“Breathin’ ”: Guangzhou Immigrant Eddy Zheng’s Inspiring Story

For a KUCI Subversity Online interview (recorded 22 April 2016) with Eddy Zheng, director Ben Wang and composer Scott “Chops” Jung, click here:

Eddy Zheng

One could say that Eddy Zheng (left) made something of himself despite being incarcerated at San Quentin prison for 19 years plus another two in immigration detention.   The Cantonese immigrant from Guangzhou, China, was only 16 when he waved a gun and participated in a home invasion.  

While he buffed up his body from careful exercise, he also took care of his mind. Reading about Asian American and other people of color struggles in the prison library – led him to enhance the collection as he managed to get the prison authorities to add many more books on such struggles.  He petitioned the authorities to implement Asian American studies in prison – instead he got put in solitary confinement – the hole – as punishment for daring to ask that.

Ben Wang, director

In the meantime, he earned an associate degree by enrolling in a prison program. And through it all, the activist community reached out to him, offering him support even as he got turned down repeatedly by the parole board, until the last time, which was successful.  But then he was placed in immigration detention because he was not able to apply for citizenship while incarcerated.

In the end, it was through a gubernatorial pardon (from California Governor Jerry Brown) that led to his deportation case being ended.  Eventually he was officially released in 2007.   Now free, he managed to get San Quentin to implement Asian American studies.

This man, now 47, remains committed to community service, and through an intermediary, successfully reached out to the mother he victimized when he was 16, with his written apology (in Chinese) accepted.

Scott "Chops" Jung, composer

Director Ben Wang (above, right) has put together a tightly edited documentary, "Breathin': The Eddy Zheng Story," on the power of reconciliation and redemption and about how writers like Helen Zia (author of Asian American Dreams and other works) inspired this inmate to commit his life to community work, while even within the dark recesses of solitary confinement. 

The film screened twice at the 2016 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.  -- Daniel C. Tsang.

 Photography © Daniel C. Tsang 2016.

Trailer for Breathin': the Eddy Zheng Story from Ben Wang on Vimeo.

Here's also a Cantonese audio interview found online:

Documentary "AOKI" on Asian American Black Panther Party co-founder

Richard Aoki (left).

2012 Update: Shocking revelation: Aoki an FBI informant? See CIR Online report.

Updated: To listen to this edition of the Subversity show, click here: . Technical difficulties precluded recording the entire show, however.

Not many people know that an Asian American radical helped start the Black Panther Party. That may now change with directors Ben Wang and Mike Cheng's documentary, AOKI, profiling the life of Richard Aoki, a militant Japanese American, interned as a kid in Topaz during WWII, who hung out with Black militants Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and was part and parcel of the Black Panther Party that formed out of the neighborhoods of Oakland, California, advocating self-determination for oppressed Blacks.

Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program, talks with directors Wang and Cheng about their documentary on Richard Aoki, who was a radical student at Merritt College and UC Berkeley. He served as Field Marshall in the Black Panther Party, training its members to stand up against police abuse and police occupation of their community. Aoki also founded the Asian American Political Alliance at Berkeley and was active in the Third World Strike there. Aoki is the subject of an ongoing biographical project, Sumurai among Panthers, by UC Santa Barbara Prof. Diane Fujino, who appears in the documentary.











The Subversity interview airs 3 May 2010 from 5-6 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County, Calif., and is simulcast via kuci.org.

The documentary AOKI will show Tuesday, 4 May 2010 at 7 p.m. at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, screening at the Downtown Independent Theater, 251 South Main St (Between 2nd and 3rd Streets), Little Tokyo, Downtown Los Angeles.

DVD copies of AOKI are available from Eastwind Books. See link for more information including where to request institutional orders.

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival closes Thursday 6 May 2010 with a screening of the Hong Kong film, "Bodyguards and Assassins" (Teddy Chan, director), at the ARATANI/JAPAN AMERICA THEATRE, JAPANESE AMERICAN CULTURAL COMMUNITY CENTER(A/JAT, JACCC PLAZA), 244 South San Pedro St., (Between 2nd and 3rd Streets), Little Tokyo, Downtown Los Angeles. The film depicts a plot to kill later Chinese Republic founder Sun Yat-sen in 1906 in Hong Kong. The real-life Sun actually attended my secondary school in Hong Kong before he overthrew the Ching dynasty.