They Called Grandpa Vicha’s Memorial “Graffiti”

Someone tore down Grandpa Vicha’s memorial flyers in the Richmond District. On camera. At 9th and Geary, in one of San Francisco’s most Asian-majority neighborhoods. And then she explained, calmly, that it wasn’t racism.

Watch the video. The woman filmed by @activeasian tears the flyers off the poles and explains herself: “We don’t know what it is.” When pressed, she calls them “graffiti” and says there’s “just too much” of it around. The person filming asks her: “So it’s not because you’re racist?” She says, “Oh, no. Got it. Of course not.” Then: “Because you know who that is, right? You know why that’s there?”

She apparently does not know. That is the whole story.

Who Grandpa Vicha Was

Vicha Ratanapakdee was 84 years old. He came from Thailand to San Francisco to help care for his grandsons. Every morning during the pandemic, he walked through the quiet Anza Vista neighborhood and was home before 8 a.m. so the boys could start their Zoom classes. He was described by everyone who knew him as someone who “wouldn’t harm a fly.”

On January 28, 2021, 19-year-old Antoine Watson ran full speed across the street and slammed into him. Vicha’s white hat flew off. He crumpled to the ground and never got up. Two days later, he died from brain bleeding. His daughter Monthanus turned her grief into advocacy that helped ignite a national movement. San Francisco named a street in his memory in 2022.

In January 2026, five years after the killing, a jury convicted Watson of involuntary manslaughter, not murder. Acquitted of both first and second degree murder charges despite clear surveillance video. Those memorial flyers went up to honor Vicha and raise awareness, weeks after that verdict. Someone tore them down within two weeks of sentencing.

The timing is not incidental. The flyers were there because people were still thinking about him, still angry, still refusing to let the city forget. And someone decided they were clutter.

Erasure Has Many Forms

This isn’t the first time Asian American pain has been waved away in San Francisco, and the pattern is worth naming clearly.

According to The Voice of San Francisco, former school board Vice President Allison Collins, while offering no school reopening plan during the pandemic, claimed Asian Americans were “the equivalent of house slaves, complicit with white supremacy.” This, while Asian hate attacks shot up 500 percent citywide. Former DA Chesa Boudin, when asked about the murder of an Asian elder, described the community’s outrage as a “temper tantrum.”

Allison Collins called them house slaves. Chesa Boudin called their grief a temper tantrum. Now someone’s calling their memorial flyers graffiti.

These are three different acts, but they share a structure: Asian American pain shows up, and somebody in San Francisco decides it doesn’t have to be taken seriously. The school board didn’t want to hear from Asian parents about Lowell. The DA didn’t want to prosecute an elder’s killer like a killer. And now a woman on Geary Street decides she doesn’t need to know who the man on the flyer is before she pulls his face off a pole.

Asian Americans make up 34 to 35 percent of San Francisco’s population, the single largest group in the city. Only 30 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander residents reported feeling safe walking in their neighborhood during the day and at night, according to a 2023 SF city survey. Their murdered grandfather’s face gets torn off a pole and called visual pollution.

The Richmond District is where this happened. Not by accident. The Richmond is home to tens of thousands of Asian families, many of them multigenerational households where grandparents live with working parents and school-age kids, the exact profile of every family I’ve heard from while building Garry’s List. This isn’t a random neighborhood. It is their neighborhood. And Vicha’s flyers were torn down in it.

The Flyers Go Back Up

The person who filmed this asked, afterward, that whoever put the flyers up would put them back on the pole at 9th and Geary. That’s the right answer.

Put them back up.

There is something infuriating about the specific shape of this woman’s denial. She doesn’t claim the flyers are harmful. She doesn’t claim they’re wrong. She says she doesn’t know what they are, and she didn’t bother finding out before tearing them down. That gap between ignorance and action, the willingness to erase something you don’t recognize without pausing to learn what it is, that is what erasure looks like at street level. No malice required. Just indifference that acts.

San Francisco is 34 percent Asian American. If we can’t hold space for a murdered grandfather’s memory here, in the Richmond, on a pole at 9th and Geary, we won’t hold it anywhere. The community has shown it knows how to respond when politicians dismiss them. They recalled Boudin. They recalled the school board. They woke up a sleeping dragon, in Lily Ho’s words, and it didn’t go back to sleep.

Forgetting is a choice. Tearing a flyer down is a choice. Calling community grief a temper tantrum is a choice. San Francisco has made enough of those choices. The people who put up those pictures of Grandpa Vicha know exactly who he was and why it matters. Put his face back on that pole. And remember it the next time someone tells you Asian American erasure is a metaphor.