Winning against the odds

Invited by SXSW to speak at its conference held from March 11-20 in Austin, Texas, Eddy Zheng, founder and president of New Breath Foundation, could easily be taken as yet another successful Asian American among many.

Spending 19 years in prison for a home invasion crime he committed when he was a teen, Zheng is anything but a stereotypical model Asian American－well-educated, with a good job and good pay.

Zheng immigrated with his family to the United States from Guangzhou and settled in Oakland, California, in 1982 when he was 12.His parents were busy making a living, and he became a latchkey kid, mostly alone with limited English.

"It was challenging. I didn't understand what the teacher was talking about. There was nothing to help me adjust to the culture and education system," Zheng says.

As a teenager who left a familiar environment and all his connections, he needed to find a place to belong and fell in with other delinquent immigrant kids who also didn't conform with mainstream society.

At 16, he and a few other teenagers committed a home-invasion crime against an Asian American family. The crime escalated and turned into a kidnapping and robbery. He was caught, charged and tried as an adult.

Without much understanding of the American penal system, he admitted to his crime following his parents' advice, assuming that, by doing so, he would get a lighter sentence. After just three and a half years in the US, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In the prison system, Zheng noticed the segregation of incarcerated Asian Americans. "It doesn't matter where we come from, if we don't fit into the category of white, black or Hispanic, we are just lumped as 'others'. The over representation of black and brown in the prison system overshadows any other smaller minority," he says.

When he first entered prison, he focused on how to navigate the system and survive. "I had no idea of the ripple effect of my actions on the victims, myself, my family and the community," Zheng says.

Fortunately, the importance of education, one of the core values shared by many Asian Americans, was drilled into Zheng by his parents and grandparents. It ended up saving him from his situation.

He started to learn English and some practical skills. After earning his GED, a high school equivalency diploma, he immediately got a better job that paid 23 cents an hour instead of 19. "Later I learned how to type and got 35 cents an hour," Zheng says.

Zheng credits generous and kindhearted volunteers, who were "progressive folks", for his ability to climb out of the hole he was in.

"They volunteered and went into the prison system to help support the prisoners. Through the process, I was able to engage scholars, professors and graduate students. When I engaged them, I was really inspired," Zheng says.

He turned to a fellow inmate with a PhD for advice on how to become well-read. The fellow inmate pointed to the classics section in the library: "You read from this aisle to that aisle, you will be well-read."

While he was reading Shakespeare, Plato and the like, it dawned on him that there were no books about Asian culture, history and philosophy. After 911 happened, he witnessed scapegoating was also going on inside the prison, where inmates of Middle Eastern descent were blamed as terrorists and accused of causing harm to America.

"I realized that they are not offered the opportunity to learn about each other's history and culture," says Zheng, adding that only by learning about the culture and history of others, would people be able to humanize each other.

He signed a proposal to advocate such learning and was put in solitary confinement for 11 months as a result.

As Zheng learned how to think critically, he wanted to understand why he committed the crime and how to move on. "Through the education process, I learned this idea of how to hold myself accountable for the harm I inflicted."

He wrote an apology letter to one of the victims. "Her embracing of my apologizing to her－it really demonstrates her true sense of humanity and compassion," Zheng says.

Zheng was released after serving 19 years in prison, but was immediately detained by the Homeland Security Department and served with a deportation order because he wasn't a US citizen. He was imprisoned for another two years. However, he kept fighting for his rights and eventually became a citizen in 2017.

Since gaining his freedom in 2007, Zheng has been active in various community and civil organizations. In that year, he published Other: An Asian and Pacific Islander Prisoners' Anthology to tell his story. A documentary film, Breathin'－The Eddy Zheng Story, was released in 2011.

In 2017, Zheng founded New Breath Foundation, a philanthropic organization offering services for Asian American and Pacific Islander immigrants, refugees, people impacted by incarceration and deportation, and survivors of violence.

Since its inception, the foundation has provided close to $3 million dollars for its causes.

"We have to address systemic racism, we have to address white supremacy, and we have to address the patriarchal society we live in that perpetuates harm on women or gender-nonconforming folks," Zheng says.

Zheng says he wants to use his experience to create alternatives to incarceration, alternatives to inflicting harm and alternative ways to address personal and public safety.