Helen Zia on Asian Hate 40 Years After Vincent Chin’s Murder

by Harper Whelan

Helen Zia first heard about the brutal hate crime murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 while scanning the headlines of a Detroit newspaper. Since then, she’s become the public spokesperson and main organizer of the Justice for Vincent Chin movement and the leading voice for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) peoples.

We spoke to this award-winning journalist, author, and activist for Asians, women, LGBTQIA+, and civil rights about the ongoing racist attacks in the aftermath of COVID, the history of Asian American scapegoating, the harmful model minority myth, and what we can do to speak up, have our voices heard, and protect our community.

You’ve fought for Asian American rights your entire career. Are you surprised that Asian hate is still going strong?

I'm sad, disappointed, and angry that Asian hate is intensifying, but I have to say I'm not surprised at all. I've been talking about the potential for this violence and anti-Asian hate for a long time because of the projection of a few trends. Number one, the rise of China as an economic and political power--and ultimately a superpower. The other thing is the demographic changes in America. There will be a majority of people of color in the country within the next 10 years. People have always said 2040/2050, but I've been tracking this demographic trend for quite some time. It's going to happen a lot sooner than we think. People who have power, or perceived power, do not want to give it up, but these are mega trends. There's no turning back. There's no Make America White Again. I have said for a long time that the rise of China, as well as other countries in Asia and the Pacific, as well as the rising numbers of Asian Americans and other people of color, is going to lead to greater tension.

Did COVID make things worse?

I didn't anticipate COVID, but any event--like what led to the killing of Vincent Chin or any economic crisis in America that can be blamed on Asia--usually will lead to greater hostility toward Asians. I would say, further, that it’s not going to go away. It's going to get worse before it gets better because these two trends are continuing. China's going to get stronger. And [President] Biden and FBI Director Christopher Wray say over and over again: China is an existential threat to America. Most Americans believe that--from the President on down--and then layer COVID, and then layer on all those anti-Asian stereotypes, and anti-Asian tropes, and themes throughout American history, and all of that is a really bad mixture for Asians in America.

Is the threat of China as an economic superpower the driving force behind the hostility towards Asian Americans?

Economics is one factor. In American history, when there are economic crises, people are hurting, people can't pay their rent, they can't get food, they can't send their kids to school, people don't have work. Then they are susceptible to blaming people for their pain. And what happens in crises like that? People in power like to blame other people so that they aren’t held responsible. That's scapegoating. Asian Americans have historically been scapegoated for more than 400 years. It is a long standing pattern in the way Asian Americans have been treated in America. [We’ve been] blamed and targeted for things we’re not responsible for. Why? Because we're identifiable.

Like when Vincent Chin was murdered after he was mistaken for being Japanese and taking American auto jobs away?

When Vincent Chin was killed, it was supposedly because Japan was competing so strongly with building efficient cars. The fact is that Germany pioneered fuel efficient cars, [but] only Japan and Asians were blamed. They could have easily blamed Germans, but scapegoating and racism only works when people look different. So this is one of the archetypal, fundamental ways that Asians have been viewed in America. Politics also has a huge role to play because it's politicians, like [former President] Trump pointing the finger over and over again in a very hateful way. But in the 1980s, the same thing happened blaming Japan. [The rhetoric was], "We should send another atomic bomb to Japan. We're at war."

That language is being used today, too. "We’re at war. We’re at economic war." So when you're at war, what do you do? You kill the enemy. So that is the politics, the economics, the pattern of racism--how Asian Americans are used in America, and how other Americans are manipulated by all this. This is deeply ingrained in part of the systemic racism of America. Asian Americans are a part of that. We fit into that jigsaw puzzle.

Is there anything we can do to make sure the problem doesn’t get worse?

The way to combat it is people speaking up and speaking out against the wrongness of this, and working together with people to actually solve issues like inequity in society, [whether it’s] economic, political, food and housing, and security. It’s not just politicians, but Asian Americans and people in communities, other allies, speaking out to say, "Hey, bashing Asian Americans is not going to solve our problems. This is an all-society problem." What we have to do for our communities is have a political presence and a voice. If we don't speak up, nobody will. We can't count on other people to speak for us, it has to come from ourselves.

Do you think the model minority myth has hurt us because people think Asians are passive and don’t fight back? How can people join hands and fight this together?

That last part about coming together is really the answer. The larger way of addressing those things and fighting back is to come together and stand up and try to eliminate these stereotypes. The only way we can fight the stereotype of Asian Americans being the model minority--passive, not speaking up--is to not be that. It’s to create or join organizations that are speaking up to support political leaders. And for the community to speak up, and where we are speaking up, to amplify our voices. Our communities have lots of organizations and lots of people who are speaking up all the time, but because of inherent social media biases, we have to speak up louder because we don't get heard. We actually have a large cohort of Asian Americans in Congress today: Grace Meng (D-NY), Judy Chu (D-CA), chair of the APA, the Asian Pacific American Caucus, people in corporate America, and a lot of organizations. We have a lot of organizations that are speaking up, but we don't get heard. That's a problem.

Is part of the reason we’re not being heard because Asian culture doesn’t encourage assertiveness, and has the model minority myth perpetuated Asian hate?

I think they're related. Stereotypes are part of culture, and people internalize culture. Here’s the thing, if your teachers and your community, and the books you read, and the movies you watch are telling you, "Oh, Asians are the good minority," they are modeling how you are expected to behave. When I was a kid, teachers would say, "Oh, you Chinese kids, you're so well behaved." We were dumbfounded by that because we were terrible, and we were not well-behaved. So there are different parts to your question. One is whether our internal culture is telling us this. I'm saying there is a broader culture that’s also telling us this. Then there's a dynamic between the broader culture--the expectations on you, as a young Asian American growing up, and also being a girl. There are gender expectations; a girl must be well behaved, girls don't fight. Then, there’s the Asian American [expectation], "Oh, Asians don't fight."

I’m just curious, who coined the term “model minority” anyway?

It was created in 1966 by a white sociology professor [named] William Petersen, who wrote two articles: one that appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, the other that appeared in U.S. News & World Report. What he wrote in one article was how Japanese-Americans are like the model Americans, and in the other how Chinese-Americans are the model Americans. And the whole idea was that--unlike other minorities who were causing political unrest and were on welfare, Asians were advancing quietly by their own hard work.

Was he a racist? Probably not. He was probably thinking that he was being highly complimentary to Asian Americans. But the reason this made it into the New York Times and U.S. News & World Report was because 1966 was the height of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a way to pit Asian Americans as the good minority and Black people as the bad minority. And in that time, it has become so ingrained and people internalized this. For Black people, it's like, "How dare you think that you are the good minority and you are better than we are?” And for Asians, it's, "Oh, we're good. What's wrong with being better? What's wrong with being a model?" What happens is that neither group is seeing that they're being manipulated and being pitted against each other. So basically, we're being used. In bad times, we're blamed. In other times, we're held up as, “You're the good ones. You don't make trouble." And another piece of this model minority, racist image is that we don't make trouble. We don’t fight back.

I want to go back to what you were saying about the expectations of Asian women. You talked about broader societal expectations and Asian American expectations, so it seems like we’re being hit with a double whammy.

Unfortunately, that false image portrays Asian females as good targets to predators. There's the expectation of the hypersexual, desirable, exotic, Asian female, and all kinds of bullshit stereotypes, [which leads] to the idea that Asian women are passive and won't fight back. To a predator, that's like the perfect victim; the perfect target.

I've said in my speeches, we have to stop being so fucking polite. Asians aren't going to just let you beat us to death. A lot of these attacks, they're part of bullying too. This happens when people think they can get away with it. "Like here comes an Asian woman, let me beat her because, hey, why not? Nothing is going to happen to me, and she's not going to fight back."

There should be a national campaign to let women know how they are targets. There are many cases where Asian women have been kidnapped, and terrible things happened to them and they were discounted by police. Every male or female [in high school and college] needs to get a good orientation on race, racism, and anti-Asian hate in America. Asian American girls in high school and college need to know that there are predators.

It’s really frustrating to see the police automatically discount hate crimes against us as not race-related.

I just worked on a publication called The Vincent Chin Legacy Guide. One of the articles in there [on page 54] is called “Know Them, Know Their Names.” It’s a four-page list of Asian Americans who have been killed since 1982. And one of the first things that law enforcement says is, "This has nothing to do with race."

That’s exactly what the police said when six Asian women were shot dead in the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.

Where does that come from? The racist model minority myth. It's like, "Oh, these are Asians. It has nothing to do with race." If it were an attack on Jewish people, they would not say automatically, "This is not antisemitic." If it's an attack on Black people, they're not going to say "It has nothing to do with race." They're going to pause and investigate a little bit more before they draw their conclusion. The presumption with Asian Americans is that we don't experience racial discrimination because we are the model minority. There's no bigotry against Asian Americans. Therefore, how can there be a racial attack? And so that's exactly what happened in Atlanta. The first thing that cops say is, "This has nothing to do with race. He was looking to kill Asian women because of sex." And like, hello, that has everything to do with race.

How do we hold people accountable for their racism and hate?

Number one is to organize. Asian Americans can’t solve the entire Asian hate alone, and Black people cannot solve police violence or violence against Black people alone. It really does take communities working together. I don't even really talk about allyship. I talk about unity; our community. The word community has the word "unity" in it. We are all part of a larger society, a larger community. You can’t build a wall around Chinatown, or around Harlem, or around Bensonhurst. Asian Americans are feeling hate in a very specific, targeted way, but this is a concern for all of our communities. Part of organizing is to hold people accountable. We have to hold public officials who do nothing, or school officials who do nothing, or universities and police who do nothing about these things--we have to hold them accountable. The first thing they say is, “Oh, this has nothing to do with racism.” That's wrong and we have to fight that.

Right. People need to realize that this problem isn’t just an Asian American problem. It affects everyone.

Violence doesn't restrict itself to one community. It spills over. If you have somebody who is susceptible to violent acts, they’re not only going to direct that to Asian Americans. That's something that could affect every community. It’s in Buffalo, El Paso, Uvalde--I could give a laundry list of violence that's been going on, whether it’s racist, islamophobic, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, or against women, and so on. Violence against women in this pandemic has increased off the charts globally. All of these things affect all of our communities.

News reports and viral videos make it seem like other people of color are committing the majority of hate crimes against Asians. Is this actually true?

I would challenge the idea that most of the hate incidents--and there's a legal difference between hate incidents and hate crimes--are actually committed by Black people. The website StopAAPIhate.org has collected more than 11,000 incidents that Asian Americans have self-reported from March 2020, during this pandemic of hate and COVID. They've done a lot of data analysis, and it's 2:1 white people, mostly white men, attacking Asian Americans, mostly Asian American women and girls.

A lot of Asian American spokespeople, academics, and activists like myself, have been pointing out that the impression that's being given by viral media in videos that are shown over and over again on TV, are being shown as Black on Asian, when in reality, the majority nationally is white against Asian; white men, against Asian women. It’s my opinion that a lot of this Black/Asian friction is also selectively chosen as a way to keep communities divided.

Do you think people of color can be racist?

There is a perception that people of color cannot be racist. Actually, the word racist is so loaded that it's more helpful to use basic words like bigotry or discrimination to describe harmful behaviors. People will say, "Racism is part of a power structure that keeps white supremacy in place." So, the thinking goes, therefore, the oppressed people cannot be white supremacists. That may be true, but their behaviors can buttress white supremacy. Anti-Blackness and anti-Asianness by people of color, for example, are real. By any name, it needs to be addressed, whether it's racist, whether it's bullying, and whether it's coming from a place of bigotry because it’s helping white supremacy.

Let’s talk about you for a minute. You were supposed to be a doctor. We’re all glad you didn’t, but what happened?

Both of my parents were immigrants from China, and they didn't know that there were a lot of different career paths available. I didn't know that either, so, being a doctor, lawyer, teacher, those were basically the things that I thought were available. So, in my small view of what options I had, that's how I ended up going to medical school. I thought, "OK, good. I’m thinking about the community and the world by being a doctor." What I discovered in medical school is that you become part of a larger system. And in those days, there were very, very few women doctors, and there were very few doctors of color. So I just realized I didn't want to do that anymore. It was the wrong thing for me. So that's when I quit, which made my parents very unhappy.

How did you decide to become a journalist?

It took me a while to find journalism. It was really a time when journalism--who you saw on TV, in politics--were almost all white men. And so I never thought I could have a career writing, even though I did write in high school and always enjoyed writing, but I didn't think I could make a living doing that. So, when I quit medical school, I threw myself into community organizing, and I became a construction laborer. Then I moved to Detroit, MI, to learn about the labor movement and to find an Asian American community because they had a tiny one. I worked in a car factory for a while.

It was in the course of being an activist that I realized I wanted to write about the social issues that I saw around me. I wanted to write about the people who were being hurt by the collapse of the auto industry and who were going through a pretty severe recession. It was then that I began my writing career because I had lost my job as a factory worker and a union activist. So I had to think “what's next?” I just knew that I wanted to tell these stories, and that's how I started as a journalist.

What advice do you have for budding journalists today?

You should choose topics that you care about. It has to provoke that curiosity that you have; your desire to pick up the stone and see what's under it. This is why it's so important to have diversity among journalists because we all have filters that prevent us from knowing what questions to ask, "What else is in this story, this picture? Is that a stone? What is it? Or is it blending into the background that I see every day?"

I would say, as a journalist, let that be your guide, and that journalism is about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. That’s part of the mission. As far as a career, you can always find work that will help you pay the rent. It may not be the thing that gets you a Pulitzer Prize, it may not be the thing that gets you a lot of money, but each step leads you to the next one.

Just believe in yourself. Writing and journalism is also about having a voice. It's not about being a fly on the wall. It’s being able to apply an analytical mind and lifting the stone and saying, "What is this? How do I view this? What is the story behind the story? Why does it matter? How will I tell it and why?" It’s all about trusting and believing in yourself.




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Interview edited for length and clarity.