In February 2020, as I was watching Dion Lim’s first report on the senior Asian man who became known around the world simply as “the can collector,” I remember fighting back waves of nausea and revulsion. I saw the reflection of every immigrant grandparent I’d ever met at Back To School Night at my majority-Asian school, and I immediately found myself hoping every other San Franciscan of good conscience was feeling as sick and enraged as I was.
San Francisco’s Asian American community is a national treasure, but most of the United States has no idea how big a slice of our demographic pie chart our Asian-American population represents. In this majority-minority city, Asian is by far the largest slice. So the attacks on our Asian seniors here have resonated strongly. In this city, anti-Asian violence leaves no one untouched.
The clip of the attack was only 17 seconds long, but it had an impact like a pebble in still water. On screen, an older Asian man in a blue jacket and baseball cap who had been quietly gathering recyclables found himself suddenly being pounded, beaten, chased, robbed, called disgusting epithets, and left bleeding and sobbing on camera while bystanders stood around unconcerned. Local security guards milled about, taking no action.
The video had been posted on Instagram, and an anonymous tipster had emailed the link to Dion Lim in the newsroom.
Lim found herself with a powerful platform — and the authority to fight back for more accurate and just representation of Asian-American experiences and stories.
Lim is a very skilled TV journalist and news anchor. She quickly put the hateful incident into both a human and a policy frame. In her interview segments with city leaders, we saw the usual performative outrage, but this time, Lim contextualized these power moves from an Asian-American perspective. When local leaders sought to shift the story’s focus onto themselves, Lim’s reporting skills drew the focus back toward the Asian experience, recentering it and making it three-dimensional. She gave it warmth, context, and a human face.
Her coverage of the story went viral.
And a few weeks later, as the Covid pandemic broke out and the Trump administration started fanning the flames of anti-Asian hate, Lim found herself with a powerful platform — and the authority to fight back for more accurate and just representation of Asian-American experiences and stories.
As Lim recounts in her new memoir, Amplify! My Fight for Asian America, that awakening was her contribution to helping launch and electrify a nationwide movement for Asian American and Pacific Islander civil rights and justice.
Amplify! is a wild ride – a front-row seat as a courageous journalist finds her way to bring Asian American Pacific Islander stories into our national conversations about who gets justice, both here in San Francisco and across the nation. It is also a story about holding leaders accountable during one of the most tumultuous — and frankly weird — periods of San Francisco and national politics. The categories of outrageous behaviors that Lim endured would make Hieronymus Bosch drink gin straight out of the bathtub: Gaslighting and Deflection by a Sitting District Attorney. Journalistic Interference with an Investigation. Retaliation by an Elected Official. Coverage of a Mourning Ritual on a Busy Freeway. And perhaps worst of all, When the Perpetrator is One of Your Own.
What gives Lim’s book its power is that, despite the truly bonkers behavior lobbed at her personally, her journalistic spine and professionalism remain intact, and that strength enables her to get the story and get it out there. She does so through sheer force of will but also through her reporter’s eye for a communicative detail. The best journalism doesn’t just tell you about what people went through – it brings you directly into the heart of their struggle. Lim notices and shares the telling details of victims’ suffering with an unsentimental but open-hearted eye.
Lim doesn’t shy away from turning her investigative eye on herself, even when it’s less than flattering. Her descriptions of the mental health toll of chasing these painful stories of hate over years and frustrations with the legal system aren’t always elegantly written, but they always pulse with what is real. It made me understand more about how journalism really is a “first draft” of history. The system may seem rotten at the time, but in a democracy, exposing the facts of hate changes people. There’s an alchemy to it, and these initial changes lead to bigger changes in a much wider sense.
By the end of the book’s journey, Lim has closed one chapter on the conventional reporting life and begun a new chapter on mentoring and advising other courageous Asian Americans to use their voices and their platforms to combat the seemingly unending onslaught of anti-Asian hate incidents and crimes.
“I used to think that change was linear,” Lim says. The message of this book for me, hammered home by one dramatic example after another, is that courage is contagious. Dion Lim has been showing us her courage for years. Now it’s our turn to meet her courage with our own.
Amplify! My Fight for Asian America | By Dion Lim | Third State Books |272 pp. | $30
