One Saturday earlier this month, after a few stuffy days indoors, my wife and I set foot outside our apartment in Brooklyn to restock on essentials. Me being steeped in COVID-19 news all day for work, I erred on the side of caution: a surgical mask, in case I was a vector, and some gloves, for opening doors and touching things. But my wife, whose parents are from Taiwan, was slightly more hesitant about wearing a mask out in the real world, even though we were walking through the neighborhood in broad daylight. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why, at least not until later that night.

“I wish I could have articulated it earlier,” she said. “But I feel like the mask just makes me more of a target.”

With coronavirus enveloping every aspect of our lives, it’s a particularly fraught time for Asian-Americans, many of whom are grappling with a new layer of anxiety whenever they need to move through the world. My family is Filipino and I present as slightly more racially ambiguous than my wife, but I was nervous that hate crimes against Asians were going to soar when the virus touched down in the U.S., and again when President Donald Trump insisted on calling it the “China virus” during White House press briefings. I was interested in how the spike in anti-Asian sentiment was changing the daily calculus for others. Whether they were having to choose between, say, taking measures to protect themselves from a highly contagious virus versus making themselves appear invisible in public.

Inevitably, some have already argued that “racializing the pandemic” was merely another distraction ripped from the Trump playbook, intended to divert attention from the administration’s countless and preventable failures in a time of crisis. (It’s an argument that I don’t necessarily disagree with.) But anti-Asian racism in the West is nothing new, and with the advent of COVID-19, hate crimes documented by different organizations are on the rise with reported incidents already in the high hundreds. Sometimes, that harassment is intended as a joke (earlier this month, a Florida rapper named 1k_Johnny went viral for chasing an elderly Chinese woman with hand sanitizer), and other times it manifests as actual physical violence (such as when a 44-year-old Korean man was stabbed in Montreal). An FBI intelligence report that was leaked in mid-March predicted as much: “The FBI assesses hate crime incidents against Asian Americans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus disease … endangering Asian American communities.”

I spent the past week talking to Asian-Americans here in New York, the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak and a city that prides itself on its diversity. They described experiencing unusually aggressive behavior that has altered how they go about their daily lives.

One of the more ironic parts of Trump’s insistence on narrowly calling it the “Chinese virus” is how undiscriminating it is against Asian-presenting people of all backgrounds. Some of the incidents were common enough. Tiffany Hsu, a resident of the Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, recalls walking by a man who appeared to be in his fifties on Fulton Street while on her way to Key Food, who loudly uttered “Chinese virus” as he passed her. (Predictably, the president’s cohorts and allies like Kellyanne Conway and Lindsey Graham have argued that the term isn’t racist, even though Trump has since distanced himself from using it.) Her incident was hurtful, but far from singular—the kinds of things Asian Americans are used to hearing—and now she doesn’t go to the grocery store unless she’s with her husband.