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Drive My Car is based on the Haruka Murakami story of the same name, but it doesn’t stop there. | Janus Films 
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How the Best Picture nominee digs into Murakami and Chekhov.

Near the end of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” — on which the multi-Oscar-nominated film is sort of based — two middle-aged men, both actors, are at a bar. One is Kafuku, whose wife died years ago after a short bout with cancer. The other is Takatsuki, the last man with whom Kafuku’s wife had an affair before her diagnosis.

Kafuku knows, or is fairly sure he knows, about Takatsuki’s relationship with his wife, and he’s also pretty certain that the other man truly loved his wife and hasn’t recovered from the loss. He initiated the friendship with motives that weren’t entirely clear even to himself; he wants to hear more about his late wife, but he also wants to better understand her reasons for sleeping with Takatsuki, and maybe punish Takatsuki, too.

But to Kafuku’s surprise, over a few months of drinking together, the pair have struck up a companionable and affable relationship without ever revealing to one another what actually happened. Now, having edged near the subject, Kafuku has opened up a bit, telling Takatsuki that he grieves not having known his wife as well as he wished he did. The other man seems on the verge of revealing what Kafuku already knows, but instead his heart opens and he says a wise thing:

The proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we can love them. All it can do is cause us pain. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it. So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.

Kafuku is startled by the normally reserved Takatsuki’s conviction and clarity, and their gazes meet. “They could see a certain sparkle of recognition in each other’s eyes,” Murakami writes.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car differs substantially in its details from the story from which it draws its name, but this theme — of the strange human struggle to actually know anyone, to speak and be heard and understood — ties the two together strongly. To write the Oscar-nominated screenplay, Hamaguchi used the framework of “Drive My Car” but mixed in two other stories, “Scheherazade” and “Kino,” both of which appear with “Drive My Car” in Murakami’s 2014 collection Men Without Women, and drew out a brief mention of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the original story into a full narrative thread.

In Hamaguchi’s spin on the story, the intricacies of language serve as a kind of metaphor for communication itself — a metaphor that’s also of a piece with Murakami’s use of the Japanese language. Drive My Car locks into this theme and amplifies it across its three-hour runtime, tugging at threads in the story and spinning them into variations. We spend our lives trying to know one another, to speak across the barrier of the self, but everything gets in the way, starting with words themselves.

Kafuku is the protagonist in the film, too. He’s also an actor whose wife, after an affair, has died; he never asked her about her actions and now carries around regrets. As in the story, Kafuku is being driven around by a young woman named Misaki, his chauffeur, who has a tremendously sad past of her own.

But in adapting the story, Hamaguchi changed a lot about Kafuku’s life. When the film opens, Kafuku’s wife, named Oto, is still alive; in the movie’s first moments, she tells him a story that’s actually told by a character in “Scheherazade.” It’s a story about a teenage girl repeatedly sneaking into the home of her crush, leaving small possessions behind and taking some of his, trying to absorb herself into him. In the film, Kafuku isn’t sure if the story is made up or drawn from his wife’s girlhood; in “Scheherazade,” the same confusion exists between the woman telling the story and the man listening.

In the film, after Kafuku’s wife dies (in this version, of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage), we jump ahead in time two years and discover that he’s directing a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. The festival has hired Misaki to drive him from his hotel to the rehearsals every day. In both versions of the story, Misaki is about the age that a daughter Kafuku and his wife lost in childhood would be, and he seems to see her through that lens.

Two men sit at a bar. The younger one looks at the older one. Janus Films

Masaki Okada and Hidetoshi Nishijima in Drive My Car.

Meanwhile, Takatsuki (younger in the film than in the story but still Oto’s former lover) auditions for Uncle Vanya and is cast — to his consternation — in the lead role, for which he’s much too young. In the play, Vanya is an old man at 47 (the play is set in the 1890s) whose life is heavy with regret — he has toiled for years at the rural estate of his former brother-in-law, and with his reappearance Vanya finds he has nothing of his own. Though Takatsuki’s career has run on some hard times thanks to his foolishness, he’s still young and full of his own ego. As in the short story, Kafuku and Takatsuki strike up an uneasy friendship over late-night whiskey, neither quite telling the other what both know about Oto. But Hamaguchi weaves elements of “Kino” into Takatsuki’s story (notably, a confrontation between him and another man that goes tragically south) and the character becomes not just a figure of uneasiness for Kafuku but a figure of what happens to a man who doesn’t know himself enough to be honest.

Yet it’s mostly in the way Hamaguchi uses a non-Murakami text — Chekhov’s play — where the themes of Drive My Car start to emerge, themes voiced by Takatsuki in the story. Kafuku’s production of Uncle Vanya is performed (in a move that’s never explained) with each performer speaking their own language: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and even Korean Sign Language. They can’t understand each other; they are responding to something beyond just the words of the play. Kafuku’s rehearsal process involves asking them to drain all emotion from their performance, letting the words alone take root in them and grip them.

And those words are powerful, even when Kafuku’s processes frustrate his cast. One evening, the actress who communicates in Korean Sign Language tells him that she has found, in the words of Chekhov, a great deal of healing from her past hurt, when she had to quit dancing after a miscarriage.

But Kafuku’s experience with the play is more complicated. At the time he discovered his wife’s infidelity, he was performing onstage as Vanya and nearly had a breakdown mid-show; now, directing the play, he refuses to play the character himself, as everyone expects. “Chekhov is terrible,” he tells someone, by way of explanation. “When you say his lines, it drags out the real you.”

Some of that has to do with the character of Vanya, whose soul has grown twisted with self-pity and rage at the disappointment of life. “Oh, how unbearable!” Kafuku says, quoting Vanya to Misaki in the story. “Is there no help for me? I am 47 now. If I live till 60 I have 13 more years to endure. Too long. How shall I pass those 13 years? What will help me get through the days?” Some of Vanya’s regret and anguish has embedded itself in Kafuku’s lonely heart, and Misaki recognizes it in her own.

But Chekhov’s lines have another meaning for Kafuku: They’re his last tenuous connection to Oto. (This part is present in the short story, too, though Kafuku is being shuttled around by Misaki because he’s acting in a production of Uncle Vanya.) Before Oto died, she recorded one side of Uncle Vanya on cassette tapes so that he could practice his lines while he drove in his car. Now, years after her death, he’s still listening to them, though he’s not performing Vanya himself. It’s Oto’s voice, the words she says mediated through the tape deck, that keeps her alive to him.

Yet her persisting presence has also rankled in his soul because the question of why he couldn’t really know Oto fully, why she wasn’t satisfied with him, has never gone away. It eats at him. It keeps his heart closed. As Takatsuki puts it in the story, the idea that it’s possible to see someone fully can only cause us pain because “it’s a fool’s game.” Talking, telling stories, trying to make oneself known — we might as well be playing roles on a stage, talking in different languages.

Which might be why the role of Vanya, and the words of Chekhov, mean so much in the end to Kafuku; as he says, they “drag out the real you.” Portraying a man who is so weary of life he wants to die, reserved Kafuku can tap into the emotions he’s buried deep inside. It’s only in confronting his feelings of regret, feelings he’s shoved down deep, that Kafuku can find a way to move beyond his grief and care for others again. When he finally agrees, with no other options, to take on the role of Vanya again, it unlocks his heart once more. Nothing gets easier, but for the first time in a long time he can reach across the divide of language and self and feel once more.

And that means Drive My Car, perhaps a little ironically, is built around what Takatsuki says to Kafuku, both at the bar in the story and in a car after a moment of decisive violence in the film: that the work of life is to seriously look inside ourselves and make peace with what we find. That “if we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.” In the place where language falls away, we come to terms with what we’ve lost in the past, and we determine to go on living.

Drive My Car is playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.

High gas prices are perilous, but not necessarily fatal, for Biden and Democrats.

Soaring gas prices, like inflation generally, will likely hurt President Biden’s popularity and Democrats’ political prospects. But there’s some debate over just how threatening the price increase will be, and whether there is a clear connection between gas prices and election outcomes.

Prices are rising across the country. According to US Energy Information Administration data, the average price for a retail gallon of gasoline has risen by about 25 percent in the past two months, and by about 70 percent since President Biden took office. Biden’s decision to block US imports of Russian oil may well send prices even higher, as he acknowledged last week. (The future is uncertain, though — oil prices have fallen back down somewhat in recent days.)

The effects of the broader trend have only begun to ripple through the American political system, and the potential consequences for Biden aren’t clear: Vladimir Putin bears primary responsibility for the most recent shock, and Biden’s approval rating has actually risen by about 2 percentage points in recent weeks to around 43 percent, per FiveThirtyEight’s tracker, though that could be a temporary bounce from his State of the Union address. Still, if these high prices continue, they’ll certainly be a centerpiece of Republicans’ attacks in this year’s midterm elections.

Will those attacks work? The effect of gas prices specifically is tougher to disentangle than one might think. One issue here is that gas price shocks often precede recessions or are accompanied by other economic woes. That makes it difficult to suss out whether it’s expensive gasoline or those other economic factors that are affecting voters. Some analysts have concluded it’s more the latter, and that gas prices on their own don’t seem to affect elections much.

However, a study by Laurel Harbridge, Jon Krosnick, and Jeffrey Wooldridge found that rising gas prices seemed to hurt presidential approval: Between 1976 and mid-2007, each 10 cent gas price increase was followed by about a 0.6 percentage point drop in approval rating. (Prices have risen by about $1.73 since Biden took office, which would correspond to about a 10 point drop in approval. That’s about the decline he’s seen since his inauguration, though there are surely other factors at play as well.)

One thing that’s very clear, though, is that politicians believe high gas prices are very important. That’s illustrated in a noteworthy but mostly forgotten episode from the 2008 presidential election, when, for a brief stretch, gas prices hit record highs and it looked like they could determine the outcome of the election, sending the campaigns into a frenzy of position-taking.

A lot has changed in the 14 years since, but there are still some useful lessons from the 2008 saga.

The 2008 gas price showdown

By the spring of 2008, polls suggested that Democrats were narrow favorites to retake the White House. Incumbent president George W. Bush’s approval ratings were in the toilet, bogged down by a weakening economy and his long, bloody Iraq war. Barack Obama led both in a long primary battle with Hillary Clinton and in polls against GOP nominee presumptive John McCain, giving him a good shot to become the nation’s first Black president.

And then, all of a sudden, the presidential campaigns became consumed by the price of gas. Gas prices soared in the first several months of 2008 — at their peak in June, they were 30 percent higher than they were in January of that year. (The national average price rose to $4.16 a gallon in that span, equivalent to $5.48 in inflation-adjusted dollars.)

“When asked in an open-ended format to name the economic or financial problem they have been hearing the most about in the news lately, fully 72% of Americans point to gas and oil prices,” the Pew Research Center wrote in June 2008. “No other issue comes close. The housing and mortgage crisis is a distant second.” (Serious problems related to subprime lenders had become evident in 2007, and investment bank Bear Stearns had been bailed out in March 2008, but the crisis’s biggest moments hadn’t happened yet.)

So out came the policy proposals. McCain and Clinton both proposed a federal gas tax holiday; Obama pooh-poohed it, calling it pandering that would achieve little, and economists agreed.

Yet after the primary wrapped up in June and gas prices kept rising, Obama concluded he needed to offer voters something, and announced he supported a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies. (Economists dismissed this as pandering that would achieve little.)

Yet though the conventional wisdom is that bad economic conditions hurt the incumbent party, Republicans were surprisingly optimistic that the gas price issue could benefit them. The party soon coalesced around the message that what Americans needed was more oil — and, specifically, to lift the federal ban on offshore oil drilling (“drill, baby, drill,” as the eventual slogan went). This was awkward for Democrats. Many in the party hated the idea due to potential environmental damage, and others pointed out it would be years before new drilling had even the slightest possible effect on prices. But it polled extraordinary well, getting 73 percent support.

Democrats squirmed, and as the summer went on, they gradually concluded they had to cave. In July, the number two Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, said he and Majority Leader Harry Reid were “open to drilling and responsible production.” And in August, after Obama’s lead dropped several points in polls, he said he could support offshore drilling as part of a broader energy bill, and that he’d tap the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try and drive down prices further. If the 2008 election was going to be fought on gas prices, Obama wasn’t going to lose it by seeming intransigent.

In the end, all this position-taking was overtaken by events. The financial crisis of the Great Recession kicked into high gear that September, resulting in plummeting stocks, plunging demand, rising unemployment — and falling gas prices. By Election Day, gas prices had dropped so much that they were about 22 percent lower than at the start of 2008. So the great gas price election showdown did not transpire.

How 2022 might be similar, and different

The midterm elections are still nearly eight months away, and so there’s ample time gas prices to move — in either direction. But there are some comforting, and some not-so-comforting, implications in the 2008 gas price wars for Joe Biden.

Biden could take heart in the fact that the incumbent party — the GOP — managed to put Democrats on the defensive on this issue. Perhaps that means that it’s not inevitable that he’ll be blamed by voters for high gas prices, and that with the proper messaging, he can avert that outcome.

Yet it’s not clear that will work out so well for Democrats this year. For one, it’s the midterms, which is almost always a perilous election cycle for the incumbent president’s party. The issue of high gas prices may also inherently advantage Republicans somewhat, since the GOP is the party more identified with support for untrammeled fossil fuel production rather than environmental concerns. So though Bush was president as gas prices soared in 2008, the GOP could push an offshore drilling advocacy message.

Biden does not have the same play available to him — he can’t outflank Republicans on drilling, as indeed they’re already calling on him to massively expand domestic production far beyond Democrats’ comfort level. Still, he could be encouraged by the fact that, even before the 2008 financial crisis replaced that year’s gas price problem with something more dire, the Republican attacks weren’t enough to totally sink Obama in the polls.

While many global trends affecting the price of oil are out of Biden’s hands, he does have the advantage of being able to use the powers of the presidency to ease the pain somewhat. Last November, he already announced he would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to ease price increases, which he expanded on during his State of the Union address.

But by blocking Russian oil imports to the US, he’s now embracing a policy he admits could send prices higher. “Defending freedom is going to cost,” Biden said last week. Now he has to hope voters agree that cost is worth it.

Since its launch, Stop AAPI Hate has a steady influx of reports. And other sources have seen a similar uptick: A study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino found a 339 percent increase in hate crimes toward Asian Americans across several major cities between 2021 and 2020.

This year, the attacks have continued. In recent weeks, Christina Yuna Lee was murdered in New York City’s Chinatown, and multiple Asian women were assaulted by the same person in New York City.

“That’s a reason we started Stop AAPI Hate. We did not want this to be minimized, we wanted to have the numbers. We didn’t want there to be denialism,” Choi previously told Vox.

The movement, meanwhile, built slowly. Across the country, people — including the Stop AAPI Hate team — had been raising the alarm about growing anti-Asian sentiment for months, though it didn’t get more attention until a series of videos capturing brutal attacks against elderly people went viral in February 2021.

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These videos, including one calling attention to the killing of 84-year-old Thai American Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco, were amplified by activists like Amanda Nguyen, a longtime advocate against sexual violence, and celebrities including actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu, who questioned why there wasn’t more coverage and focus on these attacks.

As frustration about these incidents grew, the Atlanta shootings marked an inflection point, unleashing a wave of protests, demonstrations and public outcry.

Fiona Phie, head in her hands, kneels in front of offerings of flowers, candles, and incense. Erin Clark/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Asian Coalition MA organizer Fiona Phie takes a moment of silence after placing an offering among flowers, candles, and incense to honor those in the Asian American community who have experienced violent hate crimes on April 10, 2021, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Stop Asian Hate movement changed awareness of anti-Asian racism

One of the biggest achievements of the Stop Asian Hate movement is that it raised awareness about the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism.

“There has been this narrative over the last many, many years that so many parts of our community don’t face marginalization that we know we’re impacted by,” says Mohan Seshadri, the executive director of the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance of Pennsylvania. “We are seeing folks outside of our community waking up to the fact that anti-Asian violence and anti-Asian racism has been baked into our system and our government.”

For decades, the discrimination that Asian Americans have faced — including everything from exclusionary immigration policy to outright erasure — has been rendered invisible. In large part, that’s been due to the “model minority myth.” First popularized in the 1960s, it implies that all Asian people are successful and well-off, obscuring both the diversity within the group as well as the disparities that people experience.

Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
A Stop Asian Hate rally at Discovery Green in downtown Houston, Texas, on March 20, 2021.

But public perception of the problem of anti-Asian racism has changed rapidly.

According to a UCLA-led survey, between 2017 and 2021, the percentage of people who believed Asian Americans experienced significant discrimination more than doubled. The survey, analyzed for Vox by Baylor University’s Jerry Park and Seattle Pacific University’s Joshua Tom, found that 23 percent of people across demographic groups said they believed Asian Americans faced a lot of discrimination in 2021, compared to the 10 percent of people who said the same in a similar poll done after the 2016 election.

In May 2021, following media coverage of anti-Asian attacks, as well as a surge of Stop Asian Hate rallies and protests, 60 percent of people surveyed in an AP-NORC poll also said they believed discrimination against Asian Americans had increased in the last year.

These polls were conducted shortly after interest in the Stop Asian Hate movement took off. And though they don’t prove the movement alone was responsible for changing public opinion, other data points speak to the reach of Stop Asian Hate. As NBC News has reported, Google searches for the term “Asian American” were up 5,000 percent in 2021, and searches for the term “Stop Asian Hate” and “Stop AAPI Hate” also increased. Per tracking by the social media analytics firm Zignal Labs, the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate hashtags were used on Twitter more than 8.4 million and 2.5 million times, respectively, in 2021.

A demonstrator holds a sign reading “I am not invisible.” Behind him more demonstrators hold signs. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Members and supporters of the Asian American community attend the AAPI Rally Against Hate in New York on March 27, 2021.

It’s also forced a new dialogue across industries. Congress, for the first time in three decades, held a hearing focused explicitly on discrimination toward Asian Americans. Former late-night host Jay Leno apologized for jokes he’d made about Asian people eating dogs, which followed years of ignored complaints. And new attention has been placed on how underrepresented Asian Americans have been in film, television, elected office and leadership roles relative to their presence in the US population.

There have been policy wins, too

The movement has fueled some policy wins, though activists are divided on whether certain bills actually address the source of anti-Asian discrimination.

At the federal level, Congress approved the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act last May, which designated an official at the Justice Department to focus on Covid-19-related hate crimes, provided more funding to law enforcement for hate crimes reporting, and bolstered training resources to help police address hate crimes.

At the time of the bill’s passage, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said that the legislation offered “an important signal that Congress is taking anti-Asian racism and hatred seriously.”

Some activists, like Stanley Mark, the senior staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, have also celebrated the law as an important first step. “There is funding there to promote more reporting and strengthen community-based organizations. I do think it’s a beginning,” Mark says.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Sen. Mazie Hirono, flanked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, left, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, right, speaks during a news conference about the passage of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act on Capitol Hill on April 22, 2021. in Washington, DC.

Others, however, have been more critical, concerned that the legislation doesn’t confront the root causes of bias against Asian Americans, like xenophobic political rhetoric, gaps in education, and a lack of resources across communities. Many worry that it won’t deter future hate crimes and that it could lead to unintended problems, such as the overpolicing of Asian American communities and other communities of color.

“The real question is what do we do with that data [the bill collects]? Is it to reinforce a certain narrative that we need more policing?” Jason Wu, co-chair of GAPIMNY-Empowering Queer & Trans Asian Pacific Islanders, one of over 85 Asian American and Pacific Islander advocacy groups that opposed the bill, previously told Vox.

At the state level, several bills have gained more momentum in the last year. In Illinois and New Jersey, lawmakers passed bills requiring schools teach Asian American history after groups including Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago pushed lawmakers to take up the legislation.

“We’re reaching out to school districts all across the state to make sure that this happens and that it’s taught well,” says Grace Pai, the executive director of AAAJ-Chicago. “That requires an army of people paying attention.”

In California, the state legislature also passed an API Equity Budget, which allocates $166.5 million in funding to community-based organizations, including those working to help hate crime victims and to collect demographic data about the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in the state.

Moving forward, organizers — including a coalition called Make Us Visible — are continuing to focus on legislation that will require the teaching of ethnic studies and Asian American history in schools, with states including Florida, Ohio, and Connecticut also weighing such curriculums. Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) has also introduced federal legislation aimed at requiring the teaching of Asian American history in schools, while the White House has reestablished its initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, which is dedicated to improving language access and data collection.

Asian American organizations have seen a surge in engagement

Another effect of the Stop Asian Hate movement has been a surge of engagement and participation in Asian American organizations in the last year.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice has seen more than 130,000 people participate in bystander trainings it’s held via chapters across the country. And according to a rough estimate from Candid, an organization that tracks funding for nonprofits and foundations, $112.4 million was committed in grants to AAPI organizations in 2021, a 16 percent uptick from the $97.2 million committed in 2020.

“The world of philanthropy for many years had neglected Asian American communities,” says University of California Davis Asian American studies professor Robyn Rodriguez, whose research focuses on Asian American activism. “There’s been a new investment in Asian American communities that hasn’t existed before.”

Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
Members of the Public Safety Patrol, a volunteer anti-hate crime group, patrol the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York, on March 21, 2021. Wearing high-visibility vests and carrying walkie-talkies, their goal is to protect Asian Americans against a surge of pandemic-era violence.

A host of new organizations providing mutual aid and local resources have cropped up as well. In New York City, Soar Over Hate is among the new mutual aid organizations that have launched to help provide everything from public safety resources to health care screenings. In Los Angeles, a new group called Seniors Fight Back offers free self-defense classes to elders.

Nationally, a number of new coalitions have formed between Asian American groups, including the Asian American Leader’s Table, which sought to help organizations around the country respond to anti-Asian violence in different regions.

“Where community exists now but didn’t exist before, that’s an immense accomplishment,” says Tuấn ĐinhJanelle, the director of field at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.

The movement has also spawned a new generation of organizers. Grace Xia, 17, and Nathan Duong, 18, are among those who organized their first protests last year in, respectively, San Mateo, California, and Seattle, Washington. Xia says her protest centered the voices of AAPI women leaders and was attended by 300 people. Duong’s rally focused on passing out safety supplies, including emergency whistles and face masks. Both have said they intend to keep up this activism moving forward.

The Stop AAPI Hate movement has strengthened Asian Americans’ affinity with AAPI as a political identity as well. Polls have shown a growing number of AAPI adults are now identifying as members of the broader AAPI community.

There are a lot of paths forward for the movement

Sustaining the energy of the movement, and maintaining a cohesive coalition, are the next hurdles that organizers face.

“The challenge is that you have so many Asian and Pacific Islander organizations out there. To get them to collectively work together and share the same voice is very challenging,” says Connie Chung Joe, the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles.

Among the most common goals of what’s still a decentralized movement: pushing more education about Asian American history, which activists see as key to changing perceptions and combating the erasure that AAPI people have faced.

But issues like policing are still a source of division. The Stop AAPI Hate organization found that 53 percent of Asian Americans and 58 percent of Pacific Islanders named education as an effective solution to address anti-AAPI sentiment, while 30 percent of Asian Americans and 21 percent of Pacific islanders favored more law enforcement.

Stephen Lam/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Oakland Police Captain Bobby Hookfin visits Chinatown businesses in Oakland, California, on February 16, 2021, after an increase in violent crimes.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
A resident speaks to police officers handing out information to passersby advising them how to report hate crimes in New York City’s Chinatown on March 17, 2021.

“There are some who believe we need to double down on policing and there are some who are very skeptical and vehemently opposed to a solution that focuses on law enforcement because it undermines what we know about the role of policing in Black Lives Matter,” says University of Maryland Asian American Studies professor Janelle Wong.

There’s also a push to broaden the focus of the movement beyond individual incidents of hate that have predominately affected East Asian and Southeast Asian people to confront structural racism that different Asian American groups have faced. This includes the deportations of southeast Asian people and the racial profiling of South Asian people as national security threats in the wake of September 11th.

“What kinds of incidents count is sometimes very narrow, and it ends up leaving people out,” says Willman.

To step up the fight against systemic racism, some activists hope that the Stop AAPI Hate movement can develop its own detailed policy agenda, and point to the BREATHE Act — legislation drafted by the Movement for Black Lives and endorsed by progressive lawmakers such as Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — as a source of inspiration. Among other things, that act would shutter the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency as well as the Drug Enforcement Agency, while divesting federal funds from local law enforcement.

“The Movement for Black Lives has the BREATHE Act, a North Star piece of legislation. I think we need one as an Asian American movement, a North Star,” says Sarath Suong, the national director of the Southeast Asian Freedom Network.

Many organizers also believe that working in solidarity with other communities of color is vital to combat a broader system of white supremacy and collectively build political power.

John Minchillo/AP

Demonstrators gather for the Black & Yellow Asian Solidarity Rally led by community organizers in the Black and Asian communities in memory of George Floyd and Daunte Wright outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on April 18, 2021.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

People demonstrate at the Black & Yellow Asian Solidarity Rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on April 18, 2021.

Doing so will require acknowledging biases within the Asian American community — and countering them. Some experts, like UC Davis’s Rodriguez, fear media reports that have focused on anti-Asian incidents by Black attackers could activate anti-Blackness among some members of the Asian community.

For now, different groups are approaching next steps in unique ways. The Stop AAPI Hate organization is backing California legislation that would track data about street harassment near public transit, and study it as a public health issue. 18MillionRising is supporting the VISION Act, a California bill that addresses how incarcerated immigrants and refugees are often sent to ICE detention after their release from prison. And organizers in Connecticut have ramped up advocacy for a bill requiring Asian American history in the state’s schools.

Certain activists also aim to harness the energy of this movement to mobilize more Asian American voters during the 2022 elections after the group saw sharp increases in turnout in 2020.

“Despite common assumption that Asian Americans don’t care about politics, or that they are apolitical, what 2021 has shown us is that’s not true,” says Indiana University Asian American studies professor Ellen Wu.

Cea, the voting rights activist, and others ultimately hope the energy from Stop Asian Hate can fuel affirmative expressions of Asian Americans’ strength and political power.

“It did provide a unified rallying cry for folks, but a year later, it’s important that we change the narrative,” she says. “If we continue this idea of Stopping Asian Hate, that perpetuates this idea that we are constant victims of hate. We need to have a more empowering narrative that we are speaking out and fighting back.”

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