Tell me about the Chinese American experience.”
Two weeks earlier, I had been assigned to teach ESL to a Chinese graduate student, and today she was asking for an explanation of over 150 years of Chinese American history. Answering this question would certainly be an epic one, a task that could easily take several months, perhaps years. However, being neither Chinese American nor able to speak on behalf of the 3.5 million Chinese Americans, I quickly blurted out the first name that came to mind: “Have you heard of Vincent Chin?”
She answered no. In earnest, I assigned for her homework what I thought to be a genuine American experience — to ask Americans who Vincent Chin was. With slight hesitation, she agreed, and I left the morning’s session in good spirits, impressed that I had come up with such a brilliant idea so quickly.
While brushing up on the Chin case facts, I was struck with an epiphany: Why on earth had I assigned my student to ask complete strangers about an Asian guy bludgeoned to death by two white men in Detroit? Instead of an enriching American experience, I anticipated she would report back tales of racial harassment, complete with the proverbial “fill in the blank” racial epithet of your choice, and I strongly considered canceling the assignment. But I didn’t.
The next week, I was relieved that she had not encountered any adverse treatment. To my chagrin, however, of the total two people she asked, only one, a black police officer, knew the full details of the case (in retrospect, I should have told her to ask Asian Americans).
We began discussing at length the case facts and verdict, after which my student curiously inquired as to how the Chin case was relevant to the Chinese American experience.
Besides the obvious (he was Chinese American), I explained that Chin’s case was a xenophobic reawakening for the Chinese and Asian American community; it was a resurgence in the Asian American civil rights movement and a focal point for hate crimes against Japanese Americans. And in those last two words, I glimpsed my student’s skepticism: Vincent Chin was a Chinese American mistaken for a Japanese American. His brutal attack was a result of antagonism toward Japanese Americans, not Chinese Americans. I had not foreseen this glitch in my illustration of the Vincent Chin case; my student’s response posited an interesting conundrum.
An appropriate starting point would be the term “Asian American.” This racially lumped category was completely unfamiliar to my student, revealing her confusion to link Chin with the Asian American diaspora. Quite simply, my student did not consider herself Asian, but Chinese. Here is where our cultures diverged.
Nevertheless, this prompted my investigation into current American sentiment of the Vincent Chin case. I did not have to look far. In recognition of the 25th anniversary of Chin’s death last year, director Tony Lam was presenting a special sneak preview of his film Vincent Who? at the Asian American Film Festival the following week. Bingo!
After viewing the film, which is still in production, I gleaned the gist of its direction, and recognized the continued need for Chin’s prominent place in American history. My only criticism is that the opinions expressed could have been more inclusive of those outside of the Asian American community, especially since the Chin case is comparable to infamous hate crimes in other cultures, such as Emmett Till and Matthew Shepard.
I enthusiastically shared the experience with my student, emphasizing the commentary given by a wide range of Asian American ethnicities, particularly from Chinese Americans. “Vincent Chin is history,” she responded, unconvinced. A week earlier, I would have probably been unnerved by her comment; it might have even put a dent in my ego (a tiny dent). But after viewing Lam’s film I was awe-inspired. He highlighted the experiences of those who were discovering and rediscovering (like myself) the life and legacy of Chin, and my student’s reactions to the Chin case and its relevancy to the Chinese American experience makes their crusade even more apropos.
The 26th anniversary of Vincent Chin’s death will be on June 23. Vincent Who? producer and
co-director Curtis Chin says they are in the process of adding some last-minute footage and raising funds for the completion and post-production. The film is expected to debut in the fall.
See the trailer and learn more about “Vincent Who?” at VincentChin.net.
Vincent Chin should be in the history books!
Confluence here.
The film, Kelli Rucker’s pertinent, and compassionate, piece above, and today’s London Guardian piece by Martin Jacques on “the Chinese Diaspora.”
“We” should all read the latter, albeit I think Jacques, an estimable thinker/writer, may have got his facts wrong when he claimed the “pro-Tibet” protestors outnumbered the pro-Beijing Olympics crwod in San Francisco, I think it was two-to-one t’other way, right?, and he cites 3.3-mil “Chinese-Americans” vs. Rucker’s 3.5-mil.
No matter, the 40-mil diaspora across the globe is news to me, and impressive as well. And Jacqueses’ conclusion comparison of this diapora vis-a-vis the “western” “colonial” diaspora is more than logical and possibly correct.
But the nexus here is the growing “confrontation” between the two “diasporas,” as the Mainland waxes and the “West” appears to be waning.
The film, Rucker’s insights, and those of Jacques, all impinge and are confluent here.
The first pair addresses the individual and the specific of the matter, and Jacques addresses the emerging outlines of the macrocosmos.
Between the two, this viewpoint finds the common meeting point of sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical factors in the “human nature” of “fear” and the hatreds fear feeds and expresses in aggressive violence.
On that last score, check with this weekend’s online accounts of a new book, a “study,” on the psychology of “conservatism,” in which the quartet assert and maintain that “conservatives,” here I read “fundamentalist” types, first, fear, second, aggress, and see only black-and-white and are, in a word or name, Hitler. And, likely, Dubya, who, today in the London Guardian, is reported as denying, renouncing?, his macho cowboy image of the promulgator of the Iraq war. Come to think of it now, that image of him striding down the carrier deck in full panoply resounds with the one of Der Schicklgruber slapping his raised right thigh in glee at the conquest of France.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Yes, indeed, Emmett Till and Matthew Shepard and God alone knows all the rest of the thousands, millions/, of “names” inscribed on the tablets of hatred, whatever the source.
Man I can understand the difference between what you and your foreign students refer to themselves because they never grew up experience the racial lumping Asians in America experience.
It’s great that you try to educate or remind as much people as possible that Asian-Americans are no better off in America than other minority groups when it comes to the de facto treatment given to them.
RIP Vincent Chin.