A second-year science student said he was victim of a racist comment after he confronted a man who hit his car and kept driving.
Patrick Shi’s car was sideswiped by a white car on May 13 at around 1 p.m. on SW Marine Drive. Shi said that after it happened, he wrote down the license plate number and reported the incident to ICBC and the police. Two days later, Shi saw the same driver again and confronted him, asking him to give him his driver’s information so they could resolve the incident through ICBC.
Shi, an Asian man, recorded the encounter. When Shi said to the man that he had committed a hit and run, the man originally denied that he had hit Shi’s car before saying there was barely any damage to the car. In a video posted to Reddit, the man appears to say, “You wonder why people don’t like Asian people here.”
“The damage … is nothing, but it is the attitude that he showed me, the condescendingness, how easily he thought he could brush me off, could deny everything … say, ‘People don’t like Asians,’” Shi said.
Shi said he has a claim with ICBC now, but he wants to bring awareness to racism that occurs in Vancouver.
“At first I thought it would be just an honest mistake … but then when he made the racist comment, I was like, this is something that is very worthwhile given the skyrocketing hate crimes against Asians last year in Vancouver,” Shi said.
A Bloomberg article labelled Vancouver the “anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America,” reporting that almost one out of every two residents of Asian descent in BC experienced a hate incident in the last year.
“I felt almost like a duty to confront things like this, because it's not okay,” Shi said.
This incident comes two months after a Korean student was assaulted in University Village. Other students have reported incidents of anti-Asian racism on campus.