On Fitness

Lately, my cousin Vapid has dedicated himself to the study of various Chinese martial arts -- Taiji and Baguazhang in particular -- with a fervor that matches and possibly exceeds mine at the height of my training in Wing Chun. And another cousin, Colin, has become a fairly competent student of the arts in his own right. This prompted my mother to ask me recently what the appeal was. What, she wanted to know, drove us to participate in such a low-class, useless, time-wasting activity? For that matter, she wanted to know why I was so dedicated to working out?

After all, she continued, no one else in our family ever needed to fight, and plenty of Asian Americans of my generation are perfectly happy devoting themselves to nothing but hitting the books.

Well, though mom will never read this, here's my answer:

I do it for Lily Chin.

Lily Chin is perhaps better known as the mother of Vincent Chin.

In the early 1980s, Japanese cars were proving themselves to be far superior to anything beind made by their American counterparts, and tons of American autoworkers were being laid off. A lot of racist, irrational anger was directed at the Japanese, and on one summer evening, Vincent Chin was mistaken by two autoworkers as Japanese and beaten to death with a baseball bat. He was 27 and just days away from getting married.

The two autoworkers never served a day in jail for Chin's murder, and a heartbroken Lily Chin eventually moved back to China, unable to continue living in a country that valued her son's life as $3,780 in fines.

My point is not that Chin might have been able to defend himself had he been in better shape. True, he might have made better judgement calls during the course of what would be the last night of his life, but by the time he was cornered in that parking lot, he would have had to be a very lucky and very skilled fighter to escape.

Vincent's death is credited with galvanizing the disparate groups of Asian Americans to unite into a single, pan-Asian movement (or at least a more tightly knit group), who believed that Lily Chin's failure to get justice for her murdered son was due to a lack of organization and experience in working the legal system on the part of Asian community groups.

They're right, on the surface. But on a far more visceral level, Vicent's killers got away scot free because Asian Americans are generally regarded as too meek, quiet and physically frail to make any trouble. The impression is that you can push us around and walk all over us because we'll just sit there and take it. And they're right.

It's true that violence is often not the best solution to conflict. But it is also true that the typical Asian American male's physical frailties makes people more likely to bully them and makes them more willing to take it.

I started training martial arts at a fairly early age, and though I wasn't actually all that good back then, it gave me the confidence to think I could hold my own in a fight. In my high school, the Asians were often the target of racial insults and bullying, and because I thought I had a little something in my hip pocket, I didn't really believe in taking that kind of shit. That meant I got into quite a few fights in the early days of high school; most of the time I won, sometimes I lost. In the beginning, I would attack instantly if I heard the words "chink," "slant-eye," or "gook" -- even if they weren't directed at me. But I found that when the principal would come and ask who had started the fight, the other Asians in the crowd would never back my side of the story. "I didn't see anything," and "I don't know," were the fearful responses coming out of their quivering mouths. They were too scared to even speak up in support of the guy who had tried to come to their defense.

Of course, all kids learned to adapt. I stopped fighting on their behalf, and they learned to pretend that it was funny when some gwailo punk yelled "chink" and shoved their books out of their hands or dropped something foul in their lunch.

The weakness of these kids made me nauseous. To this day, the sight of some skinny, frail antisocial FOB Asian infuriates me, and reminds me again that I never want to be like that. I think if they'd only get themselves to a fucking gym, they'd walk with the confidence not to be an embarassment to us all. These days, I see more and more of my fellow fobulous Asians getting into shape -- and learning social skills to boot!

Maybe, just maybe, if we as a demographic had started ignoring our parents' advice and learning to work out and socialize a little earlier, Lily Chin wouldn't have died such a heartbroken woman.