During his childhood, Frank Wu planned on being an architect. His parents even bought him a drafting table at a garage sale. But as a teenager, a local hate crime and homicide in Detroit changed his mind.
With Detroit being known as the “motor city,” residents depended on the larger automobile companies for employment. After the United States faced a recession in the 1970s and ‘80s, the industry quickly deteriorated. On the other side of the world, however, Japan’s business was booming.
Wu, the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, says that, during the time, people were looking for someone to blame.
“If you were Asian, people wanted to know which side you were on,” he adds. “Were you one of them or one of us? And generally, they thought you were one of them.”
In 1982, a man named Vincent Chin was killed by two autoworkers with a baseball bat. The murderers blamed him for the success of the Japanese car companies. Chin was not Japanese; he was Chinese and American.
“Before that, I’ll be honest, if you had said anything to me about race or ethnicity, I just wanted to be normal and fit in, I just wanted to be a kid,” says Wu. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with these issues.”
However, despite not personally knowing Chin, this case hit home for Wu. As an Asian American, Wu remembers being called “chink” and “Jap.” He was asked if he ate dogs, if his parents were communists and told to go back to where he came from.
