THE POWER OF EDUCATION: WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?

By Jean Wu, is professor emerita of Race Studies and Asian American Studies at Tufts University This article first appeared under the title, “Teaching Who Killed Vincent Chin?—1991 and 2001,” in AmerAsia Journal, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, vol 28, no. 3, 2002. Reprinted with permission.

2002 marks the twentieth anniversary of Vincent Chin’s brutal murder in a hate crime for which his killers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, never spent a day of their lives in jail. In the intervening years since 1982, brutal and arbitrary anti-Asian violence, fueled by xenophobia and economic press, and emblematic of racism against Asians in America, has not abated. Rather, hate crime rates against Asians have seen steep increases since the early 1980s when Chin was murdered and have remained high, with the most recent wave of violence targeting South Asians and South Asian Americans in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. While I have taught Asian American Studies since 1974, it was not till the mid-1980s, precipitated by the Chin case, that I began to include regularly a unit on contemporary anti-Asian violence in my introductory Asian American courses. After the film Who Killed Vincent Chin? by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena was released in 1988, I have used it as the introductory text to that unit. Although Vincent Chin’s murder is now two decades old, I have found that the film, with its brilliant documentation and analysis of the case, continues to be one of the best texts for stimulating students to pay attention to and analyze the ever present issue of anti-Asian bigotry and violence. At this point in time, some five hundred students in four different institutions of higher education (three privates and one public, all on the East Coast) over the past thirteen years have studied and written responses to the film in my classes. In 2000, when a group of Asian American scholars and activists gathered at the annual American Studies Conference in Detroit for a panel on The Legacy of Vincent Chin, our discussions encouraged me to use the twentieth anniversary of this watershed event for Asian Americans as an occasion to review the thirteen years of student responses and to reflect on some pedagogical questions: What is the impact on students, if any, when this film is viewed in the college classroom? What do students learn from the film? Has the impact of the film on students’ learning changed from the early 1990s? What are the similarities and differences in student responses to the

film (and the case) over more than a decade? What are recurring patterns and themes, if any, to how different students make sense of the Vincent Chin case? What, in the area of college-level education, is the legacy of Vincent Chin? For the purposes of this article, I have chosen to present six student responses, three from students taking my Asian American courses in 1991 and three from a decade later in 2001. These responses are excerpts from students’ weekly class journals, in which they are asked to discuss their reactions to texts, or in this case the film, Who Killed Vincent Chin? In their tone and content, these six responses are very typical and thus representative of the hundreds of student responses I have collected over the years. I have chosen to present each of the six selected responses in its entirety, without interruptions by my comments, so that readers can follow the writer’s unbroken train of thought. For each of the responses, I include the college class, gender, and the racial self-identification of the student.

Student Responses in 1991

AFRICAN AMERICAN, JUNIOR, FEMALE

It was an eye-opener for me to see the movie on Vincent Chin. I grew up in the same area that he lived and died in but I didn’t know anything about the case. I asked my parents about the case when I called them last weekend, and my father remembers seeing something about it on TV. I asked him if anyone in our all black neighborhood talked about it and he said there was talk but he didn’t remember the specifics very well. I asked him if he remembered Jesse Jackson speaking out for the case and he didn’t. When he asked me if I had heard about it in school back then, I told him that I’d never heard of Vincent Chin till I saw the movie in class last week. I never studied about Asian Americans in school or for that matter, in college here. Before this class, I don’t think l ever considered that Asians had any discrimination directed against them. But after seeing this movie and thinking about what happened, I’m realizing that the discrimination is there but it is not talked about. It feels to me like it is part of the model minority stereotype that nothing is a problem for Asians. For me as a black person, this is particularly interesting, since I’ve always felt that blacks alone faced racism in this society. I know that this is not true if I think about it more carefully, but then I have been taught to think this way all my life. When I talk to other blacks, we always assume that Asians don’t suffer racism. When I think about the Vincent Chin case, it feels to me just like a “lynching” that blacks are very familiar with, but what is fascinating is that I don’t think most black people will make that connection. I would not have made that connection if I wasn’t actually studying Asian American history and seeing how the system was working. I would have considered it as a somewhat unusual murder case. I wouldn’t have seen the racial issue. Based on what I’ve already learned in the course about Asian Americans, especially the history in the early part of the century and then the concentration camps in WWII, I would say that it’s not an accident that we don’t get to learn about many facts that we should know, like this Vincent Chin case. It feels to

me like it’s another way to divide and conquer dif-

ferent minority groups like they did on the Hawaii plantations. It’s like if we don’t know about what happens to the other groups, we won’t believe that racism is a widespread thing that goes beyond slavery. So it’s interesting to me that black people have been teaching ourselves the kind of thinking that ends up dividing all the groups that are supposed to be joining with us to fight against racism. This was a pretty powerful lesson this week. I’m going to be a teacher after I graduate, so this is a lesson I will carry with me.

CHINESE VIETNAMESE AMERICAN, SENIOR, MALE

In all of my education, I do not ever remember seeing a movie as powerful and moving as the video we saw this week: Who Killed Vincent Chin? I did cry during the video, just like a lot of others in the room. In our discussion group later, we talked about why we were crying. Of course, a part of it was feeling the incredible pain of Lily Chin, but there were other reasons that struck me at a deeper level. I was identifying with the helplessness of Asian people in this country who get “shut up” and “pushed aside.” This is something that my family knows very well in our own struggle to live in a hostile neighborhood in this city. But part of my emotion was also in seeing Asian people come together for the ACJ movement to get justice for Vincent Chin. I have not seen Asian Americans united to fight in this way. I have only felt silence and fear when it comes to our rights, and this is one of the reasons I have always admired black Americans because they can come together to demand justice. I wanted to show the protest in the video to every Asian person I know. I want to play the video for my family. I want to show them that it is possible to stand up for our rights. I know that the ACJ campaign was not successful in getting justice for Vincent Chin in the end, but for me it was important to know that many Asian Americans did come together to fight. It was also amazing to see non-Asians, like Jesse Jackson, speak for an Asian

issue. I have never seen that. I wish I had been old enough to be a part of this movement. I hope you will show this to many Asians to let them know that we can also be fighting for justice. I feel like I’m a college student and I didn’t know anything about it, and from what I saw in the movie, I have lots to learn.

I have never heard of racism against Asian people. Why don't Asian people talk about it more?

WHITE AMERICAN, SENIOR, FEMALE

I could hardly contain my shock after having viewed the Vincent Chin video, and I couldn’t stop talking about it to everyone I came into contact with for the next few days. How could murderers be set free in America without having served a single day in jail? We do have the best justice system in the world. After our class discussion about the readings for this week on top of the film, I am beginning to see that white people who murder people of color can in fact go free-like in the case of Native Americans or African American slaves, or Chinese and Mexican workers, etc. This realization is very upsetting and I actually don’t want to accept it. But I’ll also admit it’s hard to deny this if you really read the history. My first shock about the Chin case has changed by now. It is not that I’m not upset by it, but I am more upset by something else: Why was I not taught about

this case and other minority issues in high school?

Even here in college, I haven’t gotten that kind of education. I just happened to take this course because my roommate took it last year and liked it. I am a second semester senior, and I’ll be graduating in two months. If I had not taken this course, I would have left college thinking I was a very well educated person, and other people would have thought so too, given the reputation of this school. Instead, I would have been quite ignorant about a lot of our own country’s history and how the systems work-basically differently for different people based on the color of their skin and their looks. I would not have been well educated; instead I would have been handicapped.

AFRICAN AMERICAN, SENIOR, MALE

I have never heard of Vincent Chin, I have never heard of racism against Asian people. No offense to you and other Asians in the class, but to me Asians have it the best-they have their culture, they have their money, and they just take care of themselves. They don’t even have to learn English if they don’t want to. They don’t like black people, so I don’t like them. I don’t have any Asian friends. I don’t beat or kill Asians like in the film but I don’t like them either. I took this course on Asian Americans because it fit for me as one of the requirements. I never expected what we’re studying. It’s more like one of the black history courses I took. I look at this Vincent Chin movie and then at the reading this past week on Asian Americans as the “perpetual foreigner” and the kind of racism that is called anti-Asian violence and I feel kind of speechless at the moment. My first question is, of course, how come no one told us about this in school? I went to an excellent school—the best prep school around here, and we had lots about diversity. We had a lot of classes and programs about racism, but I never studied Asian Americans. Diversity in my school was pretty much that black and white thing that we had discussed in class. My second question is: Why don’t Asian people talk about it more? How come Asian students here don’t talk about it? Do they know? Do they care? My third question is more personal: Do I think

differently about Asians now that I know about

anti-Asian racism? Wow! This is a really big one. It’s one of those things I have to really turn my head around on. I can’t promise I’ll do it in one day, but this is what I’m starting to think: maybe I haven’t really looked at my own racism, if it can be called that. Can a black person be racist against Asian people? If the answer is “yes,” then I feel that I have been “racist” against them all my life—I grew up with it. Wow! I never imagined I would be asking this kind of question, especially in college. Check back with me in a few weeks.

ASIAN AMERICAN, JUNIOR, FEMALE

When the lights came on after the Vincent Chin movie, I could not move. I dared not move till most people had left. Then my friend came over and said, “Are you okay?” Then I started to sob. I couldn’t stop crying. It must have been almost an hour. I couldn’t control myself. I had been crying quietly during the movie, and I thought it would just stop when the lights went on, like in any movie.

Suddenly, every “ching-chong” taunt, every pinch, every shove, every beating I have put up with in my own life caught up with me. I never told my parents about the persecution me and other Asian kids had to put up with. I promised myself I would never tell them because they couldn’t do a damn thing about us getting pushed around in school just because we were Asian. If there was any fighting back, me and my friends would have to do it ourselves. So I ducked and sometimes kicked my way through school. Mostly ducked. I also learned that if you pretend you’re made of stone, they’ll go away at some point. I still approach most racial attacks this way. Today, after the movie, l think maybe this is the first time that I realize that unless you really are made of stone, you can get killed for just standing there. I don’t really know all the reasons l responded the way l did to Vincent Chin. Mostly it was the shock that in all these years I hadn’t heard a thing about him. I’m sure my parents don’t know a thing about this. But when I see Lily Chin, she’s like my grandmother. She talks like my Ah Ma. In a deeper way than just identifying with Vincent Chin, suddenly I have a whole new way of under-

standing what it means to be Asian in America.

I thought it was my bad luck to be stuck living in my neighborhood and going to the school I went to where we have to put up with people who hate Asians. I never thought my experience fit into a pattern that a whole group of people have had for more than a hundred years. I never knew that there was actually a thing called anti-Asian violence. If you had asked me before now if there was a lot of violence against Asians, I would have said “no way.” Maybe some discrimination against fresh off-the -boat people who didn’t speak English, but not Americanized Asians like Vincent Chin and like me. I always though t that if there was anything you could call anti-Asian, it’s Asians against other Asians. I would have said that African Americans really got violence against them from the police. All the racial profiling stuff that gets talked about is all about black people, not about Asians. I’m wondering as I write this how different it

might have been if I had learned about Vincent Chin and other Asian American issues back in school.

Maybe it’s the hugeness of anti-Asian violence as an issue that just hit me. It’s been building up in the course, but after seeing this movie, it really hit home. Maybe right now I feel like nothing has changed for us Asians. It’s almost twenty years since Vincent Chin was murdered, and it’s still the same for Asian Americans when it comes to violence against them. At the end of the movie, I wondered what happened to the group of people who did protest and try to get justice? Did they all throw up their hands and go home after the Cincinnati verdict? For me, it’s really clear that no matter what I major in, I must work for Asian American education, for our communities. I feel like my own directions inside me just aren’t the same since taking this course, and after watching this movie, I believe they’re a lot clearer. I’m going to work for Asian America, no matter what I do.

WHITE EUROPEAN AMERICAN, SENIOR, MALE

At the moment, the strongest emotion I feel after seeing the Vincent Chin movie for class is betrayal. I feel betrayed by my education and by the people around me who taught me everything l know. l grew up in Michigan, so did my whole family, and I can’t believe that they didn’t know about this case when it was happening. If they did, what did they do then? I can’t believe nothing was ever taught about it in school. In my school we talked about other hate crimes, mostly anti-gay and anti-black bigotry. There would be few students from my year in my school who do not know about Rodney King or James Eyrd or Matthew Shepard. Why aren’t hate crimes against Asian Americans also included? One question that’s been lurking around for me since the beginning of this course is this: If I wasn’t taught Asian American history and something like Vincent Chin (which wasn’t even that long ago) in my past education, what else have I not been told? What other lies have I swallowed? Before this course, I would have said that there is no racism against Asians. They seem to be exceptionally successful and everyone seems to accept them. So now I know that was a lie, what other lies don’t I know about?

My strongest feeling in response to the film is of betrayal: being betrayed by those I depended on to teach me.

You asked us to pay attention to the question in the title of the movie and you wanted us to answer the question: Who Killed Vincent Chin? Now that I’ve seen the movie and read the articles, I think this is the most important question really. Aside from the direct connection with the economy, I think it is

this idea in the US that it is okay to kill Vincent Chin and people who look like him. It’s actually OKAY A little naughty maybe, but not really evil. And it’s okay because people who look like Chin aren’t really American and they’re always going to do “bad” things to “real” Americans. If Chin had been black or white, I don’t think it would have been the same story. If he had been black, the killers might still have gotten off easy at first, but I think that there would have been a lot more protests from across the country, and more politicians—black, white, maybe Jewish, would have spoken out, more people on the streets would have been sympathetic, and the civil rights case in Cincinnati would not have been overturned. If Chin had been white, the killers would have gone to jail, maybe even gotten the death sentence. But because he was Asian, we don’t get to hear about him in the news or in history. If the killers had been

Suddenly I have a whole new way of understanding what it means to be Asian in America.

anything but white, they would have had a much harder time getting off, but when I think about it, they still might have, since they would have been considered “real” Americans, but an Asian is always an enemy alien, deserving to be killed. Anyway, that’s just my opinion. I don’t think it’s a purely white/ Asian thing. I think there is a real feeling out there

in both whites and blacks and maybe anybody that it’s okay to mess with Asian people and you can get

away with it. I know because this was the scene at my school. That’s how my friends felt and back then I would have gone along with it. So, in conclusion, my strongest feeling in response to the film is of betrayal: being betrayed by those I depended on to teach me.

It should be abundantly clear, even from a quick perusal of these responses, that both the intellectual and emotional impact on students of the film Who Killed Vincent Chin? remains as powerful in 2001 as when it was first released thirteen years ago and then much closer to the actual events of Chin’s murder, the subsequent trials, and the activities of the pan-ethnic, cross-class American Citizens for Justice (ACJ) movement. In 2001 the film continues to be one of the most powerful texts for students, not only in an Asian American course, but apparently, judging from their reports, in their entire education up to that point. This extraordinarily powerful documentation and analysis of a 20-year-old anti-Asian hate crime case has consistently given, over more than a decade, college students from many racial backgrounds access to greater clarity in their understanding of many hard-to-teach concepts in race studies: racism as a system beyond black and white and beyond individual racist acts, white privilege and power, nativism, racialization of Asians, institutionalized racism as in the legal and (in)justice systems, and also in education for excluding Asian America, interconnectedness of race and economics, real-life consequences of racial stereotypes and myths, media and racism, and anti-racist social activism, to name just a few. For Asian American students, two particular and repeating themes emerge in their responses to Who Killed Vincent Chin? First, the factual and emotional honesty of the film gives many Asian American students permission to articulate the anti-Asian violence they have experienced personally as well as the suffocating silence they live with, born of their own fear, unawareness or confusion regarding their own racialization, vulnerability, and in some cases, hopelessness. Seeing Asian America documented publicly and permanently gives legitimacy and validity to their own Asian American realities. Second, Asian American students are surprised and encouraged by

the knowledge of the ACJ movement in response to

the Chin case. The majority of the Asian American students in my classes over the last decade are 1.5- or second-generation, born to immigrant parents. To them, organized, publicly vocal social activism on behalf of justice for Asian Americans is, if not unheard of, considered a “taboo” activity to avoid at all costs. For them, just the knowledge of the possibility of effective pan-Asian American activism is a first step in challenging commonly held assumptions about Asian American “apathy” and their own values regarding anti-racist social activism. In 1991 students asked: Where was the Vincent Chin case and where was Asian America in our K-12 and college education? A decade later in 2001, students

repeat this very same question, almost word for

word. The fact that this particular student response has stayed constant for over more than a decade ought to be the most troubling theme that has emerged from this retrospection. These identical

statements provide us with irrefutable evidence

that Asian America continues to be systematically omitted from American education across the nation.

That Asian America was a curriculum gap in the sixties and seventies and even early eighties is not news. (In fact, it was Asian American realization of this gap and the critical need to fill it that spawned the Asian American Studies movement back in 1968 and sustains our efforts at knowledge production today.) In contrast, an Asian American curriculum gap in national American educational curriculum today is cause for the gravest alarm. Asian American Studies has been with us for over three decades. In the past dozen years, it has grown rapidly, giving rise to an explosion of new programs across the nation and rich knowledge production. During this same period, multicultural curriculum transformation projects to include previously omitted and marginalized knowledge have been underway and enjoyed success in many schools and colleges. It is within the context of these developments that we must ask with the highest level of urgency: Why are an

overwhelming number of students from reputable schools across the nation coming to and graduating from college with no knowledge of Asian Americans, worse, no awareness that this knowledge is miss-

ing from their education? Who is making use of the knowledge produced in the field of Asian American Studies and to what end? Where and to whom is this knowledge taught? What happened to the compelling need for the inclusion of Asian America in an American curriculum for the twenty-first century? In a quick survey of my class in 2001, every single student could identify and give information about the cases of Rodney King, James Byrd, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and Matthew Shepard. When I asked them how they had come to know these cases, a significant number of students reported that they had learned details in high school and college class discussions, in addition to what they had gleaned from the media.

In contrast, not a single student could identify, let alone give the facts of the cases of Vincent Chin, Jim Loo, Navroze Mody, Naoki Kamijima, Mukesh and Kanu Patel, Kuan Chung Kao, Thien Minh Ly, and Joseph Ileto. For my students, Asian America simply did not exist.

Twenty years after Vincent Chin’s brutal murder and subsequent horrific betrayal of justice played out in the US (in)justice system, one of the most powerful legacies of his case is what it can teach us about Asian America, about the experience of Asian racialization in the US, about deep institutionalized anti-Asian racism in this society, and about the urgent need for new generations to develop skills to combat

My question is how come no one told us about this in school? I went to the best prep school. I never studied Asian Americans.

entrenched systematic racism, not only on behalf of Asian Americans but for all racially oppressed peoples. In the case of Asian America, without systematic awareness and knowledge of its history and current realities, the acquisition of skills required to fight anti-Asian racism cannot begin. If, in our contact and work with the nation’s educators, we can not succeed in changing their American habit of mind that sees Asian America as un-American and the American practice of excluding what is Asian America from the American story, then the knowledge produced within Asian American Studies will benefit a very precious few. (I am referring to the relatively miniscule number of students across the nation who ends up taking, often “on a lark,” a college-level Asian American course.) Until we manage to have the teaching of Who Killed Vincent Chin? and the rest of Asian American history and contemporary issues included systematically in standard K-12 and college curricula, students in years to come will continue to be betrayed by their American education.

Jean Wu is professor emerita of Race Studies and Asian American Studies at Tufts University. She co-leads the only Asian American Pacific Islander Educators' Mentorship Program for AAPI teachers in the US.