A man denounces the American Asian woman in the busy OC park and spectators do not enter

In the latest haunting episode of anti-Asian attacks, an Orange County Olympic hopeful was in a park training the summer games when a man attacked her in an incident he captured in a video.

“I was shocked … I didn’t know what to do … and he slowly rose so he approached me and kept calling me for no reason,” Sakura Kokumai, a U.S. karate Olympian, told ABC7 in an interview.

“You’re so small,” the man is heard saying in the pictures. “I’m going to look for your boyfriend.”

“At first there were no racial insults,” Kokumai said, “but when he got in his car he yelled ‘Chinese’ and ‘sashimi’ and then he was like he was fine.”

Sakura Kokumai says she worked at Grijalva Park, as she does every day as she prepares for the Olympics. She is set to represent the United States at the Tokyo Games this summer, as the first American to qualify for the Karate Olympics.

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That’s why she says she was so calm: she knew that if she had to, she could fight. She said the man out of nowhere started harassing her for almost 20 minutes.

“You know what? If this was my mother … and if this was my grandmother … that’s where she got scared, because she knew she could handle me with the situation being calm,” Kokumai said. “You don’t want to be aggressive. But my concern was, what if it was someone else?”

In 2020, there were ten times as many incidents and hate crimes against Asian Americans in Orange County. Most of these crimes were public, according to the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

Last month, an 82-year-old Asian Asian woman in the Leisure World retirement community in Seal Beach received a letter on the day of her husband’s funeral: she said her death was a good thing because it meant “an Asian less to endure “.