I Think One Of My Asian Neighbors Got Attacked
After all that time trying to get them to not annoy me and their other immediate neighbors by keeping their door open while cooking stinky food, they've been very very quiet - so quiet I thought they had actually decided to quarantine elsewhere as I hadn't heard or seen them since right after the quarantine started. Turns out they're there...just being very VERY quiet and keeping the smells unobtrusive as possible. Its sad that it took the pandemic to convince them to do that...or rather more likely one of the racist effects of the pandemic.
I think the Asian woman (lives in a different apartment from the above) who gardens next to me and gave me some lettuce seedlings last year (then took them back when I didn't garden enough I guess) possibly got attacked in the garden area. I wasn't there, and haven't heard any news or anything about it...but on May 20th I went out in the late afternoon to check on my garden and found a cauliflower on the grass behind it. Not a huge one, just one of the little organic ones the food bank had been packing in boxes, so I picked it up and looked around. There was another in her garden, and a broken bag of lentils laying at the foot of the fence on the parking lot side, but closer to her garden than mine. I actually took pictures of the cauliflowers in place as their presence struck me as odd.
I thought it was assholes just expressing frustration with their food bank boxes by chucking things at the gardens after picking up their boxes, but...her garden has clearly not been tended since then. Everything's bolting, none of the pots have been used, there's big weeds when there normally wouldn't be, even tho I smell the manure that she was probably putting on the garden at the time of the attack. The cauliflower thrown in her garden even sat there for weeks rotting. Heck if I'd have known I'd have snatched it out of there just to keep it from being a reminder instead of leaving it thinking she'd appreciate the free gift like I did. I used the one from behind my garden for a cauliflower crust deep dish crockpot pizza. But I think I'm becoming a bit slower at putting 2 and 2 together and it didn't occur to me the likely real story until last night, and I feel bad that I didn't recognize it as a negative at the time...or do anything. Like if I could have, I mean. I don't even know her name or what apartment she's in to go see if she's okay. Or probably have the courage to even do that If I did. And if I HAD been there, I probably wouldn't have recognized what was going on in time to do something other than check if she was okay.
*sigh*
I just hope she wasn't actually hurt.
--Zhora