"I can’t believe my eyes"

Andrew Yang‘s wife has taken aim at New York Daily’s cartoon of her husband.

The New York City mayoral candidate was drawn by artist Brim Bramhall for the publication, showing him as an excited tourist exiting the Times Square subway stop. Nearby shop owners are seen exclaiming “the tourists are back!”

Bramhall’s cartoon had referenced a Showtime interview on Sunday in which Yang told host Ziwe Fumudoh that his favourite subway stop in the Big Apple is Times Square.

Yang’s wife, Evelyn, took to Twitter on Monday to deplore the publication’s cartoon.

“I can’t believe my eyes,” Mrs Yang tweeted. ‘To publish this racist disfiguration of @AndrewYang as a tourist, in NYC where I was born, where Andrew has lived for 25 years, where our boys were born, where 16% of us are Asian and anti-Asian hate is up 900%. #StopAsianHate.”

The Asian American Pacific Islander Victory Alliance also described the cartoon as “disgusting and wrong”, saying it played into the stereotype of Asian Americans as foreign tourists.

“Every single day Asian Americans have to fight the notion that we are foreigners. We are here and we’re not going anywhere.”

Others echoed similar frustration “This is hurtful and insulting,” one person said. “I was told to go back to China. We, Asian Americans worked hard to build our country, the USA. We all should be united and help each other.”

“If you don’t drop an Asian American leader into a frontrunner position you wouldn’t know the level of anti-Asian sentiment prevalent within the media and political class of this city,’ posted Twitter user @Skymorality. ‘It needs to be unmasked.”

In other news, an Asian man was pushed onto the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train in Queens.