An Australian CEO has recalled how he was told to 'go back to China' after his dog kicked sand on another beachgoer.
Tim Fung, the 38-year-old founder of tech start-up Airtasker, was at a dog-friendly a beach with his wife on Friday when his pet Harvey started 'mucking around'.
Mr Fung said he and his wife felt 'a little embarrassed' for the mess the dog made and apologised to the woman - who then yelled out the racist remark.
'I could see that getting sand flicked on me would have been super annoying and that we'd sort of stuffed up her beach day,' Mr Fung wrote on LinkedIn.
'The woman then started muttering a number of racist remarks and as she packed up her stuff to leave the beach yelled at us: ''go back to China''.'
Tim Fung, the CEO of Airtasker was shockingly told to 'go back to China' after his dog flicked sand onto a woman nearby
To make matters worse, the Airtasker founder had dubbed Friday a 'recharge day' for all his employees to have the day off and focus on their wellbeing.
The businessman shared the encounter to his LinkedIn page and asked for feedback on what he could have done in that situation.
'On one hand, the woman seemed really angry and it feels like calling her out for being racist would likely result in an escalating confrontation which would probably lead to very little impact (or something worse eg. violence),' he said.
'On the other hand, Asian folks in many countries have recently been experiencing increasingly racist behaviour, including violence (exacerbated by a Covid/China narrative) and not calling her out seems somewhat irresponsible.'
The post was flooded with hundreds of comments from many other CEOs and high profile businessmen and women, with many divided on what the right thing to do was.
Christina Chun, co-chair of SECNA said she felt she needed to say something if she was in a similar position in order to show her children how people should be treated.
