The Sunday Read: ‘Why Was Vicha Ratanapakdee Killed?’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2021

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Throughout 2020, multiple strangers came at Monthanus Ratanapakdee seemingly out of nowhere. An old man yelled at her in Golden Gate Park — something about a virus and going back to her country. When she discussed these incidents, her father would ask, “Is it really that bad?” Her father, Vicha Ratanapakdee, 84, was a lifelong Buddhist, the kind of person who embraced the world with open arms. During the coronavirus pandemic, he usually left the house before 8 a.m. and made it back before his grandsons started their Zoom classes. This year, on the morning of Jan. 28, he headed out. A surveillance video captured what happened next. A tall figure suddenly darts across a street and slams into a much smaller one; the smaller figure crumples onto the pavement and doesn’t get back up. Mr. Ratanapakdee's death helped awaken the nation to a rise in anti-Asian violence. For his grieving family, the reckoning hasn’t gone far enough.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On January 28, 2021, Vica Ratana Pacti set out for his usual morning walk.
0:09.1	Vica was 84 from Thailand, but he'd moved to San Francisco to be closer to his daughter
0:14.4	and her family.
0:17.0	Security camera footage showed Vica pausing near someone's driveway.
0:21.0	Suddenly, another much taller man ran toward him and slammed him to the ground, hard.
0:28.5	Vica died in the hospital two days later.
0:32.3	My name's J. Ali and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
0:36.8	Like many people, I first came across Vica's story by watching the security camera footage.
0:41.8	It went viral on social media.
0:44.5	That same week, there had been a cluster of attacks against Asian elders.
0:48.4	And Vica quickly became a symbol of the violence against Asian Americans that appeared to be
0:52.6	on the rise.
0:54.6	When I finally spoke to Vica's family, they kept coming back to, why?
0:59.3	Why did this happen to their father?
1:01.4	To someone they loved so much?
1:03.6	The answers didn't come easy.
1:06.2	Eventually, we learned that there were no known explicit expressions of racism when Vica
1:10.4	was shoved to the ground that morning.
1:12.8	No obvious hateful slurs, no references to the coronavirus or to China.
1:18.4	And because the person accused of killing Vica was a young black man, it brought up racial
1:23.0	tensions that had been simmering for decades.
1:26.8	Even within Asian American communities, everyone agreed the violence needed to stop.
	...

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