While prior labor struggles in Chinatown, including the 1982 garment workers’ strike and the 1980 Golden Palace protests, had been led by adult workers, radical youth were at the heart of 1995’s protest against Jing Fong management. Many had been inspired by the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, where hundreds of demonstrating students had been killed by government-deployed troops in 1989. The news coverage and accounts of Tiananmen had been politically formative for many Chinese-American students, who took what they had absorbed from global social movements and implemented it in their own neighborhoods.
"The students in 1989 fought oppression. And what we're doing here, we're saying, students are gonna fight the oppression in Chinatown."
For youth with parents working in the garment factories or the banquet halls, the labor violations were not just a matter of political principle, but the very foundations of their lives. Virginia Yu, one of the hunger strikers, reflected, "For 18 years, I've watched my parents, ever since they've came to America, they've had to come to this (indistinct) of being treated like second class citizens. And after watching them, I know I had to fight for my own people." The students on hunger strike were instrumental in bringing attention to the fight for the Jing Fong staff's rights. Their strike lasted seven days, and by its conclusion, news cameras and reporters were on the ground to document it. Virginia's sister, Betty, a documentary filmmaker who was also on the ground protesting, later turned her footage from her experience into a short documentary film, Resilience (2001), found in the next section.
