EMEMBERING VINCENT CHIN

On June 19, 1982, a young man named Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American engineer for an automotive company, was insulted at a Detroit bar by automotive plant foreman Ronald Ebens, who mistook Chin for Japanese and blamed him for the bite that the Japanese car industry was taking out of Motor City in the early 80s.  After heated words and a scuffle, Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, followed Chin outside the bar and beat the young man’s head with a baseball bat until he collapsed.  Four days later, Chin

died in hospital, leaving behind his fiancée (he was celebrating his bachelor party at the bar) and widowed mother.  What followed was a judicial nightmare as Ebens and Nitz were given a light probationary sentence and a minor fine: Detroit wanted America to know that the death of an Asian-American was not a high priority to the justice system.  Chin’s bereaved mother Lily joined journalist Helen Zia and the Justice League of America to inspire a federal case against Ebens based on an infringement of the victim’s civil rights, not realizing that they were opening up a Pandora’s Box of frustrating legalities that would last for years.  In 1987, Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena made one of the best documentaries of the decade, Who Killed Vincent Chin, interviewing Chin’s mother, his friends, Zia, Ebens’ colleagues and family and, most shockingly, Ebens himself:  he appears in an effort to prove himself wrongly accused as a racist killer, but his inarticulate protestations at tolerance are just lame attempts to downplay the nature of his crime – he never denies that he beat Chin, he and his brood merely refer to it as an “accident.”  Sadly, this work of art has yet to find its way to DVD (nor has the mere recent film Vincent Who?), but the Toronto Public library has a copy--look it up, put it on hold, you won’t regret it.