She fought with her father to go to college.
She went on to become one of the first women to graduate from Princeton in 1973. While there, she successfully lobbied to start an Asian American Students Assn.
A few years later, she demanded that authorities in Detroit handle the slaying of a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, as a hate crime. She succeeded. Later, her books and articles would showcase the violence and discrimination faced by Asian Americans.
It seems Helen Zia has always been fighting. And the reasons to fight never cease.
“Asian Americans have been slammed as cartoon characters,” Zia said. “We’ve been called gooks, geeks, geishas. Moving beyond racial slurs to communities of strength and influence is a battle that doesn’t die.”
Indeed, even after all the battles she has fought, current conditions present unusually fraught challenges.
“This time feels different,” Zia said at a leadership workshop in Oakland.
When people started blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed certain Asian Americans would feel blowback too.
“I see you nodding your heads,” she told the crowd. “You went, ‘Oh, s—.'”
No one laughed.
“Where we are today,” she continued, “is a consequence of so many things that we, some of us, have been predicting for some time.” Among those changes is the growing numbers of people of color, which some members of society find threatening.
Though hardly a household name to the general public, the 70-year-old activist and author is a trailblazer — to some, a legend — among…
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