On 22 July 2020, I got a message out of nowhere from a University friend. The most recent previous message in the conversation was April 2007. He wanted to know if I had time for a call. Given the circumstances, I didn’t think I was being overly cynical to anticipate being asked for a favour. I was also open minded – you have to feel very strongly about the reason to call out of the blue after so long, and this was one of the smartest people I knew from University.

I was correct in my anticipation: after some obligatory socials, he went right to asking me if I was aware of the steep rise in hate crimes against people from East Asian and Southeast Asian backgrounds.

The learning point for me was recognising the connections that I hadn’t made. My experience of COVID-19 as it affected my colleagues with those backgrounds was:

1. I remembered seeing a cluster of Chinese colleagues in the office in early February and hoping their families were okay.
2. I remember making a few enquiries about one particular colleague who’d gone home for Chinese New Year, wanting to know she was okay and had gotten back.
3. I’d been worried about another colleague being on her own during lockdown and had reached out, relieved to find she had her family around her.
4. I’d seen an attack in Birmingham detailed in the news and been frustrated at the ignorance of the attackers.

But it wasn’t until my friend was explaining how he and his friends are doing a crowdfunder to set up an organisation to fight hate crime and support these communities that I really connected the dots as to the experience my colleagues would have been living.

I readily agreed to donate, and anyone feeling inspired to do likewise can find the link here.

The important point for me though, was that a bit of money wasn’t enough. That was ultimately still leaving my friend and his collaborators to do the hard emotional work of tackling this issue alone. So having come off the phone, I asked the colleague opposite me – the same one who I’d been worried about being in China for Chinese New Year – about her experiences. She said it had been mostly fine, with a few questions about if everything had happened because Chinese people ate weird things. And she was very grateful – disproportionately in my mind – for my having asked. It was hard not to feel guilty for not asking sooner.

Armed with these realisations, I went on to raise it further. I was simultaneously pleased to discover there was a lot of thought and support already happening, targeting the impacted groups, and also sure that we had an opportunity to go a bit further, a bit broader.

Ultimately, we staged a webcast with panellists discussing their personal experiences and their advice to Asian and non-Asians alike. It was created in collaboration with Chinese colleagues and ultimately led by them to ensure we were able to convey the messages that resonated most for them.

One of the final calls to arms in the webcast was around these roles of bystander and upstander. I was already familiar with these terms and generally like to think of myself as more of an upstander, but I still have blind spots based on my lived experience. That’s why having a diverse network of friends and colleagues is so important. It took that phone call to make me really think this time.

Now, you may have read this and already been many steps ahead of me – I celebrate that if you were. But if you weren’t and if, perhaps, you’ve found racism has become synonymous with ‘BLM’ in recent months, maybe use this opportunity to reach out to you East Asian and Southeast Asian friends and colleagues. Let them know you’re thinking of them. My hope is that with positive steps like those – the act of simply taking a moment to connect and care – we can help support against and even prevent the impact of racism connected to COVID-19.