Top Quotes: “Asian American Dreams” — Helen Zia
Introduction
“The constant barrage aimed at stirring up patriotic zeal against the Vietnamese enemy took its toll on Asian Americans, in the same way that the previous hostilities with Japan, China, and North Korea had. Many kids in my school had relatives fighting — and dying — in Vietnam. One classmate could barely look at me because I reminded her of the war that killed her older brother. Encountering her in gym class was awkward and sad. At the dry cleaner’s and the doughnut shop where I worked in the summers, plenty of Gls would stop in, and some would have to comment. “They’re everywhere, aren’t they?” a soldier customer said to his buddy as I handed him his laundered and starched fatigues. I had become the local personification of a war nearly ten thousand miles away. Since I looked like the enemy, I must be the enemy.”
“In the spring of 1971, a joint committee of the black, Latino, and Asian American students decided it was time to make the university address the racial inequities on campus. Princeton had very few students of color then, about a hundred in an undergraduate student body of nearly four thousand. We agreed that life at Princeton for students of color was akin to being stuck in a vast snowdrift, and it was time to thaw the university out. Our small numbers didn’t deter us.
The leadership wanted to make a bold, definitive statement, so they decided that our loose grouping of minority students Third World students should seize and occupy Firestone Library and call for a massive rally at the University Chapel. We would denounce racism at Princeton and the racist war in Vietnam. We would demand an end to the war, as well as the creation of programs, courses, and a center for Third World students. To a first-year student from a sheltered Confucian home in New Jersey, this was the big time.
Princeton in 1971 was almost entirely male, having admitted its first women undergraduates in 1969. I was one of the half-dozen Asian American women students on campus, and the only one involved in this grandiose plan.”
Early Asian American History
“Long before the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain, Asian people could be found in the Americas. The first Asian Americans appeared as early as the 1500s. From 1565 to 1815, during the lucrative Spanish galleon trade between Manila and Mexico, sailors in the Philippines were conscripted into service aboard Spanish ships. A number of these seamen jumped ship for freedom, establishing a settlement on the coast of Louisiana; today, their descendants live in New Orleans.
In the 1600s, a thriving Chinatown bustled in Mexico City. The Chinese American success led Spanish barbers to petition the Viceroy in 1635 to move the Chinese barbers to the city’s outskirts. Even then Asians were seen as a threat in the New World.
At the Continental Congress of the new United States of America in 1785, our nation’s founders discussed the plight of some Chinese sailors stranded in Baltimore by their U.S. cargo ship, the Pallas, which had set sail for China. Meanwhile, the Reverend William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, wrote in his diary in 1790 that he spied a “tall, well-proportioned, dark complexioned man from Madras,” India, walking about the town.
The first known Asian American New Yorker was born in 1825, the son of a Chinese merchant seaman who married an Irishwoman. In 1850, a young Japanese sailor was rescued at sea by an American ship; he learned English and became a U.S. citizen, adopting the name Joseph Hecco. He went to work in the office of a U.S. senator, met three U.S. presidents — Pierce, Buchanan, and Lincoln — and served as an important adviser in the establishment of United States-Japan relations. In 1854, a Chinese man by the name of Yung Wing graduated from Yale College and established an educational mission from China to the United States.”
“Our Asian American migration begins with the Anglo-American moral dilemma over slavery. In 1806, one year before Britain officially ended the slave trade, two hundred Chinese were brought to Trinidad, a small offering to assuage the insatiable demand for plantation labor in the New World. Using the same ships that brought slaves from Africa, the flesh merchants rerouted to Asia. They indentured “coolie” labor from China and India to perform the same work, under the same conditions, as the slaves; in the case of Cuba, which continued the practice of slavery until the end of the nineteenth century, the Asian coolies worked alongside African slaves.
Despite the similar treatment, it is important to note that the Asian workers were not slaves; according to Professor Evelyn HuDeHart of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the coolies themselves insisted on the distinction between their status and that of the slaves. The Asians worked knowing that they would be free men after they served their eight-year contracts and paid off their indebtedness for their passage, food, clothing, and other necessities — which often extended their servitude for years. With China and India in political and economic chaos resulting from Britain’s imperial expansion, a vast pool of desperate Asian workers became available as commodities. This reliance on Asia for cheap labor was the start of a global trend that continues to the present.
Over several decades beginning in 1845, more than 500,000 Asian Indians were shipped to British Guiana (now Guyana), the West Indies, and various French colonies. Importation of Chinese began in earnest in 1847, first headed to Cuba, where more than 125,000 Chinese eventually supplemented the shrinking African slave labor force. Peru and other parts of South America also became major markets for human cargo from Asia. Most of the laborers were men, setting a pattern of Asian bachelor societies for the next hundred years.”
“Initially, the Chinese were welcomed to San Francisco, and some even participated in California’s statehood ceremonies in 1850. The reception quickly turned cold, however, as new laws and taxes singled out the Chinese. A foreign-miners tax targeted Chinese miners, not Europeans. The tax gave way to complete prohibition of Chinese from mining. Laws forbade Chinese to testify in court, even in their own defense. Special zoning ordinances were selectively enforced against Chinese. Hair-cutting ordinances forced Chinese to cut off the braids, or queues, that the emperor required as proof of loyalty — ironically, making it harder for workers to return to China. In San Francisco, special license fees were levied solely against Chinese laundries.”
“The Central Pacific Railroad was contracted to build the difficult half from the Pacific, through the Rocky Mountains; within two years, 12,000 Chinese were hired — about 90 percent of the company’s workforce.”
“When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 Chinese workers were barred from the celebrations. The speeches congratulated European immigrant workers for their labor but never mentioned the Chinese. Instead, the Chinese men were summarily fired and forced to walk the long distance back to San Francisco — forbidden to ride on the railroad they built.”
“The Workingmen’s Party in California, a white labor party with a large Irish following, adopted the slogan “The Chinese must go!” One of its ideas was to drop a balloon filled with dynamite on San Francisco’s Chinatown. The “Chinese question” framed the labor stance for Democrats and Republicans: while Democrats exploited the race hysteria to win the support of labor, Republicans supported the business ideal of an unlimited supply of second-class, low-wage labor. Caught between the racism of both political parties, the Chinese were used to inflame and distract white workers, frustrated by rising unemployment and an economic depression.
From Los Angeles to Denver, from Seattle to Rock Springs, Wyoming, Chinese were driven out. In Tacoma, Washington, hundreds of
Chinese were herded onto boats and set adrift at sea, presumably to their deaths. Mobs burned all the Chinese homes and businesses in Denver in 1880. Newspapers from The New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle stirred fears that the Chinese, together with the newly freed black population, would become a threat to the Republic.”
“The Japanese government was confident its citizens could avoid the fate of the Chinese, whom they thought responsible for their own misfortunes in America. “It is indeed the ignominious conduct and behavior of indigent Chinese of inferior character … that brought upon [them| the contempt of the Westerners and resulted in the enactment of legislation to exclude them from the country,” the Japanese consul to the United States reported in 1884. The government of Japan screened all early émigrés. Many were literate and more educated than their Chinese or European counter- parts. Women were also encouraged to emigrate because of their stabilizing family influence.”
“The Japanese were condemned as more dangerous than the Chinese because of their willingness and ability to adopt American customs. Whereas the Chinese were attacked for not assimilating, the Japanese were reviled because they readily integrated. By 1913, a number of states west of the Mississippi River already prohibited Chinese and Asian Indians from owning land. The situation for Japanese immigrants in California was ambiguous until 1920, when a more comprehensive Alien Land Law was passed, preventing anyone of Asian ancestry from owning land.”
“The decision was a big setback to the Japanese, who were caught in a cruel vise — under constant attack both for being “foreign” and for being “too ready to adapt.” In the Kingdom of Hawaii, a number of Japanese had become naturalized citizens, but when Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898, becoming a territory in 1900, the territorial government refused to recognize them as U.S. citizens.”
The Early 20th Century
“When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, there were barely a half-million Asian Americans in the nation. Of those, only 150,000 were Chinese Americans — not enough to populate a small midwestern city. We made up less than 0.1 percent of the population.”
“With the population of Japanese immigrants increasing, plantation owners in Hawaii and labor brokers in the mainland United States feared that the growing community might organize for more money and better working conditions. To keep the workforce fragmented, the labor brokers looked to India for workers.
In 1900, some 2,050 Asian Indians resided in the United States. Most of these earliest Indian immigrants were professionals, students, merchants, and visitors in the northeastern states. However; between 1906 and 1908, nearly 5,000 Asian Indian emigrants from the Punjab region arrived in Canada, which quickly established regulations that would prevent “hordes of hungry Hindus” from entering the country. In reality only a small fraction of the Indians were Hindu, most being Sikhs and about one third Muslim, but the misnomer stuck. Discouraged from entering Canada, many of the Indians headed south to Washington and Oregon. Others ventured to the farmlands of California, where they were contracted specifically to counter the labor power of the Japanese workers. Intra-Asian hostilities arose between the Japanese and Asian Indian laborers working next to each other in the California farmland.
Prevailing race theories included Asian Indians with the Caucasian race. European Americans acknowledged them as “full-blooded Aryans.” This led many Asian Indians to believe that they were a cut above the other Asian migrants and could avoid the prejudice that the others faced. Citizenship was actually granted to some sixty-seven Indians, in seventeen states, between 1905 and 1923. The 1790 Naturalization Law allowed “free white persons” to become U.S. citizens, and Asian Indians were thought to be part of the “Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian family.”
Nevertheless, their dark skin and willingness to work for low wages made Asian Indians a threat to white society. The Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, established in 1905, later changed its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League to include the Punjabis. Agitating against the “Indian menace” and the “tide of turbans,” they succeeded in barring Asian Indians from entering the United States between 1908 and 1920. A magazine writer of that time warned: “This time the chimera is not the saturnine, almond-eyed mask … of the multitudinous Chinese, nor the close-cropped bullet-heads of the suave and smiling Japanese, but a face of finer features, rising, turbaned out of the Pacific.” Whites forced seven hundred Asian Indians from their community in Bellingham, Washington, across the border into Canada in 1907. A few months later Asian Indians in Everett, Washington, were rounded up and expelled. Indian immigration was short-lived, ending with the Immigration Act of 1917.”
“In an effort to tear down citizenship barriers for Asian Indians, Bhagat Singh Thind took the issue to court. Thind had been granted citizenship in 1920 by an Oregon court, on the grounds that he was Caucasian, but the federal government disagreed and appealed in 1923. Arguing his case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Thind reasoned that Indians are Caucasians, not Asians, and therefore should be accorded full rights of citizenship, including land ownership and suffrage. But the Court determined in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that it was not enough to be “Caucasian.” It ruled that it was also necessary to be “white.” Since Indians were not white, they could not become citizens, nor could they own land or send for their wives from India.
The decision in the Thind case was applied retroactively, and the citizenship of the naturalized Indian Americans was revoked. One Indian American committed suicide, writing in a note that he tried to be “as American as possible,” but “I am no longer an American citizen … I do not choose to live a life as an interned person.” The small Asian Indian population declined after the Thind decision, but a few thousand stayed on. A majority of the Asian Indian men in California married Mexican women and established successful farming communities. Other Sikhs, believing that discrimination was stronger against Asian Indians, abandoned their turbans and tried to pass as Mexican or black.”
“The last significant migration of Asians to the United States in the early twentieth century came from the Philippines. Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory and its residents were U.S. nationals, Filipinos carried U.S. passports and could travel freely within the States — they were the only Asians eligible for immigration after 1924. Hundreds of Filipinos came to the United States as college students beginning in 1903, on scholarships set up by the United States after it annexed the Philippines, ceded by Spain after the Spanish-American War.”
“The white exclusionists strategized that there was only one way to end Filipino immigration: the United States would have to grant “independence” to the Philippines. Their racially inflamed arguments persuaded Congress to pass another law specifically targeting Asians, the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, converting the Philippines to a commonwealth. Immediately, all Filipinos were reclassified as aliens and prohibited from applying for citizenship because they weren’t white. Only fifty Filipinos from any nation of origin would be permitted to immigrate each year, except for plantation labor to Hawaii. As with the Japanese in Hawaii, Filipinos were debarred from leaving the Hawaiian Territory for the mainland. Congress even offered to pay for workers’ fare to the Philippines if they agreed never to return; the Los Angeles Times urged Filipinos to “go back home.” Fewer than 5 percent took the offer — in spite of the elusiveness of citizenship, the rest wanted to stay in America, as Americans.”
“Southern plantation owners imported Chinese to Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana in the 1870s to “punish the Negro for having abandoned the control of his old master.” Chinese were also brought to factories in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to keep the wage rates down.”
“Despite the deliberate attempts to provoke ethnic friction, unity was eventually achieved. In 1920, Filipino and Japanese plantation workers decided to join ranks against the plantation owners; 3,000 members of the Filipino Federation of Labor and 5,000 Japanese workers went on strike after their demands for higher wages were rejected by the owners. Representing 77 percent of the plantation workforce, they brought sugar production to a halt, leading to a $12 million production loss. The strikers were joined by Portuguese and Chinese workers in the first united, interethnic labor action in Hawaii. Their action ultimately resulted in a 50 percent wage increase and paved the way for a strong trade union movement tradition that continues in modern-day Hawaii.
In the Western states, Filipino workers were in the vanguard of farm worker organizing, forming the Filipino Labor Union. They contributed significantly to the American labor movement, building interethnic solidarity with Mexican and white workers. In 1936, the Filipino Labor Union led a strike alongside Mexican workers. Their joint union received a charter from the American Federation of Labor — finally overcoming the barriers set by union founder Samuel Gompers against Asian workers in the unions. It is a little-known footnote to American history that Filipino labor activists initiated the United Farm Workers’ grape pickers’ strike that Cesar Chavez would build into a movement.”
“Even faced with the multitude of inhospitable barriers, Asian Americans found ways to build lives in America. They formed their own political and cultural organizations, and sometimes they were able to beat city hall — as they did in 1906 in Butte, Montana, where Chinese successfully fought a boycott aimed at driving them out of town.
In addition to their labor, the Asian immigrants made significant contributions to their adopted homeland. In 1875, Ah Bing developed the Bing cherry in Oregon, and in 1886, Lue Gim Gong produced the frost-resistant Lue orange, which became the foundation of Florida’s citrus industry. In Hawaii, Japanese workers created irrigation systems throughout the islands. In 1921, two Koreans, Harry Kim and Charles Kim (not related), invented the nectarine, the “perfect, fuzzless peach,” in Reedley, California, and opened a successful orchard business, Kim Brothers. In California’s Central Valley, Asian Indians found that the region resembled the Punjab and used their expertise with irrigation methods and specialized crops to make the land productive. In Louisiana, the descendants of the Filipino sailors who escaped the Spanish galleons introduced the process of sun-drying shrimp to the region.
As the Asian immigrants had children, they were able to find ways around laws that forbade them to own or lease land. Japanese in particular were able to establish families because women had immigrated in significant numbers, but other Asians were also able to wed Asian women who made it into the country or women of other races. Their American-born children were American citizens by birth and therefore not subject to the “alien land” ownership prohibitions. Many immigrant Japanese parents bought farmland in their children’s names. Farmers without children paid other families with Nisei — second-generation children to use their names as fictitious landowners.”
“Knowing that Asians “all look alike” to most other Americans, the Chinese posted signs saying “This is a Chinese shop” and wore buttons that said “I Am Chinese” and even “I Hate Japs Worse Than You Do.” Filipinos and Koreans did the same. Koreans, to their great horror and despite their own hostility toward Japan for occupying their country, were classified by the U.S. government as Japanese subjects and therefore “enemy aliens.” In Hawaii, Koreans were required to wear badges designating them as Japanese; they retaliated by wearing other badges that read “I’m No Jap.”
Many Asian Americans jumped at the chance to enlist as American GIs to demonstrate their patriotism. Their service offered another benefit: foreign-born Gl could become naturalized citizens.”
“Ironically, near the end of the war in Europe, the Japanese American Gs of the 442nd broke through the German defensive “Gothic Line” in northern Italy, and were among the first to liberate the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. However, the U.S. military commanders decided it would be bad public relations if Jewish prisoners were freed by
Japanese American soldiers whose own families were imprisoned in American concentration camps. As with the transcontinental railroad photographs seventy-five years earlier, the Japanese American soldiers who liberated Dachau were MIH — Missing in History.
When World War II ended, about 45,000 Japanese Americans were still interned. Many were unsure where to go, their homes and livelihoods lost and their communities poisoned by neighbors who had turned against them. Some followed children or relatives to the Midwest or the East Coast, while others received only train fare to go back to their old homes on the West Coast, which they often found dilapidated, vandalized, or destroyed, and farms wasted.”
The Late 20th Century
“The Communist revolution in China turned the newly beloved ally extolled in Time magazine only a few years earlier into a “Red Menace.” In 1950, the Korean War, fought by the United States to “contain” Communism, raised the specter of two other Asian enemies — China and North Korea. The Chinese American population, under particular scrutiny from the FBI, became fearful that they, too, could be rounded up and incarcerated. Sharp divisions formed between Chinese Americans over the question of Communist rule in China — with a clear awareness of the trouble it might bring them in America. The more conservative community organizations mounted their own anti-Communist campaigns to prove, preemptively, that Chinese were loyal Americans.
Their fears were not unfounded. Congress passed a bill in 1950 authorizing another internment, the McCarran Internal Security Act, to lock up anyone suspected on “reasonable ground” that they would “probably” engage in espionage. The immigration service posted signs in Chinese in Chinatowns publicizing a “Confession Program,” which encouraged people to inform on friends and relatives in exchange for legal immigration status; thousands participated, including more than 10,000 in San Francisco alone.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that Chinese Americans posed a domestic Communist threat. In 1969 he warned, “The United States is Communist China’s №1 enemy…Red China has been flooding the country with propaganda and there are over 300,000 Chinese in the United States, some of whom could be susceptible to recruitment either through ethnic ties or hostage situations because of relatives in Communist China.”
With hostilities directed toward the Chinese, citizenship exclusions for Japanese and Koreans were finally lifted in 1952, allowing many first-generation Japanese immigrants, now elderly, to become citizens. The Japanese American Citizens League actively sought to eliminate the laws that had impugned the loyalty of Japanese Americans, and tried to restore some of the property that they had lost. In 1956, Japanese Americans successfully led a ballot initiative in California to repeal all alien land laws that had for nearly a century prevented any Asians from settling down in America.
As the movement for racial equality swept the nation following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Asian Americans were inspired to civic consciousness and involvement, after having been so long forbidden to exercise the privileges of citizenship in a democracy. A contingent of Asian Americans from Hawaii joined the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, bringing him the lei he wore during the march. The first Asian American entered Congress when Dalip Singh Saund, an Indian immigrant, won election in 1956 in the mostly white district of California’s Imperial Valley, ultimately serving three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
“Among the demands the student strikers in San Francisco and Berkeley fought for — and won — were educational programs that taught their history in America. Out of these student movements, the first Asian American studies programs in the country were established as part of new ethnic studies departments at San Francisco State and Berkeley and, soon after, the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. Other universities on the West Coast followed as Asian American scholars began to reclaim the rich history of Asians in America.”
“Pan-Asian issues that linked the various Asian communities periodically caught fire. In San Francisco, efforts to evict fifty-five elderly Filipino American retired migrant workers from their home, the International Hotel, began in the late 1960s, as developers of the new financial district continued to dismantle the last pieces of what used to be a ten-block Manilatown. Asian American community activists fought the evictions with a broad multiracial coalition, mobilizing several thousands of protesters for tenants’ rights and community control — a nine-year battle that finally ended in 1977 when police on horseback and in riot gear broke through the demonstrators’ barricades.”
“The numbers of Asian Americans grew from 877,934 in 1960 to 1.4 million in 1970, 3.5 million in 1980, and 7.3 million in 1990, making Asian Americans the fastest-growing minority in the nation.
But flashpoints were inevitable when war-ravaged refugees unfamiliar with American culture, language, or people were placed in homogeneous rural and inner-city areas, where Asian Americans of any stripe were rare sightings. A report by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division in 1983 noted numerous racially motivated assaults against Southeast Asian refugees: “Often, [they| cannot even walk along the public streets without being physically attacked and threatened because of the their race or national origin.” In Davis, California, Thong Hy Huynh, a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese student, was stabbed to death in 1983 by a white student in a high school with a history of racial harassment of Southeast Asian students. Escaping the mainly African American section of West Philadelphia, a rickety car caravan of the entire Hmong community made a mass exodus out of the City of Brotherly Love in 1984 after suffering years of physical and verbal assaults. They hoped to find safe haven with other Hmong in Minnesota.”
Vincent Chin
“While Detroit had once scoffed at the threat of oil shortages, Japan’s automakers were busily meeting the demand for inexpensive, fuel-efficient cars. In 1978, a new oil crisis and subsequent price hikes at the gas pumps killed the market for the heavy, eight-cylinder dinosaurs made in Detroit, precipitating the massive layoffs and a crisis throughout the industrial Midwest. The Japanese auto imports were everything the gas-guzzlers were not — cheap to buy, cheap to run, well made and dependable. They were easy to hate. Anything Japanese, or presumed to be Japanese, became a potential target. Japanese cars were easy pickings. Local unions sponsored sledgehammer events giving frustrated workers a chance to smash Japanese cars for a dollar a swing. Japanese cars were vandalized and their owners were shot at on the freeways. On TV, radio, and the local street corner, anti-Japanese slurs were commonplace. Politicians and public figures made irresponsible and unambiguous racial barbs aimed at Japanese people.”
“Vincent’s background was like that of many second-generation Chinatown Chinese. His father, David Bing Hing Chin, had worked in laundries all his life, from the time he arrived from China in 1922 at the age of seventeen until his death in 1981, the year before Vincent was slain. He had served in the Army during World War Il, which earned him his citizenship and the right to find a wife in China. Lily came to the United States in 1948 to be married, like so many other Chinese women of her generation, including my mother. Lily knew her husband-to-be’s family, and looked forward to joining him in America. Lily’s father opposed the move because his grandfather had worked on the transcontinental railroad, but was driven out. He feared Lily might face similar bigotry. In Detroit, Lily worked in the laundries and restaurants alongside her new husband.
In 1961, Lily and David Bing Chin adopted a cheerful six-year-old boy from Guangdong Province in China. Vincent grew up into a friendly young man and a devoted only child who helped support his parents financially. He ran on his high school track team, but he also wrote poetry. Vincent was an energetic, take-charge guy who knew how to stand up for himself on the tough streets of Detroit. But friends and co-workers had never seen him angry and were shocked that he had been provoked into a fight.
For Chinese Americans, the identification with the Chin family was direct. The details of the Chins’ family history mirrored those of so many other Chinese Americans, who, like Lily and David, came from Guangdong Province. So did the military service that made it possible for Chinese American men to get married, and their work in the restaurants and laundries. Vincent was part of an entire generation for whom the immigrant parents had suffered and sacrificed.
Other Asian Americans also found a strong connection to the lives of Vincent, Lily, and David Chin. Theirs was the classic immigrant story of survival: work hard and sacrifice for the family, keep a low profile, don’t complain, and, perhaps in the next generation, attain the American dream. For Asian Americans, along with the dream came the hope of one day gaining acceptance in America. The injustice surrounding Vincent’s slaying shattered the dream.
But most of all, Vincent was everyone’s son, brother, boyfriend, husband, father. Asian Americans felt deeply that what happened to Vincent Chin could have happened to anyone who “looked” Japanese. From childhood, nearly every Asian American has experienced being mistaken for other Asian ethnicities, even harassed and called names as though every Asian group were the same. The climate of hostility made many Asian Americans feel unsafe, not just in Detroit, but across the country, as the Japan-bashing began to emanate from the nation’s capital and was amplified through the news media. If Vincent Chin could be harassed and brutally beaten to death, and his killers freed, many felt it could happen to them.”
“AC] expanded its civil rights work from anti-Asian hate crimes. It took on employment and discrimination referrals; successfully lobbied the governor to create a statewide Asian American advisory commission; campaigned against offensive media images, like the poster of the slant-eyed car displayed in Flint, Michigan, and a children’s TV program whose host, Jim Harper, appeared in yellowface as a sinister Fu Manchu character with a phony Asian accent. To reach out to children and young people, ACJ members Pang Man and Marisa Chang Ming sponsored a ten-kilometer Run for Justice, while Harold and Joyce Leon’s three daughters, professional violinists and a pianist with the world’s leading symphony orchestras, performed a special benefit concert for ACJ.”
“On June 28, the federal jury in Detroit disagreed, and found Ebens guilty of violating Vincent Chin’s civil rights; Nitz was acquitted.
The jury foreperson explained to filmmakers Christine Choy and Renee Tajima in their documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? that Racine Colwell’s testimony was the clincher-in Detroit, it was clear that “you motherfuckers” meant the Japanese, or people who looked like them. Ebens was sentenced to twenty-five years by Judge Taylor.
But the case won a retrial on appeal in 1986 because of pretrial publicity and evidentiary errors associated with audiotapes made of witnesses when AC was first investigating the case. It was a cruel irony that the very interviews that convinced Detroit’s Asian American community and the U.S. Department of Justice of the killers’ racial motivation would be used to grant Ebens’s appeal. The new trial would be held in Cincinnati, where there was less chance that prospective jurors knew of the case.
Located across the Ohio River from Kentucky, Cincinnati is known as a conservative city with Southern sensibilities. Absent was the heightened racial consciousness of Detroit, with its black majority and civil rights history. If Asians were hard to find in Detroit, they were near-invisible in Cincinnati — but not completely invisible; on July 4, 1986, a gang of patriotic whites shot up the homes of Southeast Asian refugees in the city. When the jury selection process for the new trial began on April 20, 1987, potential jurors were interrogated on their familiarity with Asians. “Do you have any contact with Asians? What is the nature of your contact?” they were asked, as though they had been exposed to a deadly virus.
Their answers were even more revealing. Out of about 180 Cincinnati citizens in the jury pool, only 19 had ever had a “casual contact” with an Asian American, whether at work or the local Chinese takeout joint. A white woman who said she had Asian American friends was dismissed as though the friendship tainted her; also dismissed was a woman whose daughter had Asian friends, and a black man who had served in Korea.
The jury that was eventually seated looked remarkably like the defendant, Ronald Ebens — mostly white, male, and blue-collar.
This time the jury foreperson was a fifty-something machinist who was laid off after thirty years at his company. This time the defense attorneys tried to argue that AC] and the Asian American community had paid attorney Liza Chan to trump up a civil rights case; that argument was objected to by the prosecutors and overruled by the judge.”
“In a civil suit against Ebens and Nitz for the loss of Vincent’s life, a settlement judgment of $1.5 million was levied in September 1987 against Ebens, who later told documentary filmmaker Christine Choy that Mrs. Chin would never see the money. He stopped making payments toward the judgment in 1989. At no point did Ebens ever publicly express remorse for taking Chin’s life; he never spent a full day in jail. He and his wife, Juanita, moved several times, leaving a trail in Missouri and Nevada en route to whereabouts unknown.”
Korean Merchants
“The December 12th Movement immediately set its sights on shutting down the Tropic Market and calling for a boycott of all Korean-owned stores, with the stated goal of forcing all Korean merchants out of black neighborhoods.
It was easy to single out the Koreans. By the late 1980s, Koreans owned some 1,500 vegetable markets, 500 fish markets, and 2,500 grocery stores, often in low-income, predominantly black, neighborhoods. The Korean shopkeepers operated at such a low margin that family members each put in sixteen or more hours per day, seven days a week, just to make a go of it. Their long hours meant that there was little time or energy left to develop a relationship with their customers and community. Many of the new immigrants didn’t understand the importance of becoming a part of the neighborhood. For others, their limited ability to speak English added another barrier.
The call for a boycott of Korean stores gave release to the black community’s simmering anger over economic and social dismemberment — a deep-rooted phenomenon that began long before Koreans came to Bedford-Stuyvesant. This most recent incursion by yet another outsider merchant group only added to the insult, worsened by the gulf between the cultures and the feeling that Koreans didn’t show the proper respect or cultural sensitivity to African Americans. The Korean immigrants were not the same as the more familiar — and more acculturated — Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans.
The Tropic Market became a flash point for the discontent. A protest and boycott began outside the store immediately after the incident. Pickets with loudspeakers, led by the December 12th Movement, demonstrated outside the store almost daily. Amid chants of “Pass them by, don’t shop, watch them die,” community activist Coltrane Chimurenga told a crowd of more than a hundred that Korean merchants were controlling the economy of the black community and were disrespectful to blacks. “We want all Koreans to understand they do not control our community. We must drive them out,” he said, and charged that the U.S. government hired Korean merchants to take over black communities.”
“The efforts to negotiate a neighborhood peace marked the first time that the Korean storekeepers and African American community leaders came together in New York to resolve what seemed an unreachable cultural divide. The groups met weekly over a period of three months, trying to reach some common insight on such fundamental issues as the particular significance of equal rights and economic justice to African Americans, or the hardships and problems faced by Korean American storekeepers. Most Korean storekeepers came to the United States after the civil rights movements of the 1960s and had limited knowledge of that struggle; some felt that Koreans were being used as racial cannon fodder in a black-white conflict. At the same time, many African Americans believed that Koreans disliked blacks, were rude, and received special government loans, or secret financing from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, to open their stores. Each group was burdened with misinformed stereotypes of the other; each wanted recognition and respect.”
“Four months after the initial incident, on December 21, the Korean merchants of Bedford-Stuyvesant agreed to all six demands from the African American negotiators. They apologized for the Tropic Market incident; they promised to open accounts at a black-owned bank, to participate in mutual cultural sensitivity training, and to donate money for scholarships and a program to build black entrepreneurship. Most amazing, the Korean negotiators also agreed to shut down the Tropic Market by helping the owner sell his business. In exchange, the African American negotiators would help end the boycott and in the agreement would acknowledge that Koreans receive no special financing from the U.S. government or the Unification Church for their businesses. This was an important point for Korean Americans, who mainly belonged to mainstream Christian churches and had scrimped over years to buy their businesses. The agreement explained that Koreans used a private investment and lending club system of pooling money with others, called “kye,” to finance their businesses. The merchants agreed to assist African Americans in developing their own private credit pools.
By sacrificing the Tropic Market’s owner, the other thirty-two Korean merchants of Bedford-Stuyvesant hoped to secure stability for their stores. The concessions were made to generate some sorely needed goodwill with African Americans that would allow the other Korean American businesses in the city to operate without the threat of a boycott, which the Korean shopkeepers believed to be racially driven, in spite of the agreement.”
“On January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California, a white man named Patrick Purdy donned military fatigues and a semi-automatic rifle, then drove to his old school, Cleveland Elementary, which had become 70 percent Asian American, mainly refugee children from Southeast Asia. Firing a hundred rounds of ammunition into the school yard where second and third graders were playing, he killed five children — one Vietnamese and four Cambodian; thirty others were injured. Purdy then killed himself. The police chief immediately rejected the possibility of a racial motive. That night, ABC’s Nightline covered the shootings, but Ted Koppel didn’t ask the obvious question: whether race might be a motive.”
“The cultural differences with Americans — including other Asian Americans — were considerable. To Koreans, looking customers directly in the eyes was a rude affront; touching a stranger’s hand when giving change, an inappropriate intimacy. The demeanor of Koreans was more abrupt and less self-effacing than Chinese or Japanese — other more familiar Asian American cultures. During those years I heard people of various races and ethnicities complain of experiences with Korean merchants; when I asked Korean American friends what made them so fierce, they said that hundreds of years of harsh colonial occupation made them curt and distrustful, even with each other. But to native-born Americans, the missing cues of friendliness were signs of rudeness.”
“On January 18, 1990, tensions reignited between African Americans and Afro-Caribbean Americans, and Korean American grocers. Jiselaine Felissaint, a Haitian immigrant, filed a police report charging that she was beaten by the manager and employees of the Family Red Apple Market on Church Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, after a dispute over three dollars’ worth of plantains and limes. The store owner, Bong Jae Jang, was arrested and charged with third-degree assault.
Many residents in the Flatbush neighborhood were Afro-Caribbean immigrants from the West Indies.”
“Flatbush residents, members of the December 12th Movement, and others began a daily vigil of demonstrations outside the Red Apple. They not only picketed the Red Apple but included Church Fruits, the Korean-owned shop across the street, where a Red Apple employee had reportedly run for cover. The protesters demanded that both stores be shut down permanently; in addition, they wanted apologies from the Korean grocers and arrests of all involved in the alleged beating. Korean merchants in Flatbush offered to participate in sensitivity workshops and to provide more jobs and training for Flatbush residents — borrowing elements of the Bedford-Stuyvesant agreement in hopes of reaching a quick settlement. Both stores also temporarily shut down for a few days to create a cooling-off period.
Tempers continued to flare as the peace offerings made no difference. Raucous crowds of fifty to a hundred people gathered daily to protest the alleged Red Apple attack and the general disrespect black customers felt they were shown by Korean merchants. Each day, more than a hundred NYPD officers in riot gear lined Church Avenue, further aggravating the picketers.”
“The ranks of the boycotters swelled to six hundred, forcing police to shut down Church Avenue. Adding to the volatility, a judge finally ordered police to clear picketers away from the store entrances. Inevitably, violence erupted, as Sonny Carson forewarned with his crude remarks: “In the future, there will be funerals, not boycotts.” After midnight on May 13, less than forty-eight hours after the mayor’s appeal for racial peace, black youths threw a beer bottle and smashed the window of some Vietnamese men who lived in a ground-floor apartment two blocks from the Family Red Apple Market. When occupant Tuan Ana Cao and two other men ran out to see what was wrong, they were met by a group of black teenagers who hurled bottles and racial insults: “Fuck the Chinese! Fuck the Koreans!” Cao was soon on the ground, bleeding profusely, his skull fractured by a baseball bat swung by one of the youths.”
“If the police and city leaders didn’t recognize the racism of the attack, the people of New York did. They had had enough; the attack on the Vietnamese in Flatbush proved that the animosities had gone too far, way beyond a neighborhood dispute with two stores.
Support quickly turned to Jang and his market. Members of the First Korean Church of Brooklyn held a prayer circle to end bigotry in front of the Red Apple Market the morning after Cao was hospitalized. Wiping tears from their eyes, they presented Jang with $200 collected from church members.
On May 14, the Monday after the attack, an African American teacher from nearby Erasmus High School, the rallying site for the boycotters, became the first black man to publicly defy the picketers. The teacher, Fred McCray, took fifty of his students on a shopping trip into the Red Apple after a classroom discussion of the boycott.
“They want to put an end to this chaotic circus atmosphere,” said McCray of his students. As they walked past jeering protesters, some shouted death threats and slogans like “What’s the fortune cookie say? No money today!” The quiet schoolteacher was immediately reviled by boycotters, who branded him a race traitor for standing with the Koreans, and demanded that his teaching credentials be revoked. But in the news media he was lauded for his moral courage. His deed emboldened others to cross the picket lines to end the boycott.
In significant numbers, others from the community began to shop again at the Red Apple. A neighborhood teenager told reporters, “I’m buying an apple here, and I don’t even like apples!” A man stopped at the Red Apple and dropped off a bag with an anonymous letter and cash. Jang cried when he read it, and taped the note to his empty shopwindow. It read:
To my brother Koreans:
I am a Black American born in Brooklyn raised 20 years in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I cannot apologize for the treatment my brothers and sisters are giving to my Korean brothers. Instead I can only suffer. I can only feel pain as my Korean brothers and sisters feel. If any man has the authority to throw the first stone at his neighbor, it should be me.
Instead I only feel LOVE. Please accept my small donation … along with these few words. “This is hard-earned money.” I’m sorry and I only ask that you feel forgiveness in your heart. And please continue. Keep faith.”
“The momentum pushed Korean Americans and African Americans to find their own ways to bridge their cultural differences, independent of government intervention. For example, Korean church congregations began to reach out to African Americans, sponsoring several cultural exchange trips to Korea for members of the black community.
Eventually Mayor Dinkins made the symbolic gesture of visiting the besieged shops and crossing the picket line to buy some potatoes, apples, oranges, and melons. “Let this boycott end so that the work of bringing this community back together can begin,” he said. But it was too little, too late. His actions had no impact on the boycotters, who called him “Stinkin’ Dinkins.” By January 1991, on the one-year anniversary of the boycott, six hundred protesters held a rally, still insisting that the stores must go.”
“It seemed like the facts of what really transpired at the Family Red Apple Market would never be uncovered — and if they ever were, they wouldn’t matter. By the time of the misdemeanor assault trial of Pong Ok Jang, the owner’s brother, a year after the original incident, the presumed disrespect by Koreans toward blacks was etched in the minds of a city and a nation. The Korean storekeepers and Jiselaine Felissaint gave their radically conflicting and media-worn accounts in Brooklyn criminal court. But then a surprise witness, another customer, came forward and testified that Felissaint had not been beaten.
Alma Stein, an African American resident of Flatbush, told the courtroom that she was with her son buying some peppers when she heard Felissaint and the cashier argue in “broken English”. Haitian-Creole-English and Korean-English. She saw Felissaint throw some items at the cashier. When the store manager asked her to leave, the Haitian woman lay down on the floor and began to scream. Other customers began shouting at Felissaint to stay on the ground, that she could collect a lot of money. Stein said Felissaint was not slapped, knocked down, or kicked, as alleged.
When the six-member jury acquitted Jang of all charges after deliberating three and a half hours, the Korean American sank into his seat and sobbed uncontrollably. The Korean American community was vindicated and hoped that the verdict would bolster their claims that they were not abusive to customers. Celebrations were short-lived, however, as boycotters denounced the verdict and vowed to continue picketing the stores. Just hours after Pong Ok Jang’s acquittal, ten boycotters entered the Red Apple, put their hands together in a pistol shape, pointed at Bong Jae Jang, and shouted “Die,” pretending to pull the trigger. Said one Flatbush resident who supported continuing the boycott, “It has little to do whether the woman was hit or not. It’s about the lack of respect Koreans have for blacks in general.” Mayor Dinkins made a toothless plea for an end to the strife. The boycott continued for another few months, until Bong Jae Jang decided to give up and sold his store to a Korean couple.
Even with the acquittal, his business couldn’t recover. The new owners immediately put up a “New Management” sign and changed the name of the store at 1823 Church Avenue to Caribbean Fruits and Grocery. Two weeks later, the protesters disappeared.”
“Korean Americans in New York paid a hefty price to learn economic and political survival, American style. During the seventeen-month boycott, Jang’s gross sales had dropped from $8,000 to a few hundred dollars a week, but he survived through donations from other Korean storekeepers and church congregations. “Before the boycott, if there was some problem, we’d say, “That’s not our house’ and not worry about it,” Jang said. “But then it came to the point where we didn’t know who would be next.”
Several Korean American groups worked to improve communications with African American and other communities, sponsoring scholarships, becoming involved in neighborhood events, donating five thousand turkeys to the needy on Thanksgiving, offering small-business workshops, conducting regular cultural exchange missions to Korea, and developing political ties. The Korean Produce Association issued a booklet to members, with such advice as “Don’t speak Korean in stores,” “Try to make eye contact with customers,” “Make a personal touch when giving change, and “If there is a possible theft, don’t chase after.” “We tell our members, this is America, don’t hold on to old customs, said executive director B. J. Sa, who was twice awarded the Martin Luther King Award by African American community groups for contributions made by his association.
One month after Jang’s acquittal, a supermarket employee at a Korean-owned grocery store in Queens allegedly hit an eleven-year-old boy he suspected of shoplifting. This time, leaders of local community groups, the store’s owner, and representatives of the Dinkins administration and the police department acted immediately to resolve the issue, to calm the neighborhood, and to keep outsiders who did not live in the community from entering the dispute. “We don’t want this to be a Brooklyn-type situation, said Ruby Muhammad, one of the community leaders.
In 1993, having lost the confidence of New Yorkers, David Dinkins, the city’s first African American mayor, failed in his bid for reelection after serving only one term. Insiders cite his mishandling of the Family Red Apple Market boycott as the beginning of his downfall. “People wanted the mayor to control the ‘savages,’ said Dennis deLeón, the mayor’s chief negotiator during the boycott. “It cost him his office.””
Conclusion
“I learned why the job had suddenly vaporized. I was told that the State Department had a policy that no persons of Chinese descent should work at the China desk no matter how many generations removed from the ancestral bones. This would protect America in case some genetic compulsion twisted my allegiance to China.”
“Many of these Filipino Americans first came to the United States as college students, part of Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy to help “our little brown brothers” in the Philippines. But even with their college diplomas, the Filipino men could find work in the segregated American labor market only as seasonal migrant workers.”
“Before tending to his first customers of the day, Jae goes to the back and loads a clip into a 9 mm pistol. He wears it around his waist, along with a pair of handcuffs and a canister of Mace — mandatory paraphernalia for a licensed security guard, which he is. Jae covers it all with a cheery red Forest Gump apron. The city wouldn’t permit him to reopen the One Stop unless he hired a security guard. He couldn’t afford to hire a guard, so he obtained a license to be one himself. As he holsters the gun, he shrugs. One of his friends, he says, refused to keep a gun at his shop and was stabbed to death there. Until last week, Jae didn’t wear a gun either, but an armed robbery attempt brought a change of heart.
One week ago at 3 p.m., a man came up to the cash register and flashed a gun under his T-shirt. Jae dived under the counter, but Nina screamed and ran for the back room. The man reached through the merchandise window cut out of the Plexiglas and began shooting at her. Jae was pinned under the counter, unable to reach the .32 near the cash register, or the shotgun in the back office. The shooter missed Jae and Nina, but struck several bottles of Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin before running out of the store. A few of the bullet slugs remain imbedded in the Plexiglas, a silent reminder that Jae and Nina might have joined the other Korean storekeepers killed in their stores each year. In the year following the riots, fifteen grocers were killed in Los Angeles County alone.”
“It was as incriminating for us to get mail from the People’s Republic of China as it was for our relatives to correspond with Americans. Telephone contact across the Bamboo Curtain wasn’t possible. The fragile letters and their meager news were our only link to Mom’s mother, eldest sister, and numerous cousins.
Occasionally a small black-and-white photo was tucked in the letter. Stiff and formal in their studio poses, my grandmother, aunts, and other relatives were enigmas to me. Their serious faces, etched with hardship, were so far from my life as an American-born Chinese in New Jersey. I could hardly guess at their lives in China or how my grandmother and other Chinese suffered as part of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
One day when I was home from college, a letter from China arrived. Mom unleashed a mournful wail: my grandmother, her mother, was dead. Mom hadn’t seen or spoken to her mother in twenty years, and the prospect of never seeing her again filled Mom with anguish. Disconsolate, she lay down. in bed and cried for days. I had never seen my energetic, attentive mother like this and was unsure how to comfort her for the loss of a grandmother I never knew.”
“The drivers were burdened by the work itself, with grueling twelve-hour shifts spent scrambling to find enough fares to cover the cost of leasing the cab for the shift and paying for gas. Taxi drivers had no health insurance, no benefits — only traffic jams, air pollution, and demanding passengers. Their work is a virtual sweatshop on wheels, the most dangerous job in the country. Cabbies and limo drivers are more than twice as likely to be killed on the job as the next group — sheriff employees and bailiffs — according to a report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.”
“Mayor Giuliani proposed a seventeen-point plan to rid the city of reckless cabdrivers. The new rules included requisite annual drug tests, at the cabbies’ own expense; a defensive driving course, also at their expense, required before they could renew their taxi license; increased fines that would climb to $1,000. Most severe was the proposal that after six penalty points accumulated within an eighteen-month period, a driver would be suspended for thirty days; for ten points, the driver’s license would be revoked. A driver could amass six points for following another car too closely or for having a burned-out roof light. The proposed rules would push even good drivers, already living on the economic edge, over the brink and out of work.”
“The abuse reflects the problems faced by immigrant women who are isolated in a foreign country. The wife of a high-tech immigrant on an H1-B visa, for example, is prohibited by federal immigration law from getting a job — rendering her completely dependent on her husband financially as well as for her immigration status in the United States.”
“More than 11,000 of the leased cabs sat idle in their garages, with 95 percent of the taxi drivers on both shifts, of all races and ethnicities, forgoing a day’s worth of fares to prove their point. Even the garage owners, who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lease fees, supported the drivers. Hard-boiled New Yorkers were glad for the reduced congestion on the city’s streets, but it was impossible not to notice the impact that the taxi drivers had. The cabbies finally got the public’s attention and even their respect.”
“After months of debate at the national board level, in May 1994 the national board of directors approved Kaneko’s resolution to support same-sex marriage, 10 votes to 3, with 2 abstentions. The Japanese American Citizens League became the first non-gay national civil rights organization to support same-sex marriage.
The next day JACL’s legal counsel to the national organization resigned, citing conflict with his religious views. The attorney was duly replaced, but a dissenting chapter called for the issue to be discussed at the national convention. Kaneko and the Hawaii chapter knew that they were going to have to fight an uphill battle.
As the debate took its tumultuous path through JACL, other Asian American groups watched closely, wondering how far an Asian American constituency was willing to move beyond obvious self-interest — and whether the strain of controversy might lead to a fracture. For the first time, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders would lead the nation with a strong, clear stand on an unpopular and divisive issue.”
“Initial discussions in the Hawaii JACL chapter arguing for the same-sex marriage suit came a few months after the unprecedented ruling by the Hawaii State Supreme Court in May 1993. In its decision, the high court determined that the state discriminated by denying marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. The court said that state law was violated by denying “same-sex couples access to the marital status and its concomitant rights and benefits.” The Hawaii court also relied on a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case that said marriage is a civil right. The Hawaii court ordered that same-gender marriages must be allowed unless there was a “compelling state interest” against such unions, one of the toughest legal tests for a state to prove, generally involving evidence that public safety is at stake.”
“The mainly Asian and Pacific Islander American voters of Hawaii not only ratified the federal Equal Rights Amendment but decided to incorporate this and other equality concerns directly into their state constitution, which became more inclusive in its equal rights protections than the U.S. Constitution. Whereas the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws, in 1993 the Hawaii state constitution incorporated the additional provision that “No person shall … be denied the enjoyment of … civil rights or be discriminated against in the exercise thereof because of race, religion, sex or ancestry.”
In 1993, after three local lesbian and gay couples sued for the right to marry, the Hawaii Supreme Court noted that same-sex marriage fell under the equal protection of the law, unless a “compelling state interest” proved otherwise: “By its plain language, the Hawaii Constitution prohibits state-sanctioned discrimination against any person in the exercise of his or her civil rights on the basis of sex!”
“Occasionally, race and ethnicity have been used to squelch the airing of such “negative” issues in the Asian American community. For example, Dong Lu Chen, a Chinese American in New York, killed his wife in 1987 by pounding her head with a claw hammer. Chen, who suspected his wife was having an affair, claimed that violence against women was the norm in Chinese culture under such circumstances. The judge accepted his argument and sentenced Chen to five years’ probation, the lightest sentence possible, saying that Chen “was driven to violence by traditional Chinese values about adultery and loss of manhood.” The case outraged Asian American women, triggering protest demonstrations and considerable debate on the validity of “cultural defense” arguments. Asian American men, however, offered little comment.”
“For Native Hawaiians, who were fighting a hundred-year-long battle for their sovereignty, the same-sex marriage debate had a very different context. It was difficult for Native Hawaijans to rally behind the marriage question, especially when studies predicted that tourism could increase by $4 billion a year if same-sex marriage were legal. The destructiveness of tourism development was a major factor in the loss of ancient sacred sites and the disruption of agricultural land and water. Anti-gay groups injected a homophobic element into the tourism concerns by planting fears of the state being overrun by gay white men on their honeymoons.
Yet same-sex relationships were once an accepted part of Native Hawaiian culture, centuries before Hawaii had a constitution. “When men were away for long periods on voyages or for battle, they had same-gender relationships. So did the women at home together; it was something that was accepted,” said Ku’umealoha Gomes, of Na Mamo O Hawaii, a Native Hawaiian organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. “Is it any wonder that the missionaries were so threatened by us?” Extended families often included same-sex partners, and many of the ruling chiefs, including King Kamehameha, had male companions in their households. Legends of Pele, the creation goddess of Hawaii, ruler of fire and volcanoes, include tales of her female partner. It is said that some of the Hawaiian warriors who first greeted Captain Cook ashore asked his sailors to become their lovers. How the Europeans responded to the invitation is not known.”
“Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Kevin Chang ruled that the state, the Mormon Church, and others appealing the original court decision had failed to provide a convincing justification for the state to discriminate against lesbians and gays. On December 6, 1996, he ordered the state marriage bureau to begin issuing licenses. For a fleeting moment same-sex marriages were legal in Hawaii, but it was only an illusion. The state immediately appealed his decision. The next day Chang stayed his order, pending appeal. Though Judge Chang had rendered the courageous ruling that same-sex marriage was legal under Hawaii’s constitution, he evidently did not want to be the one to allow the first gay marriage to take place.
Having lost in the courts, same-sex marriage opponents pressured the state legislature to allow a ballot initiative calling for a state constitutional convention to change Hawaii’s state constitution. The possibility of changing the constitution sounded an alarm to Native Hawaiians. For years, land developers searched for ways to chip away at Native Hawaiian rights to water and land and to gather in sacred places. Before a developer could divert water for a golf course, for example, plans would have to account for Hawaiian rights — rights that are guaranteed by the state constitution. A constitutional convention to bar same-sex marriage could open up changes in Native Hawaiian rights. “Once the Constitution is open for change, there is a domino effect on other rights, the rights of Native Hawaiian people,” said Ku’umealoha Gomes, “The same-sex issue is being used as a wedge to divide us; it will have a domino effect on other people’s rights.”
The fear wasn’t imaginary. Developers joined with the same-sex marriage opponents to lobby for a constitutional convention. “There is a link as to why developers jumped on the same-sex issue,” said Eric Yamamoto, professor of law at the University of Hawaii. “A ‘yes’ to change the constitution on marriage could provide momentum for a constitutional convention vote and open up a reconsideration of Native Hawaiian rights. The link was a practical one.””
“Asian American artists, at the forefront of creating synergies between Asian and Western culture, are themselves influencing artists in Asia. For example, taiko drumming, a traditional Japanese musical form, became popular in the 1970s among Asian Americans of various ethnicities, not solely Japanese Americans. These Asian American taiko enthusiasts adapted the Japanese theatrical and ceremonial form into a contemporary form, turning what was a male-only art in Japan into music performed by Asian American women as well. A number of all-female and mixed-gender taiko drum dojos (schools) have been established among the approximately 150 taiko groups performing in North America, including Minnesota. The innovations of Asian American taiko drummers have reached Japan, where Japanese taiko groups have sought out Asian American interpretations of classical Japanese taiko. Asian Americans are providing creative inspiration to Asia as well as America.”
