My response to the attack on Jonathan Mok in London

There has been an incident in the news here in the UK that I simply cannot ignore and quite a few of my readers have asked me to address it since it concerns a topic that I have already discussed many times on my blog: racism. On the 24 February, 23 year old Singaporean student Jonathan Mok was attacked on Oxford Street in a racially aggravated attack where he was singled out for being Chinese. Four white youths insulted him about the Corona virus, then brutally beat him up, leaving him with horrific facial injuries. There is plenty more information on the BBC about this incident but I wanted to point out that before I wrote this article, I had already looked up Mok on Facebook - turns out we do have mutual friends given that we both went to UCL and I still know some current students there because of my involvement with their gymnastics club. I offered Mok my support and wanted him to know that there's someone here in London who does care and if there's anything I could do to help in light of the current circumstances, I am here to help. I know that I have said I have not personally experienced any racism in London in light of the Corona virus that is still true - but allow me to offer a response to what has happened as a British-Chinese Londoner who has lived here in London since 1997.

I remember this conversation I had last year when I was in the small town of Esquel in Patagonia, Argentina. I got to know a local lady called Cristina and she was telling me about why she has chosen to bring up her kids in a small town like Esquel rather than a big city like Buenos Aires, Cordoba or Mendoza. "There are these gangs in the big cities - they deal drugs, they're probably all drug addicts, they carry knives and guns and their lives are worth nothing you know, they are so poor, they literally have nothing. These teenage boys will shoot you in the head just to steal your iPhone or 500 pesos (about US$8). That's why I don't like going to Buenos Aires, it is not safe at all and you have to be very careful when you're there." I shrugged my shoulders and told her that it was the same thing in London - there are poor people and criminal gangs in practically every city in the world and yes, whilst crime rates are higher in some cities compared to others, I don't live in a city that has very low crime rates - I live in London. There are parts of London which I would not want to go to, not that I believe I would be stabbed or murdered if I set foot there, but rather London is a very divided city. The rich and affluent people live in the nice neighbourhoods, they shop in upmarket areas, they go to expensive restaurants and entertainment venues; whilst the poor people live in more run-down neighbourhoods, they shop in cheaper areas and they socialize in cheaper districts. It is ultimately the price-tags involved that segregates the different communities and keeps the rich and the poor apart: poor people wouldn't go shopping on Bond Street because they can't afford anything there. Do remember this story from my Argentinian friend Cristina, as I will be coming back to it later on.

But here's the thing: there are no physical barriers to stop a poor person from going to Bond Street, this isn't Apartheid South Africa. The location where Mok was attacked was described as 'Oxford Street, near Tottenham Court Road station' - now there's an obvious landmark at the junction where Oxford Street meets Tottenham Court Road station: Primark. For those of you not familiar with Primark, it is a budget clothes retailer and you can get some really good bargains there. Some might describe it as cheap and tacky or cheap and nasty, but the prices there are really catering for those shopping on a very limited budget. They call themselves a 'fast fashion retailer' but the word that I think suits it best comes from Malay: "lelong-lelong", you would use that phrase to describe something that is very cheap but not of high quality. Here's an example of how it is used, "if you buy those very lelong-lelong batteries from the pasar malam (night market), they probably won't last as long as Duracell batteries. You get what you pay for!" The Primark chain current has 370 stores over 12 countries in Europe and America, it is expanding very fast rapidly - even if you do buy something from Primark, you probably won't admit to it because of its rather poor reputation for being 'lelong-lelong'. I'm not a snob when it comes to shopping at Primark, I have even bought stuff from Primark before (hey, I do love a good bargain, guilty as charged) but the fact is a huge Primark store like the one right by Tottenham Court Road Station tends to attract poorer people looking for a bargain. Now I wouldn't describe the area as particularly dangerous (given that I did live in the West End for 12 years), but I couldn't help but notice that none of the news reports mentioned anything about the big Primark.

Thus the notion of there being rich areas for rich people and poor areas for poor people in a city like London is a myth really - what actually happens is that rich and poor people live right next to each other. An example of how that manifests itself in London is the location of the extremely exclusive Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant Hakkasan on Hanway Place - the entrance to Hakkasan is just 24 meters (I checked on Google Maps) from the back entrance of Primark (though that entrance on Hanway Place is only used for deliveries). Hakksan is expensive, it is so exquisite and special. The online menu doesn't even show the prices - basically in a place like that, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. Part of the reason why a lot of celebrities like to dine in places like that is because ordinary folks can't afford to eat in places like that. Hence it is the price tag (and the security staff) that keeps poor people away from exclusive establishments like that.  Yet this super exclusive restaurant with a Michelin star is literally a stone's throw from Primark - the Primark staff on their cigarette breaks are literally watching the celebrities get out of their limousines on Hanway Place when they arrive at Hakkasan. These celebrities will probably spend on one meal there what the staff at Primark earn in a month working in that clothing store - it is a highly unequal society when it comes to the rich and the poor rubbing shoulders in that one narrow little street in the West End of London, very close to the spot where Mok was attacked. Such is the complex nature of London, where the rich and the poor somehow co-exist right next to each other.

The otherfactor that I have to point out is the fact that this assault happened very close to a major London Underground station: Tottenham Court Road, where two major lines intersect, the Northern and the Central lines. So what we have are three category of places: spaces where you're more likely to find only rich people (such as in Hakkasan restaurant), where you're more likely to find only poor people (such as in a Primark clearance sale) and mixed spaces where you're going to find a mix of poor and rich people. Thus Oxford Street near Tottenham Court Road station is a perfect example of these mixed spaces. There isn't that much of a social stigma when it comes to using public transport: a good example of that is how a lot of politicians make it a point to use public transport so as to demonstrate that they are not adding to the pollution and congestion in the streets by driving their own cars. Boris Johnson, our current prime minister, was often seen cycling around London when he was the mayor of London, before he became prime minister (but I don't think he's allowed to do so anymore, now that he's the PM running the country). Most of the time in these mixed spaces, people simply mind their own business and ignore others but in the case of Mok, these four thugs were clearly looking for trouble. They were never going to get into a posh place like Hakkasan and they might not want to pick on someone who is as poor and underprivileged as themselves in a places like Primark, thus they found Mok who is a relatively privileged foreign student at a top university in the mixed space outside on Oxford Street. Thus I wouldn't say that Mok was in the wrong place at the wrong time - 99.99% of the time it is a perfectly safe space; Mok was simply very unlucky in this case.

There is one particular aspect of British housing policy that I need to explain that would help you understand the urban geography of British cities: council housing. The government is committed to provide cheap, affordable housing for poor people in our society here, so those who otherwise cannot afford to pay their rent will not end up homeless. I know there are still a lot of homeless people in the UK but without the valiant efforts of the government with the council housing programme, that number would be far, far higher. The people who benefit from council housing either get their housing at a massive discount through government subsidies or in some cases, the government simply pays for it entirely if it is an unemployed single mother with young children or a very old person with no savings. A lot of countries have a similar social housing policy to cater for poor people, but one distinguishing feature of the British policy is trying to avoid ghettos. So the government would try to place responsibility on rich boroughs (districts) to house a certain number of poor people, so the onus would be on them to build council housing in those nicer neighbourhoods for poor people so you would not have all the poor people concentrated in one area regarded as 'the wrong side of town'. Does it work? Sort of, not totally: there are clearly still poverty stricken areas in the UK where poverty, deprivation and unemployment are serious problems, but I must point out that without the council housing programme, the situation would have been so much worse. So, here's a video below for you to further understand the history of social housing and its impact here in the UK.

There is a limit to what the government can do: so for example, they can build council housing in very nice parts of towns, so that you can get poor and rich people living side by side, reducing social segregation if they use the same local facilities, such as the local churches, schools or sports centers. It is very easy to put poor people in the nice parts of town, this happens a lot as even the rich areas have the responsibility to build a certain amount of social housing to house poor people - so the classic example of that is a council block located very close to Harrods in Knightsbridge, in one of the three most exclusive and expensive part of London (along with Belgravia and Mayfair). However, the reverse isn't true: it is impossible to lure rich people to live in deprived neighbourhoods full of poor people. Property developers simply will not build luxury developments in such deprived areas because they know rich people would take one look at it and think, "there's just no way I would live in a place like this, it is disgusting and dangerous, I've the money to buy a home in a much nicer, safer neighbourhood." So on one hand, the government can only shift a small number of poor people into nice neighbourhood through the council housing mechanism, but on the other hand, it is not a communist state which controls the entire housing market - no, market forces plays a huge part in determining where people live so there is still to a large degree, a lot of segregation between poor and rich people in the UK, even if the problem isn't as serious as in some American cities for example. So over time, rich British people are quite used to living in close quarters with poor people, if the government decides to build a council block in a very rich neighbourhood to house poor people.

In London, there are some extremely safe places where you're probably never going to be the victim of a racist hate crime. For example, one of the safest places you can be is in a police station because criminals are highly unlikely to dare to commit a crime in a police station where they risk getting caught red-handed. Conversely, you're in a far more dangerous situation if you're in an area with a lot of criminals but few people who will come to your help if you were attacked and you scream for help. An example of such a place would be Ciudad Juarez in Mexico - it has one of the highest murder rates in the world and the city is overrun by dangerous drug gangs. So if you're attacked in the streets of Ciudad Juarez, well nobody will come to your rescue because the people who heard your cries for help are probably running the other way out of fear. But what about central London then? It is usually very crowded but unlike Ciudad Juarez, the streets of London aren't as dangerous. Violent crime in central London isn't unheard of but what is unusual in the case of Mok's attack is that it took place in what is generally considered a safe area where such attacks are unlikely. Allow me to refer you to another attack in London recently: a 24 year old man was stabbed and murdered in the West Hendon area - this was a far more attack than what happened to Mok yet hardly anyone noticed. Why? Because the victim was poor and black and the attack took place in a poorer neighbourhood, so there was a sense of, "yeah that kind of thing happens to poor black people in those places, so what." Have we become so desensitized to that kind of crime?

In fact on the day when Mok was attacked, one man was stabbed to death in Cricklewood (another poor neighbourhood in North-West London) whilst another man remains in a critical condition after a stabbing in Hackney (a very poor neighbourhood in Hackney). Again, neither attacks received as much media coverage as Mok's attack because the victims were poor and black and the attacks happened in poorer neighbourhoods. Thus if a poor black man in a poor part of town gets murdered, nobody bats an eyelid. But if a rich white woman in a nice parts of town gets attacked or in this case, a fairly rich Singaporean student get attacked in a central part of town that we generally feel safe in, then oh everyone goes up in arms and screams for justice on social media. I wonder how many of these same people would ask for justice for that poor black man who got murdered the same day Mok was attacked. If I may be ever so blunt, yes there's plenty of crime in the UK but it disproportionately affects the poor and if you look at the statistics for violent crime like murder and stabbings, the vast majority of the victims are young, black men from poor, deprived areas. The fact is Mok had done absolutely nothing wrong in that he didn't wander into a notoriously dangerous neighbourhood in London like Brixton, Peckham or Tottenham (not to be confused with Tottenham Court Road, which is in central London - Tottenham is actually a deprived neighbourhood in North-East London). However, people are shocked that a man got attacked in what even us locals would consider a very safe part of town and this is why the vast majority of British people are up in arms about this: it challenges our long-held beliefs about where we consider 'safe' and 'unsafe' in our capital city, this should not have happened on Oxford Street but somehow it did. The police were under pressure to catch the people who did this to make people feel safe again on Oxford Street and sure enough, arrests have already been made. 

According to the 2011 census, there are about 120,000 Chinese people in London and that figure is probably much higher today due to a massive influx of students from China studying at London's many universities. The census is carried out once every ten years so the next census is due in 2021, next year. Whilst the attack on Mok is undoubtedly horrific, I need to point out to you that there are so many other Chinese people in London carrying on with our lives as per normal without experiencing any racism. Indeed, London is one of the world's most diverse cities: only 44.9% of the residents here are considered 'white British', 37% of the population here were born outside the UK and 24.5% were born outside Europe. In total, white people (including European migrants from places like Hungary, Italy, Poland, Greece, Slovakia etc) number only 59.8%. Bear in mind these statistics are from 2011, so the 2021 census will probably reveal a huge drop in the number of white and white British people in London. The statistics reveal London to be one of the most mixed cities in the world, where 4 in 10 people are not white and white British people are in the minority. You're hardly going to stand out as a foreign in a place like London where there are so many non-white and non-British people! If you went to a small town in the countryside, then the percentage of white British people would go up to over 90% and even then it is not as if there's a direct correlation between the percentage of white people and incidents of racism. No, rather you're far more likely to see such racist hate crime in parts of the UK where there is poverty and a lack of minorities - now that is hardly the case in London which is very ethnically diverse and relatively rich compared to the rest of the country.

If the people who attacked Mok genuinely believed that he had the corona virus and was likely to infect others, then they were very foolish in beating him up because they broke his nose and got his blood on themselves. Anyone who has seen the news on the corona virus would know that it is spread via human contact and the last thing you want to touch is another person's blood. So the people who attacked Mok clearly were not sure what the virus was or how it is spread, which shows a level of stupidity and ignorance. There are moments in life when we all get very angry but we always show a level of restraint before hitting someone (no matter how angry we may get) for a simple reason: assault is a crime. I may use my words but I know that the moment I use my fists, then I risk being hauled up in court with a charge of assault and desperately trying to explain that I was acting in self-defense. No thanks, I have a good life, I have too much at stake: I have a good job, I earn a lot of money and I am always going on holiday every few weeks. I have too much to lose and so we go back to the beginning of the article: remember that story that the Argentinian lady Cristina told me about how some of these poverty stricken teenagers in Buenos Aires who have so little that they nothing to lose so they join criminal gangs and participate in violent crimes? Well unfortunately, we do have the equivalent of young people in London who have nothing, their lives are worth so little that they have nothing to lose - they don't have a job to lose because they're unemployed, they don't risk being suspended from school or university because they dropped out of school years ago and if they get sent to jail for a violent crime, that's free food and accommodation for them. That's why these people don't think twice the way the rest of us normal people do: they have nothing, thus they have nothing to lose.

Here's the problem that all societies will face: there will always been stupid people who will end up poor because they simply don't have what it takes to acquire the necessary skills to find a well paid job. Such people would then end up in the kind of situation as described by my Argentinian friend Cristina: they end up so poor, their lives are so miserable as they have nothing and have nothing to lose, so they turn to crime. So this isn't an issue of racism per se, but more what a society does with stupid people who end up stuck in poverty and don't have any purpose with their lives. Usually, the threat of punishment by law enforcement authorities is enough to deter most people from committing crimes, but what if your life is so wretched you have nothing to lose anyway? This opens up a whole new debate of a much more complicated topic beyond racism that has no easy answers: in every country in the world, from Japan to France, China to Canada, Singapore to New Zealand, there will be that section of society which through the genetic lottery are way too stupid to become productive members of society - what the hell do you do with these people them to keep them from harming others in the way they harmed Mok? I really dislike the way people simplify the whole issue to that of racism, as if that's the only reason and motivation for the people who attacked Mok when the real situation is far more complex. If you look at people who commit such crimes, they have such complex social problems that have contributed to their criminal behaviour - thus we need to ask ourselves as a society what we are prepared to do to deter such evil people from criminal behaviour in the first place and how much of a role the government has to take in dealing with such people.

I have observed something really quite disturbing on social media and that is the reaction to Mok's attack: there is this really stupid, simplistic reaction by some Asian people when they share the new of Mok's attack. They use Mok's attack as evidence that white people are racist and really hate Asian people, so their response is to be even more racist than these white racists and hate white people even more in return. Great, just fucking great, that's a race to be the bottom just to see who can be more racist. So is that really what you want, a world where everyone fucking hates everyone else who is slightly different? Perhaps I am indeed pointing out the obvious here but hate isn't the answer that we need here. I think the most important part of coming up with a sensible response is to gather all the facts first. The fact is the vast majority of British people are most certainly not racist and whilst you may react to the attack on Mok with anger, you need to direct that anger specifically towards the individuals who attacked Mok rather than all British people or all white people in London. Do not hold a whole group of people such as 'white British people' accountable for the crimes of a tiny handful of individuals - we need to react in a calm, rational and sensible manner rather than lash out in blind hatred. After all, it was blind hatred and stupidity that led to the attack on Mok in the first place by these four individuals, simply lowering yourself to their level doesn't solve any problems. This is why it is vital that Asian people do not have any knee-jerk reactions towards white people in light of this episode, but instead focus on pressuring our politicians to make sure that an example is made of these four individuals who attacked Mok, that they are punished with the maximum jail sentence possible under our justice system to send out a very clear message that racist hate crimes will not be tolerated in the UK.

Am I angry at what happened? Yes, like so many of you out there, I amangry too and I would love to beat the crap out of these four people who attacked Mok. However, I want you to note how specific my anger is towards these four individuals. That's why I must caution people against making statements like 'London is a racist place' or 'there is racism in London' for it misrepresents the situation - such statements make it sound like what happened to Mok would probably happen to every single Asian person in London. That's incorrect: what happened to Mok is atrocious and shocking, but thousands of Asian people in London like myself are getting through their daily lives here as usual and we're not worried about racist attacks. Allow me to use an analogy to make my point here: in 2010, a Singaporean student Tan Mingwei was tragically killed in North London when she was hit by a bus. It was late at night, she had crossed the road and somehow was struck by the bus. Can you imagine if Singaporeans or Asians were to go up in arms and claim that public transport in London is not safe for Singaporeans or Asians? Of course not, we are all deeply saddened by the death of Ms Tan under such tragic circumstances but we also accept that such accidents are rare and we would still go on using public transport in London without making the assumption that if it can happen to Ms Tan because she is Singapore, then it must happen to me too as like her, I am also from Singapore. No, there simply isn't that correlation at all there. Hence what happened to both Mok and Tan in London were awful but I also know that it is highly unlikely to happen to me even if I am, like them, from Singapore too and that's my most rational, sensible response. In fact now is the time to be calm, rational and sensible rather than give into anger and blind hatred - do you want to be part of the problem or the solution?

I'd like to finish with the story that I started with: remember that conversation I had with Cristina? Well, I had a brilliant time in South America last year and thankfully, I had no trouble at all with crime when I was there - the closest I got to trouble was when I had a few oranges confiscated from me when I crossed the border from Argentina to Chile. Then after I had returned to London, I came across a story in the news about a British tourist who was shot dead in Buenos Aires outside his hotel during a robbery and as I read the article, I remembered Cristina's words. I can just imagine her saying to me (in English, with a thick Argentinian accent), "see what I told you? This kind of thing happens in Buenos Aires!" So on one hand, she is right, violent crime like that does happen sometimes in Argentina, but on the other hand, just because violent crime like that happens sometimes doesn't mean that you will be attacked should you go to Argentina as a tourist. The fact is we do live in a world where there are criminals, where there is crime and don't just focus on racism: the British tourist in Buenos Aires was killed in a robbery. There are a thousand different reasons why someone may want to harm you without racism being a part of the equation - maybe they just want to steal your money and phone and they really don't care what the colour of your skin is. Just because that one British tourist got shot in Buenos Aires doesn't mean that British people stopped going to Argentina on holiday and by the same token, just because Mok got attacked in London doesn't mean that all Chinese people are in great danger the moment they walk down Oxford Street. What happened to Mok is highly unusual and like I said earlier, the people responsible have been arrested already - even in the Buenos Aires shooting, the robbers have been arrested as well. So, what we need now is justice, not more hatred.

On that note, that's it from me on this issue, over to you. What did you feel when you read about the attack on Jonathan Mok? Do you have any concerns about your safety in London or for the safety of Singaporeans/Asian people in London? What do you think the police needs to do to make the public feel safer in light of this? And what do you think of people trying to hijack this incident to make London look like a very racist place? What are your impressions of London, do you feel it is a rather racist city or are the locals quite friendly? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.