The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [164]
The tremendous publicity generated by the Vincent Chin murder did not mean that the United States had actually become more dangerous for Chinese Americans. A century earlier, when the Exclusion Act precipitated anti-Chinese riots, dozens were murdered with virtually no media scrutiny whatsoever, the victims presented more as clumps of statistics than as individuals whose lives were snuffed out. But by the 1980s, the Chinese American community had come to expect more from the United States, and had learned to broadly disseminate information about injustices suffered by their people. Seven years after the death of Vincent Chin, activists drew on the political lessons learned from his tragedy when another Chinese person became a fatal victim of a hate crime.
Jim Loo (also known as Ming-Hai Loo) was a twenty-four-year-old immigrant from China, working in a restaurant to save enough money for college. In 1989, Loo and several Vietnamese friends were playing pool in a Raleigh, North Carolina, billiards hall when two whites started to push them around. Robert Piche and his brother Lloyd Piche called them “chinks” and “gooks,” and even blamed them for American deaths in Vietnam. “I don’t like you because you’re Vietnamese,” Lloyd Piche told them. “Our brothers went over to Vietnam, and they never came back.” He also threatened, “I’m gonna finish you tonight.” The manager ordered the two brothers to leave the premises, but they waited outside, ambushing Loo and the others as they walked out. Robert Piche struck Loo in the back of the head with a gun, causing him to collapse onto a broken beer bottle. The glass forced a bone fragment through his brain, killing him.
Initially, Lloyd Piche was found guilty of only two misdemeanors—simple assault and disorderly conduct—and his brother Robert was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison by a state court for second-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. But the Chinese American community, observing the parallels between the Jim Loo and Vincent Chin cases, lobbied for federal intervention. After the U.S. government stepped in with a federal trial, Lloyd Piche was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $28,000 in reparations to Loo’s family.
Not all the murders of Chinese Americans during the 1980s were committed by whites. As diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the PRC steadily improved, the KMT appeared obsessed with the idea of controlling Taiwanese intellectuals in the United States. There was, for instance, the mysterious death of a Carnegie Mellon professor, Chen Wencheng, when he returned to his native Taiwan in 1981. Shortly after being interrogated by authorities about attending certain political meetings during his student days in the United States, Chen fell to his death from the window of his Taiwan hotel room. Though exactly what occurred will probably never be determined, many Chinese Americans believe the KMT gave Chen some help through the window.
Three years later, another death shook the Taiwanese community in America. In 1984, Wang Xiling, head of KMT military intelligence, dispatched members of the island’s criminal “Bamboo” gang to Daly City, California, where they assassinated Henry Liu in his home. Liu had written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek and at that time president of the Chinese