June 19, 1982
Vincent.
They never understood.
Are you related? They ask.
Not understanding the tie
that binds
The tie that has been ripped
from our hands.
Vincent.
I see your face
Twenty-seven years you lived
and twenty-seven that you’ve been missing.
Vincent.
I see your face and remember
a bicycle on the side of the road.
A wife, now a widow
A baby with no father
An adult who knows him only from pictures.
Vincent.
I call a friend
on the anniversary of the day he was murdered
and we cried into the telephone
for your friend whom I never knew
for the tie that had been broken
for the hand I could not be holding.
Posted on June 19, 2009, in history, susceptible to bad poetry. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Beautiful. Thank you. I will be wearing my V. Chin shirt tomorrow.
Vincent Chin’s story breaks me up every time I hear it. Thanks for sharing this poem with us.
I read somewhere that Vincent Chin was adopted.
“I read somewhere that Vincent Chin was adopted.”
Yep. His parents adopted him from an orphanage in 1961.
To re-post the quote from Judge Charles Kaufman’s dicta on Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz that resistance also included in “Dear Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak”:
“These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail… You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
I’ve known about Vincent Chin for a while now, but it wasn’t until around a year ago that I learned about a widespread anti-Japanese sentiment in the 70s (I’m 22). Public car bashing is an interesting topic. I was aware that Ebens and Nitz thought Chin was Japanese, but never connected that to an existence of a broader, more rampant hostility from the rise of Japanese automakers.
This was a new one for me, so I just read an article on Vincent Chin.
Goddamn.