Everybody knows who killed Vincent Chin. But the narrative of why it happened, and the significance of what came next, remains convoluted. It has become a microcosm of the Asian American community’s experience, and not just for what the events of the eighties evoke about discrimination, the potential for violence, and the struggle for justice. It’s also a story about the ongoing quest for visibility, the desire to make an oft-overlooked experience relatable or resonant to those outside of it.
Zia and Tajima-Peña have expressed some weariness over the proliferation of Chin-related media, such as “Hold Still, Vincent.” This might seem ironic, given their role in keeping his memory alive. (Zia is currently developing her own television series, drawing from her experiences.) But their concern is with the single-minded focus on Chin’s victimhood. “One of the reasons that I continue to talk about all this is because I don’t want the legacy of Vincent Chin to stay in the experience of racism and injustice,” Zia explained to me. “That’s not the only part of his legacy. The major part is that our community did something about it. We came together.”
When I learned about Chin, as a college student in the mid-nineties, I took that togetherness for granted. The brutality of the attack seemed to translate easily within the community—my parents, who came to the U.S. in the seventies and had little awareness of Asian American milestones, remembered reading about it in the Chinese-language newspapers—and beyond. When my peers and I protested the killing of Kuan Chung Kao by the Rohnert Park police, in 1997, maybe we were seeking our own Chin-like moment, too—a moment of injustice so egregious that it could make a community of disparate groups feel coherent and unified.
That desire for a straightforward, paradigm-shifting moment persists today; perhaps it’s even stronger in the age of #StopAAPIHate and the pursuit of the stickiest, most viral hashtags and clearest instances of outrage. Stories such as Chin’s can make Asian Americanness legible to outsiders, and also to ourselves. It could have been any one of us—this was the realization which compelled so many Asian Americans in the early eighties, many of whom had rarely thought about the injustices of racism, to come together and wonder what could be done. That same sentiment has roused many Asian Americans over the past few years, inspiring some of us to seek solidarity and coalition, and others to take up arms in self-defense.
But the memory of Chin isn’t sustained solely by the shock of violence, the terror of that one night in Detroit. We remember because of the relationships that grew out of that trauma, and the slow, boring organizing that gets retold from a distance as a spontaneous, united uprising. The legacy persists because of the journalistic career Zia put on hold to devote her time to Chin’s case, because of a difficult, tedious meeting in a Ford dining room among immigrants from different countries who felt like they shared little in common—because of the conversations among families and strangers about why Chin’s death could not be in vain. It could have been any one of us. It can be all of us, together. ♦