By Andrew Li-ren Wang
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 31, 2002

As a journalist, author, and activist, Helen Zia has been an influential voice for pan-Asian unity and political empowerment. She has also been an outspoken feminist and supporter of equal rights for gays and lesbians, many times finding herself at the confluence of race, gender, and sexual orientation issues. In her career she has repeatedly made the cause of disenfranchised people her own and told stories to the world.

Ms. Zia was born in New Jersey in 1952, the daughter of immigrants from Shanghai. At the time, there were less than 150,000 Chinese Americans in the country, most of whom were concentrated on the West Coast. As a child, she was proud of her heritage, though admittedly, she had little concept of the meaning of being Chinese in America. Her sense of cultural self-identity was fundamentally shaped by a society filled with stereotypical caricatures of Asians, in which any discussion of race was limited to black and white and the term "Asian American" had not yet been coined.

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Ms. Zia joined with the nascent Asian American movement, heightening her level of awareness of her role as a person of color. Princeton in the early 1970s was dominated by whites of privileged background, from the highest levels of the administration to the undergraduate population of roughly 4,000 students. Ms. Zia and other Asian American students founded the Asian American Students Association and joined with other minority students to form the Third World Students. In 1971, as part of a larger protest against the war in Vietnam, the Third World Students organized an overnight sit-in at the campus library, for which she was in charge of security. It was at the rally following the sit-in, at which she spoke before a crowd of hundreds about the inhumanity of the war, that Ms. Zia began to discover her voice and the power her words had to influence people.

At the same time, she came into her own as a feminist, blazing a trail as a member of one of the first coeducational classes at Princeton. As an activist for two distinct minorities on campus, she saw that the fault lines of each movement cut across the other. For the first time, Ms. Zia realized that she occupied a unique position as a person equally devoted to both feminist and Asian American issues who could bridge the gap between them.

In 1976, following two difficult years in medical school, Ms. Zia decided to move to Detroit to discover, as she describes it, "what it meant to be an American in America's heartland." There she experienced first-hand the frustration of the failing American auto industry. In this tumultuous climate, she became a journalist, writing on labor organizations for the Detroit Metro Times and Monthly Detroit Magazine. Because of Detroit's small Asian American population and the non-existent demand for news related to that community, Ms. Zia very rarely wrote on Asian American issues.

This changed with beating death of Vincent Chin by disgruntled white autoworkers in the summer of 1982. The incident and the light punishment that followed for the killers evoked a visceral reaction from the Chinese American community in and around Detroit. Ms. Zia was one of the founding members of American Citizens for Justice (ACJ), a group with the expressed purpose of claiming justice for the death of Vincent Chin. Her work in publicizing the case eventually led to a federal civil rights trial in which one of the killers, Ronald Ebens, was convicted of violating Chin's civil rights. This decision was later overturned, though a civil suit found the killers liable for Chin's death and mandated that they pay the Chin family $1.5 million. The work of Ms. Zia and the ACJ on behalf of Vincent Chin is chronicled in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Who Killed Vincent Chin?

In the years since, Ms. Zia has continued to give voice to Asian Pacific Americans who ordinarily would not have spoken out when face to face with discrimination. The result of this work was her book, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. It was at once a journalistic work recording the history of Asian Americans' continued fight for self-identity and empowerment and a series of personal anecdotes telling the stories of Ms. Zia's life against the backdrop of the Asian American community's continued progress. Ms. Zia tells the history of Asians in America from the first Filipino settlers in Mexico in the 1500s to the struggles of a diverse group of communities today. She discusses, among other subjects, the perceptions of Asian Americans in the popular media, the conflicts that rage between Korean American grocers and African American communities in Los Angeles and New York City, and the continued struggle of Asian Pacific Americans for a political voice, particularly on the national level. She also discusses the struggles of South Asian cab drivers for workers' rights and the fight for acceptance and rights by Asian American gays and lesbians.

In 2001, she published My Country Versus Me, the story of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese American nuclear scientist falsely accused of being a spy for the People's Republic of China. A staunch opponent of racial profiling, Ms. Zia has written articles and spoken out against discrimination in the federal workplace and malicious characterizations of Chinese American political campaign donors. In 1997, she testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the impact of the campaign finance hearings on the perception of Asian Americans. She also wrote a complaint to the Commission, charging Congress, both major political parties, and the news media with racially discriminatory treatment and coverage of Asian Americans.

As a journalist, Ms. Zia's work has appeared in A.Magazine, Essence, The Nation, The Advocate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Detroit News, OUT!, Arizona Republic, and numerous other publications. She is also the former executive editor with Ms. Magazine, and continues to act as a contributing editor. In 1995, she attended the Fourth United Nations World Congress on Women as part of a delegation of journalists of color from the United States.

Ms. Zia sits on the board of the San Francisco chapter of Asian American Journalist Association, and has received numerous honors for her journalistic work, including being named Chinese American Journalist of the Year by the Organization of Chinese Americans in 1998.