Thoughts After A Hate Crime

I was assaulted last night.

Jose Legaspi, “Bakla”. Taken in 2011 at the Manila Contemporary art exhibit “Hate Mail”

I was assaulted last night. After watching Babygirl at Pathé Comédie with my friends Maeve and Olga, we walked to the tram station at Corum. Olga would usually take the train from the station at Comédie, but yesterday evening, she decided to walk to the next stop instead. I said I wanted to add more steps to my count for the day and was happy to go with her. Maeve was okay with it too, so we headed there together, sharing our thoughts about the film we had just watched.

As we descended the stairs on the way to the platforms, I felt something wet and sticky behind my left ear. Instinctively, I reached to touch it, thinking it was a raindrop—or chewing gum? A group of young men was walking behind us. I remember hearing someone say, “Konnichiwa,” followed by fake Chinese sounds.

“Is it spit?” I asked my friends.

It was. The fluid dripped onto the front of my jacket. Maeve and Olga searched their bags for wipes. It took me some time to piece things together—someone from the group had spat at me. It was likely because I was Asian. The group had been walking to our left when I turned to them and asked, “What’s your problem?” I defaulted to English because French wasn’t my language for anger—at least not yet. The young men looked at me indifferently. We watched them as they crossed the tracks, keeping an eye on them from the opposite platform.

Olga and Maeve told me I should report it to the police. In California, Maeve said, spitting on someone was considered assault. After Olga got on the tram, Maeve and I retraced our steps and checked for CCTV cameras in the area. Maeve said she felt safe in Montpellier, but she wondered if growing up in a rough neighborhood in California had affected her perception of security.

I’ve been thinking about the incident ever since. I find it both funny and sad that I remember being sexually abused by my uncle and using that experience as my frame of reference. There’s the shock, then the denial, then the self-blame. Did it happen? No, it wasn’t that bad. Was it my fault? Did I subject myself to it? A part of me wants to forget the incident altogether and dismiss it as immaterial; another part of me says, That’s your internalized homophobia speaking. You don’t want to be painted as a victim because you think men can’t be victimized—only women and sissy boys can.

Why do people harm others? There are profound ideological and political reasons, but some people do it simply because they want to belong. I remember bullies from school who picked on others not because they had something intrinsically against their victims, but because they wanted to align themselves with the bullies. To be powerful, you must perform power. Aggression was a performance of it.

At dinner a few years ago with some high school classmates, I asked one of them if they remembered bullying me. “Did that happen?” they asked. They had forgotten about it because, from their perspective, it wasn’t violence. It was just what everyone did to everyone else—or rather, what their group did to everyone else. It was what normal looked like to them, and normal was unremarkable.

But when you’re the one being bullied, you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, hoping that today, you’ll get a pass. You hold your head down and try to remain invisible, but it’s not what you do that makes you a target. It’s who you are. The randomness of it makes you sick.

In some way, I think I am downplaying the violence of the incident because I’ve experienced far worse. My parents would smash plates and appliances, wield knives, and punch each other during their worst fights. As a child, I would hide in our room, hoping everything would stop—except I also distrusted the silence because I wondered if one of them had finally succeeded in killing the other. At some point, it felt inevitable.

My parents also hit us regularly. In their minds, discipline meant brutalizing their children with whatever object was at hand—brooms, belts, books, even a hot iron. My mother once threw boiling water at my brother; he still has scars on his arm to prove it. They never apologized for any of it, justifying their actions as being “for our own good.” But these acts of violence didn’t follow logic—they followed their moods. The angrier they were, the more brutal they became.

What’s ironic is that they also convinced us never to talk about it. It was shameful to admit that your parents were horrible monsters hiding behind aspirational careers and a respectable middle-class lifestyle. The story we were supposed to tell was the good side—their long-suffering and self-sacrifice—not that they spent frivolously to present themselves as enviable members of society, with two cars, a house they owned, and at one point, even parcels of land near where we lived.

As I grew older, I realized my parents were probably products of their own generation’s experiences. Violence begets violence, as the saying goes. But even as I acknowledge this, a part of me still believes they must be held accountable. Where does personal responsibility lie within the grand tapestry of society’s moral evolution? Maybe the belief that we can simply escape our history comes from witnessing the actions of outliers, rather than the majority—who act without ever questioning the system and culture they live in.

In France, racist acts are punishable by three years in prison and a €45,000 fine. The process of determining them, however, can be quite complex. Some argue that harsher punishments don’t necessarily deter people from committing crimes—if anything, they might encourage recidivism. But one could also argue that punishment isn’t meant to be a statement about the future; it’s a way of proving that justice exists in the present. If that’s the case, then isn’t our idea of justice just compounding the problems we already have?

I don’t have the answers, to be honest. But I want someone to be held responsible for yesterday’s incident.