Vandals Smash Restaurateur’s Confidence

A bat-wielding vandal has the owner of a Southeast Asian restaurant downtown wondering whether to close up shop during the Covid-19 panic.

Pho Ketkeo server Maylene Malichanh left her shift on Sunday afternoon and opened the door of her car to find glass on her seat. That’s when she realized that someone had broken her windshield. She started to cry.

“It just felt like people were out there to get me. Like I was a target,” Malichanh said.

On Tuesday, restaurant owner Ketkeo Rajachack realized that her car had been vandalized too — the rear panel looked like someone had smashed it. Rajachack’s son-in-law works as an autobody tech and said the damages look like they were done by a metal baseball bat.

Downtown top cop Lt. Sean Maher told the Independent that there was no indication that the vandalism was a hate crime.

Nevertheless, Rajachack and Malichanh can’t help thinking about the wave of wave of racist incidents Asian Americans are facing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Rajachack’s daughter, Christine Son, sets the hours for employees and manages the restaurant from afar, on top of her fulltime job.

Son was already trying to protect Pho Ketkeo’s female employees before the vandalism. She had scheduled Malichanh for morning shifts and had a male server lock up with Rajachack at night.

The Laotian restaurant is functioning with a skeleton crew as income has plummeted in the last month. Rajachack has reduced hours, switched to takeout and delivery only, and temporarily laid off all but a few staff members. Rajachack cooks all day herself and the one other employee in the building takes orders, packs them up and delivers them, if required.

Pho Ketkeo is doing about one-quarter of its usual business, Son said. (Rajachack preferred to have Son speak for the business.)

“We’re at the point of saying do we stay open? Is it worth staying open for the barely quarter profit that we usually make so that we can try to pay rent?” Son said.

Son pointed out that her mother is Laotian and has an even more tenuous relationship to the ​“Chinese virus” than Chinese Americans. Rajachack fled Laos and lived briefly in Thailand before settling in the U.S. She loves cooking and catered for Laotian communities in the area prior to opening her restaurant, Son said.

“The news really does a poor job in educating the public on things like the types of Asians there are. Not every Asian is Chinese,” Son said.

She added that it is not okay to target Asians, period.

“People need to realize that the idea that Chinese people will give you the virus is ludicrous,” Son said.

Son, who lives in Milford, has had her own run-in with what seemed like Covid-related racism in a grocery store recently. She recounted a man walking towards her and saying ​“Excuse me” loudly several times. She moved and as a store employee near her started to move too, the man said to the employee, ​“No, no, no. Not you. HER.”

“I turned around like, ​‘That was really strange.’ I couldn’t help but think it was because I’m Asian,” Son said.

No other restaurants are open on Pho Ketkeo’s block of Temple Street, between George and Crown streets. Cameras nearby were not trained on the restaurant and did not pick up the crime, according to Maher.

This worries Malichanh that another crime could happen without any consequences. Other employees are afraid to drive their cars, she said.

Malichanh’s car was hers for only two weeks before it got vandalized, she said. She is a student at Southern Connecticut State University and was managing without a car for a while. Her parents bought her this one and she sunk a lot of money into fixing it up, she said.

Now that the windshield is broken, Malichanh does not have enough savings to fix the car again. She gets dropped off at work by friends or family.

“I get paranoid now. Whenever I do work, I always look outside. I’m very careful now,” Malichanh said.