In New York, Indictment of an Officer Divides Chinese-Americans

In Chinatown in Manhattan, it is the ultimate feel-good holiday: a time for joy, for festive red bunting and for stocking up on dumplings and rice-flour cake. Discord and heavy thoughts, according to custom, can wait until after the Lunar New Year.

But even as Phil Gim, a businessman in Whitestone, Queens, sent holiday greetings to friends and relatives in China through WeChat, a popular social media app, he found himself preoccupied with grimmer news. Churning through WeChat was a torrent of messages denouncing the indictment this month on manslaughter charges of Peter Liang, the Chinese-American police officer whose ricocheting bullet killed an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in a housing project stairwell in November.

The shooting came as the country awaited the decisions of grand juries weighing charges in the deaths of two other unarmed black men: Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, who died on Staten Island after an officer placed him in a chokehold during a confrontation. Now, Mr. Gim and others said that with the Brooklyn grand jury’s decision to indict Officer Liang, he “is being sacrificed for all the injustices that happened.”

“The climate is crying out for the indictment of a police officer,” Mr. Gim said last week at a restaurant in Flushing, Queens, where he and other supporters of Officer Liang had gathered for dim sum.

For Chinese immigrants in New York City and elsewhere, recent events have provided an opportunity for a rare public reckoning with one of their adopted country’s most volatile fault lines. Though Officer Liang and one of the two New York officers killed in an anti-police ambush in December shared a Chinese heritage, Chinese-Americans have so far figured little in the debates over police misconduct and racial injustice that have roiled the country.

That figure has grown tenfold in the last 25 years. That it is not bigger, she said, is both a cause and a symptom of how little mainstream political power her community can claim.

“We are very vulnerable,” she said. “We don’t speak up.”

Jia Guo and Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on February 23, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: In City, Indictment Of an Officer Divides Chinese-Americans. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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