A 56-year-old man was knocked unconscious outside a Manhattan subway station on Tuesday night, and the police are investigating the seemingly unprovoked attack as a hate crime.

The incident occurred just before 9 p.m., when victim Teoh Ming Soon, who is Asian, was walking towards the F train station at East Broadway and Rutgers Street in Chinatown. According to the NYPD, an assailant attacked him "by punching him in the face, rendering him unconscious."

The suspect fled the scene and EMS treated the victim for a laceration to the lip, black eye, and swelling to the head.

Soon told WABC 7 he is an immigrant from Malaysia who has been in the U.S. for 20 years. He was attacked on his way to the subway and said it happened "too fast, I cannot remember anything. Too fast, it happened."

Security camera footage shows the suspect standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the station as Soon walks past him. Without warning, the man turns around and hits Soon in the face. Soon falls to the ground, and the suspect continues to pummel Soon's face before getting up and go down into the station.

Soon wasn't sure why he was attacked, but told WABC 7, "Maybe because I'm Asian?"

There has been a rise in attacks and discrimination against the Asian American community over the past year, resulting in the NYPD to form an Asian Hate Crimes Task Force. Earlier this week, Mayor Bill de Blasio discussed how the NYPD is trying to carefully investigate whether incidents with Asian American victims are hate crimes or not, telling reporters, "The idea is always with all hate crime investigations to determine was it motivated by hate or not? As he, as the inspector told us, you know, once it's determined factually that there was a hate motivation, it adds to the penalties. So no, we can't, pre-judge each incident. We need the facts, but that said, there is clearly a horrible trend right now, disgusting trend in this city and in this nation, of attacks on Asian-Americans."

At a Thursday morning press conference with the mayor, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said that although reported hate crimes overall have gone down 42% in NYC this year over the same time period in 2020, hate crimes against Asian New Yorkers are up, with six reported so far in 2021, compared to zero this time last year.

"There is nothing we take more seriously than hate crimes," Shea said, noting that the NYPD has the largest Hate Crime unit of any police force in the United States.

According to the city, there was one reported incident of an anti-Asian hate crime or bias incident in 2019; in all of 2020 there were 30, with 16 of them violent crimes.