After Asian-American Kat Zhou’s tweet sharing her horrific racist encounter at a Stockholm train station went viral – liked over 150,000 times – the designer realised that she wasn’t alone in her experience
On a chilly evening in February 2022, just over two years after I first moved to Stockholm, I was accosted by two white men. They cornered me while I was walking outside a train station alone in the city centre, one of them shoving his middle finger in my face while the other pulled his eyes back in small slits. They shouted racist taunts and jeers at me, slurring their words.
Taken aback, I froze and then shakily reprimanded them. Four passers-by shuffled around us, averting their eyes. After what seemed like an eternity, the men slinked away. Luckily, a friend was nearby, and he accompanied me home. As we were walking through the subway station, we saw my attackers again, loitering around, and I was able to capture some pictures of them with my phone.
Distressed, I decided to file a police report. Two months later, I received a terse response stating that there was too little evidence to pursue things further. The icy churn of rage twisted inside my stomach after reading their words. Thinking to myself, ‘What about my pain? What about the possibility that the perpetrators were still traipsing around town, harassing others?’ The police never followed up on their promise to find an interpreter. And while I did not have a video of the crime, I had photos and timestamps of my harassers jumping the subway turnstile. I hated the fact that I felt obligated to document my trauma too. I asked myself: ‘What kind of society expects victims to be vigilantes in their own abuse?
Photo: Courtesy of Kat Zhou
I felt a wave of resignation wash over me. So when a white woman called me “Asian trash” two months later, right in my own Stockholm neighbourhood, I stayed quiet.
In September 2022, the country elected a new rightwing government. The far-right Sweden Democrats became the second-largest in parliament, gaining more than 20% of the votes. The dismay of my friends in Sweden reminded me of the dread that enveloped my friends back in the US in November 2016. For every exclamation of shock I heard from a Swede who said they “hadn’t expected the election results,” there was a microaggression, discriminatory affront, or blatant hate crime that I experienced whilst living in the country.
Most alarmingly, it was Sweden’s younger generation that had swung conservative: a startling 22% of first-time voters aged between 18-21 had cast their ballots for the Sweden Democrats. When I heard news of this, the image of those two young men outside the subway – a picture which had been long buried in the archives of my phone – suddenly recrystallised in my mind. It felt as if those men were given societal permission to brazenly commit a hate crime in central Stockholm.
The election reignited my rage, which I had swallowed for months. Sitting on a ten hour flight to the US for a work conference, I started jotting down my racing thoughts in a series of tweets. I wanted to illuminate my own painful experiences in Sweden and hold my attackers to account. With only 1,400 Twitter followers, I expected very little response, but it still felt cathartic to scream into the void. Maybe someone out there might listen or care. When I finally made it to my hotel, I took one last drowsy read of my draft, and hit ‘Tweet’ and then melted into bed.
Photo: Courtesy of Kat Zhou
I woke up to over 500 notifications of solidarity, both in English and Swedish. I had never experienced anything like this. By that afternoon, my tweets had quadrupled in likes. The supportive retweets and replies were still coming, ushering in an inevitable backlash of antagonistic responses from racists, trolls, and incels, too.
There is no way to emotionally steel oneself for the vitriol that is part and parcel of being a visible woman of colour online. As someone who has studied the strange social phenomenon of ‘going viral’ in her own research work, it was even more bizarre to have it happening to me. I felt bewildered when absurdly racist rumours about me began circulating. I felt disgusted when a perverted 4chan thread was created about me. And I was stunned when a screenshot of my address was posted online. Nobody can prepare for being targeted online – nobody should have to.
By the time my trip was over and I had landed back in Stockholm, my Twitter thread had amassed over 150k likes and 28k retweets. It was the truths of the folks who extended their solidarity which really moved me. I am in awe of the bravery of those who publicly replied with their own experiences of discrimination, all while knowing that the right-wing mob online would descend upon them as well. There is a certain affective tension that accompanies the double-edged sword of kinship forged through marginalisation. While I found solace in knowing that I was not alone, it gravely pained me to know that others had experienced similar, if not worse, traumas.
And for every shared truth, I wondered how many unshared ones existed. Not everybody has the societal privilege or fiscal security to confront their oppressors. I want to build a reality where we all have the safety to speak up – a reality where our stories of resilience are not glorified for consumption, but instead seen as urgent calls to reimagine a world without hate.