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Death and Elections
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PERSONALITIES | FEATURES | NEWS
henever I am faced with choosing between a republican and a democrat, I start by remembering Vincent Chin, Jim Loo, Thien Min Ly and Kao Kuan Chung. I guess I hold the notion that our political leaders influence the social climate in which we Asian Americans live and die.
On June 19, 1982 Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman, was celebrating his upcoming wedding at a suburban Detroit strip club called Fancy Pants. While the bachelor party was under way, Chin was drawn into a shouting match across the bar by a laid-off autoworker named Ronald Ebens. |
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“It's because of you little motherf***ers that we're out of work,” Ebens shouted, apparently taking Chin to be Japanese. Chin went over to confront Ebens. Punches were thrown and Ebens hit the floor. Into the fray jumped Ebens's stepson Michael Nitz, another laid-off autoworker. The fight was quickly broken up by Club employees.
Chin and his party left and parted company. Ebens and Nitz caught up with Chin in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Ebens grabbed a baseball bat from the back of the car and slammed it against Chin's leg. Then Nitz grabbed the wounded Chin and held him from behind while Ebens swung the bat again, this time against Chin's skull. “It's not fair,” Chin managed to murmur to a friend before slipping into a coma. Four days later, Chin was dead. Chin's dying words might have been a comment on his killing, but it could as well describe the aftermath. In the criminal case brought against Ebens and Nitz, the duo plea-bargained the charges down to manslaughter and the judge sentenced the two men to three years probation and a $3,000 fine. Subsequent federal prosecutions resulted in acquittals for both men. Neither served any time for their cowardly murder of Vincent Chin. As Vincent Chin said, “It's not fair.” To see just how unfair it was, consider what would have happened had two unemployed Asian Americans smashed the skull of a white draftsman with a baseball bat. Who should we blame for Vincent Chin's murder and its egregious aftermath? The media and political leaders for playing up the Japanese economic threat? The American educational system for letting people like Ebens grow up seeing Asian Americans as embodying a threat from Asia? The Michigan judge for placing such small significance on the loss of an Asian American life? The political leader who appointed the Michigan judge? The President who set the tone for the entire nation? Ronald Reagan was President when Vincent Chin's killers literally got away with murder. Reagan is credited with revitalizing the Republican party by returning it to its conservative roots. Many Asian Americans see that as code for giving racists free rein to their worst tendencies. But lest anyone be tempted to draw easy conclusions, remember that Reagan signed the bill to pay $20,000 in reparations to every surviving Japanese American who had been interned during World War II under Executive Order 9066 — which had been signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the patron saint of liberal democrat presidents. The killing of Jim Loo in Raleigh, North Carolina in July of 1989 happened during the presidency of George Bush, a Republican who pledged to promote a “kinder, gentler America”. Jim Loo and friends were at a pool hall in Raleigh, North Carolina when they became targets of racial slurs and harassment by Robert and Lloyd Piche, brothers who had lost a third brother in Vietnam. Pool hall employees told the whole group to go outside. “We shouldn't put up with Vietnamese in our country,” said Robert Piche before killing Loo with a shotgun in the parking lot. Loo was Chinese American. In March of 1990 Robert Piche was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 37 years. Lloyd was sentenced to four years. There was nothing kinder and gentler about Loo's murder, but the judicial aftermath was a huge improvement over the Chin case. Bill Clinton, a moderate democrat, was President on May 3, 1996 when a 24-year-old Vietnamese American named Thien Minh Ly went rollerblading in a tennis court in Tustin, an affluent Orange County suburb. Ly had a bachelors degree from UCLA and a masters from Georgetown and was on the verge of a promising career. He was accosted by two young white men. After putting Ly at ease, Gunner Lindberg, 21, pulled out a butcher knife and stabbed Ly nearly four dozen times while Dominic Christopher, 17, egged him on. Ly's body was found the next morning by the janitor. The murder may have gone unsolved if Lindberg hadn't written to a former New Mexico prison inmate bragging casually, “Oh I killed a jap a while ago I stabbed him to Death at Tustin High school.” Lindberg was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Again, the murder was motivated by the vilest of racist impulses but the judicial aftermath was just enough. PAGE 2 |
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