Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
SUPPORTING ‘OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR’
Around the time George Floyd died, Eileen Huang was asked to write a poem about Chinese people in the U.S. to commemorate a new documentary about Asian Americans on PBS.
What came out, instead, was a searing 1,600-word letter from the incoming Yale university junior to her immigrant elders, pleading with them to understand the massive debt owed to African American civil rights leaders, beseeching them to join a global movement to fight anti-black racism.
“We Asian Americans have long perpetuated anti-Black statements and stereotypes,” Huang wrote. “I grew up hearing relatives, family friends, and even my parents make subtle, even explicitly racist comments about the Black community. … The message was clear: We are the model minority — doctors, lawyers, quiet and obedient overachievers. We have little to do with other people of color; we will even side with White Americans to degrade them.”
Huang, 20, grew up in the small and largely white New Jersey township of Holmdel. The oldest of three children born to engineers who moved to the U.S. in the 1990s, she wasn’t taught much about the history of black people in America.
It wasn’t until college that she learned of the 1982 beating death of Vincent Chin by two white men who thought Chin was Japanese. The men were convicted of manslaughter but sentenced to probation; the judge said the men weren’t the kind of people to go to jail.
African American leaders, notably the Rev. Jesse Jackson, marched with Chin’s anguished mother, seeking justice.
Huang came to realize Asian Americans owe “everything” to the black Americans who spearheaded the civil rights movement, which led to an end to racist terms such as “Oriental” and housing policies keeping them out of white neighborhoods.
“We did not gain the freedom to become comfortable ‘model minorities’ by virtue of being better or hardworking, but from years of struggle and support from other marginalized communities,” she wrote.
Her outrage over Floyd’s death pushed her to a protest in Newark, then another in Asbury Park, where a terrified Huang and others faced off with armed police officers in riot gear.
Her letter, posted to a website aimed at Chinese speakers in the U.S., has sparked passionate responses, including many accusing her of being a traitor and of unfairly painting Chinese in a negative light.
“I’ve also just gotten very sweet (messages) from people saying, ‘My grandmother read this, my Chinese-can’t-speak-English grandmother read this, and she was really touched by it and now she’s supporting Black Lives Matter,’” she says.