"Vincent Who?" was the question on people's minds as well as the name of the documentary shown on Tuesday night at the Peeler Auditorium.
Director of the Cultural Resource Center Vivie Nguyen, organized the viewing event after receiving a forwarded email regarding the documentary, which is about the historic hate crime murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 in Detroit.
"I just thought it was something that our campus hasn't really seen yet and in terms of Asian-American activism, something important to bring to the forefront and hate crimes in general," Nguyen said.
In addition to watching the documentary for free, students and guests were invited to a reception in the Peeler Art Center lobby prior to the viewing where they could eat Asian-inspired dishes and talk to Curtis Chin, the creator of the documentary.
Curtis Chin is used to these types of events for his documentary, having toured to over 300 colleges for the viewing of "Vincent Who?"
A native of Detroit, Curtis Chin testified in his documentary after the viewing during a question and answer session that he knew Vincent Chin and remembered the incident occurring when he was a child.
"I vaguely remember being in the back of my parents restaurant and someone coming in and saying that Vincent had just been attacked," Curtis Chin said.
However, this event didn't really affect him until he was a grown man with a career in writing for television. He only decided to make the documentary after returning home to Detroit after his parents were in a car accident, and his father had passed away.
"When I was back [in Detroit], I was sort of having a little mini mid-life crisis with what was I doing with myself, writing bad TV shows...there's got to be something more meaningful to life,'" Curtis Chin said. "That's when I thought back this case as something that really impacted me."
Curtis Chin received a surprising wave of help from many people as he began to work on the documentary. One man from San Francisco raised all the money to fund the documentary because he simply remembered the case and wanted him to do a good job.
Before he had even finished the film, Curtis Chin had invitations from 12 colleges asking to come screen it.
Considering only a few people out of the around 25 that attended the screening knew about Vincent Chin, everyone learned more about the incident and about civil rights movements in the Asian-American community, including senior Rebecca Zucker.
"I was glad I got to learn about this issue, about a community that I'm apart of and didn't know about before," Zucker said.
The film mostly consisted of testimony from Asian-Americans involved in the Asian-American civil rights movement as well as historical footage from protests after the murder. Zucker would have liked to see a larger perspective of accounts of the event though.
"I would have liked to have testimonies from people outside of the Asian-American community and see how [this issue] has affected people overall," Zucker said.
No matter what attendees got out of the presentation, these events are important for the DePauw community in order to grow towards the direction of equality for everyone.
"My goal for DePauw is creating a culture of awareness," Nguyen said. "There is a lot to be done in terms of equality on several fronts... I think it is important to understand the historical context about how far we've come and how far we've yet to go with these types of issues."