Watters’s “scoop” is so full of wince-inducing stereotypes that the casual watcher may confuse it with a grade-school educational video about the hazards of discrimination. Fox News / Youtube

The past year has not exactly been a good one for Asian-Americans. Back during the Republican primaries, fear-mongering politicians talked about Asian immigrants and their “anchor babies” in a way that portrayed an entire race as opportunists thronging to exploit America and its resources on behalf of their offspring. After predicating his campaign on deranged anti-immigrant rhetoric, the Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, gleefully mocked the Chinese and Japanese using broken, accented English during a campaign rally in Iowa. In August, he included Filipinos on a list of potentially terrorist immigrants and said, “We’re dealing with animals.” (There were also North Africans and Middle Easterners on his list.) During the first Presidential debate, China was mentioned twelve times, mostly by Trump, as a threat and hindrance to America’s growth.

Then, on Monday night, Fox News ran a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” that Bill O’Reilly, the show’s host, called “gentle fun.” It was so relentlessly odious and flagrantly racist that if you were a Chinese immigrant, like me (I came to America when I was eight years old, and am now a citizen), you began to wonder, with a twist of dread, if prejudice had somehow become infectious. How many of my fellow-Americans were laughing at the bigotry along with O’Reilly and his perennial sidekick, Jesse Watters?

This is not the first time that Watters, a Fox News reporter with a Stifler-esque swagger who does not tend to break actual news but has repeatedly praised Trump as the “winning” guy, has targeted minority communities. Back in April, he visited Harlem, ostensibly to investigate the reasons for Hillary Clinton’s success among black voters. He ended up posing hard-hitters like “Are there any downsides to having a woman President?” “Watters’ World,” as his man-on-the-street segment is called, seems an appropriate title for a correspondent who seems insistent on inflicting himself and his world views upon hapless strangers.

But his latest “scoop” from Chinatown, a five-minute video, is so chock full of wince-inducing stereotypes that the casual watcher may confuse it with a grade-school educational video about the hazards of discrimination. If only. “Am I supposed to bow to say hello?” Watters says to passersby, before asking a watch vender if his merchandise is stolen. He turns a foot masseuse’s silence at his innuendo-laden commentary into a joke. Occasionally, the screen cuts to clips of “The Karate Kid” or—what else?—to kung-fu movies, because, obviously_,_ that is the cultural heritage of all Chinese immigrants. Not that Watters cares enough to learn that the Chinese, even in Chinatown, speak more than one regional dialect, or that there is a difference between what is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. In a stunning thirty-second clip, Watters asks a man if he knows karate (a Japanese style of martial arts) and then, confusingly enough, proceeds to attempt Tae Kwon Do (a Korean style of martial arts) with nunchucks (which originated in Japan). The point is clear: no one can tell these Orientals apart anyway! (The same smirk was present on Wednesday, when Watters tweeted out a non-apology as the backlash against his segment mounted: “My man-on-the-street interviews are meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek and I regret if anyone found offense,” he wrote, as if the problem were that the concept of a joke had to be explained to the humorless Chinese.)

As I write this, I fear that I am projecting more bravado than I feel. True, the rational, reflective part of me is indignant and affronted. It asks: How can it be that the fastest-growing racial group in America, one that has doubled its share of the electorate in the past decade, is subjected to such crass caricature on national TV? But the other part is a Chinese-American woman who viscerally feels the heat of humiliation as Watters attempts to grind on the street with two Asian-American women while the screen inexplicably cuts to clips of Japanese schoolgirls dancing in pigtails and skimpy uniforms; who feels inward embarrassment when subtitles are inserted for an Asian Hillary supporter who speaks accented but perfectly intelligible English; whose stomach involuntarily drops when Watters harangues an elderly woman who clearly understands little English but is too timid or polite to walk away from an aggressive white man yelling about “Trump beating up on China.”

At one point, Watters talks to a young man who is helping in his family store, which the host determines sells traditional herbs. Is there anything that helps with “performance,” he asks, with a sideways smile. There is a flicker of abashed comprehension on the young man’s face. “Um, I’m not going to ask my parents about that,” he says. Then Watters delivers the I-caught-you-acknowledging-my-stereotype punchline: “I mean on television!”

It all seems so backward, but, then again, so is bullying. Watching “Watters’ World: Chinatown Edition,” I am reflexively reminded of the shame I felt as a young immigrant with a tenuous grasp of the English language and American culture, whose insecurity mutated into mortification on behalf of my Chinese parents and an inexorable fear that I might remain like them, a perpetual foreigner and an inferior American doomed forever to be at the mercy of those like Watters. To legitimize myself as a proper citizen of this country, there are times when I have wondered, despite myself, how much distance I must place between myself and those whom Watters and Trump feel free to mock. What must I do to impress the bully?

This is the psycho-social climate of intimidation with which the Trump campaign has bedevilled the country. That a buffoon with deplorable manners can endlessly exercise his right to self-satisfied idiocy is a scary thing. Scarier still are the tiny seeds of self-doubt he sows in each one of us who has ever been led to believe that those who insult us might somehow be better than us, that we should be the ones who are embarrassed. That such a man could, one day soon, be the leader of a nation built by immigrants—now, that’s a new kind of fear, and of shame.