Members of the Chinese-Indonesian diaspora share their experiences of facing discrimination in Australia.

Bernie, 36, a Chinese-Indonesian artist based in Melbourne, shared his unpleasant experience from a couple of months ago, when he received verbal harassment from a group of 13-year-olds. 

"They started yelling ni hao ma (a typical Mandarin greeting, meaning “how are you?”) in an exaggerated, mocking tone. I was wearing an outfit with a Mandarin collar back then," he recalled.

"I whistled back at them in my defense," he continued. 

The number of incidents of discrimination against the Asian community in Australia increased proportionally during the early pandemic. Citing the Global Citizen, the Asian Australian Alliance (AAA) found 377 incidents of anti-Asian racism from April 2 to June 2, 2020, of which 65 percent of claims came from women. Forty percent of racist incidents happened on a public street and almost 60 percent of incidents involved physical or verbal harassment.

Moreover, the AAA also found that there were different types of discrimination against Asian people, which included direct racial name-calling ("Go back to China," "Stop eating bats or dogs," "Ching Chong") making up 35.7 percent of reported cases, online harassment at 25.7 percent and downplaying racist jokes at 13.1 percent.

Erin Wen Ai Chew, national convener of the AAA, shared that discrimination against minorities already happened long before the pandemic. 

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