WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?
Item: In 1982 in Highland Park, Michigan, Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese auto engineer, got into a fight with Ronald Ebens, a somewhat older Caucasian autoworker, in a topless bar called the Fancy Pants. According to witnesses, the fight was precipitated by Ebens’s remark: “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work”–which implied that he thought Chin was Japanese and therefore somehow responsible for the massive layoffs in Detroit brought about by the influx of Japanese cars. (At the time of the incident, there was about 17 percent unemployment in Detroit, and local media showed some irate locals smashing Japanese cars with sledgehammers.) Outside the Fancy Pants, Ebens took a baseball bat out of his car and, accompanied by his stepson Michael Nitz (who was also involved in the barroom brawl), chased after Chin and beat him repeatedly; Chin, who was to have been married within the week, was taken to the hospital, where he died four days later.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The advantage of this approach is that it brings to the fore the bewilderingly incomplete methods of most TV news reports–becoming, in effect, a comment on media coverage as well as an account of the murder case. (Unlike the old Hollywood cliche showing various overlapping newspapers with blaring headlines reporting the same event, this cacophony offers no hint of consensus.) The disadvantage of the approach is that it leaves so many unanswered questions–such as what the “errors” were in the first federal trial, and precisely what the two charges were in the second–that it’s not possible to follow the chronology of events as closely as we’d like to.
On the other hand, it might be argued that Choy and Tajima are not interested in giving us the comforting sense of closure and (false) knowledge that comes with the average news story, or even with conventional agitprop. While the forces represented in the film tend to be polarized around separate interpretations of what happened, the film is explicitly not trying to segregate the truth along racial lines, and neither the implied audience of this film nor its major spokespeople are defined strictly according to race. (Although the filmmakers are of Chinese and Japanese descent–filmmaker and cinematographer Choy was born in Shanghai, and Chicagoan Tajima is currently a film critic for the Village Voice–the film does not ask to be read as an “Asian” statement.) As we simultaneously witness a denial of racial motives behind the crime and an exposure of racial attitudes on every level, we gradually come to realize that the film’s title is less literal than it may first appear–that the who of the title (as well as the implied what) leads to questions that eventually take in the society as a whole, and therefore address the entirety of the film’s possible audience.
