As part of Notre Dame’s Asian American Distinguished Speaker Series, LGBTQ+ activist, journalist and author Helen Zia spoke in the Smith Ballroom of the Morris Inn on Wednesday evening. The Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, which is a part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, hosted the event, titled “Helen Zia: A Life at the Intersection of Activism, Writing, and History.” Assistant professor of American Studies Jennifer Huynh served as a moderator.
Zia, who is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a Princeton alum, gave a detailed account of the events that inspired her to create change through her current career in journalism and life as an activist.
She was a teenager in New Jersey in the 1960s, a time when the United States was home to only about 500,000 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Many of those there were “relegated to live” in ghettos that classified them by their race, Zia said.
Zia added that she “always felt like an alien” in her state, so she rarely spoke up and avoided bringing attention to herself in school. Zia described how she frequently received the question, “Where are you from?” despite the fact that she was born and raised in the United States.
“And then, finally, if I let [the questioning] go on for a while, that might mutate into ‘your people’ – ‘Where are your people from?’” Zia explained. “And then I would have to relent and say, ‘Oh, my parents are from China.’”
When she asked the same question to white people, she usually received the response, “My people are from America, of course.”
Zia recognized that this was, in part, a failure of the American school system to educate children on the rich history of Asian Americans.
“How could I blame anybody for being ignorant about Asians in America? Back then, there were no history books that included Americans of Asian heritage [and] no classes, even at the college level, let alone kindergarten through 12th grade,” she said.
She added that, as a child, she was unaware of Asian American history too.
“I had no idea how much Asian Americans have always been part of the American people,” Zia said.
She discussed many prominent Asian Americans who invented and contributed to common food practices and industries in the United States (including the frost-resistant orange and the process of sun-drying shrimp), describing these people and their stories as “MIH”, or “missing in history.”
When Zia eventually learned these things, she was both happy to learn something that connected her heritage to the United States and sad that she had been deprived of such important knowledge for so long.
“I used to wonder, how different would life have been for me as a kid growing up if just a little bit of this had been known?” she said.
When Zia got to college, situated within the tumultuous anti-Vietnam War period of the 1970s, she began a long process of learning how to speak up. Zia threw herself into liberation movements organized by other Asian American students, first as a helper, but eventually as a speaker in a peace rally denouncing the war.
“What I [learned] was that I could speak out if I had to, and that moved me one step closer to finding my own voice,” she said.
After college, Zia felt lost. She entered medical school, but left after two years, as she realized that it was not the kind of social change that she wanted to make. She began doing community organizing as her full-time job, worked as a construction worker to try to integrate the construction industry and eventually moved to Detroit, where she worked at a Chrysler plant.
“There was nothing conventional about the path that I took. I just wanted to know how I could make some small difference on this planet with the little time that I’m here on this earth,” Zia said.
When Zia was laid off from her factory job after two years, she eventually realized that she wanted to tell the unknown stories of people she knew. So, she began her journalism career.
It was while Zia was still living in Detroit in 1982 that she learned of the brutal murder of Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American man who had been beaten to death by two auto workers. According to Zia, many people affected by the struggling economy were looking for a scapegoat, and they found that in Japanese Americans. Japan had recently begun manufacturing fuel-efficient cars, and factories in Detroit couldn’t keep up.
“Anybody who looked Japanese became the enemy,” Zia explained.
As the environment in Detroit became increasingly hostile and xenophobic, Zia knew that she needed to take action. Her first step was to report on Chin’s murder, so she attended a community meeting, at which multiple lawyers, as well as Chin’s mother, were present. When the lawyers said that there was nothing they could do about the judge deciding not to sentence Chin’s killers to jail time, Zia was moved to speak up.
“I raised my hand. That is something everybody can do, to raise your hand and say something,” Zia said.
In that moment, Zia said she learned that to make a difference, you have to step out of your comfort zone.
“Choosing to do nothing is also a decision, and the act of doing nothing still has consequences, too,” she added.
In 2023, Zia established the Vincent Chin Institute, which “creates intergenerational resources for the support, education and empowerment of Asian Pacific American communities to stand against bigotry and to build the beloved community, especially in areas where there is little advocacy infrastructure,” according to the Institute’s website. She has also written three books: “Asian American Dreams,” “My Country Versus Me” and “Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution.”
“I hope that by telling the stories of Asian Americans, there might be more compassion, more understanding, more seeing Asian people as humans,” Zia said.
