LONDON — It happened when Jiye Seong-Yu, a 29-year-old Korean interpreter who lives in the Netherlands, was biking the 10 minutes home from the Monday dance class she looks forward to every week. Two men with brown hair and beards driving past her on a scooter yelled out “Chinese,” and the man sitting on the back tried to punch her.



“It was really scary because it was late, and I was alone and I was on a street where I couldn't see anyone nearby,” she said.

Seong-Yu, who lives in the Hague, was on edge already because she was biking alone past 10 p.m. She swerved when she saw the punch coming and nearly crashed her bike. The men drove away and, terrified, she rode the rest of the way home to tell her roommates what had happened and to file a police report online, which BuzzFeed News has seen.

Seong-Yu, who has a Dutch stepfather and has lived in the Netherlands for three years, had just experienced what seemingly hundreds of people of East Asian descent have reported in Europe and the United States — a racist attack in the time of coronavirus. The problem is so bad that the South Korean embassy in Germany warned its citizens about possible incidents of racial violence in a Facebook post on Feb. 3 after reports that a 23-year-old Chinese woman was beaten by two women in Berlin and hospitalized.

In France, Twitter users of Chinese descent have used the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus — meaning “I am not a virus” — to push back on racism. In the UK, a student said he was beaten up by men who yelled "I don't want your coronavirus in my country," and a 24-year-old tax consultant from Thailand was attacked and robbed by teenagers yelling “coronavirus.” In Italy, one of the countries the virus has hit the hardest, Chinese Italian activists say misinformation from anti-immigration politicians has fueled assaults on people of East Asian descent and boycotts of Chinese businesses. In the United States, Asian Americans have reported being attacked and having racial slurs yelled at them in public, and Asian American lawmakers have urged their colleagues to quell hysteria by only sharing verified information.

Seong-Yu said she was so shaken by what happened to her that she decided not to go out at night at all for a couple of weeks. What if, she thought, she coughed in public?