Illustration by Narrative Initiative
In June of 1982, Vincent Chin—a Chinese American engineering technician—was out with friends in Detroit celebrating his bachelor party. The night took a terrifying turn after two white autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, chased Chin with a baseball bat and beat him to death. Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz were only fined and put on probation—even a later federal conviction of Ebens would be overturned. Vincent Chin’s mother, Lily Chin, traveled the United States seeking justice for her son’s murder. The details of the hate crime that took Vincent’s life catalyzed pan-Asian organizing in Detroit and a national conversation on anti-Asian racism in the broader context of racism in the United States–one that continues to be examined and re-examined today.
A member of the 2024 Changemaker Authors Cohort, Annie Tan wanted to understand her connection to Vincent Chin, especially when she learned more about why her family—and her aunt, Lily Chin’s sister—migrated from China to the United States.
Annie Tan is working on a memoir chronicling her relationship with her family, language access and gaps, and lineage as pathways toward her activism. In this interview, Annie reflects on the importance of mentorship, the power of teachers’ unions, the role of cross-racial solidarity with regard to police brutality, and stewarding family stories.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Narrative Initiative:
You recently started a new role at Apex for Youth connecting students with mentors. Can you speak to the role education played in your own life?
Annie Tan:
Yep, absolutely. I was a special education teacher for ten years.
My parents didn't speak English and I wasn't fluent in Chinese, so I couldn't really share with my parents about my lives: my theater life, all the volunteering I was doing, my extracurricular singing.
My teachers were the adults in my life who saw these parts of me and encouraged me. And I think it was pretty natural that I became a teacher, because then I was like, “Oh, these are the people who are giving me the attention, so I'm going to want to give that back to someone else.”
Narrative Initiative:
How does your time in education connect with your work in activism?
Annie Tan:
I was in Chicago during the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012. At the time, teachers were asking: Where's the budget for nurses? Why aren't we hiring the assistants we need? Why aren't we buying books? Why are we spending so much money on cops in schools?
This was why 10,000 school staff, teachers, paraprofessionals, all in red shirts, walked out on strike. The strikers shut down the schools to push for bigger budgets, to fight against layoffs and school closings. The school closings did eventually happen the following year, which is why we hate Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s then-mayor.
Three years later, I was the chair of the Special Ed Committee for the union. This work laid the foundations for the Chicago Special Ed Task Force, which I helped form. After I left Chicago, journalists started reporting on the nearly 10,000 plus students who weren't getting special education services. Because of this, Chicago Public Schools still, to this day, if I recall correctly, have not been able to oversee its own Special Ed department.
Narrative Initiative:
Not only are you involved in movement organizing, but your family has a place in history with regards to movement organizing. How do the two things relate to each other?
Annie Tan:
When I was teaching in 2012, it was around the same time that I learned the full story of my cousin Vincent Chin.
November 2012 is when I visited Detroit and met my family there for the first time. I found out the whole family story around Vincent and how my great-auntie, Lily Chin, who was living in Michigan at the time, was by herself in Detroit, and there was no one really in America to support her. There were relatives in other places, but they couldn't just uproot themselves to go support her. So my maternal grandmother and her sister are sisters of Lily Chin. They ended up moving to Michigan to support her. So my other great-auntie ended up staying with her children. But my grandmother said, "I don't want to drive." She ended up moving to New York and brought my mom and dad there, and that's why I was born and raised in New York City.
For me, that was my understanding at that point in time: had my grandmother not moved and made the decision she did, to move to New York, my parents wouldn't have settled in New York City, and I wouldn't be here because–as I told the Moth Radio Hour–I am the second child of three and China had a one-child policy at the time.
I thought that was kind of the genesis of me, which turned out to be wrong. Once The Moth Radio Hour story came out, my great-auntie in Detroit told me, “That's not true.” My family was always planning to move. It just so coincidentally happened that they moved two months after Vincent was murdered. But it was still very much a defining thing I thought was true for about seven years. I believed that, which is why I felt pushed so hard to organize, as I did in Chicago, around special education budgets.
In 2014, Black Lives Matter and the teachers' activism were happening at the same time. In 2015, I had to fight for the special education budget. Then in 2016, a not-guilty verdict came out for an Asian cop named Peter Liang who killed Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a public housing complex here in New York. A lot of people in Chinatown were supporting the cop, and I just felt that was wrong. I was obviously aligned in Chicago with the Black Lives Matter movement.
I remembered the past and all of the activists that fought for Vincent, including Jesse Jackson, who came out and spoke on behalf of Vincent. He is seen in photos and videos hugging my great-auntie Lily Chin and talking with her. I thought, “We can't turn our back on the Black community, and we can't be supporting this Asian cop who should not have been in that stairwell and who should not have killed Akai Gurley.”
I think Peter Liang knows that too. He shot a bullet and it ricocheted off a wall and shot Akai Gurley. So it wasn't as clear- cut as a shooting like Michael Brown's murder, right? Or Laquan McDonald. So there was a lot of murkiness around Liang's case.
In 2016, I wrote this article for HuffPost saying that it's not okay that we support Peter Liang. As a cousin of Vincent Chin, I recognized the same logic that was used to protect Ronald Ebens. People said, “Ronald Ebens didn't mean to murder Vincent Chin,” and repeated that justification for Liang, saying, “This is not the kind of man you sent to jail.” And I said in my article, “You can't defend Peter Liang. He's not a victim, as you are saying right now.”
Narrative Initiative:
How was your article received?
Annie Tan:
Initially, my family thought I wrote the article for clout. They said, “You weren’t alive when Vincent was killed or when the court cases were happening. How could you understand the gravity of the court cases?”
I wrote the article in English, thinking my relatives who didn’t speak English, including my parents, would never be able to read it. I posted the HuffPost article without consulting my family. That was a mistake. I realized I didn't even want to talk to my family about it. When you shut off your whole community and you don't believe your family can change, then who are you as an activist? And yes, there are boundaries that one must set. But in this case, I had shut my family out for nothing they did. I just hadn't talked with them.
When I made the decision to move home, it was so I could connect with my family, and hopefully combine my activism and organizing with what I'm doing with my family.
Narrative Initiative:
Could you speak more about the decision to move home? What considerations did you make?
Annie Tan:
Two months before I published the article about Vincent Chin and Akai Gurley in the HuffPost, my dad threatened to disown me. This is a big turning point in the memoir I am working on. My dad has threatened to disown me five or six times at this point. He’ll say, “I’ll never speak to you again,” but it’s never stuck. At some point he eventually talks to me again, because he's my dad and he cares. But it was very painful the first time he threatened to disown me.
The tension would blow over through uniting over a meal and sharing some words. Since I’m not fluent in Chinese, there were only so many things I could say over the phone; I needed to be with my family in person. Ultimately, I realized that sharing meals was the way I needed to connect with my dad, and he knew it, too. Phone calls across Chicago to New York weren't going to cut it anymore because we had just so few words to communicate what our inner lives were.
I made the decision to move home so that I can really connect with my family, and hopefully combine my activism and organizing with my family. In the absence of language, what you have is your physical interactions.