Herman Li , the skilled guitarist of Dragonforce , has lived with prejudice and hatred against Asians throughout his life, both before and after starting his career with the band. In a new interview on the subject, the musician opened up about it.
Born in Hong Kong, the musician grew up in Europe and learned to live in a state of alert from an early age. “Someone set my hair on fire, randomly and without provocation. This was before Dragonforce , in the UK,” he told Consequence of Sound . “I was just a guy who played guitar, listened to metal and went to metal bars. There was nothing I could do, sometimes you don't know what to do.”
After joining Dragonforce, the guitarist suffered other instances of prejudice and attacks. “There aren’t many Asian guitarists, and even fewer Chinese ones. Another experience, before Dragonforce grew, I would receive phone calls at my house almost every day, sometimes at 4 am, sometimes at 7 pm, from someone with a funny accent, insulting me, calling me as a joke,” he recalled. “This lasted for months. I had to involve the police; they couldn’t trace the number. (…) I think the metal scene denies the racism that exists.”
In March of this year, the Stop Asian Hate gained momentum in the United States after a white man attacked eight people, six of whom were women of Chinese and Korean descent, in an act of hate. With misinformation and waves of fake news during the pandemic, people are wrongly blaming Asian countries for the existence of COVID-19. Ted Nugent , for example, refuses to use the official term and calls the coronavirus the "Chinese virus .
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