducted by Pew in April, 2021, one in five Asian American respondents attributed the increasing violence against their people to Trump. Statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also show there was a 73 percent rise in hate crimes against Asians in 2020, compared to 8 percent in the previous year.

To Ng, Trump's rhetoric added fuel to the fire of anti-Asian sentiment. She said Asian Americans have a history of being "scapegoats," and have long been neglected by their own country. Ng is a staff writer at AsAmNews, a volunteer-run news site that covers the AAPI communities, which she said are ignored in mainstream media. Asian American communities rarely get reported on in mainstream news "unless there's a murder, a fire, a bank robbery or some kind of vandalism," she said.

Growing up learning about the British colonization of the Americas, Ng did not study the history of her people until college, and even then, what she learned was still "bits and pieces." Decades of neglect on the history of Asian Americans have made them seem "invisible" to the rest of America, Ng told CGTN.

The forgotten history

In fact, Asian immigration to North America started as early as the 16th century, and expanded in scale in the mid-19th century when large numbers of East Asians came to Hawaii and America's west coast to find jobs during the Gold Rush.

The Asian laborers worked in the mining industry and later on the construction of the Pacific Railroad – the first railroads that connected the coasts of the U.S. – but were hardly acknowledged for their contributions in nation-building. Instead, the plight of discrimination loomed over them and generations of their descendants.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first and only law implemented in the U.S. to ban entry of a people by race. In 1941, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast were put in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 2001, hate crimes against people of Arab and South Asian descent spiked in the U.S. following the September 11 attacks.

Lok Siu, associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said Asian Americans have always been seen as "perpetually foreign," even though they have settled in America for generations. She believes this underlying discrimination toward Asian Americans manifests at times of rising political tension as racially motivated violence.

"When we have moments where the U.S. is tied in a struggle with an Asian country, the struggles are also then played out in a national terrain. Asian Americans are then linked to Asians, and whatever discourse or tensions between U.S. and different countries in Asia are also played out among Asian Americans," Siu told CGTN's The Heat.

What can be done?

To combat rising hate violence, 48 percent of Asian Americans believe strengthening laws against hate crimes is the first and foremost task, a survey by Pew suggests. Creating community watch programs and increasing police presence came second and third in the survey.

Hate crime laws in the U.S. are "inconsistent" and "flawed," for the lack of unity in response across federal and state laws hinders their effectiveness, according to a report by the Movement Advancement Project, a non-profit organization in the U.S. that advocates for equality. A victim may receive widely different levels of protection depending on which state the hate crime occurs in.

Aside from hate crime laws at the federal level, 46 states have their own. Among them, 18 states require law enforcement to train on identifying and responding to hate crimes. Only nine states provide resources and legal protections to hate crime victims. Improving law enforcement training is "imperative" in addressing hate crimes in the U.S., the report says, as "the effectiveness of hate crime laws will depend on law enforcement's treatment of and accountability to vulnerable communities."

As an active volunteer in her community, Ng stressed the need to raise awareness of the importance of reporting. She said most Asian Americans, and cited her parents as an example, tend to avoid trouble and "mind their own business." She joined in a grassroots movement to encourage victims and bystanders to report hate crimes, putting posters out in the community to spread the message.

"If it doesn't get reported, it's not documented...and it makes the community look like it's always safe, and that's not true," Ng said.

To curb the tide of anti-Asian hate and not let history repeat itself, another key step to prevent bias-motivated violence is through education, Siu said. She said it is important for the suffering and contributions of Asian Americans to be represented in textbooks, which is currently lacking.

As of now, Asian American and Pacific Islander history is not required to be taught in public schools in the U.S. Among 50 states, only Illinois and New Jersey have passed legislation to include Asian American history in the curriculum starting in the 2022-2023 school year.

"Unless we come to understand and grapple with that history, we won't be able to move away from it," Siu said.