In June 1982 in Detroit, Vincent Chin, the adopted son of a Chinese laundry owner, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two disgruntled auto workers who mistook him for Japanese. Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American engineering student about to be married, had gone to a topless bar with three friends to enjoy that quintessential American prenuptial activity, the bachelor party. At the bar, two Caucasian auto workers—Ronald Ebens and his step-son Michael Nitz, who had been laid off from his job—began to taunt them. They called Chin a “Jap” and yelled, “It’s because of you motherfuckers that we’re out of work!” Insults soon led to blows, and when the manager threw them out, Ebens and Nitz grabbed a baseball bat from the trunk of their car and chased Chin through the streets. Twenty minutes later, they seized him in front of a McDonald’s restaurant. Nitz held back Chin’s arms while Ebens shattered his skull. Expecting to attend his wedding, Chin’s friends and relatives came to his funeral instead.
Charged with second-degree murder, Ebens and Nitz entered into a plea bargain and pled guilty to manslaughter. Charles Kaufman, a Wayne County circuit judge, apparently unwilling to confront the xenophobia in that part of the country, placed the pair on probation for three years and fined them $3,750 each. Neither spent a single night in jail. “What kind of law is this? What kind of justice?” cried Lily Chin, mother of the victim. “This happened because my son is Chinese. If two Chinese killed a white person, they must go to jail, maybe for their whole lives … something is wrong with this country.” Others echoed her outrage: “Three thousand dollars can’t even buy a good used car these days,” one Chinese American protested, “and this was the price of a life.”
Infuriated Chinese American activists organized the Justice for Vincent Chin Committee, which prompted an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The federal government indicted Ebens on charges of committing a racially motivated crime. In a new trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but an appellate court overturned the conviction. Lily Chin, Vincent’s mother, felt betrayed by the justice system. “I don’t understand how this could happen in America,” she cried. “My husband fought for this country. We always paid our taxes and worked hard … Before I really loved America, but now this has made me very angry.” Disillusioned, she moved back to China to live there permanently.
The only positive outcome was that this tragedy reminded the Chinese American community—immigrant and ABC alike—of the need to organize politically. Suddenly people realized that as long as they looked Asian, they could all be vulnerable to assault. The murder of Vincent Chin galvanized the ethnic Chinese community. “My blood boiled when I first learned that Vincent Chin was deliberately attacked and murdered as an act of racial hatred,” said Harold Fong of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance at a rally in San Francisco. George Wong pointed out, “The killing of Vincent Chin happened in 1982, not 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act!” The Chin murder spawned demonstrations, films, and a new generation of Chinese American political activists. It launched the careers of several prominent human rights leaders in the Chinese American community, among them Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams, and Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.
The tremendous publicity generated by the Vincent Chin murder did not mean that the United States had actually become more dangerous for Chinese Americans. A century earlier, when the Exclusion Act precipitated anti-Chinese riots, dozens were murdered with virtually no media scrutiny whatsoever, the victims presented more as clumps of statistics than as individuals whose lives were snuffed out. But by the 1980s, the Chinese American community had come to expect more from the United States, and had learned to broadly disseminate information about injustices injustices suffered by their people. Seven years after the death of Vincent Chin, activists drew on the political lessons learned from his tragedy when another Chinese person became a fatal victim of a hate crime.
(Chang 320-322)