Why Asian Americans on Wall Street from Goldman Sachs to Wells Fargo are breaking their silence

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Why Asian Americans on Wall Street from Goldman Sachs to Wells Fargo are breaking their silence

Assaults and harassment against Asian Americans, a group comprising some 23 million people in the U.S., have brought AAPI issues to the national stage for the first time since the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982.
Asian Americans in banking are now connecting with co-workers in virtual chatrooms, over Zoom and in person to commiserate about being Asian in finance, and in America.
“They thought they were part of the mainstream until this `Chinese virus’ stuff,” Wall Street recruiter Mike Karp said of his Asian American clients. “Now there’s a building resentment that people have, and they aren’t taking it anymore.”

A year after the pandemic began in New York City, something snapped in Alex Chi.

The 48-year-old Goldman Sachs banker had been inundated with articles and video clips of horrifying seemingly random attacks on Asian Americans in his home town. Then, in late March, eight people were gunned down in the Atlanta area — most of them immigrants from Korea and China — and Chi could stand it no longer.

The barrage of attacks forced a change in Chi, a partner and 27-year Goldman veteran. He became an in-house agitator of sorts, attending protests and rallying his colleagues around a simple idea: Silence is no longer an option.

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