Dominic Ng, the president, CEO and chairman of East West Bank, is hopeful that a new federal hate crime law will help stem the pandemic-era spike in anti-Asian xenophobia and violence.
Ng, whose bank has branches in both China and the U.S., expressed optimism that the measure, signed into law last week by President Biden, will encourage more Asian Americans to report hate crimes, and also enable police to make more arrests.
The $56.9 billion-asset East West is one of several banks that have made financial commitments in recent months to groups that work to track and reduce violence against members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. One such group, Stop AAPI Hate, reported 6,603 incidents across the country between March 19, 2020, and March 31, 2021.
“East West Bank will be very, very actively engaging with any other organizations that will join us to speak out against these types of anti-Asian crimes, and hopefully we will collectively help to move the country forward,” Ng said in an interview.
The wave of anti-Asian hate incidents has sparked particular concern at banks like East West that focus on serving Asian American communities and have predominantly Asian workforces. In early January,
Roughly 74% of East West’s workforce is Asian American, and Ng said that he worries about his employees’ safety. He praised them for going “above and beyond,” even as they commute to work during a pandemic and harbor fears of being attacked.
“It’s amazing,” Ng said, “that they were able to overcome their fear and continue to provide services to our customers.”
Ng is a Hong Kong native who got an accounting degree from the University of Houston in 1980. He has previously spoken out about discrimination against Asian Americans, once recalling that when he first came to Los Angeles, real estate brokers were paying appraisers to inflate the price of homes sold to Chinese immigrants.
“I’ve seen it all,” he
The recent attacks on Asians in the U.S. has unfolded against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China. Former President Trump used derogatory terms such as “China virus” that
Ng credited Biden for tackling the violence, contrasting his record to the prior four years of anti-Asian rhetoric that he says “woke up the racists” and treated Asian Americans as “collateral damage.”
“Finally, we have a president that is willing to speak up for the Asian American community,” he said.
Ng’s bank, a unit of East West Bancorp, was among the companies that announced donations this spring in an effort to combat hate. In March, shootings at three Atlanta-area spas that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent. Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, allege that 22-year old Robert Aaron Long, who is white, targeted some of the victims because they were of Asian descent.
Cathay Bank, which, like East West, was founded in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, announced a $1 million donation shortly after the shootings.
“While we all believe in the importance of the fight against anti-Asian sentiment and violence, actions speak louder than words,” Dunson Cheng, executive chairman of the $19 billion-asset bank, said in a press release at the time. “Cathay Bank wants to show our support by providing funds to organizations that serve the Asian American communities and provide invaluable education to the community at large.”
Larger banks, including
The hate crimes law, which was sponsored by Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., and Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, will add a new position to the Department of Justice to help expedite hate crime reviews. It also aims to encourage more reporting of incidents and seeks to make it easier to report in multiple languages. Biden said last week that too many Asian Americans have woken up “each morning this past year, genuinely, genuinely fearing for their safety.”
That fear is present for Asian Americans during everyday errands, Ng said. He noted that members of the Asian community now worry about how far away they should park from their destination, or think about buying fewer groceries at once in order to spend less time outside of the store unloading them, for fear of being attacked.
“That's very, very saddening, that after all these years, that with the contributions Asian Americans have made to American society, that we end up in this kind of fear and anxiety,” he said.
