Choy, Christine and Tajima, Renee (Directors). (1988) Who Killed Vincent Chin?
(Documentary). United States: Film News Now Foundation and WTVS-Detroit Public Television.
Christine Choy is a Shanghai-born independent filmmaker and a professor at the New York University Graduate Film and Television Department. The Oscar-nominated film "Who Killed Vincent Chin?” is probably her most famous work. Another notable film "A Shot Heard around the World" won her a best documentary award at the Bangkok International Film Festival in 1998. Renee Tajima is a Japanese-American filmmaker whose award-winning films include “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” and “My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha.” Her other credits include the PBS series The New Americans (Mexico story segment) and My Journey Home. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Social Documentation Program of the Community Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The film is a powerful statement about racism in working class America and examines the role of the media in fermenting hate crimes as well as promoting justice. It relates the stark facts of Vincent Chin's brutal murder. In June of 1982, Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American, while celebrating his last days of bachelorhood in a Detroit bar, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by Chrysler plant superintendent Ronald Ebens and Ebens’s stepson, Michael Nitz. Motivated by their belief that the decline of American automobile sales was the fault of the Japanese, the two men attacked their Asian victim, who happened to be Chinese. “This attack stands out as perverse symbol of racist violence. Even if one presumes that their unemployment was caused by unjust trade practices of the Japanese government, when Ebens and Nitz brained Vincent Chin, they transferred blame not only from the Japanese government to the Japanese people, not only from the Japanese people to United States citizens of Japanese descent, but finally from Japanese Americans to anyone unlucky enough to bear Asia features.” (Harvard Law Review, 1928)
Using newsreel footage, Ms. Choy and Ms. Tajima set the story in the context of a Detroit attempting to cope with competition from overseas automobile makers. In one shot, auto workers trash a Japanese car in much the way Mr. Ebens and Mr. Nitz trashed Mr. Chin. The film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder in the streets of Detroit, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system. “The documentary film that Choy and Tajima have created is rich, complex, and evocative; it weaves together interviews, location shots, news, and television clips, still photographs, and the music of Motown and the Chinese-American community. Its exploration of causality is wide ranging, as it implicates industrial alienation, the failure to acculturate rural youth, Detroit’s sagging automobile economy, as well as racism, in Chin’s tragic death.” (Fishbein, 1148)
There are disconcerting elements in the film. For instance, “it notes the media exploitation of the tragedy as Chin’s mother appeared on the Phil Donahue show, a Japanese television crew seeks to interview Ebens at home, and Lily Chin is accompanied by Jesse Jackson at a public rally.” (Fishbein, 1149) But such media publicity kept the case alive as a public issue. Media played an important part on the Vincent Chin case as shown in one of the episodes of the documentary, Nitz’s girlfriend was interviewed and she complained about how the media “blew it all out of proportion.” In the documentary, in a separate interview, Helen Zia who helped championed the case of Vincent Chin, responded to accusation of “sensationalism” in the case. She acknowledged that yes, there was sensationalism, “but it was on both sides.” She also added that it was “investigative journalism at its best.” I tend to agree with Helen Zia. While it is true that we cannot believe everything we read in the papers or hear on the news, the media still exert some influence, but even more important, was the ability of news stories to focus public attention on social problems or political corruption. And in the case of Vincent Chin, some crusading journalists helped to bring about a number of reforms; journalists after all are supposed to serve as watchdogs for the public.
The documentary, which can be hard and disturbing to watch, especially for Asian Americans like myself, is valuable because it provokes questions that we might not have considered or investigate histories that we did not previously know about. The film also shows the presence or gives voice to Asian American filmmakers as a group and as a film going community. It “announced that Asian Americans could be artist, could be commercial filmmakers, and could support Asian American filmmaking (as well as successfully market Asian American films to wider audiences). (Feng, 88) The film is not perfect but “despite its flaws, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” is a compelling film whose candor and complexity are remarkable.”(Fishbein,1150) In the end, the film raised the consciousness of people about hate crimes against Asian Americans and served as a catalyst for Asian Americans to look beyond their individual Asian ethnic communities to organize against anti-Asian violence. Finally, Vincent Chin's story has become a milestone in the Asian American struggle for racial equality and political empowerment. (Reviewed by Catherine G. Viado)
Bibliography
Feng, Peter. "Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American: "Chan is Missing"."
__ Cinema Journal__, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Summer, 1996): 88-118.
Fishbein, Leslie. "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" The American Historical Review Vol. 95.No.4
"Racial Violence against Asian Americans." Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1926-1943.
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