Viral video of racist incident at Mills 50 restaurant reflects rising anti-Asian abuse

Even as Kristen Nguyen recorded a customer directing racist and abusive comments at her, she didn’t plan to post the videos. She hoped that if the woman knew she was being recorded, the diatribe would end.

In one 28-second video captured June 13 inside King Cajun Crawfish restaurant on Mills Avenue, Nguyen is heard telling the woman, “I got that on camera,” but the woman continued cursing and making noises meant to mock languages spoken in Asia.

In another 12-second clip, the woman tells Nguyen, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in Orlando, to “take your [expletive] back to your country.”

“I wasn’t going to put it online,” Nguyen said. “The reason why I did was because I told her after she made those mocking noises, ‘I’m going to put you on Facebook,’ and she didn’t care. She said more things. … That to me just said that she didn’t care about all the racist remarks that she was saying. She didn’t care that I was going to publicize it. Inside our establishment, we have to make a stand.”

Nguyen’s videos captured one of the latest examples of anti-Asian rhetoric that has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic. Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks different forms of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, recorded nearly 11,000 incidents between March 2020 and December 2021.

Though about 16.2% of the reports to Stop AAPI Hate included some form of physical violence, about 63% were verbal harassment that included hate speech, for which victims have little legal recourse. Nguyen said she tried calling the Orlando Police Department to file a report and was told there was nothing officers could do.

“An officer was not dispatched to the business as no crime had occurred,” said OPD spokesperson Heidi Rodríguez, adding the agency later increased patrols around the restaurant.

If no act of violence is committed or threatened, there is little police can do to protect victims. But more support is slowly becoming available for Asian Americans in Central Florida.

Liaisons, grassroots group offer help

In January, with the help of the Orange County Branch of the NAACP, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office launched its new AAPI Liaison program and now has a team of 10 Asian-American deputies who are Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese and Indian. They are helping to build connections between the community and the Sheriff’s Office.

An AAPI Liaison showed up to speak with Nguyen after the verbal attack at her family’s restaurant and again to participate in a fundraiser organized by the community to show support of King Cajun’s owners and staff.

They also plan to make sure someone from the liaison program shows up for community events and other positive occasions too, said Deputy First Class Tom Lin, who is leading the AAPI Liaison initiative.

Lin said a Vietnamese-American deputy who serves as one of the liaisons recently met an older Vietnamese man and was able to speak with him in Vietnamese. Even small moments like that can help to build trust and open lines of communication across the Asian-American community, Lin said.

“You could tell the older Vietnamese gentleman was not super comfortable with us yet but we’re a still a new group,” Lin said. “We’re getting out there, we’re reaching out and attending a lot of events to let them know that we’re out here for them.”

Citizens are also doing their part to give residents of Asian heritage a greater voice in Central Florida.

In March, with the approaching passage of a year since a mass shooting killed six Asian women and two others at three Atlanta spas, a group of Central Florida residents created the grassroots organization Asian American Pacific Islanders Coming Together (ACT).

ACT launched with a survey to better understand the concerns of Metro Orlando’s 112,000 Asian American residents. More than 300 people have already responded highlighting education, immigration and public safety as priorities, said Ricky Ly, cofounder and spokesperson for ACT.

The group will hold its first meeting on Monday at 6 p.m. at the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office.

Ly said he expects hate speech, national violence against Asian Americans and the incident at King Cajun to be part of the conversation on Monday but a key focus will be on getting Asian Americans registered to vote and engaged in local and national elections so they have a voice in shaping the policy around the issues that ACT will bring to light.

“A lot of the voter turnout issue has a lot to do with a lack of information because I know I don’t vote if I don’t have information,” Ly said. “But if you’re working 80 hours a week trying to take care of your family and you have a language barrier, etc. it’s going to be very difficult.”

He said he hopes ACT will be able to recognize and then remove some of these barriers so that more Asian Americans will feel empowered to vote for elected officials who will prioritize issues important to their communities.

Fallout of racist tirade spreads

In the nearly two weeks since Nguyen posted her videos of the racist incident at her mother-in-law’s restaurant, they have been viewed more than 30,000 times and shared widely on Facebook and other social media platforms.

While it brought many supporters who decried the hate speech, it also showed the harm that online outrage can do, especially if misdirected.

In an attempt to identify the woman responsible for the hate-filled attack, commenters wrongly blamed it on Iris Mejia, the owner of Beauty Bar Orlando, a salon with a similar name to that of the woman in Nguyen’s video.

Since then, Mejia said she has received more than 800 calls, texts and voice messages with verbal attacks meant for the woman who ranted against Nguyen. Others booked fake appointments and more left negative one-star reviews on Yelp to drive potential customers away from her business.

One person vandalized the outside of her salon, painting expletives across her doors.

“After it went viral, it just didn’t stop,” Mejia said. “It was just horrible. I just… didn’t know what to do.”

After losing thousands of dollars over the past two weeks, Mejia raised nearly $7,000 of a $10,000 goal through a GoFundMe campaign to cover her rent and ensure that her stylists, who normally pay a fee to work from her salon, would not have to struggle.

By 2 p.m. Thursday, only one customer was at the salon which is usually booked solid, she said. She reported the attacks to Orlando police but, like Nguyen, was told there was nothing police could do and said officers advised her to consider hiring private security and an attorney.

While the calls have finally slowed, Mejia said the experience aggravated her arthritis in her neck and back and sent her to a local hospital, where she is waiting to find out if she will have to undergo surgery to relieve her inflammation.

The woman in the video did not answer phone calls and her storefront was closed Thursday. She could not be reached for comment.

dstennett@orlandosentinel.com