The complex story of how the pandemic impacted the Asian American diaspora

In mid-March five years ago, President Donald Trump tweeted about the threat of a “Chinese virus.” That month marked the official beginning of a pandemic that went on longer and took a larger toll in the U.S. — on lives, the economy, mental health and our social fabric — than a naive public could anticipate. And it sparked a wave of anti-Asian racism that rhetoric like Trump’s exacerbated.

Researchers have since quantified many aspects of the pandemic’s impact, from mortality and morbidity to educational gaps and mental health metrics. UC Berkeley professors Khatharya Um and Julian Chun-Chung Chow, however, noticed that those efforts told an incomplete story.

Um, in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Chow, from the School of Social Welfare, center their scholarship on South and Southeast Asian American communities. Existing studies on COVID-19’s impact on Asian American people tended to be overbroad, describing the experiences of a community that comprises over 20 major ethnic groups as a monolith. When studies did look at specific subgroups, they tended to be limited to East Asian people or Filipino health care workers. 

But the Asian population in the U.S. includes a wide range of experiences. For instance, 22.1% of Burmese Americans live below the federal poverty line — that’s more than four times the 5.5% poverty rate among Filipino Americans — and Asian Americans’ COVID-19 mortality rates varied based on factors including their state of residence.

Data and anecdotes about the pandemic’s toll on some of the most marginalized Asian populations in the U.S., the researchers found, were scarce. Beyond being a gap in academic literature, Um said, this is a problem with tangible consequences: “If you have no political clout, you are invisible, and if you are invisible, it is assumed you have no needs or challenges.” Understanding and publicly airing those challenges, she maintained, is a necessary first step to devising solutions.

Chow and Um are helping to identify these oft-overlooked issues through new, collaborative research. Last year, the team conducted lengthy interviews and sharing sessions with more than 200 people from the Nepalese, Cambodian, Hmong, Lao and Iu Mien populations. From the beginning, the pair shaped the project, its consent forms and its outreach strategies in consultation with various nonprofit groups like the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants and the National Cambodian American Organization.

Their work exemplifies a growing brand of research known as community-engaged scholarship. This approach emphasizes collaboration with the groups being studied to ensure alignment with a community’s values, instead of extractive scenarios in which researchers might parachute in without much buy-in from or knowledge of the community and neglect follow-up once data-gathering is done.

Um said community-engaged research is growing more prevalent, especially as academia diversifies and researchers with deep connections to marginalized communities become principal investigators. Still, such studies can face additional hurdles; for instance, they can take longer than the one-year increments for which funding is commonly dispensed. “To involve community groups in many aspects of the research — from sustained collaboration to sharing the data with them — is time-intensive because it involves relationship building,” she said.

But that relationship building was necessary. “Community members see researchers come and go, and they disappear after data collection, leaving nothing meaningful,” Chow explained. Such exploitative research practices erode trust. Language barriers and fears about immigration status also pose obstacles to doing research in these communities.

Sitting in person at community centers or online on Zoom, the scholars listened to people of all ages talk about their pandemic struggles for more than an hour at a time. They’d ask about their biggest challenges, how they obtained information about COVID-19 at the start of the outbreak and their experiences of anti-Asian violence.

A pattern emerged. “These were populations that the system had failed,” Um said. Medical information about the virus, as well as the application for the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, wasn’t available in their languages until community groups took it upon themselves to translate. Hard-to-access unemployment benefits after widespread job losses led to food and housing insecurity.

In one interview, when asked about any support she’d received from the city or county, an older Cambodian woman who lived alone recounted, “Someone called once from some organization asking if I needed any food. I said yes, and the man asked what kind of food I wanted. I said rice. But I never heard from him again.”

The plight of isolated elders, in particular, stood out to Um. “We were struck by the acuteness of the [older citizens’] needs, which challenges the widely held assumption about the multigenerational support that Asian families have. That is not the case for many,” she said.

Alongside economic and language challenges, the specter of anti-Asian racism weighed on interviewees, particularly older people who relied on public transportation or walking in their daily lives. “Many were afraid to leave the house or were told by their families not to go out, so that exacerbated their isolation,” Um said. The professor, who herself is a refugee, added that the threat of violence particularly disturbed refugees who had previously experienced war or genocide.

Their preliminary policy recommendations include stronger workforce protections, as well as a better and more linguistically-inclusive health care infrastructure. One solution, Chow said, could be home care cooperatives. Populations of vulnerable elders would benefit from accessing trained health workers and service providers in their communities, who in turn would have ownership stakes in the cooperative and would have greater economic security, and above all, self-determination. 

Chow and Um continue to analyze their data, including tracking how different ethnic groups’ pandemic challenges dovetailed or diverged. Next, they plan to release a policy brief on proposed interventions to address the ongoing problems their research has identified. In keeping with the community-engaged element of the project, they’ll share findings not only with policymakers and academics, but also through events with their research participants. 

The idea of a home care cooperative takes inspiration, in part, from the aid people said community organizations, including Buddhist temples, provided during the pandemic’s acute phase. These organizations helped translate key information and supply transportation and food to those in need. As one Khmer elder put it, “If I didn’t have the Khmer Community of Seattle-King County (KCSKC) to help me, I would have turned into a fermented fish.”

In the many conversations Um and Chow conducted, the profound vulnerability of these politically “invisible” communities emerged. But other, more optimistic throughlines surfaced, too. Communities banded together to get elders groceries or encourage vaccination. 

What Um calls “the human story” of the pandemic is undeniably a narrative of neglect, suffering and alienation, but it’s also a tale of the power of collective care and mutual aid. As one interviewee said, “One of the biggest strengths we have as [a] Nepali community is to come together to help people.”