Asian Americans 'screaming out for help'

US lawmakers, academics and actor Daniel Dae Kim have told a congressional hearing that the Asian-American community is reeling from a year of heightened attacks on their ranks.

Their accounts were given in Washington on Thursday, just days after the killing of six Asian women in the southern state of Georgia.

The hearing in the House of Representatives, which was scheduled before the attacks in the Atlanta area, aimed to examine a spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans. Such crimes soared by 149 percent in 2020 in 16 major cities compared with 2019, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

"Our community is bleeding, we are in pain and for the last year we've been screaming out for help," Democratic Representative Grace Meng told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Experts have linked the surge to the COVID-19 pandemic, after some US people, including Republican former president Donald Trump, started demonizing Asians and called the coronavirus the "China virus", "the China plague" and even "kung flu".

A 21-year-old white man has been charged with killing eight people, six of them Asian women, at three spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday. Police are investigating motives and have not ruled out the possibility that the attacks were provoked, at least in part, by anti-immigrant or anti-Asian sentiments.

The spike in anti-Asian American incidents in the past year included people being slashed with a box cutter and set on fire, as well as verbal harassment, said Steve Cohen, the subcommittee's Democratic chair. "All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America," said Cohen.

Kim, best known for starring in the television series Lost and Hawaii Five-0, called on lawmakers to pass legislation to fund groups that provide counseling to victims of hate crimes and improve data collection for hate crime reporting.

"What happens right now and over the course of the coming months will send a message for generations to come as to whether we matter, as to whether the country we call home chooses to erase us or include us," said Kim.

In the closely divided House, the hearing quickly lapsed into partisan politics.

'I am not a virus!'

In a sprawling opening speech, Republican lawmaker Chip Roy said the subject matter was important, but then moved on to attack China's handling of the coronavirus and its internal affairs in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

When Roy warned that the hearing was an attempt at "policing" free speech, he drew rebukes.

"I am not a virus," congressman Ted Lieu, who was born in Taiwan and served in the US Air Force, reminded Roy.

"Whatever political points you think you're scoring by using ethnic identifiers in describing this virus, you're harming Americans who happen to be of Asian descent," he added.

"So please stop doing that."

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said US President Joe Biden, who was due to meet Asian-American leaders on Friday in Atlanta, was determined to be "part of the solution, not part of the problem".

Biden had ordered that the US flag be flown at half-staff at the White House to honor the victims of Tuesday's rampage.

Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, said Asian Americans have been "terrorized", and the ongoing abuse marks "a systemic national tragedy" that won't just disappear after the pandemic.

"We have heard in the past 24 hours many describe the anti-Asian discrimination and violence as un-American," she said.

"Unfortunately, it is very American."

Agencies via Xinhua, Ai Heping and Minglu Zhang in New York contributed to this story.