Remembering Vincent Chin at MOCA
LIVING, SLIDER Thursday, March 24th, 2011
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) and the Organization of Chinese-Americans (OCA) NY-chapter presented a screening of The Vincent Who? documentary at MOCA last Friday.
The venue was almost reached at full capacity with many generations of Chinese-Americans, young and old, including a father who brought his two teenage children.
“I grew up in the South Bronx so it was a different time and place. My kids are growing up in suburban New Jersey and they haven’t faced much discrimination so far, but they will some time in their lifetime unfortunately and I wanted them to come here today and learn.”
Indeed, for many attending the film screening, it was a learning experience, including yours truly, who had never really heard much about who Vincent Chin was and his legacy. Vincent Chin, was a Chinese-American autoworker in Detroit who was beaten to death by two white autoworkers who mistook Chin for being Japanese. They blamed him for being out of work due to the layoffs created by an increasing market share of Japanese automakers. The two perpetrators were given three years probation, and fined $3,000. Outraged at the lenient sentencing, Chin’s death and failure of the American justice system brought the Asian American community together for activism and the start of the Asian American civil rights movement.
The documentary is inspired by a series of townhalls organized by the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress on the 25th Anniversary of the legendary case. The film features interviews with key figures from that time, as well as a new generation of young Asian-American activists inspired by the event. “Vincent Who?” asks how far the Asian American community have come since then and how far we have yet to go.”
Many audience members brought up their own life experiences, before the movement and before what was considered politically correct. One man exclaimed how back in the day if he had been called a racial slur like ‘gook,’ or ‘chink,’ he would’ve “given them a bloody nose for it.”
The film director/producer Curtis Chin, talked about how nowadays, there’s “the exciting potential that the Asian American community can use social networks like YouTube as response,” to hate and prejudices against the community. This was brought up during the Q&A panel when a college student asked the director’s response to the recent UCLA scandal about Alexandra Wallace, a student making a racist YouTube rant about the Asian American student population.
Chin stressed that every act, intentional or not, is a political act, and that people should be more pro-active. Beatrice Chen, who is charge of Family Programs & Group Visits at MOCA also stressed the importance of standing up and speaking out against hate crimes and injustice. “People always say it didn’t happen to me…but it’s happening to us.”
Virginia Lou Ng, a member of OCA-NJ who came up to NYC especially for the screening, addressed everyone in the room, “This is your story. This is our story.”
Short URL: http://blogs.aaja.org/ourchinatown/?p=821
Posted by Pearly Huang
on Mar 24 2011. Filed under LIVING, SLIDER.
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