How the racist killing of Vincent Chin sparked the Asian-American movement

Chin’s killing highlighted how Asians in America have faced racism, too, no matter how much they tried to be a ‘model minority’. His death inspired both a new degree of consciousness among Asian-Americans and a nationwide movement

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Frank H. Wu

Frank H. Wu is William L.

Published: 3:00am, 20 Jun 2020Updated: 3:36pm, 21 Jun 2020

The Vincent Chin murder is why I became “Asian-American”. The victim is at once iconic and obscure. Chin did not set out to represent the Asian-American movement. He was an ordinary guy who died because of racism; that is the only means to understand it because the encounter among strangers was anything but random.

In my hometown of Detroit, Chin was killed by attackers who blamed him in a case of mistaken identity. This was in 1982, at the height – or the depths – of a recession that was record-setting until recently.

Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American, was celebrating his bachelor’s party, a traditional ritual before a wedding. He was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers, father and stepson, who had used racial slurs. According to a witness, they shouted that it was because of “little motherf*****s” like him that they were out of work.

Teachers said that sticks and stones would break my bones, but words would never hurt me. Even as a child, however, I realised how words led to sticks and stones

Chin was Chinese, not Japanese, and an American, not a foreigner. But even though, like the killers, he felt the economic anxiety of the Motor City at the time, Chin symbolised Tokyo and Toyota. Until the oil embargo and energy crisis, the city, once among the most important in America, had been home to the Big Four car manufacturers.