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"I'm Vincent Chin!": The Hate Crime that "Created Asian America"Remembering June 19, 1982 as the Defining Moment for Asian American Political Identity6/19/02 - Among the greatest challenges of my decade’s work in Asian-American media, organizations, and ethnic studies programs has been explaining exactly what "Asian American" means -- to Asians, non-Asians, and myself. Skeptics argue that this diverse, artificial, ever-shifting government "race category" constitutes an impossibly big, and unsustainable, political tent. We share no single language, religion, economic status, cultural customs, immigration patterns, skin color, colonial experience, regional affiliation, nor any common denominator beyond our roots somewhere at some time within world’s largest continent and ocean. Even among ourselves, APAs resist being lumped together; we retain our individual cultures, cling to our conflicts, live our separate American lives. Nonetheless, in the past two decades we have increasingly moved beneath that tent that someone else constructed for us, not because we necessarily want to, but because we have to. Although my own understanding of "What’s an Asian American?" has changed over time, and I can’t always satisfactorily articulate what it is, it helps me to recall a phrase from the depths of our collective community memory. It replies: June 19, 1982.
Twenty years ago today, the 27-year-old son of Chinese immigrants was headed out on the town with friends. He would have hummed with the special-ness of the day, anticipating his last hurrah as a single man, the impending wedding. En route to his bachelor party at suburban Detroit’s Fancy Pants striptease club, in his periphery, he might have noticed the stickers, "Toyota, Datsun, Honda…Pearl Harbor" aggressively glued onto the bumpers of passing cars. Perhaps he knew with certainty these had nothing to do with him. Perhaps he even agreed with them. A short time afterward, he was subjected to racial epithets and beaten to unconsciousness with a baseball bat by a Chrysler employee, Ronald Eben, and a laid-off autoworker, Michael Nitz. Chin died of his wounds four days later. The resulting protests signaled an "awakening" for Chinese Americans who had remained silent in the face of a century’s violence and discrimination, as on-the-ground journalist Helen Zia would later describe in her vivid, authoritative book, Asian American Dreams. It was a (or perhaps the) defining moment for a pan-Asian American political consciousness. How ironic it is that the birth of "Asian America" was, in a sense, a mistake. For, Ebens and Nitz justified their monstrous act by explaining that they had thought Chin was Japanese. In the political and economic climate of 1982, the rationale was compelling enough for judge Charles Kaufman’s tastes. At sentencing, the justice determined that the worth of the slain bridegroom’s life amounted to exactly this: three years’ probation and $3,780 in fines.
The Asian Formula
Beneath the particulars of Chin’s murder as a personal tragedy, an act of racist terrorism, or even a political watershed for Asians in a specific political / economic / social moment, the case helped unify Asian Americans by dredging up to the surface a deeply buried and insidious "formula of Asian-ness" understood in America:
In this sense, there was nothing at all new about Chin’s murder. Asian ethnic populations in America had been subjected to economic scapegoating, racial violence, and exclusionary legislation for over 100 years. Chin’s expendability was a logical conclusion of Orientalist world-views that had evolved over centuries. The only thing new was the revelation that in addition to being expendable, we were also interchangeable. Sallow or dark brown, Buddhist or Christian, immigrant or fifth-generation, we all looked alike to the outside world.
The Accidental Hate CrimeThis revelation was significant because, historically, we carried our old inter-ethnic enmities and prejudices to these shores. As a first-generation immigrant, it is entirely possible that Lily Chin -- Vincent’s recently deceased mother who became an uneasy symbol for "Asian-American activism" after his murder -- might have had little love for Japanese herself. These enmities were exacerbated by divide-and-conquer strategies here – in the ethnically segregated plantations of Hawaii, the Christian sell-out of Buddhists after Pearl Harbor, and shifting foreign policies during the Cold and Second World Wars. While Japanese had early on enjoyed a vogue as cheap labor replacements for the more numerous Chinese, China’s allegiance in WWII restored some favor to Chinese Americans during and after the war. Alien Land Laws, immigration exclusion, citizenship restrictions, and even the very definition of "Asian race" ultimately netted most of us, but not always at the same time.
But Chin’s murder showed us the extent to which these distinctions we make among ourselves really don’t matter here, in America, beyond our local neighborhoods. Not incidentally, the same period also saw the Japanese-American community emerging from its own long era of silence. Nationwide, JAs were then relating their experiences to the Congressional Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. The CWRIC would find by early 1983 that the WWII internment was not justified by military necessity, but the unjust result of race prejudice, war hysteria, and failed political leadership. The arising movement would ultimately lead to a national apology, reparations, and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It also bred a generation of J-A political and civil rights activists who recognized that an "accidental hate crime" against the Chinese American mistaken for a Japanese foreign national had as much to do with them as the internment camps. Other Asian-American communities intuited this, too. Chin’s murder showed us just how easily "Dot-Buster" attacks on Indians in New Jersey can seep across the bridge to infect Pakistani neighborhoods in New York. We understand that nukes in the country of our families’ origin can make the engineers and scientists among us just as suspect as Wen Ho Lee. We’ve seen that our last names on a political donors roster can be red-flagged right along with contributions from an Indonesian businessman. And we know that "mistakes" keep happening: We know that for the killers Ebens and Nitz, Chin’s resemblance to a Jap was "close enough" – as close as "Gobind Sadan" sounded to "Go Bin Laden" to the "patriotic" illiterates who set the NY Sikh temple ablaze in 2001.
Sure, there’s nothing "organic" about the Asian-American community. It’s not quite "real" in the usual sense, but it has been an effective grouping, born out of our political reality. For many of us who came of age after Vincent Chin's death, it has also become a deeply personal psychological truth. We are Asian Americans because we choose to be. Accepting an Asian-American identity is like traveling (as we’re fond saying about APA online community-building and the Village itself) to the "Hawaii of the Mind". This is the multilingual, multiethnic, multicultural, virtual space we head for when we need to spend some time unbesieged, where the majority comprises people more or less like us. Oh, we may have started out in (even preferred) our segregated camps, but gradually we had to develop a pidgin, a fake language, in which to converse, connect, and survive. And what was the first phrase we ventured to speak in that new tongue? "Remember Vincent Chin," of course.
Related Readings from the AAV Archives
[Some articles archived on another site, the Wayback Archive]
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