Curtis Chin:

That case probably changed my life in the sense of before that I was going to be a Chinese waiter for the rest of my life. I mean, it was a great restaurant, my family was out there, I got all the free food I wanted. But then that night that he was killed our families were friends, you know, my uncle was his best man.

And so you know, when we found out that Vincent had been attacked, and he was in the hospital, I immediately checked the newspapers, right, I didn't see anything reported then. I didn't see anything the next day, the next day after that, after that, it took the media 12 days before they actually covered it.

Meanwhile, everybody's coming to our restaurant asking for details about the case, what we heard had happened, that disparity between what the Chinese American or Asian American community wants to know versus what the mainstream media was covering, really made me think about, well, who gets to tell the stories, you know, and I think that when the judge only fined these guys $3,000, and they never had to serve a single day in jail.

I really thought that if the media had done a better job of telling the stories of Asian Americans, that he probably would not have given that sentence. And so in that sense, I thought, like, I, maybe I could be one of those people to go out and tell the stories of our community.

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