On Jan. 11, 2023, an Indiana University student was stabbed as she rode a Bloomington Transit bus, because she looked Asian.
From the city council dais this past Wednesday, District 5 representative Shruti Rana mentioned the incident, calling last week “a poignant one for our city, in that it marks the one-year anniversary of the racially motivated attack on the Asian American IU student who was stabbed while riding a city bus.”
Last year, in the wake of the attack, an early February solidarity rally in Dunn Meadow was organized by the Asian Pacific Islander Public Affairs (APAPA) Indiana chapter. At the rally, IU neuroscience student Katelyn Wo told the crowd, “Even our little bubble at IU Bloomington is not, and never has been, a safe place for Asian and Asian American people.”
Giving remarks this past week that supported the “never has been” part of Wo’s statement was Helen Zia, a journalist and activist for Asian American and LGBTQ rights, who was visiting from California. Zia recalled the shooting of IU student Won-Joon Yoon on July 4, 1999, by a white supremacist who had singled out minorities in two states.
Zia’s remarks came as part of an event that re-launched AAPA Indiana as Hoosier Asian American Power (HAAP).
The relaunch was held in the I Fell Gallery on 4th Street, the same building that is home to Rainbow Bakery.
The HAAP team includes co-chairs Melissa May Borja and Michelle Waugh Dahl along with Melanie Castillo-Cullather, Katherin Chi, Maria Douglas, Ami Gandhi, Monica Heilman, April Hennessey, Shruti Rana, and Ellen Wu.
As part of the HAAP launch, Dahl gave Zia was a chance to talk about her history of activism, which includes her work as a journalist, writing about the racist killing of Vincent Chin in 1982, near Detroit. Chin was beaten to death by a Chrysler plant supervisor, and a laid-off autoworker.
Zia’s own work history includes a couple of years working at a Chrysler factory. She told The B Square that as a young community activist in the late 1970s, friends had said to her, “If you want to know about social change in America, you should go to the heartland of America.”
Zia went to Detroit specifically, she said, to get to know the labor movement. It was not hard to get a job in the auto industry at that time, she said, because it was booming. She got a job as a large press operator in a metal stamping plant, two weeks after applying for it.
Zia described what the work was like. “Rolls of steel come down, and they have to be cut by these gigantic 100-ton hydraulic press things.” She added, “Then they get shaped and you can’t just make a shape automatically—you have to have it go through a process. “Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. … It’s loud. It’s steel on steel all day long.”
Zia said she was not the only woman who was working in the factory, but she was the only Asian American woman there.
In her remarks to the group who had gathered for the launch of HAAP, Zia gave some advice to young activists. “If you want to change the world, or change any part of it, it’s not going to happen overnight.” She continued, ”You’re not expected to have the answers—the main thing is to do something, because the alternative of doing nothing is being part of the problem.”
Zia told young activists: “Don’t expect to do the kind of things that you see on social media or whatever.” She wrapped up the point like this: “One step at a time is a huge step forward, every step.”
Photos: HAAP launch (Jan. 18, 2024)
As horiible and painful as the violent events were It is perhaps not irrelevant to note that the recent stabbing case may have it roots primarily in mental health issues and that the 1999 murder spree originated in Chicago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Independence_Day_weekend_shootings
“My mom suffers from severe mental illness,” Tyler Pottorff said in an email to a Herald-Times reporter. “I feel sorry for the victim, so sorry, it’s a sad situation all around but people need to know how bad my mom has been crying for help especially in the last couple months,” he wrote. “People need to know that she’s mentally ill and this is not her.”
A competency hearing is scheduled for January 31.