Vincent Chin

Hello, friends! 

When I was working at Mizzou, one of the first things that I did was join the Asian American Association (AAA). With the population of Asian Americans at Mizzou being less than 3%, AAA was a great way for me to meet a large number of Asian Americans on campus without running around campus looking for a needle in a haystack. 

One of the things that I could always count on at AAA was that the first General Body Meeting (GBM) of the school year would be centered around the story of Vincent Chin. It was a story that I hadn't heard before I got to Mizzou, but one that affected me deeply as God has called me to more and more activism. Yesterday (Tuesday) was the 38th anniversary of his murder.  

I could recap Vincent Chin's story in my own words, but there are many people who are much better writers than me who have summarized the story well, so I'll be quoting one of them instead. Below is from a friend on Facebook. Please read it and learn. 

"Today is the 38th anniversary of the death of #VincentChin, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death by two white men, a father and a step son, who targeted Vincent over their frustrations with the rise of Japanese automobile imports into the US. After an initial altercation, the two men spent up to 30 minutes searching for Vincent. They found him at a nearby McDonald's. While hurling racial slurs, one of them held Vincent down and the other bludgeoned his head repeatedly with a baseball bat until his skull was cracked open. Vincent died 4 days later on June 23, 1982.

Sound familiar? A father and son, chasing down a person of color, murdered him in cold blood while making a mockery of his killing with racial slurs. This was practically the Asian American version of #AhmaudArbery. Two almost identical narratives separated by almost 40 years between the two incidents and you wonder why we are still taking the streets in protests.

The two men, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were convicted in a county court for manslaughter after a plea bargain brought the charges down from second-degree murder. They served NO JAIL TIME, were given three years' probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. When asked about the insanely lenient sentences, the judge responded by saying "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal."

While we wait begrudgingly for the trials of Gregory and Travis McMichael to unfold over the murder of #AhmaudArbery here in 2020, any true sense of hope seems to have been robbed by our exhausted cynicism. And after more than 120,000 American lives have been claimed in a matter of a few months, he gets on stage and says #KungFlu and the crowd known for their Confederate flags and the wielding of their guns began to scoff and laugh. And you wonder why we are traumatized while we lay awake at night wondering who's going to be the next #VincentChin, except this time the justification is not just car companies coming to "take their jobs", this time, it's "Kung Flu" coming to "kill Americans".'

A few weeks back, as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting, I wrote a post about how anti-Asian sentiment across the country was growing and how rhetoric around the coronavirus was putting my kids at a higher (albeit still unlikely) risk of having violence done against them. Vincent's story reminds me that this is the story we have lived for decades. May God have mercy on us all. 

Have an excellent day!

~Adam