Vincent Chin’s legacy: Lighting the future of Asian American activism
When Vincent Chin, a Chinese American groom-to-be, was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by two white Detroit autoworkers in 1982, his loved ones’ cries for justice fell on deaf ears.
It took twelve full days before the media reported his killing — without recognizing the racism involved, remembers Curtis Chin, the nephew of Vincent Chin’s best man. Nine months later, judge Charles Kaufman handed the perpetrators just three years’ probation and a $3,780 fine, reasoning that “These aren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”
But the injustice in Vincent Chin’s case did not go unnoticed by Asian Americans, who began to unite themselves across ethnic and cultural lines.
Despite the initial media silence, residents converged at Chinese restaurants like Chung’s and Golden Star — where Chin had worked part-time on the weekends — to keep one another informed. Hundreds of Detroiters of all Asian backgrounds marched downtown in protest of the trial’s verdict, and his mother, Lily Chin, traversed the nation to champion her son’s cause.
“For a whole generation of Asian American activists, the Vincent Chin case was the case that got them involved,” Curtis Chin says. “It was the thing that brought them to the table.”
Today, advocates still ensure that Vincent Chin’s name is never forgotten. In the wake of his death anniversary this past weekend, and amid increasing xenophobia worldwide, his story provides guiding light for the struggle toward equality.
A CHORUS OF ASIAN AMERICAN VOICES
After the judge spared Vincent Chin’s killers jail time, then 14-year-old Curtis Chin grabbed his parents’ typewriter and wrote outraged letters to the editors of local papers.
He found his calling in the experience, and instead of taking over Chung’s — his family’s restaurant of five decades — spent the next 30 years elevating Asian American voices as a writer and a filmmaker. In his memoir and his documentary, “Vincent Who?,” Curtis Chin recounts Vincent Chin’s story and the racial animosity of 1980s Detroit.
For Helen Zia, an activist who moved to Detroit in 1976 and took up work at an auto plant, Chin’s case laid bare the glaring injustices that Asian Americans faced: “There were two legal organizations in the whole country, one in New York and one in California,” Zia says. “We were in Detroit, and they couldn’t help us.”
Frustrated, Zia rallied leaders from Detroit’s Chinatown and local lawyers to support Lily, Chin’s bereaved mother, and co-founded the American Citizens for Justice, which helped secure a federal trial for Vincent Chin. Last year, Zia launched the Vincent Chin Institute — an initiative that fills the void Asian American Detroiters found themselves in four decades ago through advocacy, education, and resources for Asian Americans in underserved areas.
In the 21st century, the killing of Vincent Chin continues to energize Asian American advocacy and presence. Law students reenact his trial to highlight legal shortcomings. Hollywood has adapted his case into films like “Hold Still, Vincent” and “Who Killed Vincent Chin?”
Vincent Chin was a victim of brutal, racial violence. But from his tragedy emerged “a chorus of Asian American voices,” Curtis Chin says.
CONSIDERABLE WORK AHEAD
The autoworkers who attacked Vincent Chin did so under the false belief that he was Japanese, attributing the auto industry’s hardships to foreign competition from Japan.
This fear of foreign economic threat parallels modern “anti-China hysteria and scapegoating,” says Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Cynthia Choi, pointing to how COVID-19 was racialized and fueled attacks on Asians across the country.
“What’s different for our community today is that we are speaking out — We are speaking out loudly,” Choi adds. “We want to prevent the murder of Vincent Chin from happening again.”
Established in 2020, Stop AAPI Hate advocates for policy change and runs the country’s largest reporting center for acts of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It has recorded thousands of cases nationwide, including verbal and physical abuse and discriminatory practices in businesses and schools,
“Close to 50% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders reported that they experienced some forms of race-based hate in the past year,” Choi says. “We have to continue to see this as and treat this as a serious ongoing issue, and that can’t be overemphasized.”
Despite the progress achieved, advocates against anti-Asian hate assert that there is still considerable work ahead in every sector, from the workplace to the entertainment industry.
The comprehensive history of Asian Americans, for instance, continues to be excluded from core K-12 history curricula in the United States. Asked to name a prominent Asian American in a recent survey, most Americans responded “I can’t think of one” or Jackie Chan, who is not American.
“We don’t even exist to most Americans,” Zia says, citing lack of Asian American visibility as a key factor to the perpetuation of their stereotypes, such as the model minority myth and the notion that Asians are perpetual foreigners.
Some advocates like John Yang, the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice AAJC, are turning their attention to what they say is a new form of anti-Asian hate: a growing number of bills preventing some Chinese citizens from buying and owning land.
Choi says these bills resemble the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which prohibited Asian immigrant farmers from owning land in California and was often justified with racist arguments.
“Everyone is concerned about whether an Asian American is truly an American, and so they’re not being shown the same houses, they’re not being afforded the same opportunities,” Yang says.
VINCENT CHIN WAS A GIANT
On Sunday, the air beneath Boston’s Chinatown gate was thick with remembrance. A few dozen residents in shirts reading “STOP ASIAN HATE” had assembled to honor Vincent Chin. Above flickering candles arranged in a heart on a folding table, they set up a poster featuring Chin’s portrait, his name written in Chinese, and the dates “May 18, 1955 – June 23, 1982.”
Wilson Lee, co-founder of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Boston Lodge and the Chinese American Heritage Foundation, has organized this vigil for Vincent Chin every June 23 for the past six years. Even as media attention faded after the 40th anniversary of Chin’s death two years ago, Lee’s own dedication to Chin’s memory has not wavered.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” Lee tells the Associated Press. “Because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s the popular thing to do.”
At the vigil, city leaders, Boston City Councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy, American Jewish Committee of New England Regional Director Rob Leikind, and Miss Chinese Boston Sarah Chu, gave remarks. Among them, sixteen elementary and high school students stood with orange lilies and yellow flowers pressed to their chests — their inclusion an intentional one.
“It’s important that they take part in it, not as spectators but as stakeholders — because I am not going to be around in 20, 30 years to continue this vigil,” Lee says.
“We need to make sure that future generations, especially our young people, know about the experience that he went through,” Lee adds. “They are standing on the shoulders of giants, and Vincent Chin was a giant — He opened the door.”