Anti-Trump demonstrators gather outside Trump tower, voicing opposition to Donald Trump's election as President on Nov. 9 in New York. / AP-Yonhap



By Jane Han

DALLAS ― While incidents of racial attack and hate crimes are pouring in across the country in the wake of Donald Trump's election, Koreans here are also becoming an immediate target of discrimination and abuse.

People everywhere from California to New York have started sharing their experiences on various Internet and social media platforms.

"I was taking an afternoon walk around my neighborhood the day after the election, and a young white man in his 20s rolls down his car window and shouts, ‘Soy sauce!' at me," wrote one New Jersey resident on HeyKorean.com, a large portal site for Koreans living in the U.S. "I was totally bummed."

"The language itself wasn't violent, but it's the first time I experienced this kind of racism straight in my face in the 13 years that I've lived in the U.S.," she said.

Another user, who works as a waitress in Pennsylvania, said she was baffled by all the insulting racist jokes made by customers.

"I had numerous guests jokingly say something like, ‘Isn't it time to go back to your country now?'" she wrote. "At that moment, I laughed and played along with them, but at the end of the day, I realized how racist those comments were."

These incidents are just a few of the hundreds of wide-ranging cases being reported throughout the country.

According to The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit civil rights organization that monitors hate groups in the U.S., more than 200 incidents of election-related harassment and intimidation have been experienced or witnessed nationwide just several days after the presidential election.

"Anti-black and anti-immigrant incidents were far and away the most reported with anti-Muslim being the third most common," the SPLC said in a statement.

And some abuse and attacks were more extreme than others.

A female student wearing a hijab was reportedly robbed by men talking about Trump and Muslims, while people painted racist graffiti on walls of dozens of school campuses.

One report made directly to the SPLC said, "My 12-year-old daughter is African American. A boy approached her and said, ‘Now that Trump is president, I'm going to shoot you and all the black people I can find.'"

Just as many of the incidents have occurred on campuses, a growing number of Korean parents say their children have come back home from school, offended and degraded.

"My high school daughter said a black student called her out shouting, ‘Go back to China!'" said Eugenia Kim, a mother in South Carolina, a region in America with a relatively small Asian population.

"My daughter wasn't going to back down. She shot right back, ‘No, you go back to Africa,'" she said. "I have a feeling this is just the beginning of more similar incidents to come. This is a time for us to be brave and speak up."

Many civil rights activists say Trump's rhetoric throughout the campaign has given way for racially abusive language, which has long been a taboo in American society, to emerge from different corners of the country.

"All the bigotry and divisiveness we've seen on the campaign trail have left this country bruised and feeling afraid of what's ahead tomorrow," said Lisa Kim, a member of the Korean American Coalition in New York, a non-partisan community advocacy organization.