Eddy Zheng’s Asian American Experience Behind the Bars and After
Eddy’s life journey inside and outside of prison as a Chinese immigrant sheds light on the untold side of Asian American experience, your Friday long read from the New Yorker
We go to The New Yorker for this week's long read by Hua Hsu, read the whole article “An Education While Incarcerated” We include key excerpts below to convince you it’s worth your time.
From the first time stepping on American soil to partaking in gang violence as a teen, from ICE detention center to organizing POC solidarity
Eddy wanted to prove that he was tough. He and another teen robbed a gambling house in broad daylight. He worked nights as security at a brothel in San Francisco, sitting at the window with a walkie-talkie and a shotgun. He remembers watching one of the sex workers seated at the bar between shifts. She was bathed in red light, hunched over, long hair flowing down her back, writing a letter to her boyfriend in prison. It was one of the first times Eddy thought about what it would be like if something went wrong.
On January 6, 1986, Eddy and two other teen-agers invaded the home of a family who owned and operated shops in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They ambushed the parents at gunpoint when they returned to the house at night, and locked the children in a bathroom. They tied up the husband and hit him. They tore off the wife’s clothes, threatened to rape her, and pretended to take compromising photos of her with an unloaded camera. They spent hours in the family’s house. At one point, Eddy wandered into the living room and noticed a toy robot. He began playing with it, momentarily forgetting where he was. He was sixteen.
Eddy and one of his accomplices drove the wife to the couple’s shops, ending up at one on Jackson Street, where they took anything that looked valuable. The police pulled them over as they were driving the wife home—Eddy had forgotten to turn on the headlights.
His parents had no money to hire a lawyer. A behavioral analyst described Eddy as a “lost soul,” incapable of making any decisions on his own. Older criminals had assured him that, as a minor, he wouldn’t receive serious punishment. His family was ashamed of what he had done. His father thought that he should just admit wrongdoing and beg for forgiveness. “It was very Chinese,” Lili recalled. Eddy was tried as an adult and convicted of sixteen felony counts, including kidnapping. He was sentenced to seven years to life.
Underscored
I met Eddy in the winter of 1998, as he awaited news of his release date. I was volunteering as part of a program administered by Patten College. Most of the volunteers were Berkeley undergraduates, and we were drawn to the program for various reasons. Earlier that year, I had volunteered at a conference of activists, scholars, and artists in the emerging prison-abolition movement. I was already working with so-called at-risk youth in the East Bay. Now I saw clearly what it meant for there to be a pipeline from underserved schools to prisons.
I was not expecting to meet as many Asian inmates as I did. Statistics about the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders who are incarcerated are imprecise, but it is estimated that during the nineteen-nineties this population increased by two hundred and fifty per cent. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, men in the Other category are imprisoned at three times the rate of white men. The Other female category has the highest imprisonment rate of any ethnic or racial group.
Eddy wanted more from San Quentin’s classes, so, in 2002, he and three other inmates, Stephen Liebb, Viet Mike Ngo, and Rico Riemedio, circulated a petition to have ethnic studies incorporated into the prison’s curriculum. Eddy had managed to avoid getting into serious trouble for sixteen years, but now he, Mike, and Rico were put in solitary confinement. Eddy was guilty of sharing his writings with outsiders without prison approval.
Chaddha recognized that Eddy needed not just a lawyer but a political campaign. Chaddha started the Asian Prisoner Support Committee with Yuri Kochiyama, a longtime activist who had been a confidant of Malcolm X in the sixties. The committee’s immediate aim was to support Eddy, Mike, and Rico, who became known as the San Quentin Three. Mike and Rico were eventually transferred out of solitary. But Eddy, who was technically still eligible for parole, remained in isolation for eleven months.
Bottom line
Eddy says that when he was in prison he had a “narrower range of emotions.” “He had a kind of intensity to him,” Wang, the former U.C. Davis student, recalled. People who knew him back then still sense it sometimes. These days, he is often seen as famous or well off; after all, he’s a philanthropist. “That’s a certain image,” Eddy told me. “But in daily life I have issues—family issues, marital issues. I have my own life, the traumas that come with post-incarceration.”
I asked Eddy if, when he was in prison, it was hard to imagine life on the outside. “It wasn’t difficult,” he said. “The sky did not change much. The clouds, the mountains, they did not change. But the people, the life style, the technology, everything changed. Even though we get access to television and radio, people from the outside, we’re not part of it. I’m not part of that world anymore. To look beyond the wall to see the mountains—you see the razor wire, you see the wall, the paint is peeling. You got to look beyond that to see the mountains.”
In prison, he explained, you lose your perception of time. Routine keeps you sane, and yet you live with a constant sense of anticipation, subject to institutional whims. You keep secrets for guards or officers, and then one day they turn on you for being overfamiliar.
At times, it feels as if the only people who truly understand Eddy are those with whom he experienced the “fellowship” of incarceration. Eddy, Mike, and Rico—the San Quentin Three. They once stood in the yard and looked up at Mt. Tamalpais, in Marin County. “Freedom is close enough,” Eddy remembers saying to himself. “It’s torture.” They promised one another, “One day, we gonna climb up there.” More often, they focused on the yard, to avoid putting themselves through that anguish.
Read the whole article here.
Resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection. Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.
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