Originally published 2021-03-24.
Photo: KPIX
On the morning of 17 March 2021, Xiao Zhen Xie, an elderly Chinese American grandmother, was punched in the face while standing on Market Street in San Francisco. She was widely reported to be 76 (some outlets said 75). Instead of collapsing, she grabbed a wooden board and struck back until her attacker was taken away on a stretcher. Days later she announced she would give away the nearly $1 million that strangers had donated to her.
Her story became one of the defining images of a year in which Asian Americans reported a wave of harassment and violence. Here is what happened, what is known about the man arrested, and how to read the statistics that were quoted alongside it.
What happened on Market Street
The attack came one day after the shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area on 16 March 2021, in which eight people were killed, six of them women of Asian descent. Fear in Asian American communities was already high.
According to reports at the time, a man walked up and hit Xie without warning. She picked up a piece of wood, reportedly from her shopping cart, and hit him repeatedly. When police arrived, the man had a bloodied mouth and was strapped to a stretcher, while Xie, shouting and crying, kept trying to reach him.
Dennis O'Donnell, a sports director at the local station KPIX, happened to be nearby and filmed the scene. His post on X is no longer available, but the video was broadcast widely.
Just came upon an attack on an elderly Asian woman on Market Street San Francisco. Effort I got more details pic.twitter.com/5o8r0eeHE2
— Dennis O'Donnell (@DennisKPIX) March 17, 2021
(This post is no longer available on X.)
Police identified the man as Steven Jenkins, aged 39. Police Chief Bill Scott said investigators would look at whether he was connected to other recent attacks on older Asian residents in the city, including an assault on an 83-year-old man reportedly attacked nearby the same morning. He stressed that the department would put full resources into these cases and into making arrests.
Her injuries and the fundraiser
Xie was left with two black eyes, one of them bleeding, and a badly swollen wrist. Her grandson, John Chen, started a GoFundMe page to cover her medical costs. He wrote that she was deeply shaken, physically and emotionally, and too frightened to leave home.
The page went viral. It passed $500,000 within a couple of days and eventually approached $1 million. Then Xie surprised everyone. Through her grandson, she said the money should go to the Asian American community to fight racism, because, in Chen's words, "this issue is bigger than her."
Her own message was blunter. As reported by NPR, she said: "We must not submit to racism. And we must fight to the death if necessary." Coming from a woman in her mid-seventies who had just been beaten in public, the words carried weight.
Was it a hate crime?
Many early reports called the attack racially motivated, and that is how many people still remember it. Legally, though, motive is a separate question from the assault itself. Under California law, prosecutors must show that a victim was targeted because of a protected characteristic, such as race or national origin, before hate-crime penalties can apply. That often requires evidence such as statements made during the attack, prior conduct, or messages, and it is frequently harder to prove than the assault.
So the fair way to describe the case is this: a man was arrested for punching an elderly Asian woman in a period of heavily reported anti-Asian attacks, and the question of motive was for investigators and the courts to decide. That does not make Xie's fear, or her community's, any less real.
What the 3,795 figure really measures
Articles about Xie often cited Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition launched in 2020 by the AAPI Equity Alliance, Chinese for Affirmative Action and San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies department. Its March 2021 report counted 3,795 incidents reported to it between 19 March 2020 and 28 February 2021.
That number was sometimes described as 3,795 "attacks." It was not. The breakdown in the report was:
- Verbal harassment: about 68%
- Shunning or deliberate avoidance: about 20%
- Physical assault: about 11%
Women filed reports about 2.3 times as often as men, and Chinese Americans were the largest group of reporters, at roughly 42%. The coalition itself stressed that the figures are self-reported and capture only a fraction of what happens. Because they are not a random sample, they cannot measure how common incidents are across the whole population, but they do show clear patterns in where and how harassment occurs.
Why attacks rose during the pandemic
COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019. As the virus spread, some public figures used labels that tied it to China and to Chinese people. Researchers and civil-rights groups linked that rhetoric to a rise in hostility toward anyone who looked East Asian, whatever their nationality or history in the US.
A virus has no ethnicity, and where a disease first appeared says nothing about the people who share a heritage with that place. Many of those targeted in the Bay Area were older immigrants who had lived in the US for decades.
What bystanders and families can do
- In an emergency, call 911. Do not put yourself in danger, but do stay to help and give a statement.
- Use bystander training. Free courses, such as the "5Ds" approach (distract, delegate, document, delay, direct), teach safe ways to step in.
- Document carefully. Video can help police and victims, but ask the person targeted before sharing it publicly.
- Report incidents. Even if no crime was committed, reports to local police or to Stop AAPI Hate help build a clearer picture.
- Check on older relatives. Walking with them, or arranging escort programmes, made a real difference in several cities in 2021.
Xie's response, fighting back and then giving away the money raised in her name, turned a frightening few seconds on a busy street into a story about dignity. It remains a reminder that behind every statistic is a person who has to walk the same street the next day.
Sources: NPR via KVCR, Rafu Shimpo on the Stop AAPI Hate report, Wikipedia: Stop AAPI Hate.
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