We often create new words in reaction to things happening in our society. As a linguist who specializes in meaning, and as a Japanese-American living in Canada, I have both professional curiosities and personal anxieties about some of the new expressions that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this essay, I discuss racism and anti-Asian slurs, and the ways these new words channel existing racist ideologies.
It’s no surprise that people have come up with new labels for increasingly common phenomena during COVID-19.11Linguistics writing convention note: words, sentences, and phrases being analyzed/referred to are italicized (e.g., Apple is a word in English). Paraphrases of meanings of linguistic expressions are put in single quotes (e.g., Kitten roughly means ‘young cat’). Linguistic innovations like social distancing, quarantini (quarantine + martini), and maskne (mask + acne) reflect the new societal norms we are living through. People create new words because they need them at the time. If a particular group of people finds a new expression useful, they might repeat it in other conversations. If the concept is something people refer to frequently, it might spread to a wider group of people and stick around in the language. Otherwise, it may fall out of use. Will the term maskne fall out of fashion when mask mandates are lifted? That would be its natural fate if people need to talk less and less about acne caused by masks. In contrast, racially-charged linguistic innovations like Kung flu, Wuhan virus, Chinese virus, China flu, and Corona chink have a higher potential of sticking around long after the disease itself goes away, as long as racists continue to be racists.
One of the functions of language is for us to communicate our thoughts to others. For example, when you say A person is walking, the literal meaning you are communicating is the existence of some individual who is walking. You could also be communicating something that you haven’t explicitly said; it can be conveyed implicitly instead. For example, pronouncing walking as walkin’ can communicate something about what kind of person you are—you’re laid back, perhaps. This kind of meaning is called social meaning. Some types of social meaning point to information about what kind of person other people are. For example, Japanese has politeness markers that indicate psychological distance or (non-)familiarity between the speaker and the addressee. The lexical items we choose, the phonology we adopt, the syntactic structure of the sentence we utter—these variations within a language help language users situate themselves and others in the social landscape.
Slurs have both literal and social meaning. The literal denotation of (Corona) chink may be Chinese people, but the user of this slur also takes a specific stance about Chinese people, shunning them as socially inferior and not belonging. In the North American context, words like this carry an immense amount of force with the backdrop of systemic white supremacy. Slurs are ultimately a reinforcer of the flawed dynamic of the privileged and the oppressed, which means that the impact of a slur goes far beyond just hurting the feelings of one person: a slur has its function to subordinate an entire non-privileged group.
The term Chinese virus may not be a slur if it is used to refer to a virus rather than a person, but it can nevertheless be used as a thinly veiled derogation of Chinese people. Political leaders have justified the use of terms like Chinese virus with excuses like “it just means that the virus originated in China,” but this cheap linguistic analysis is irresponsible and wilfully naïve. The word Chinese does derive from China, but even if we hypothesize that Chinese fundamentally means ‘relating to China,’ words are naturally polysemous. Nouns that denote places have a regular pattern of metonymy in everyday language use. Metonymy is the extension of meaning via contiguity: noun X can be used to mean ‘things that come into contact with X.’ When you say that the office called, you likely don’t mean the literal building did. You most likely mean that someone who works at the office did. This of course applies to China too; country names readily stand in for their citizens (e.g., China won a gold medal in weightlifting). So when people use expressions like Chinese scholarship, Chinese protection, and of course, Chinese virus, Chinese can mean something more specific than ‘relating to China’: ‘relating to people of China’. So even if it is true that the first use of Chinese virus was intended to mean ‘virus that originated in China’, there is descriptive linguistic evidence for the risk of people interpreting it as ‘virus caused by people of China’ or ‘virus that people of China have’—whatever relationship between the virus and Chinese people they can form in their head.
This, in the context of diseases, is not even a new phenomenon. The 1918 flu was called the “Spanish flu” and this led to the stigmatization of Spanish people. The World Health Organization learned from this history and in 2015 mandated the use of neutral names for diseases—hence COVID-19 as the official name of the current virus.22“WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases,” World Health Organization, May 8, 2015, https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases. But when highly influential people adopt terms like China flu anyway, the use spreads rapidly to other speakers. They insincerely perpetuate the “it means it originated in China” rhetoric—only to undercut it by their own actions (for instance, avoiding Chinese-owned restaurants in Canada).
Depending on how flawed, exactly, the ideology of the speaker is, the literal meaning of anti-Chinese slurs can point to the broader Asian and Pacific Islander (API) community. The conflation of API identities is widespread and not new. COVID-19 didn’t cause this; bigots are just using existing prejudices in a new context. As a Japanese-American living in North America, a white man has asked if my “parents in China” visit me often; a white woman (with a sigh of relief) has asked me, “What can fish sauce be substituted with?” when I walked into the Thai condiments aisle; and another white man has inquired: “I’m trying to locate your accent.… Is it Korea?” Externally, I am reduced to some generic Asian otherness. Simultaneously, I have had people eliminate my internal Asian identity completely (“I consider you a white friend, really”). I grew up being told I’m just some Asian and somehow that I’m not Asian at all. Where am I in this social landscape, then? Nowhere? Sometimes, even the social meaning that should be carried by my words fails me. A student once accused me of “not moving my mouth right,” and it is a regular occurrence for strangers to backhandedly compliment my English as being “pretty good.” I’m from Peachtree City, Georgia.
So, what then, of my language and identity in this pandemic? I see reports of anti-Asian hate crimes in the news and fear that I will be the next target. What am I to do when I am categorized as a Corona chink in racists’ minds? The erasure of my Japanese identity is layered with the deeper problem of society using people of colour as a scapegoat in the face of the unknown. Provincial messages like “We’re all in this together” miss the point that not all of us are experiencing the pandemic in the same way. As a Japanese-American in Canada, I am constantly battling the various anger, fear, and anxiety that come along with the emergence of terms like Kung flu, Chinese virus, and Corona chink. Sometimes these feelings are personal, and some are global.
We must remember that—with or without slurs—people will be racist: specifically dodging Asian people on the streets is equally racist and sends the same message that Asian people somehow caused the virus. Racist expressions do not create racists; racists create racist expressions. So, eliminating or criminalizing the use of these terms is not our only end goal. Racist linguistic innovations are just a snapshot of the racism that has always existed, but they tell us a lot about the capacity of stigmatization to outlive disease trends. We must dismantle xenophobia itself and all routes of spreading it.
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