While incarcerated, Eddy Zheng exchanged writing with poets like Ishle Yi Park and published his own zines. After sharing his writing with outsiders without prison approval, he was put in solitary confinement. He remained in isolation for 11 months.
In September, 1998, Eddy’s petition for parole was approved. His parents got a room ready for him at home. He had job offers from a Chinatown youth center and a law firm, and he planned to enroll at San Francisco State. All that remained, one of the parole-board commissioners explained, was for the governor to sign off. The commissioner told Eddy, “Wait until everything is over and done with before you pack your suitcase.” But he began giving away his cassette tapes and books.
I was not expecting to meet as many Asian inmates as I did. Statistics about the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders who are incarcerated are imprecise, but it is estimated that during the nineteen-nineties this population increased by two hundred and fifty per cent. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, men in the Other category are imprisoned at three times the rate of white men. The Other female category has the highest imprisonment rate of any ethnic or racial group.
In April, 2000, Eddy became one of the first inmates in the program to earn an associate’s degree. He continued taking classes. That year, some Berkeley students arrived at San Quentin wearing yellow armbands. One of them explained that there was a strike on campus to defend Berkeley’s ethnic-studies department against proposed cutbacks. “I think that’s where I first really tried to understand more” about Asian American history, Eddy said. These students were free, and yet they wanted more.
In May, 2003, Eddy was sent to the California State Prison in Solano. As a teen-ager, he had been processed at an inmate-reception center; from the yard, he could see Solano being constructed, just across the street. Since he’d entered the system, in 1986, California had built three new universities and nineteen new prisons. The state’s prison population had more than doubled.
But the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 had expanded the categories that made noncitizen felons subject to deportation. On Eddy’s release from Solano, he was handed over toagents, who drove him to a field office in San Francisco. As the van made its way through the city at lunchtime, Eddy looked out the window. He hadn’t seen so many free people in nearly twenty years.in Marysville, north of Sacramento.
Last June, I visited Eddy in Oakland, where he lives in the hills with his second wife, Lisa, a Chinese American social worker, and their eight-year-old daughter, Abella. Eddy drives his daughter to school along the route he used to walk when cutting class. A lot of Eddy’s post-incarceration work is animated by a belief in restorative justice, which seeks to put victims and perpetrators of violence in conversation with one another. It’s an alternative to traditional models of retribution, and, when it works, the victim and the perpetrator come to understand each other’s history and recognize their membership in a shared community.
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