Chinese Americans of Lexington

莱镇华盟(CALex)

H.3361 Public Hearing 1/30/2018

On Tuesday, January 30, 2018, this is a day to be remembered in history of Chinese Americans in the United States. Nearly 1,000 Chinese Americans from all over Massachusetts gathered in the State House to attend the public hearing to oppose H.3361, a Bill initiated by Rep. Tackey Chan to single out Asian Americans for data disaggregation.

Here is the public hearing summary.

  1. The hearing at the Gardner Auditorium (with a capacity of 600 people) was overwhelmed with close to 1000 attendees (as some attendees left early and opened the space for other participants).
  2. The hearing started at 1pm. There were so many people registered for testimony that the hearing was supposed to last 11 hours into the midnight! Even after Chairwoman Benson cut off the presentation time per speaker from three minutes to one minute at about 8pm after a short break , the hearing ultimately ended after 9pm.
  3. It is an unexplained mystery how the majority of H.3361 supporters were scheduled for early speech while  the opponents, many of whom arrived at 9-10am, signed up for spoken testimony in front of the line, but most were not able to give speeches until 4 hours after the hearing started. We are waiting for explanation.
  4. During the H.3361 hearing, both the supporters and opponents were wearing colored tags (blue-color for “Yes” and yellow-color for “No”). From what we observed, more than 80% of attendees were wearing the yellow-color “No” tag (which can be easily confirmed by the video recording later released by the State House).
  5. Lexington was among the communities with the largest number of attendees at the hearing. Eight panels from Lexington with a total of 23 residents testified orally. Most importantly, all the 100+ on-site participants from Lexington were wearing the “No” tag! There was no single supporter of H.3361 from Lexington!
  6. CALex showed Chairs and Joint Committee members over 1800 signatures in opposition of H.3361. There are 663 paper signatures from all races including 71 Cambodian Americans and over 1100 online signatures from over 70 towns/cities including Lexington, Newton, Acton, Andover, Allston, Boston, Quincy, Woburn, Worcester and so on. Over 1000 online signatures have be collected in less than one week (from Jan 24 when the public hearing was announced to Jan 30, the day of public hearing)! Thanks to all participants for the signatures to oppose this Bill!
  7. Representative Chan and Representative Wong testified in front of the Joint Committee, along with multiple panels of bill supporters:
    • The main point of support is to facilitate state-level service (e.g., bi-lingual community service, healthcare research, etc.) for Asian subgroups.
    • We did not hear any other significant reasons beyond the above.
  8. There were more than 50 panels of opponents testified in from of the Joint Committee, who came from all kinds of places in Massachusetts:
    • The #1 reason is that H3361 singled out  Asian American, which touched the fundamental basis of fairness and equality.
    • People testified and explained all other reasons/concerns that lead to the opponent of this bill: Asian Registry, ethnicity tracking, data privacy protection, redundancy of desegregated data, ignorance of implementation cost, questionable allocation of government resources, etc.
    • Moreover, many people testified with their personal stories, from which we could certainly feel their emotional pain!
  9. CALex also organized carpool for Lexington residents who went for public hearing.

 

Here is the 8-hour video recording of the public hearing from 1pm to 9pm on Jan. 30, 2018 (from https://malegislature.gov/Events/Hearings/Detail/2861/Video1):

CALex organized 8 panels (usually 3 persons to provide spoken testimony each panel) for the public hearing to oppose H.3361. Here is the timeline in orange for each panel (panel 8 didn’t get a chance to speak before the team left).

  1. Voices of Minutemen (3:17pm) — 2:07:30
  2. Parents Panel (4:23pm) — 3:14:50
  3. Greater Boston Professional Network (4:54pm) — 3:45:20
  4. Lexington Friends (5:22pm) — 4:14:00
  5. CALex (6:08pm) — 5:00:00
  6. Battle Green Youth Club (6:25pm) — 5:18:20
  7. Belfry Women’s Club (7:09pm) — 6:00:10
  8. Youth Metro North Team (8:22pm)