Man cheats on Asian American woman in busy OC park, and bystanders do not enter

In the latest in a disturbing increase in anti-Asian attacks, an Orange County Olympic hopeful was in a park training for the summer games when a man targeted her in an incident she captured on video.

“I was shocked … I did not know what to do … and it slowly increased in a way where he came close to me and for no reason kept shouting at me,” Sakura Kokumai, a Karate Olympic team in the USA. , ABC7 said in an interview.

“You are so small,” the man heard in the footage. “I will f your boyfriend.”

“There was no racial hindrance at the beginning,” Kokumai said, “but when he got in his car, he would shout ‘Chinese’ and ‘Sashimi’, and then I was like OK there.”

Sakura Kokumai says she was training at Grijalva Park – just like every day when preparing for the Olympics. She will represent the USA at the Tokyo Games this summer – as the first American to qualify for the Karate Olympics.

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This is why she says she was so calm: she knew she could fight back if she had to. She said the man started harassing her out of nowhere for almost 20 minutes.

“You know what? If it was my mother … what if it was my grandmother … that was where it got scary because I knew I could handle the situation myself by being calm,” Kokumai said. said. “You do not want to be aggressive. But my concern was: what if it was someone else? ‘

In 2020, there were ten times as many hate incidents and crimes against Asian Americans in Orange County. A majority of the crimes were public, according to the Orange County Commission for Human Relations.

Just last month, an 82-year-old Asian American woman received a letter at the Leisure World retirement community in Seal Beach on the day of her husband’s funeral. His death is said to be a good thing because it means’ one less Asian for tolerating. ‘