Twenty years ago last month, I adopted a Chinese daughter and brought her to live in a country that is steadily creating a climate of officially sanctioned antipathy toward her homeland, if not actually her race.

The messaging from the top is clear, and it affects her daily life in ways that range from the subtle to the grotesque: having coronavirus labelled the “China virus” by President Donald Trump makes her, and other people of Chinese ethnicity in the US, feel as if they are being blamed for the pandemic.

That is ironic, given that the pandemic’s grave toll in the US can more properly be laid at the door of wishful thinking and incompetence at federal government level, coupled with a peculiarly American obsession with individualism that deems it heroic to refuse to wear a mask.