Wave of Violence Against Asians Plagues the Nation

In another time, Kao Saechao might have become a soldier, a fierce fighter of Communists in his native Laos.

In his new inner-city home, he has become a perpetual victim, gingerly fingering the latest scar on his head from a baffling battle in a strange place with unfamiliar rules.

“They pulled a gun on me,” the 18-year-old tells Officer Robert Sayaphupha, a Laotian who acts as a liaison between the Oakland Police Department and the city’s Southeast Asian refugee community. Black youths harass and beat them regularly, Saechao and his friends say, gathering around Sayaphupha in the parking lot of the boxy beige apartment complex nicknamed “Cambodian Village.”

Nearby in the noisy courtyard, a small black boy waves his toy dart gun in a Laotian child’s face. For a moment, play time imitates real life.

From Washington state to Washington, D.C., from Boston to Houston, violence against Asians, whether refugee or American-born, appears to be escalating at an alarming rate, recent studies show.

In some cases, observers cite tensions that arise when refugees settle in poor urban neighborhoods and begin competing with longtime residents for scarce resources. Cultural clashes and misconceptions, such as the myth that Asians receive special government aid, also contribute to hostilities, researchers say.

A survey by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations said that Asians were one of the most victimized groups in Los Angeles County in 1986, although they make up only 10% of the population. In Boston, Asians constitute 3% of the population but were victims of nearly one-third of the attacks police considered racially motivated last year.

Since 1984, 11 Korean businesses have been firebombed in Washington, D.C., and about the same number of Korean merchants in the Los Angeles area have been killed or wounded during robberies. Laotian refugees who settled in largely black West Philadelphia have been beaten and robbed and their homes vandalized. Vietnamese fishermen have been intimidated and assaulted in Texas, Florida and California.

In 1984, a white man pushed a pregnant Chinese-American teen-ager in front of a New York subway train, later saying he had developed a phobia about Asians while in Thailand. That same year, a Laotian immigrant whose car had stalled on a St. Louis street was beaten to death by an angry motorist; in Houston, a Chinese student was fatally beaten after a minor car accident.

Massachusetts Incidents

An arson fire last Christmas left 21 Cambodians homeless in Revere, Mass., one of a series of violent incidents that inspired a recent protest rally by Asians. In Stoughton, Mass., three young white men were charged in December with beating three Vietnamese men, whom police found cowering on the ground, covered with blood.

In perhaps the best-known case, Vincent Chin, 27, was beaten to death with a baseball bat on a Detroit street in 1982 by two white men who reportedly blamed the Japanese for the dismal state of the U.S. auto industry. Chin was a Chinese-American.

Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, were convicted of manslaughter, but fined only $3,270 each and released. The sentences touched off national protests, inspired the formation of a group, American Citizens for Justice, and ultimately led to a 25-year prison sentence for Ebens for violating Chin’s civil rights. A federal appeals court recently overturned the conviction, but the U.S. Justice Department has promised to retry Ebens.

For the Asian-American community, the Chin killing was an eye-opener and a turning point.

“It is the first case on record where the government has prosecuted under civil rights laws for the killing of an Asian,” said attorney Jim Shimoura, who heads American Citizens for Justice in Detroit. “It has been a very high-profile uniting factor in the Asian-American community.”

A recently completed two-year investigative report by the Civil Rights Commission concluded that “anti-Asian activity in the form of violence, vandalism, harassment and intimidation continues to occur across the nation.” The frequency of such violence has been difficult to track, however, because it often goes unreported and rarely is so clearly racially motivated as in the Chin case.

In Tacoma, Wash., for example, police rejected allegations of racist intent behind an October arson fire that gutted an apartment house where 12 Cambodians lived. But neighbors said the fire was another in a series of anti-Asian incidents, including tire-slashings, verbal threats and beatings, growing out of tension between the refugees and area blacks.

“There are some (longtime residents) who resent the fact that some seem to prosper from their poverty, and they blame the Asians,” said the Rev. James B. Williams, who lives near the burned apartments.

A Subtle Thing

“It’s a very subtle thing, racial motivation,” said Monona Yin, administrator for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. “You do need a certain amount of training to be sensitive to it. The person who usually makes that determination is the officer on the spot, who doesn’t have that training.”

In Oakland and Los Angeles, blacks and Asians are talking and forming coalitions to try to educate authorities about ways to identify hate attacks and to foster understanding about cultural differences.

Refugees who live in a block of dilapidated Victorians around a storefront Buddhist temple in Oakland were tormented for months by broken windows and other harassment.

Police stepped up patrols, and community leaders began talking. The situation calmed down, although even a blessing by the temple’s monk cannot guarantee that a refugee’s new car won’t end up with its windshield smashed or tires slashed.

“The police departments themselves don’t know how deep the problem is,” said attorney Mike Wong of the Asian Law Caucus in Oakland, part of the Bay Area’s “Break the Silence” coalition of agencies against anti-Asian violence. “If you have crime continually in a refugee neighborhood, you can assume the perpetrator is deliberately choosing that area . . . . If the people are known as perpetual victims, you can assume it’s of a racial nature.”

History of Violence

Anti-Asian violence dates back a century to the time when hundreds of early Chinese immigrants were terrorized, murdered and hounded out of economically depressed western cities by whites who believed they were “stealing” jobs. A sour economy in some areas and a trade deficit with Japan approaching $60 billion fuel similar economic scapegoating today.

“On the street, I see things and hear things, a return to the sort of ‘yellow peril’ resentment of the turn of the century,” said Mini Liu, chairwoman of the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence in New York.

“It doesn’t matter whether they are American-born or foreign-born--the tendency is to look at all Asians as the same,” said Sam Cacas, who chairs the Violence Against Asians task force and acts as coordinator for the Oakland-based Asian Community Mental Health Services violence prevention project. “I am Filipino and American-born, but it’s not unusual for me to be called Chinese or to be asked if I speak Cambodian.”

“Like it or not,” Shimoura said, “people still think you’re fresh off the boat.”

Indeed, those who really have recently disembarked face special problems. Police say refugees make easy victims. They often speak little or no English. They have little understanding of the American justice system, and they have a cultural aversion to calling in authorities.

“In the morning, you open your door widely, and you don’t have to worry about people coming in to take your stuff,” said Sayaphupha, 23, who came to the United States in 1978.

Unlocked Doors

“A lot of them are still doing that,” he said, turning knobs as he walked from apartment to apartment in a crowded East Oakland complex. Every door was unlocked.

Steps away, a bullet hole and bloodstain on a wall bespeak a moment of desperate resistance. A black man died after being shot during a burglary in the apartment of a Laotian family last May. Three blocks away and four months later, another black man was fatally wounded under similar circumstances.

“Many of the (Laotian refugees) were trained by the CIA,” said Phiane Sayarad, a former major in the Laotian army and a member of the Violence Against Asians task force, which was formed after the firebombing of his brother’s East Oakland home. “They tend not to believe that authorities will restore their property peacefully. That’s why they protect themselves.”

Such retaliatory instances are rare, but some people worry that they will increase unless tensions are defused and the victims learn to trust police. Language and cultural barriers make that difficult. Sayaphupha was offered his liaison job about the time the department was criticized for its handling of an attempted rape of a 16-year-old Cambodian girl by some black youths in East Oakland. The police reportedly were slow to respond and failed to do an investigation or follow-up, citing language difficulties.

Often, the calls are never made. “In Laos, we don’t have police going out to a family disturbance and solving your problems for you. In Laos, that’s a disgrace,” said Sayaphupha, who tries to educate classes of refugees about the American justice system. “I teach them how to call 911, tell them how the officers work on the beat. I talk to them about self-protection.

“They are good, law-abiding citizens,” he added. “They don’t want to break the law. That’s why when I teach class, a lot of them will ask questions like, ‘Can I beat him up? Can I shoot him?’ Because they don’t know the law. So they don’t do anything. They are scared.”