Asian Americans - Breaking Through (2020) | Full Documentary
PBS America
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At the turn of the millennium, Asian Americans have become the fastest growing population in the U.S. It is a time of tremendous change, as the country tackles urgent debates over immigration, race and economic disparity. Asian Americans, newly empowered by growing numbers and rising influence, must navigate their role in the American future.
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HELEN: When the bottom fell out of the economy, blame ended up on japan. People with a Japanese looking face were a target.
VIET: The Vincent Chin murder was shocking. CROWD: We want justice. REPORTER: The verdict stunned everyone, four officers acquitted of beating Rodney King.
HELEN: All hell broke loose. ERIKA: But as much as tragedy is a part of our heritage here,
so is possibility. OANH: Asian Americans become founders with fantastic vision.
JERRY: We were one of the largest web sites in the world. Literally laying down the train tracks, uh,
as the train was running. You just got to stay ahead of it. HARI: The country's changing and people are freaking out about it.
After 9/11 I wanted my art form to reflect what I believe. VIET: To transform the system into something more just.
That's the hope of activism. That's the hope, from which, the Asian American movement was born.
♪ ♪
HARI: The country's changing and people are freaking out about it. I keep hearing about the year 2042 on the news.
For those of you who don't know, 2042 according to census figures is the year when white people will be the minority in this country.
They'll be 49% and white people are freaking out about it. Don't freak out white people!
You were the minority when you came to this country. Things seem to have worked out for you.
I first wanted to do standup comedy when I saw Margaret Cho do standup on television.
She was a Korean American woman, but as an Indian kid that was as close as we were going to get at that point.
MARGARET: I was in Mobile, Alabama. I was walking down the street and this man actually calls me a chink.
I mean actually called me a chink. I was so mad. I just looked at him and said chink. I'm sorry. Chinks are Chinese.
I'm Korean. I'm a gook. All right. Get like a redneck to English dictionary.
HARI: That fearlessness. She stood out and it made me believe there was a chance
that I could perform in front of people and be accepted.
The future that people in this country seem to be afraid of. Where there's many different cultures,
where whites are the minority. Yeah. I grew up in the future. That's Queens. I was always surrounded by diversity like if anything,
I was sheltered in diversity, I just assumed the whole country was like Queens, New York.
NARRATOR: When Hari's parents came to the United States, they were part of a historic wave of new immigrants who
would change America.
Today Asians in America are making their presence felt, as the country's fastest growing racial group.
In a time where we find ourselves increasingly polarized, Asian Americans are playing an essential role in
the future of America.
In the late 1970s refugees are escaping war-torn Southeast Asia, and coming to the United States.
They settle in the big cities, but they also move to small towns across the country.
MEE: Growing up, I always identify as being Hmong, not even Hmong-American.
My family came to the United States in 1978. We were refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
I grew up in the Midwest. And I remember walking my brothers and sisters to school
and we would have cars go by. People would throw their ashtrays out the window at us,
you know, give us the finger. They would say, you know, "Chink, gook, go back to your own country."
I didn't grow up with a consciousness that actually there were other Asian Americans
experiencing similar things. It felt very isolating. Uh, and it felt like we just had to suck it up.
NARRATOR: Mee Moua's perspective would be drastically transformed by an event that will rock the Asian American community.
It happens in Detroit on a summer night in 1982.
REPORTER: Was Vincent Chin beaten to death with a baseball bat because he was Oriental?
The brutal slaying has outraged the Chinese community in Detroit, and across the nation.
HELEN: I had gone to Detroit in the mid-seventies to be involved in community organizing and to learn about
the Heartland of America. I actually arrived in Detroit when the auto industry was
still booming and I got hired in as a large press operator in a Chrysler corporation stamping plant.
These were well paid jobs with full benefits. The city had millions of people whose livelihoods for
generations have been based on a manufacturing economy.
Then the bottom fell out. NARRATOR: In 1979 Detroit's automakers are devastated by
an international oil crisis. Gas prices skyrocket.
Consumers start buying fuel efficient foreign cars and sales of American-made cars plummet.
By 1982 one in five Detroit residents are unemployed.
HELEN: People lost their futures and their children's futures. Pretty soon the finger of blame ended up on Japan.
All of this hatred. You could feel it. It was palpable. REPORTER: Detroiters were invited for 50 cents a
smash to take out their anger on Japanese cars. HELEN: It was in that climate of intense hatred that a
27 year old Chinese American was getting ready for his all American bachelor party.
NARRATOR: Vincent Chin is the only child of a Chinese immigrant couple, who adopted him because they couldn't have
children of their own. As a teenager he was a football player with a wide
circle of friends. By the summer of 1982, he's all set for a June wedding
to his long-time girlfriend, Vicky.
HELEN: A week before his wedding, he was out with his buddies at a bar in Detroit.
REPORTER: Inside the bar, 43 year old Ronald Ebens, a foreman at a Chrysler auto plant, and his 23 year old stepson Michael Nitz taunted Chin,
mistaking him for Japanese and accusing him for the economic downfall of the US auto industry.
NARRATOR: The fight ends up outside where the assailants hunt down Chin and his friends.
REPORTER: According to witnesses, Ebens took this bat out of the trunk of his car and repeatedly used it to hammer and crush Chin's skull.
As his friends held him, his last words were, "It isn't fair. It isn't fair."
NARRATOR: Vincent's killers plead guilty to manslaughter and face 15 years in prison.
But Judge Charles Kaufman sentences them to three years' probation and a $3,000 fine.
He says, "These aren't the kind of men you send to prison”"
VIET: I think the Vincent Chin murder was shocking to a lot of Asian Americans. Not because it represented something new,
but that it actually represented something old. It reminded Asian-Americans that progress
hadn't really been made. HELEN: In 1882 you could kill a quote China man and
get off paying $1. In 1982 you can kill an Asian American and get off
paying $3,000. This was not justice, but there wasn't an organization
that existed to stand up and say, this is wrong.
What began out of that was meetings that started with four people, 10 people, 20 people, 100 people,
and people were talking about what can we do? What can we do? What can we do? I raised my hand and I said, the world wants to know how
the Asian American community feels about this. CROWD: We want justice. We want justice.
REPORTER: In death. Vincent Chin inspired protest marches, rallies, dinners, banquets.
GROUP: Justice for Vincent Chin! HELEN: The killing of Vincent Chin is probably the
most tragic example of the kind of violence that's being committed against Asians.
JEFF: For Asian Americans, Vincent Chin's murder symbolized an extreme example of the kind of
discrimination that they'd face. It becomes a rallying point for Asian Americans
to be able to say, "That's me too." MEE: I was a freshman in college when I heard about
Vincent Chin and the impact on the Asian American community.
And it was the first time that I felt like my experience as a Hmong refugee, as a Southeast Asian was connected to the
experience of other Asian Americans. I am finally a piece of the puzzle that completes the
picture and it was so liberating.
HELEN: Civil rights organizations of every kind came forward as well as individuals.
JESSE: We have been drawn together by death,
an unplanned family reunion, our hearts are made heavy by a mother who sits here
with us whose son was brutally killed just because he was, what can we do in the aftermath?
Those who live, we must redefine America, So that everybody knows everybody fits
in the rainbow somewhere.
HELEN: Mrs. Chin was the inspirational and spiritual leader of this movement.
Many of the ways that she's been seen is to remember her as a grieving mother, but to know her, she was a strong,
outspoken woman. LILY: You know how they killed my son?
Killed my son. Like they kill an animal. DONAHUE: Like they kill an animal. Yes ma'am.
LILY: This made me very angry. DONAHUE: Yes ma'am. HELEN: Lilly Chin's husband had just died six months
before Vincent was attacked and killed. Her son had already been shopping and looking for a
house that would have a room for his mother to live in and there was nothing more that Mrs. Chin wanted
than to have grandchildren. Even through her pain.
She was standing up, speaking up, organizing. LILY: I don't want any other mother to suffer like me.
HELEN: We began to look at the different civil rights laws.
There were constitutional law professors who came out and said, "Civil rights laws are only meant to protect
African Americans." We had to talk to them and say, no, that's not true.
As an Asian American, he was being isolated and targeted and scapegoated because of his race in this climate of hate.
So of course, civil rights laws should apply. NARRATOR: Under mounting pressure,
the Justice Department agrees to bring charges. This is the first hate-crime prosecution involving
an Asian American. Ronald Ebens is found guilty of violating Vincent's
civil rights and is sentenced to 25 years in prison. But his conviction is overturned on appeal.
Neither he nor his stepson will ever serve a day in prison for Vincent's murder.
LILY: I wanted justice for my son, this is not fair...
MEE: All the things that went wrong didn't give justice to Vincent's mom, but what it did do was it invited
Asian Americans to search our voices and demand that we are seeing beyond being the perpetual foreigner,
but that we actually belong. This is our country.
HELEN: Vincent Chin's case has a legacy that affects all Americans. Even to this day.
MEE: A hate crime now is not just an act committed on somebody because of who they are, but
because of who the perpetrator perceived them to be. That's one of the concrete legacies
of the Vincent Chin case.
NARRATOR: Mee Moa's activism led her to a career as the first Hmong politician in the U.S.
Though she came to this country as a refugee, she was elected to the Minnesota senate in 2002,
where she will serve for 8 years.
The early 1980s is a tipping point: the Asian American population flips from majority US-born
to largely foreign-born. New neighborhoods pop up all over the United States.
One of the biggest is in the heart of Los Angeles, an enclave that comes to be known as Koreatown.
ANGELA: Koreatown was a physical space where you could migrate here and never have to encounter the mainstream.
We had our grocery stores, our restaurants, watch repair stores, wig shops, you name it.
You could transact daily life without breaking into English.
ALEX: When I think about Koreatown, I really think about the Sundays with my family.
It would be like a whole day, we'd like go there in the morning, go to church service.
And then after that we'd go and have like a family meal together and my parents would go to the video store.
For our family and many families a store was like a second home. We had birthday parties there and I know a lot of
Korean American store owners had a little cot in the back or someplace where people ate meals.
(singing in Korean)
NARRATOR: Korean immigrants like Alex's parents look for opportunities where the cost of business is affordable.
For many, this means looking beyond the borders of Koreatown in places like South Los Angeles.
These neighborhoods are predominantly black and Latinx, with their own identities and histories.
BRENDA: Many people of color and African Americans in particular were disappointed, frustrated, um,
agitated about, um, social conditions, about the lack of jobs, about policing in Los Angeles.
And so you have an African American community that in some ways is like an immigrant community because we've never
been completely integrated within the society. NARRATOR: In March of 1991, the world watches as Los Angeles
police officers beat a 26 year old African American man named Rodney King.
ANGELA: Back then in the 90s, I was just a lawyer when a number of us who practiced in that area saw that video.
Our reaction was, well, it's about time the rest of the world see what happens on the streets of South LA.
MAN: We are not going to take this racist police brutality in our streets.
HELEN: Unfortunately in our Asian American community, many of the newer immigrants who come have no idea of the
civil rights history in America. ANGELA: The civil rights laws that came into effect in the
60s were the product of huge fights, mostly led by African Americans.
Sacrifices that were made by African Americans. None of this was appreciated by the majority of new
immigrants who came after the fact. ALEX: You know, my parents didn't have any understanding
that there was the civil rights movement or the history of racial equality in this country.
They didn't know anything about that. ANGELA: In South L.A. you had a region that was
historically an established African American community being transformed into a Latinx community.
There's competition for jobs. There's competition for housing.
BRENDA: Close to 70% of businesses were owned by Korean Americans. There was a notion that the shop owners had been
disrespectful, had been dismissive. MAN: Yeah, prices are high. Their attitude is wrong and they just don't seem to have
any respect for the black community. ANGELA: In the Korean community, there's an anxiety because there was a lot of news about
assaults, robberies, shootings that were being reported in,
in language news, but if you read the LA times Metro section, all you read about when it came to Koreans was
how rude they were, how racist they were. JEFF: What we see is a lot of media trying to play up
Asian and black tensions. ALEX: I'm sure that's a much easier narrative to build and
write than something about the hundreds of years of racial inequality and social inequality in America.
BRENDA: Latasha Harlins was a 15 year old African American girl who lived in South Central Los Angeles.
She went into a grocery slash liquor store in her neighborhood on March 16th, 1991 to purchase a bottle of
orange juice for $1.79. The proprietress Mrs. Soon Ja Du accuses her of stealing,
pulls her across the counter. Latasha responds by punching her, a fight ensues.
Latasha bends down to pick up the orange juice and Mrs. Du has stood up with a gun in her hand.
Latasha turns to walk out of the store and she shot in the back of the head.
JEFF: This particular incident comes to represent all these grievances that have been building up.
REPORTER: A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter. A pre-sentence report recommended the maximum
16 years, but judge Joyce Karlin imposed probation, a $500 fine, no jail time.
JEFF: This is literally 10 years after the killing of Vincent Chin.
Wasn't the equivalent to Vincent Chin, Latasha Harlins?
But in this case, certain Asian-Americans organized to support Soon Ja Du.
HELEN: And instead of being seen as a part of the multiracial coalition, suddenly Korean Americans
were seen as just like those racist LA cops who beat up Rodney King.
MAN: Go home CROWD: Go home! MAN: Go home CROWD: Go home! HELEN: People on the ground within the Korean American and
African American communities were trying to signal this could be a problem.
Then all hell broke loose. REPORTER: The verdict stunned almost
everyone except the four officers acquitted of beating Rodney King. Sheriff's deputies escorted them from the courthouse to
face a hostile crowd.
ANGELA: We had five days of looting, burning, arson,
chaos really in the city of L.A. CROWD: No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace.
ANGELA: The fire department, they felt unsafe rolling out. So the city burned.
I mean I counted at one point 19 fires going simultaneously.
ALEX: I remember the whole scene playing out on TV. Much as the first Gulf War played out on TV that it was
kind of, I don't know, infotainment in a way. REPORTER: Though the riots were sparked by the
verdicts in the Rodney King case. They were fueled by growing hostilities between blacks and Koreans.
ALEX: I remember my father said, he knew that this wasn't good. That this media narrative that Koreans and black people
were in this conflict. BRENDA: As people left South central and went up to
Koreatown, Latasha's name was heard on the streets. You know, "This is for Latasha. This is for Latasha."
ANGELA: The police were not coming to protect any of these stores. Most of them owned by immigrant families from Korea.
The Korean community itself went over the airwaves and they were calling for people to show up wherever
they could with arms. A lot of the men in the community,
first generation immigrants had served in the military ‘cause it's mandatory in Korea.
So they had firearms, they knew how to use firearms and they started defending their own stores.
ALEX: The strongest memory I have, the one that goes deepest is I had a conversation with my father,
we sat on the couch in our living room. He came and sat down next to me. He said that the violence and looting in Koreatown was
getting really bad and that he had to go and defend the store, that he had obtained a gun and that he was
going to go down there. And um...
Even now it's a very painful memory that, um, basically he may not come back.
NARRATOR: Alex's parents' store is destroyed along with more than 2,000 other Korean owned businesses.
WOMAN: This is America. We have to stand our pride.
Human dignity. Where is your human dignity? We are human beings, we have to have dignity.
We don't do things like this.
JEFF: I mean it was, it was one of those moments that actually really changed my life because it was like war had broken out and I knew people that
I deeply loved on both sides.
And for me, you know, I had come up really deeply believing in this third world strike ideal and this idea of,
of a rainbow coalition, it was like,
not just people whose lives were at stake, but also our revolutionary dreams are kind of
going up in smoke.
NARRATOR: As a result of the unrest in Los Angeles, 63 people lose their lives,
with damages estimated at $1 billion.
ALEX: Because the rioting had destroyed their businesses, my family's financial situation changed drastically,
had to move from where we were living. They were under tremendous stress to figure out what they're going to do to, like feed me and my brother.
That trauma stayed with them, like marked them as people.
I made a documentary about my family's experience with the riots.
ALEX: After the riots, my parents and I barely discussed it, so the film was a way for me and my parents
to like engage about it.
ALEX: I think about when I should tell my daughter about riots. Like when is she old enough for me to explain the riots
are part of her family's journey here in this country. I wouldn't be able to speak of our experiences in this
country, our immigrant story, without talking about that.
I recognize now the reason that Koreatown burned down. That was a neighborhood that was brought up, established,
populated by people who are themselves marginalized.
If those businesses were in the well-heeled parts of this town, do you think that the mayor would let that burn down?
Never. They would go down themselves to protect those places.
There's no way that they would let that happen. So, you know, we were victims as well, of this system.
(inaudible chanting) CROWD: We want justice. We want justice.
ANGELA: There was a consciousness that woke out of the fire and the chaos and the crisis that hit LA.
Korean America was born in 1992.
NARRATOR: On May 2nd as the violence subsides, 30,000 people gather in Koreatown for a peace rally.
ANGELA: It was a huge March that took us down Olympic Boulevard.
That kind of diversity that you would expect to see in LA. There were African Americans, there were Latinos,
there were Koreans, there were whites. Everyone was present.
We wanted to send a message that we also want justice and we also want peace.
BRENDA: We had emerging now these new leaders within the Korean American community and this leadership has been
working with African American leadership to move forward.
MAN: We have a dream as late Martin Luther King had a dream.
That we together will be able to establish a nation of justice and peace and we are here to stay.
VIET: My parents were shopkeepers. And I think it would take a little bit of time for me to think through what all these things meant.
Like every population, Asian Americans have choices to make. They can dwell on their own victimization which is a
choice that is there for every so-called minority and for the majority. They can choose to side with power or
to be complicit with power. And to be perpetrators or to at least enjoy the profits of being aligned with perpetrators.
Or they could refuse these kinds of choices and instead seek to
transform the system into something more just, more equitable for everyone.
That's the hope of activism, that's the hope of solidarity. That's the hope of alliance, that's the hope and the
conviction from which something like the Asian American movement was born.
MOM: Margaret, do you know why I encourage your brother to become a cardiologist? MARGARET: No.
MOM: Because I always knew that one day you give me a heart attack, what are you wearing!
RANDALL: In 1994 I remember "All-American Girl" coming out and it being a big deal because it was uh,
an Asian family on TV. MARGARET: I'm American, Eric is American, even Stuart is American.
Tell her. RANDALL: And I remember there being criticisms of the show and even from within like, the community,
but I remember watching it and just thinking it was like so great to see this and normalizing,
HARI: Well there was a whole group of films in like the late 90s all about like a middle class Indian life.
MAN: Leaving the house is leaving the house no matter where you go. And just be a good boy and let her do a poojah.
HARI: And they were terrible. But that's, you know, we had to create art for, for us to represent our stories 'cause they weren't being told.
WOMAN: Okay, looks nice, now smile naturally mom. MOM: I always do... WOMAN 2: You look younger all the time, how is that?
MOM 2: I give you my good skin, you will look like me when... VIET: I went to a local bookstore and came across
Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club", which had just come out. I had never seen a book before written by an Asian-American
about Asian-Americans. And even if it wasn't about Vietnamese people, it was close enough. I was like, wow, this is an amazing book.
And I can't believe the story is being told and in such a powerful way. JERRY: The kinds of stories I heard from my grandmother who
escaped to mainland China in 1949 by herself with five kids.
For my kids' generation, it's like fairy tale. It's hard to believe that war was 60 years ago.
You know, in some ways she hated the country she came from because the Communists tortured her.
She never looked back. But her mission in life was to make sure her kids
and then her grandkids had it better. NARRATOR: Jerry Yang was born in Taiwan,
and was 2 years old when his father died. His widowed mother decided to emigrate the family to America.
When he arrived he only knew one word of English, shoe.
JERRY: My mom was a single mother and I was the first born, so I was expected to go to college, get a job,
make money so my mom doesn't have to pay for us anymore. NARRATOR: Jerry is accepted to Stanford University.
There, he forms a partnership with fellow student David Filo. The two of them create a business that changes
the way that Americans engage with the world.
MAN: Do you, uh, Yahoo? JERRY: When the worldwide web started in 1989 we had this
explosion of content that you'd never had before.
David and I said, Hey, maybe we can try to keep track of all these websites that are coming online.
We had no idea that it would be a business. For the longest time it was called Jerry's Guide to the Worldwide Web.
By the end of the 1994 we were one of the largest websites in the world.
You're literally laying down the train tracks as the train is running. And you just got to stay ahead of it.
OANH: I was a young reporter in Silicon Valley, started at the Mercury News in 1998.
It was a really exciting time because, you know, the tech boom was in full mode.
You really felt this was at the center of where things were going to happen that was going to change the world.
ANNALEE: In the early 90s supplies of white and native born talent really dried up and you started to see the
influx in large numbers of highly skilled Asian immigrants.
Close to 40% of the new startups were from Asian entrepreneurs.
OANH: You know, Asian-Americans have been a very important part of the rise of big industries.
You know in the 1860s you had the Chinese who were so integral to building the transcontinental railroad.
Going into the 21st century there were Asian Americans who were becoming founders with fantastic visions.
If you were lucky enough to have gone to American schools and get a US education, Silicon Valley and that
boom was fantastic for them.
There were a lot of people who had to do the hard work of actually manufacturing the guts of what goes into
computers at the time. And those people, unfortunately though they were immigrants from China, immigrants from Vietnam,
most of them didn't have the college education that these other engineers did.
They basically would be putting transistors on circuit boards and getting paid by the piece.
For every printed circuit board that you finished. And that's why it's called piece work.
Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were using Asian immigrant workers to do piece work at home.
We ended up doing a nine month investigation into piece work in Silicon Valley.
We were looking at violations that included child labor, minimum wage violations.
So you do have kind of this barbell division, right, where you have Asian Americans at the very top who are doing
really well, who are the model minorities. And at the very bottom you also have a different
flavoring of Asian Americans who are really struggling. A lot of them were refugees like myself and my family.
You know, there weren't too many people in the "San Jose Mercury" newsroom who can go into the Vietnamese American community to ask them about piece work.
You know, in the aftermath, I just realized that as a journalist of color, I need to be able to tell the stories of my community.
NARRATOR: Jerry Yang draws from his own bicultural experience as an immigrant to become a maverick of the
internet revolution. JERRY: During the starting of the internet craze, and
starting Yahoo! I still identified as Asian American. There was no question. But especially when I went back to Asia to do business,
my identity really helped. ANNALEE: Immigrants were part of opening up India.
Apple wouldn't be in China without the help of Asian immigrants. You wouldn't have manufacturing in Taiwan.
Many pieces of the global economy are fueled by the contributions of the Asian immigrants in Silicon Valley.
JERRY: If you look at our children, they live in a more global world today than we did
30 years ago, but in many ways more divided. And for me, making sure they know who they are,
the history of the places that they come from, first and foremost, America.
You want to prepare them to be the most impactful citizens of their community that they can be.
In many ways, that's what my mom did for us by moving to the US. When people's backs are against the wall and there's
nowhere else to go, you go forward.
♪ ♪
TEREZA: I started playing piano when I was seven years old.
We couldn't afford lessons, but my dad made me practice three hours a day every day.
My parents are from South Korea. They fled the aftermath of the Korean War to South America.
I was born in Brazil and when I was two years old, we came to the United States.
Soon after my little brother was born. When I was seven years old, my dad sat the whole family
around in the living room and he said, "I have a very serious secret to tell you and that is that,
we are undocumented." My dad said that if anyone found out we were undocumented,
my parents would be sent to the South Korea and I would be sent to Brazil. My brother, who was born in Chicago,
sent to some foster care because he's a US born citizen.
That made us become muted. The fear of separation is real.
We grew up having nightmares of the police storming up our stairs and breaking our doors down
and taking our family away. NARRATOR: The piano is Tereza's sanctuary.
She gets a scholarship at a music school in Chicago. The artistic director Ann Monaco takes Tereza
under her wing. TEREZA: She proceeded to print out 10 college applications for me and she said, fill them out and bring them back to me
as soon as you can. She saw that my social security number was blank.
She saw that my birthplace was Brazil and she looked at me and said, you were born in Brazil?
I burst into tears and begged her to not turn me into the police.
She said, "Tereza, do you trust me?"
NARRATOR: Ann Monaco makes a plea on Tereza's behalf to their Senator, Dick Durbin.
DICK: Tereza Lee, under the eyes of the law in the United States was undocumented. She was in the United States illegally.
The law said the only thing Tereza could do was leave the United States for 10 years and apply to come back.
Uh, I thought that was a terrible outcome. NARRATOR: Senator Durbin drafts an immigration bill
specifically for Tereza that puts her on a path to citizenship and college, but in the process,
he hears from more students facing the same dilemma. DICK: We realized she was not alone.
There were thousands just like her. TEREZA: He needed to redraft the whole thing into a larger
bill and that became known as the "DREAM Act." NARRATOR: The "DREAM Act" would open a path to citizenship
for undocumented children who are brought to the country as minors. To qualify, they must either join the military
or attend college. They become known as dreamers.
DICK: The first dreamer was Tereza Lee. My mother was an immigrant to this country.
She didn't become a citizen until she was in her mid-20s, a mother with two children.
If you're here through no fault of your own, you ought to have a chance to prove yourself and be part of America's future.
NARRATOR: The DREAM Act is cosponsored by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch. The bill attracts overwhelming support on
both sides of the aisle. TEREZA: 2001 we had a hearing set,
62 votes were lined up and president Bush was ready to sign it into law.
I was set to perform a little concert for the senators.
I was ready to fly to DC and the subways were closed. There were no cabs available.
Everyone was talking about this attack.
BRYANT: It's 8:52 here in New York. I'm Bryant Gumbel. We understand that there has been a plane crash on the
southern tip of Manhattan. You're looking at the World Trade Center.
HARI: 9/11 happened when I was in college, so I was so far from home.
My brother went to Stuyvesant High School, which is not that far from where the Twin Towers were,
so that day was horrible for everybody ‘cause my city was attacked. I don't know where my brother is.
I'm very far away. I feel very alone. REPORTER: The terrorist attacks have united much of America,
but some Arab Americans are feeling left out. Fearful they could become the next target of misguided anger.
Since Tuesday's attacks, the FBI reports 40 hate crimes, suspected retaliation.
HARI: You had a lot of people being beaten up because they were brown skin, because they were Muslim, because they were Sikh.
REPORTER: In Mesa, Arizona, a man from India was killed at his convenience store because he looked Middle Eastern.
HARI: One of the weird parts about being a Brown person in that post 9/11 era is you get victimized twice.
Like on one hand you're afraid of terrorism as much as anybody else is at that point, like that's all you're hearing
from the media. And then your country hates you. They don't, they don't say it openly,
but when people are yelling things to you, telling you to go back to countries you're not even from cause you're from America.
WOMAN: Go home. You don't like America. Leave this country. We're proud to be Americans. HARI: You start to get the hint.
NORM: On Thursday, September 13 there was a cabinet meeting with the House and Senate,
Democratic and Republican leadership. Congressmen from Detroit, Michigan said, Mr. President,
we have a large population of Middle Easterners and Muslims and they're very concerned about all the rhetoric.
President said, you're absolutely correct. We don't want to have happen today
what happened to Norm in 1942.
MAN: Before arrival at their new quarters, the evacuees voluntarily registered. What this means for the Japs, nobody knows.
What it means to us, everybody knows.
HARI: And it didn't happen again in the same way. REPORTER: The Bush administration has been
conducting a top secret surveillance program without warrants in Muslim communities.
JEFF: What happens after 9/11 is immigration policy moves from trying to create pathways to citizenship,
to being wholly about closing the door and deporting people.
TEREZA: Any immigrant friendly legislation was out of the question. The DREAM Act was canceled and that meant that the
undocumented immigrants were at risk. HARI: It wasn't so public, let's round them up,
put them into camps. But it was like, quietly and quickly, deport people, arrest people.
Like the Ansar Mahmoud case.
ANSAR: My name is Ansar Mahmoud. I'm here for the something happening after 9/11.
That's the reason I'm here. NARRATOR: Born in Pakistan, Ansar Mahmoud moved to
New York's Hudson Valley in 2000 after his dream came true: he won a green card from the immigration lottery.
ANSAR: I liked the quiet life, you know, tried to relax. Not too many people over there, not too much noise.
All old houses. I can see lots of mountains. There's a nice river.
NARRATOR: One evening in October 2001, Ansar was taking photos of the Hudson Valley landscape
to send home to his family. He ducks behind a fence to get a better view,
not realizing he has stumbled onto the grounds of a water treatment facility.
REPORTER: DPW crews saw him and they did report to the police. Hudson PD then called the FBI who contacted INS
and the state police. HARI: And even after they cleared him, even after they said,
"Oh yea, this is just some harmless guy taking a picture," they wanted to get rid of him.
REPORTER: In searching his apartment, federal authorities found he had co-signed a lease for a
Pakistani couple who had overstayed their visa. HARI: It was fear. Fear drove all of it.
REPORTER: One big source of comfort for Mahmood is a group of people in Hudson deeply concerned about his case.
They are searching for a way to keep him here. CROWD: Free Ansar, free Ansar!
ANSAR: These people, they make my spirit high and high hope.
I still believe this country is good. It's valuable. You can live here, you can work.
MAN: Even after all that's happened? ANSAR: Even after all that's happened.
DICK: I rise today to speak about an issue which is timely and controversial.
It's the issue of immigration. NARRATOR: After September 11th,
the DREAM Act is reintroduced a number of times in the Senate, but never achieves enough votes to become law.
TEREZA: In 2012, Dreamers started organizing. (inaudible chanting)
CROWD: Now! TEREZA: For the first time we started seeing an immigration
movement, not just undocumented immigrants, but other Americans coming out to support.
HELEN: On the one hand, communities are now under intense investigation.
On the other hand, it's also brought communities together.
HARI: 9/11 happens. I go from someone who's sheltered in diversity and fairly apolitical to a politicized being.
I was an immigrant rights organizer. I worked with victims of hate crimes, people being detained and deported,
and I wanted my standup, my art form to reflect what I believed.
I hate how immigrants are talked about in this country. I was watching CNN, which was my mistake, and they were interviewing this woman in Arizona who is
against immigration, right? And she said, look, we're just trying to bring this country back to the way it used to be.
The way it used to be! Lady, you're in Arizona. It used to be Mexico.
Growing up I always felt like I had access to the world. People from all over the world. Different races, religions,
people with status, without status. Like I felt, looking back on it now, I feel like I was trained for the future.
NARRATOR: They were seen as outsiders... Dreamers who could never become American.
But they were always American. By arriving on these shores, by seeking a better destiny,
by giving their all, by building up the nation rail by rail.
By claiming their space. By striving for justice.
By struggling for the rights of all people, not just their own. They have always been American.
HELEN: History has a way of moving in cycles, and if we can learn from history even a little bit,
we can avoid repeating it. But even better than that, we can find the things that have moved civilization forward and have led to greater progress.
And if we learned from that, we can really move ahead. JEFF: The idea of being Asian American originated in part as
a will to power. As a way to be able to say we've been stepped on,
we've been excluded, we've been erased. And you need to recognize us now.
Because we're here and we're not going away.
VIET: The very idea of the Asian American contains within itself an endless range of possibilities...
Is a part of who we are! CONNIE: We honor the courage, fortitude and sacrifice of
Chinese railroad workers and their legacy in America which belongs to all of us!
ERICA: The Asian American story is such a quintessential American story because we,
as Asian Americans, have represented the polar extremes of the American experience.
The most downtrodden and discriminated against, to rising to positions of power and privilege.
To being singled out for exclusion, to being explicitly welcomed, and included, and held up,
of the very best of America. That is the story of America, and that is the story of Asian America.
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다큐멘터리 <아시아계 미국인: 돌파 (2020)> (Asian Americans - Breaking Through)에 대한 요약과 평론이다.
요약: 혐오의 파고를 넘어 권력의 중심으로
이 다큐멘터리는 20세기 말부터 21세기 초까지, 아시아계 미국인들이 급격한 인구 성장과 함께 미국 사회의 주류로 진입하며 겪은 갈등과 성취를 다룬다. 영상은 아시아계가 직면한 모순적인 현실, 즉 '모범 소수자'라는 찬사와 '잠재적 적대자'라는 혐오 사이에서 어떻게 자신들의 자리를 개척했는지 추적한다.
비극적인 기점은 1982년 빈센트 친 살해 사건이다. 일본 자동차 산업의 부흥으로 미국 경제가 침체되자, 그 분노는 아시아인 전체를 향한 폭력으로 분출되었다. 중국계였던 빈센트 친의 죽음과 가해자들에 대한 솜방망이 처벌은 흩어져 있던 아시아계 공동체를 하나로 묶는 강력한 계기가 되었다. 이들은 "우리는 더 이상 침묵하지 않겠다"고 선언하며 사법 정의를 요구하는 전국적인 운동을 전개했다.
이후 1992년 LA 폭동은 아시아계 미국인, 특히 한인 사회에 깊은 상흔을 남겼다. 인종 간 갈등의 희생양이 된 이들은 국가가 자신들을 보호해주지 않는다는 뼈아픈 교훈을 얻었고, 이는 정치 세력화의 필요성을 절감하는 계기가 되었다.
동시에 다큐멘터리는 아시아계가 기술과 문화 영역에서 이룬 눈부신 성취를 조명한다. 야후(Yahoo)의 공동 창업자 제리 양처럼 실리콘밸리의 지형을 바꾼 혁신가들, 그리고 정치권에 진출하여 정책 결정에 참여하기 시작한 지도자들의 모습은 아시아계가 더 이상 주변인이 아닌 미국의 미래를 설계하는 주체임을 보여준다. 9/11 테러 이후 불어닥친 이슬람 공포증 속에서 무슬림 및 남성 아시아인들이 겪은 차별을 언급하며, 아시아계 정체성이 모든 소수자와의 연대로 확장되어야 함을 시사하며 마무리된다.
평론: 성취의 이면에 숨겨진 취약성과 연대의 힘
<돌파 (Breaking Through)>는 아시아계 미국인의 역사가 단순히 성공 신화의 연속이 아니라, 끊임없는 외부의 충격에 대응하며 자아를 확립해온 생존의 기록임을 냉철하게 분석한다. 이 작품이 훌륭한 점은 '성공한 아시아인'이라는 화려한 겉모습 뒤에 여전히 존재하는 인종적 취약성을 숨기지 않고 드러낸다는 데 있다.
빈센트 친 사건부터 LA 폭동, 그리고 9/11 이후의 차별까지, 다큐멘터리는 미국 사회가 위기에 처할 때마다 아시아계가 얼마나 쉽게 '희생양'으로 전락하는지를 보여준다. 이는 아시아계가 누리는 경제적, 사회적 지위가 인종주의라는 기반 위에서 얼마나 위태로운 것인지를 경고한다. 특히 '모범 소수자'라는 프레임이 실제로는 아시아계 내부의 빈부격차를 가리고 타 인종과의 연대를 방해하는 도구로 쓰였음을 시사하는 대목은 매우 날카롭다.
동시에 이 다큐멘터리는 아시아계 미국인들이 이러한 위기를 '정치적 각성'의 기회로 삼았다는 점에 주목한다. 단순히 열심히 일해서 잘 사는 것에 그치지 않고, 투표권을 행사하고 목소리를 내며 시스템 자체를 바꾸려 노력한 과정은 감동적이다. 제리 양의 인터뷰에서 알 수 있듯, 이들은 새로운 기술적 영토를 개척함과 동시에 미국이라는 민주주의 영토 내에서 자신들의 지분을 명확히 요구하기 시작했다.
결론적으로 <돌파>는 아시아계 미국인의 이야기가 미국이라는 국가가 가진 무한한 가능성과 고질적인 한계를 동시에 비추는 거울임을 말해준다. 가장 천대받던 이방인에서 권력의 핵심부로 진입한 이들의 역동적인 에너지는, 결국 "누가 미국인인가?"라는 질문에 대한 가장 현대적인 답변이다. 과거의 개척과 투쟁을 거쳐 이제는 미래를 주도하는 세력으로 성장한 아시아계 미국인들에게 남겨진 과제는, 자신들이 뚫고 지나온 그 '돌파구'를 다른 소외된 이들을 위해서도 열어두는 연대의 정신임을 이 작품은 강조하고 있다.
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