old Chinese American named Vincent Chin. Chin’s death and the subsequent prosecution of his
killers galvanized the Asian American community—not only in Michigan and the Midwest, but
also nationwide. In the decades that followed, the Vincent Chin case achieved near-mythical
status as a milestone of Asian American history. For instance, though legal scholar Frank Wu
acknowledges that Asian Americans were politically active before the early 1980s, he argues
that “[the] Asian American movement began with the Vincent Chin case.”
1 What does this
monumental framing of the Vincent Chin case obtain for our understanding of Asian American
history and the history of civil rights activism more broadly, and what does it elide?
Rather than revisiting the tragic events of Vincent Chin’s killing, which have been
well-documented by authors like Helen Zia, Yen Le Espiritus, and Paula Yoo, this paper
examines the circumstances before and after June 19, 1982 in order to situate and understand
the case on its own terms. For Chinese and Chinese American residents of Detroit, Chin’s
slaying followed several other acts of anti-Asian violence in the preceding decade that
registered even more traumatically and exacerbated the community’s dislocation from the city’s
Chinatown. The overwhelming focus on the Vincent Chin case in its aftermath by new,
professionalized civil rights organizations like American Citizens for Justice glossed over other
needs and tensions within the Asian American community—especially among members of the
South and Southeast Asian diasporas. Placing the Vincent Chin case within its proper context
thus invites us to see this incident in a new light—as an unexceptional moment of continuity in
terms of anti-Asian violence in the region, and one that reinforced divisions within the
community as much as it bridged them.
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