A national town hall to mark the 30th anniversary of Vincent Chin’s death | NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog - GIL ASAKAWA'S JAPANESE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE ON POP CULTURE, MEDIA & POLITICS

Gil Asakawa reflects on why the Vincent Chin case 30 years ago still resonates for him and for all of us. Excerpt:

Vincent Chin was beaten with a baseball bat 30 years ago on June 19 in a Detroit suburb, and died four days later.

At the time, I was three years out of art school, managing a paint store, and was a budding young rock critic writing for a Denver newspaper. I didn’t follow any news coverage about the attack on Vincent Chin, and I was clueless about the importance of his tragic death. I was still a “banana” — yellow on the outside, but white on the inside. Like the name of the 2009 documentary film about the impact of Chin’s murder on the Asian American community, if you had asked me then about him, I would have said, “Vincent who?”

Today, Vincent Chin is very much on my mind.

In the decades since his death, I’ve become aware and much more appreciative of my ethnic roots, culture and history as a Japanese American, which I used to take for granted. I’ve also become much more aware of my place in the much larger Asian American community.

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