WE NEED UNITY NOW
building empathy for asian solidarity
HENRY CHANG
chinese american
In unity there is strength, a message that crosses over to each generation. Author Henry Chang has experienced the birth of Asian American unity and reflects on what he sees is improving, as well as what struggles lie ahead. Drawing from his upbringing of studying in college while coming home to the streets of Chinatown, Henry dispels the myths about Chinatown residents and Chinese gang culture in his books, seeking to reach a wider audience to contribute his voice to increasing more empathy for the Asian American community. After nearly seven decades of seeing countless changes in our country, Henry continues to use his platform in pursuit of a greater unity for the future of Asian America.
Q: What is the biggest misconception you would like to address about your Chinese American identity?
A: I'd like to first extrapolate from my Chinese American identity to my American Asian identity. You can say the same thing about it — as Chinese Americans, as Asian Americans, many times we're perceived to be this one, monolithic group. Whereas, what we really are is a large group of different people, where we have differences between our religions, our politics, and our generations like everyone else. We're not just one monolithic thing, so when people try to paint us all as the model minority, or that we're all immigrants coming here just to take everyone's jobs away, those kinds of statements present us in a misinformed and misunderstood way that is not good.
I wish we would be more united so that ideally, we would have one voice, we would have greater representation, and we would all be on the same page. Unfortunately, we're not. While we're not monolithic, we also don't have that advantage of group representation, of group powers — in unity there is strength. We don't really have that unity. That's one of the biggest mistakes when people think about us as Asian Americans, because we're not just one, monolithic group, but then, we also do need more unity.
Q: How would you describe the difference between being a monolith or monolithic, versus being united or having unity?
A: I think they go together. If you are truly monolithic, that means you're together as a group and are fighting for the same things. At the same time, be proud of the fact you're Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, as long as you can still subscribe to the idea that we can be together, and that together we can have a much greater voice. There's nothing wrong with being proud of our individual ethnicities, but let's also be proud of who we are as Asians, because the people who hate us don't really care about our individualities.
They just see your face, and if it doesn't look like theirs, they'll say, "Get the hell out of here, go back to where you came from, you brought this disease upon us," all this stuff, and you know, that kind of negativity groups us together in a way that is bad. We really have to recognize our own sense of unity if we're going to be able to change anything at all.
“There's nothing wrong with being proud of our individual ethnicities, but let's also be proud of who we are as Asians, because the people who hate us don't really care about our individualities.
They just see your face, and if it doesn't look like theirs, they'll say, ‘Get the hell out of here, go back to where you came from, you brought this disease upon us,’ all this stuff, and you know, that kind of negativity groups us together in a way that is bad. We really have to recognize our own sense of unity if we're going to be able to change anything at all.”
Q: How have your parents' perceptions about your ethnicity/culture and gender affected your overall upbringing?
A: My parents were immigrants, so I would try to take the second part of that question first, about gender and sexual identity. My parents were old school people, and growing up, we never had a conversation about gender and sexuality. Even though, in those days we had Stonewall and we had the Gay Movement, and for sure there were some gay people in Chinatown but very few. And if there were gay people in Chinatown at that time, they usually tried to keep it a secret. I only knew one or two gay people back then and they definitely didn't come out. So, in my family, my parents and I never had that conversation. Then it was just finding out about gender and sexuality while normally growing up in the city. And I was a pretty open-minded guy, I'm accepting of people and that's really how I ended up learning about gender and sexuality.
Getting back to the first part of that question, what my parents and I did have a conversation about was the Confucian thought and they would always emphasize that, "If you study hard and you work hard and you're diligent, you'll find success." Of course, that's a lot of immigrant families, and so growing up, there was never any doubt that I was going to finish high school or that I was going to get a college degree. Then, as I would navigate the world and make my way, my parents would look at how I'm born here, that I speak the language, that I participate in the culture, things like that. They saw their future in me, and that first generation of immigrants who come here, they really live for their children. Everything they struggle through, all the work and the jobs they have, it's because they see their children have a future here. So that's as far as it goes with my parents, they were just hardworking and humble people.
I do also have an older brother. We actually went to the same high school and I ultimately wound up going to the same college as him as well. He was a good example of the stereotypical Chinese guy who becomes an engineering major, and that kind of made me want to be anything but an engineer. I saw what he had to go through, so naturally, I went into the liberal arts as the English major who studied journalism. And my older brother, he worked hard, he studied hard, got his degree, got some great jobs in his life, and he's still in an engineering application to this very day. But you know, I'd like to think that my parents, had they lived long enough, would have been even more proud of us... I mean they never got to see my books. I regret that, but at the same time, I think they're up there somewhere and they can see what I'm doing.
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Editor’s Note:
Q: As you were growing up, what did you generally notice about the world, and did you feel like it was headed towards a worse or a better direction?
A: It only happened later on when I got older and I was in my college years that I really began to see there's a lot of screwed up things in this world. When you start to get a little older, you start noticing different things about the world around you and how it affects you. You learn about prejudice, you learn about racism, you learn about sexism, and growing up, I'd like to think that before 1972 or in the early 70s, there really was no "Asian American”. That term or that phrase was coined by a lot of young Asian American activists at the time who saw what was going on in the nation and decided then that we needed a common name or a common classification, so we can have this sense of togetherness, that we're united. And that's when we first started talking about Asian America.
Myself and my peers were all of college age at the time, and we realized that the people who hated us didn't really care, like I said before, about our individual ethnicities, and in those days, the three major groups of us that were here were Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The Vietnamese didn't really come until after the war in the mid-70s. But prior to that, we were mostly in those three groups. And it didn't take much to see, when you're in these radical college confines, that we'd have a lot more strength if we were united than if we were separate and clinging to our own different cultures. This is what happened in the 70s, and I think that's really when Asian America was born. It was very necessary — we took over the college campus with all the chanting and everything and guess what? We got Black Studies started at CCNY, we got Asian Studies started at CCNY in 1972. Now, at the same time I was in college, when all of this fervent activism was going on, it was also the most violent time in Chinatown history with the street gangs.
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Editor’s Note:
Foundation of Asian America | Vietnamese immigration to USA post-Vietnam War | Asian American Movement
“Now, at the same time I was in college, when all of this fervent activism was going on, it was also the most violent time in Chinatown history with the street gangs.”
Q: What perspective(s) did you develop while attending college and also living in Chinatown during this time period?
A: I would go to class in the morning and in the afternoon to learn all this "stuff", right, all the stuff when you're in college and you're learning about all the history and other things that you have to take. After that, I would get out of class, take the subway back down to Chinatown, and by then it would be evening, so I would go from the classroom to the pool room. That was the neighborhood place where I would meet up with all my friends, and so I went from what I learned in the educational halls earlier that day, to then catching up with my friends in a pool room — all about who shot who, which gang had a beef with who, who's hunting for who, and knowing what street to stay off of because there might be trouble on that street. This is what I would come back down to, find out what the "score" was for that day.
Later on, the things that I was doing in the neighborhood anyway by just hanging out really contributed to the material I was writing. I would hang out with my friends, my crew, and get into the element where we would go down into the illegal gambling houses or a drug factory, so I'm hanging out in these spaces, surrounded by all these different kinds of experiences — dark experiences, illegal experiences in my own neighborhood. Then, the next morning I would wake up and go to college and learn all the bright, shiny things about civilization and whatnot, just to come back down home and see all the darkness and violence again.
Until you've been in a gambling den — wall to wall with men, who are smoking and drinking and swearing and gambling, patrolled by a crew of street gang people and controlled by the Tong that sponsors the gambling — until you've been in one of those kind of places, you really don't get the picture of what that kind of element is like, and that's what I tried to capture. And it was not easy! Trying to remember all those little, but vivid details while I was in that element. I couldn't even help but get a contact high because I would have my own crew and have to act a certain way. Nobody's gonna whip out a little micro recorder and start taking notes on a pad or something, that just wouldn't happen.
Q: How did you manage to document these stories that you were witnessing and hearing about?
A: That was definitely the concern because I'd get ready with the crew to hit up a bar before we went down to the gambling house, or I'd be hanging with some guys who are in the street and maybe they're smoking weed or whatever it is, and then by the time I got down to the gambling den I was already in an altered state like everybody else. So then I was like, "Well, I'm gonna have to try to remember all these vivid things that I'm seeing in my altered state." And again, you couldn't just whip out a tape recorder or take out a pen and start taking notes, so I would really follow the guys around and gamble and whatnot, and then every so often, I would get some vivid detail.
I would go into the men's room, close the door, and then pull up my sleeves so I could write key words or phrases on my biceps, all up and down my forearms just so that when I woke up in the morning from that altered state, I would still have these keywords and they would remind me of what I was thinking, seeing, smelling, little notes here and there. Even before I would wake up in the morning, we would leave one of these nefarious places at two, sometimes four in the morning, and then we would go to some all-night dive and eat. All these Chinatown dives we went to, and I would right away take all their table napkins and start writing so furiously on all these table napkins till I had a stack of table napkins from trying to record all these vivid images, and my crew would say, "Oh man, there he goes again." They would always kind of joke about it, but I really would have all these table napkins and scribbles on scraps of paper from these Chinatown dives and I would drop them into this milk crate that I had at home, and at the end of a few weeks or months, I would look back into that milk crate, and I would have all these vignettes. I would have all these little scenes that, once they were combined together, started making up the plot of my first book.
Q: What made you decide to turn the vignettes into your first Detective Jack Yu book, Chinatown Beat?
A: I knew I didn't just want to write about crime and criminals, so I wrote about regular people like my parents, or somebody who waited on tables, or somebody who worked in the garment sweatshop — regular, everyday people, as well as about the criminals. But I found out that the stories people were most interested in were the ones about the criminals and about the crime and all the dark stuff, they didn't really want to know about the woman working in the sweatshop. So, I would take all those little vignettes of crime and gangsters and violence, and then put them all together into some sort of a plot along with the stories of regular people. I knew I had to have something to tie all this together and tell the story, that I couldn't just have all these separate things going on like, excuse the phrase, a Chinese fire drill, where everybody's running in different directions. I knew I needed something to drive this book.
At the time, I was a journalism major, so I had some experience writing essays and articles and understanding that there had to be some sort of structure to the book. And luckily, along the way I had read some mysteries from popular authors like Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson, the different hardboiled crime writers. From reading those, I had an idea of how to drive this thing. The problem with Chinatown Beat was that I had all these vivid characters, so vivid I think any one of them could have had their own book. But I knew I couldn't flesh out that many vivid characters in one book, otherwise it was going to be 600 pages, and nobody would read it.
I figured that there had to be a way to keep this thing moving, where within a reasonable number of pages, I could tell all these people's stories in a way that also linked them all together. Quite often, it's solving a crime. So in the course of Jack solving a crime, you're going to run across all of these people, with all these different stories, and some of them are going to help Jack, some of them are going to hinder him, and therein lies the plot.
Now what happened with that was, I really didn't get a chance to flesh out many of these characters, because there's only so much room in one book. So I left room and said, "Okay, if I get a Book Two, she's coming back in book two, and I'm going to develop her more in Book Two, and I'm going to develop this and that character, too," and thank goodness Chinatown Beat was successful; I got a second book! And guess what? I went right after those characters, and then what I had was people telling me that Book Two was good, but then they would ask me about what happened to so and so character, and I knew I was saving that for the next book if I could get it. And guess what? I got a Book Three. So along the way, I was thinking about which character I was done with, which character I wanted to develop more, who I was gonna leave until the next book, but at that time, when you're on Book Two, you're not thinking about Book Four or Book Five. It's one book at a time. I really even tried to get a two-book deal because I had an agent at the time, but they said, "No, we like you writing one at a time. We think you'll be more focused." And they were right! I mean one book after another... it took 13 years for all five books, and it's been quite a journey, I must say.
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Editor’s Note:
Q: What was it like doing your first reading for Chinatown Beat?
A: Well, I've done readings for short stories before, even prior to Barnes & Noble on that day, November 2nd, 2006. Prior to that I had done readings in smaller venues, smaller crowds, so that wasn't as big a surprise to me. What was the big surprise was that Barnes & Noble, the one on 8th St Astor Place, a flagship at the time but it's no longer there, that particular reading was the biggest event I had taken part in.
We had about 100 people, friends and family members who came up from Chinatown just to cheer me on. But also, there were regular people in the store that were, I think, surprised to see an Asian author, and hung around just to see what was going on. And when I read it, it was just great. I was so thrilled to see so many people. At the time, that was the biggest event I had ever read in, and what happened was, subsequent to the book doing well, getting good reviews in the New York Times, after that reading I got more reviews, and other major media outlets like the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, all these different people started calling me up, I was asked to write a short story for another book, different opportunities opened up for me. As we moved beyond that particular event, I felt my voice was really growing. Whereas before, I'd done some readings, but I wasn't reaching that many people. And it really made me wonder about the purpose of it. But at Barnes & Noble, I really felt like I was reaching a lot more people.
Then of course, it did lead to four more books! After that event, I did more online interviews, book tours, talked to people about the neighborhood, and tried to tell these true stories. Dark as they were, I wanted to incorporate these true stories of real people in the neighborhood, not just the criminals, but also regular people, some good people, some bad people, true portraits of people and then there would be people who read the stories and say, "Yeah, I remember that, I can empathize with that." That's what Barnes & Noble on 8th St Astor Place did for me that day on November 2nd, 2006 — I remember that day very clearly because it seemed like, for a couple of years after that day, I was really able to enjoy some of the success of it, and I was also very excited because I knew I was going to get another book.
Q: What is your earliest memory of meeting Patrick Chen, director of the short film A Father's Son, which is based off of Chinatown Beat and Year of the Dog?
A: There were numerous posters of my books around Chinatown, where the ones he refers to might have already been on those walls for almost like two or three years by the time he saw them. Then, I remember when my fifth book came out, I was doing a reading at MOCA [Museum of Chinese America] and Patrick attended it. I gave him a shout out because he had just finished his third short film, The Last Tip, about a long time beloved restaurant in Chinatown that was closing after all those years, and people were lining up around the block to get their last chance of visiting 69 Bayard restaurant, and so that was the big rumor in Chinatown at the time, that it was closing — and somehow, Patrick came around one night, and it was a bunch of us OGs, sitting around during the last days of that restaurant, and I guess he got inspired to do The Last Tip, where even though it was only about five minutes long, it was very touching and very well received.
By the time I was having my reading at MOCA, I said, "We have here today one of our own rising young filmmakers, Patrick Chen," then I pointed him out in the back and everybody looked at him and he got all embarrassed. After that, I think he was just really grateful, and he really wanted to do something with the books. A Father's Son is not the first effort that we tried to do something with books, since for almost a year before that, we had been exploring some different stories, we wrote some things that didn't feel quite right. Then in 2019, I got involved in another project and it was just busy times and finally Patrick said, "If we're going to do this thing, we better do it now," and I was like, "Yeah, right on, let's do it," because, you know, I'm not getting any younger! So we had that kind of conversation, and now so much has happened since last October [2019], much of the world has really turned upside down, especially in Chinatown, but thank goodness, we did manage to finish shooting the short film right before the pandemic hit in March.
But yeah, I think Patrick's the guy. He's got all the sensibilities, and I think he's very sensitive to the subject matter, he knows the subject, and he's been in the streets himself. He can certainly relate to my books, and I think he's the one when it comes to adapting them for film or for TV. I mean we have a teaser trailer and everything for A Father's Son, so I'm just really excited to see all of this through.
Q: As your books and their adaptations begin to gain more attention, what is your hope for what these stories can continue to do for the Asian American community, as well as what people from outside the Asian American community can learn from your stories?
A: Chinatowns have been here a long time. They’re rich with history. And I happen to have been, well fortunately or unfortunately, to have lived through that time where there were the old school gangsters. So, I tried to transpose some of that history and that culture. It wasn't all that much that I had to create. I was drawing from a common culture, knowledge, and history of things that have gone on around here. I've always said to a lot of people, "There was not much that I had to make up." A lot of its drawn from personal experiences and growing up in one of the most violent times in Chinatown history.
If I can use this advantage with the books and use my voice to say things that are important now about what we're going through as Asian Americans, what our Chinese American experience is like, and what we as American Asians are going through right now, if I can use that voice from these books to touch upon those things, then maybe I can help educate some people about who we are and what we are and what our achievements are and what our struggles are. I think it's important now, because if you thought Asian American identity was important back then, it's even more important today, especially what we can see with all this hate going on around us. It's just rampant, not only in New York, but all across the country. So, if I can help change that a little, speak out about something with whatever little voice that I have, I will. That's something I will do every opportunity I get.
“If you thought Asian American identity was important back then, it's even more important today, especially what we can see with all this hate going on around us. It's just rampant, not only in New York, but all across the country. So, if I can help change that a little, speak out about something with whatever little voice that I have, I will. That's something I will do every opportunity I get.”
Q: What do you think are the responsibilities of Asian American artists going forward?
A: I'm a baby boomer, I'm from that Woodstock generation. But like I said before, I will speak out against racism, inequality, and violence against the Asian community every chance I get. I think that as Asian American creative people, we have a voice, and as a collective we should use that voice not only to entertain and show our creative talents, but also to educate. We have all these different platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and whatever kind of following we have, we still have that voice and we need to reach out. I think especially as Asian American creatives, we have a responsibility to reach out and educate young people about our people. Growing up in school, we still don't really learn about the struggles of Asian Americans or about our history in this country, so even when they don't teach about us in schools, young people still need to be educated about our history, our struggles, and our achievements so they don't have so much hate — this hatred that they might get from lack of education, from the streets, and even from their elders.
Creative people who have a voice should also let young people know about the Chinese Exclusion Act, or about when World War II happened, the government rounded up all the Japanese, American or not, and threw them into internment camps. People should know about the struggles that Vietnamese fishermen encountered in the Gulf when they came here as refugees after the Vietnam War. Young people should know about all these histories so they can begin to empathize with Asians and Asian Americans, and the only way they're going to empathize is if they have this knowledge. That knowledge is what would really change things. So please, creative Asian American people, if you have a voice and you have an audience, please try to reach out and educate young people.
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Editor’s Note:
The Chinese Exclusion Act | Japanese Internment Camps | Vietnamese Fisherfolk post-Vietnam War
Q: What did you used to think and what do you now think about your American Asian identity?
A: I always thought it was one-sided, but once I saw that it was bringing people together, I knew that we could really speak with one voice. This is what we experienced in the early 70s. I thought it was significant then, and I think it's even more significant now, especially with all the division in this country. I hope we can manage to get behind this Asian American or American Asian voice and send a unified message to the people out there. It's been said by different people, but hey, we're not the virus! We're not the problem, so let's all wake up people, let's do the right thing, let's make this country work.
Q: In line with building empathy and raising awareness, could you discuss gentrification and the kinds of changes you are now seeing happen around you in Chinatown neighborhoods?
A: In the first place, gentrification is not a good thing for any of our Chinese and Chinatown communities. What I've just been hearing about is that gentrification is even driving regular people right out of Flushing, where now there's these luxury high rises and they're attracting a different crowd of people. All around here in Manhattan Chinatown, the population of the neighborhood has been graying out for many years now, a lot of people who still live here are getting older and when their apartments become available, the landlord will usually convert the apartments so that they can take in four or five gentrifiers. They'll convert a two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in Chinatown into four little bedrooms, and they'll get four gentrifying people coming in because in their eyes, it's more convenient to live in Manhattan, the thought process being so what if it's Chinatown, so what if it's a walk up, so what if they only got the one little bedroom out of four little rooms in this one apartment. So, the rent-controlled apartment now has four gentrifiers in it, $1000 a month from each of them, now that apartment is bringing in $4,000 a month, and this is what's happening all over Chinatown. As the older people die out, or as other people move away or are already evicted, for whatever reason, that's what's going on around here.
In my building, where everybody used to be Chinese, every family here was Chinese, now there's only like two families left. Everybody else is not Asian. They're all much younger people, let's put it that way, and to be real, it's not all these non-Asian senior citizens coming down here, but that's what gentrification has done. I think it's supporting certain types of businesses, especially now since certain Chinatown restaurants and businesses have closed for good due to the pandemic. They're not coming back. And you wonder, "Well, what's going to come in?" So now, I think we're going to get businesses that come in and cater to these younger people who are gentrifying, businesses that are familiar to them and that continue to wipe out all the original Chinatown businesses; and to be honest, with the way it's going, I wouldn't be surprised.
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Editor’s Note:
Anti-Asian American sentiment during COVID-19 | The dangers of Gentrification in New York’s Chinatown | The struggles of Chinatown store and restaurant owners during COVID-19
“Certain Chinatown restaurants and businesses have closed for good due to the pandemic. They're not coming back. And you wonder, ‘Well, what's going to come in?’ So now, I think we're going to get businesses that come in and cater to these younger people who are gentrifying, businesses that are familiar to them and that continue to wipe out all the original Chinatown businesses; and to be honest, with the way it's going, I wouldn't be surprised.”
Q: In connection to these changes you see happening around you, what dreams are you most passionate about manifesting?
A: Well, I've come to this point of being passionate about working with Patrick and doing our short film, seeing my series of Detective Jack Yu books eventually being translated into different media where I can potentially reach a bigger audience, telling these real stories, and presenting a different perspective about my neighborhood in Chinatown. I want these real stories to reach more audiences so that we could dispel all these myths — every time you see Chinatown on TV, it's some stereotypical thing, it's some racist notion. C’mon, it's 2021, we’re still getting episodes of the stereotypical street gangs and prostitutes and the mamasan and the Tongs, we gotta get away from all these stereotypes.
Some of my friends and I started this group to try to hold production companies accountable when they come down to Chinatown and use Chinatown as a backdrop, because it's rampant the way they'll come here, portray all these Chinese characters as villains who just kill each other, and then they put in all this racist innuendo in there that is really just rehashing all these old tropes. So, what I would like to do is try to not have that, and through my stories, present a kind of truer view on it. It may be a predominantly Asian cast, it may or may not be, but I would like to have some true stories, some true representation of how our lives were like here and just maybe get people to see who we really are — maybe then people can start empathizing with us a little more, and we can get away from some of this hate and this racism.
Q: What sense of urgency do you feel with regards to unity going forward?
A: I think we need that now more than ever. Even just watching the presidential politics play out, I can see we need that unity now more than ever because, and as Asians here in America, we really need that one voice to state our main concerns, to talk about how we're being treated, how unfair things are, all different concerns about things like the pandemic, law enforcement, and racial injustice. We need to have one voice that talks about us as Asians, as South Asians, the entire spectrum of us being Asians, and that's more important now than ever. Where are the people who are standing up for all of us and are united together to represent all of us?
Maybe it's happening, but I'm not really seeing it, not yet anyways. Not when we keep having rallies in New York, with big groups of Chinese people where one side is more in support of law and order, one side is more in support of Black Lives Matter, and we keep fighting each other again and again. Just within our own Asian American community, we got our own groups clashing against each other over these differences, where it's becoming harder and harder to come to an agreement and be on the same page about any of these issues. Once again, it's like the Chinese fire drill, we're too all over the place and we don't really have one voice at all. At the very least, if we could agree on saying one thing, let it be, "Please stop attacking us."
“As Asians here in America, we really need that one voice to state our main concerns, to talk about how we're being treated, how unfair things are, all different concerns about things like the pandemic, law enforcement, and racial injustice. We need to have one voice that talks about us as Asians, as South Asians, the entire spectrum of us being Asians, and that's more important now than ever.
Where are the people who are standing up for all of us and are united together to represent all of us?”
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