Vancouver has been anything but.

Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined. With almost 1 out of every 2 residents of Asian descent in British Columbia experiencing a hate incident in the past year, the region is confronting an undercurrent of racism that runs as long and deep as the historical links stretching across the Pacific.

Covid-19 was the trigger. But the resentment had been building for decades. Few cities have been so visibly transformed by Asian immigration—and money—as Vancouver, a struggling industrial backwater that morphed into a glittering cosmopolis of luxury condos and designer boutiques. The disproportionate rash of incidents has raised an unsettling question: Maybe Vancouver isn’t the bastion of progressive multiculturalism it thinks it is.

“Covid has just revealed what’s always been there,” says Trixie Ling, 38, a Taiwan-born immigrant who runs a nonprofit called Flavours of Hope that assists refugee women. She was accosted in May 2020 by a man who spewed a stream of racist and sexist insults before spitting in her face. “There is so much anti-Asian racism in our past that carries through.”

The backlash against the broader Asian community started almost as soon as the virus began spreading beyond China in early 2020, with Vancouver seemingly poised to become an epicenter. The city had more direct flights with mainland China than any other in the Americas or Europe. A local businessman flying home from Wuhan became British Columbia’s Case 1 on Jan. 26, among the first detected outside Asia at the time.

Months later, it would become clear that route wasn’t, in fact, the principal cause of the virus’s spread in the area: Epidemiological studies showed that the primary source of infections was strains from Europe, eastern Canada, and Washington state.

But in the early weeks of the pandemic, simply looking Asian and wearing a mask in Vancouver triggered verbal assaults—“Virus spreaders,” “Go back to China,” “Stop stealing masks from front-line workers.” The attacks quickly escalated: One 92-year-old was hurled out of a convenience store to the sidewalk; a woman was punched in the head at a downtown bus stop in broad daylight. Vandals repeatedly defaced statues and buildings in Chinatown with racist graffiti.

In 2020, Vancouver police documented 98 anti-Asian hate crimes, an eightfold increase from the prior year. That was triple the number recorded in New York, which logged the most of any U.S. city, according to police data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.

Of course, most incidents go unreported. An April 9 survey by Vancouver-based pollster Insights West revealed that 43% of British Columbia residents of Asian descent say they experienced a racist incident in the past year, ranging from racial slurs to property damage to physical assault. And almost half say they believe the racism will get worse. Another report in September found that Canada per capita had a higher incidence of anti-Asian racism than the U.S., with British Columbia topping the list.

For those living in Richmond, a district just south of Vancouver proper where ethnic Chinese constitute 54% of the population, it’s been a particularly bitter irony. Richmond residents began practicing social distancing and donning face masks even before British Columbia’s first case was detected. Months later, public-health officials and researchers would commend the local Chinese community for playing a key role in containing the virus’s early spread. More than a year into the pandemic, Richmond’s total infection rate remains dramatically low, closer to that of the remote Arctic territory of Nunavut than to the Vancouver metropolitan area.

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