Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America

6: Anti-Asian Racism: Forever Foreigners

6 Anti-AsianRacism Forever Foreigners “TheBoatPeopleOwnEverything” Asian Week, October 18, 1989 Nine months ago, Patrick Edward Purdy went to Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, and opened fire at a school yard filled with children and teachers. California Attorney General John Van de Kamp has issued a report on the shooting and possibly why it occurred. The report has generated additional heat in this much-discussed case. Many Asian Americans are gratified that a state official has focused on anti-Asian violence. Others, however, particularly people in Stockton, are incensed that the case has once again become a subject of public scrutiny. They would like the case to fade away. Asian American community leaders in San Francisco (Ling-chi Wang, Henry Der, and Dale Minami, particularly) asked Van de Kamp to investigate the circumstances surrounding the case because of suspected racial motivations of the killer. Purdy’s extraordinary deed—spraying 105 rounds of ammunition from his semiautomatic AK-47 assault rifle into a crowd of elementary-school students, killing five of them and wounding thirty others plus a teacher— horrified everyone. But Asian Americans felt a deeper chill because all those killed and most of those wounded were Southeast Asians. Many Asian Americans I talked with in the days following the incident instinctively felt that a racial motive was a factor in Purdy’s desperate behavior. Speculation at the time—January 17 and the days immediately following —included the possibility of race hatred by Purdy against Southeast 107 Asians. An acquaintance of Purdy’s was quoted in some news accounts as saying that Purdy resented Southeast Asians for taking away jobs from him and other white Americans. Stockton police officials quickly put a lid on a possible racial motive by saying that Purdy hated everyone. They closed the case because the killer had killed himself and police could find no specific evidence that directly tied his shooting spree with any hostile feelings toward Asians. Van de Kamp’s report deepens our understanding into the possible motives of Patrick Edward Purdy, a troubled individual who, according to the report, received little love and affection when he was a child and who, since the age of thirteen, was essentially on his own. He had problems with alcohol and drug abuse as a teenager and had difficulties holding onto jobs. He drifted, on the tawdry edges of society, and found a fascination with weapons and toy soldiers and a hatred of all racial and ethnic minorities. The attorney general’s investigators couldn’t find any direct evidence that linked the shooting to Purdy’s attitudes, but they unearthed plenty of circumstantial evidence that strongly suggested a racial motive. Van de Kamp called Purdy’s act “premeditated murder, carefully planned over the course of a month. And the choice of victims was not random.” The attorney general continued, “Purdy attacked Southeast Asian immigrants out of a festering sense of racial resentment and hatred. And he attacked children out of his own insecurity and cowardice.” Purdy spoke “openly and often of his resentment toward Southeast Asian immigrants,” Van de Kamp said. “He told friends and co-workers both in Oregon and in Stockton of his dislike for Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis and others. He believed they were getting money and jobs that he wasn’t getting. He also believed many of the immigrants were communists and that they would overrun the country.” State investigators learned that Purdy, two weeks before the shooting, spoke about the power of rapid-fire weapons such as his AK-47 and his resentment of Southeast Asian “boat people.” Purdy was seen watching the Cleveland Elementary School playground one morning, then watching a Stockton high school where a large number of Cambodian refugees attend. “We believe he was scouting the two schools as targets for his assault.” On the morning of January 17, before he took off for Cleveland School, Purdy told someone at a motel where the two of them stayed, “The damn 108 Anti-Asian Racism: Forever Foreigners Hindus and boat people own everything.” Those were possibly the last words Purdy said to anyone. In the aftermath of the Van de Kamp report, questions are being asked as to the value of recounting the Purdy case. An editorial in the Stockton Record expresses one school of thought. “It is simply irresponsible to conclude on the basis of one mentally deranged person’s actions, horrible as they were, that...