From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo

★★★★★

This book is an incredible read.

With this book, specifically written for teenage readers, there is now a readily accessible way for all American students, Asian or not, to learn about this critically important piece of American civil rights and Asian American history. Chapters are short, concise, and very approachable. But even though it's YA, it does not pull any punches; every detail of the murder and trial is laid bare. Parents should know that this book uses the word "motherfucker" explicitly, as well as racial slurs like Chink, Nip, and Jap, but only because they are part of direct quotes related to the case. There's also a passing mention of prostitution.

I think the author choosing to tell the story interspersed with the experiences of Jarod Lew was brilliant. I didn't know about Vincent Chin until well after college, and the fact that Jarod didn't know about Vincent Chin until he was 25 was not only believable to me, but actually representative of my generation of Asian Americans.

Having read Asian American Dreams by Helen Zia, who played a major role in the activism surrounding the Vincent Chin case, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what happened. Still, this book presented a deluge of information that was new to me, including heartwarming and heartbreaking anecdotes about Vincent, his mother, his friends, and the activists demanding justice. As a mother myself, I bawled every time Lily Chin's part of the story was told; I could feel the weight of the enormity of what she suffered and how much she fought.

Given the target audience, I liked the occasional reminder of how events occurred before social media and even before personal computers were prevalent, e.g., the way flyers and press releases had to be typewritten, cut and pasted, and frequently hand-delivered to recipients. (p. 93-94, 130) I also appreciated how the author connected the behaviors of people involved in the case to relevant terminology that is used today but which was not yet coined in the 1980s, like "white privilege" (p. 239) and "toxic masculinity" (p. 241).

It's clear the author did an immense amount of research, getting perspectives from basically every person remotely involved in the case, on both sides. Paula Yoo impressively managed to walk the fine line of humanizing the killers without excusing their actions or defending their light sentences.   

Notably, the book is physically heavy. Each page is printed on glossy photo paper, which allows pictures to be displayed throughout the book according to their relevance to the text. I actually love this formatting because when photos are grouped together in the middle of a book, I always feel a little annoyed having to flip back and forth between text and related photos. I also liked that any time images with text were included, they were printed with enough clarity to actually be read.

Incidentally, there's an episode of the They Call Us Bruce podcast with the author, Paula Yoo, which I also highly recommend. It's an excellent conversation with even more behind-the-scenes tidbits.