---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stanley Sue <ssue@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 8:02 AM
Subject: [AAPA Members] Tribute to one of our Past Presidents
To: "members@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <members@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Shium Andrew Chen <shiumchen@xxxxxxxxx>
I wanted to send everyone this tribute from APA, in the event you have not
seen it. As you know, Andy Chen was one of our AAPA Presidents. His
courage, determination, dedication, and concern for social justice are
revealed in this tribute. Thanks, Andy, for your many contributions!
Stan
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION MEMBER CENTER
[image: PsycIQ] <http://psyciq.apa.org/>
- Your Membership <http://psyciq.apa.org/your-membership/>
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23 Feb 2017
Shium Andrew Chen and 50 Years of the Asian American Experience
<http://psyciq.apa.org/shium-andrew-chen-50-years-asian-american-experience/>
by Drew Costley <http://psyciq.apa.org/author/dcostley/> | in Community
<http://psyciq.apa.org/category/community/>, Public Interest
<http://psyciq.apa.org/category/public-interest/>
APA Fellow Shium Andrew Chen has written extensively on the issue of
cultural inclusion of Asians through psychological identity and
acculturation. (Photo: Drew Costley)
Shium Andrew Chen, PhD, drove all night from Slippery Rock, Pa., to
Raleigh, N.C., one night in July 1989. He was spurred to action by
<http://articles.latimes.com/1992-06-21/opinion/op-1247_1_bigotry>the
murder of Jim Ming Loo
<http://articles.latimes.com/1992-06-21/opinion/op-1247_1_bigotry>, a
Chinese American, who was killed by two white brothers, Lloyd and Robert
Piche. The Piche brothers admitted to not liking “Orientals,” as they
called them, and harbored resentments originating in the Vietnam War. After
hearing about the murder, Chen went to support the family and community in
its pursuit of justice in the situation.
“We spent two hours listening and comforting Loo’s crying parents about
their loving son who was ready to enter [college] as a freshman that fall.
It was heartbreaking to learn that Jim's 11-year-old brother knelt in front
of his brother's portrait without saying a word for a whole month,” Chen
said. “At 8 a.m. in the morning we met with the community task force,
helping to solidify their effort. I attended the court hearing of the case.
The murderers were found guilty and sentenced.”
For Chen, the Loo case was similar to the murder of Vincent Chin
<http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/man-convicted-vincent-chins-death-seeks-lien-removed-still-owes-n478766>
in 1982 by two white American autoworkers, who, according to Chen, were
influenced by media coverage of the booming Japanese auto industry
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/30/theres-a-dark-side-to-buy-american/?utm_term=.0d0eb405306a>.
Like Loo, Chin wasn’t of the country of origin that the assailants sought
to discriminate against, but he was Chinese American.
“He was killed by Caucasian Vietnam War veterans and they saw an Asian, but
he wasn’t even Vietnamese. . . . I link their attitudes to violence in the
media and the media portrayals of Asians, so that’s resulting in that type
of violence.” Chen was among the first wave of psychologists researching
and/or writing about the impact of violence in mass media on violent
behavior. In 2003, *Developmental Psychology* published a study conducted
from 1977 to 1992 titled “Early Exposure to TV Violence Predicts Aggression
in Adulthood
<http://www.apa.org/pi/prevent-violence/resources/tv-violence.aspx>.” He
was also among the first generation of academics in the past few decades
writing about the media’s portrayals of Asians and its impact on American
perceptions of Asians
<http://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2381&context=gc_etds>
.
The perpetrators of the murders in the both cases were convicted for their
crimes, but they received different sentences. Robert Piche was convicted
of second-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and Lloyd Piche
was convicted of misdemeanor assault in the case of Loo. Ronald Ebens and
Michael Nitz were charged with second-degree murder, but were convicted of
manslaughter in the case of Chin.
For Chen, these cases represent a nearly 50-year exploration of implicit
learning, ethnic identity, the causes of violence both against Asian
Americans and in general, and ways to prevent it.
“I dream about world peace. Any problem, whether it be diplomatic or
otherwise. I think it can always be addressed with psychology,” Chen said.
“That’s why I [talk] about cultural adaptation and psychological identity,
basically because we feel that we are different, but if we share with each
other and share or accept or adapt to each other, we can solve a lot of our
problems. . . . [It’s like] with China. They are building their military
because the U.S. threatened their country in the South [Asian] seas. . . .
If you are planning peace, you have to practice peace yourself.”
“I hope that the racial problems, the ethnic problems can be solved by
navigating our individual psychological identities and psychological
interchange of our attitudes,” said Chen.
Chen, a longtime Fellow of the American Psychological Association, was an
early psychologist to explore implicit learning, the learning of complex
information in an incidental manner, without awareness of what has been
learned. This type of learning has become known as one of the causes of
racial and ethnic discrimination
<http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/inquiring-minds-david-amodio-your-brain-on-racism>.
Chen said that media portrayals of Asians, combined with depiction of
violence in the media, play a large role in the discriminatory attitudes
that lead to violent crimes like the murder of Loo.
For Chen, it was the atrocities that he saw growing up in Japanese-occupied
China, along with the humanistic Eastern philosophies of Confucius and
Mencius, that inspired him to become a psychologist.
Chen was born in 1931 in the Jiangsu province in eastern-central coastal
China, the same year that Japan invaded Manchuria, a region that is now
referred to as Northeast China, in what many considered to be the beginning
of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The war, during which between 17,000,000
and 20,000,000 Chinese civilians died according to Michael Clodfelter’s
(1992) book *Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference
<https://www.amazon.com/Warfare-Armed-Conflicts-Statistical-Reference/dp/0786412046>*,
served as a backdrop for his childhood.
He was witness to and a victim of these atrocities. “Witnessing atrocity
during childhood years affects one's personal development and attitude,”
Chen said. “When I was in my teens, each time I entered the city gate, I
had to bow down to Japanese soldiers holding their guns with bayonets on
them. And one night, we had to hide in a small boat under tall weeds in a
creek while Japanese gunboats were sweeping with machine gun overhead.”
This time in his life made Chen feel “desperate for safety, peace,
security, love, and all of the other human ingredients.”
He found comfort in the philosophies of Confucius and Mencius, who
emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social
relationships, justice, and sincerity.
“They provided me very much with the base, the roots of interest in people
and interest in psychology,” said Chen. In 1949, Chen emigrated from Taiwan
to the United States to continue his studies in psychology at the
University of Oregon and then at Teachers College, Columbia University.
He was quickly confronted with being an ethnic minority in a country mired
in racial segregation and untrusting of those from outside of traditional
Western European culture.
It took him a long time to acculturate to American society. Chen said he
learned that ethnic minorities have to negotiate with their indigenous
ethnic culture, the minority realm that is imposed on them by way of being
a minority in a society, and the mainstream culture that exists in a
society.
“[I acculturated] because of my kids. They are Americans. . . . One of my
boys was in the Boy Scouts, I remember vividly one scene. His Boy Scout
leader kept saying, ‘You are Chinese,’ and my son said ‘I’m not!’ He said
‘You are. You are Chinese,’ and he was almost in tears,” Chen said.
At the time he was living in Butler, Pa., a formerly all-white town where
his family was one of the first two minority families to arrive. Because
Chen was so focused on his studies, he said, he hadn’t realized how
discriminatory Americans could be toward Chinese Americans. The experiences
of his children, his research on the aforementioned hate crimes and his
becoming president of the Organization of Chinese Americans opened his eyes
to what was really going on around him.
“I didn’t realize how badly the Chinese were mistreated until I was in the
Organization of Chinese Americans,” Chen said. “I had no idea how badly the
Chinese were treated, especially laborers in the early days of this
country.”
In addition to bringing to light the discrimination that Asian Americans
face, Chen has identified issues related to seeking and receiving mental
health services.
Regarding his 1985 paper “The Need for Relevant Psychology for Asians,”
Chen said, “I emphasize the value of psychology, but psychology is still
foreign to people in general,” adding, “especially to Asian Americans
because they are unaware of it. Maybe not because of them, but because of
the exclusiveness of American culture itself. Personally, I feel my work,
Asian American psychologists’ work, is a success, even though the awareness
level is low.”
For example, when he joined the Association of Asian American Psychologists
(AAPA) in 1975, it was somewhat monolithic in its scope, focusing on
building unity among Asian Americans and attempting to tackle the issues of
the Asian American community as a whole. But now, Chen said, the
organization has several subgroups – an LGBTQIA+ group, an East Asian group
and a South Asian group, for example – that focus on individual identities
that Asian Americans form.
Now retired, Chen hopes his body of work can contribute to the struggle for
a better life for all ethnic minorities. He’s written a memoir titled* My
Journey to Becoming Chinese American – A Memoir of an Asian American
Psychologist and His Search for Ethnic Identity* that’s currently being
edited.
“They say that I retired from psychology,” he said. “But I never retired
from civil rights and my work, the memoir I’m working on, is a continuation
of that.”
Stanley Sue
ssue@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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