05.31.07
Posted in Politics at 9:16 pm by albert_lim
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has released a statement on Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Here’s an excerpt:
“Let’s honor (Asian Pacific Americans) by rededicating ourselves to the challenges we all have in common — whether it’s protecting our civil rights, making college more affordable, or passing comprehensive immigration reform. And let’s fight for affordable, high-quality health care, so we can cover the 2.4 million Asian American and Pacific Islanders who are currently uninsured. Finally, let’s make sure that Asian American and Pacific Islanders are getting the pay and jobs they deserve by raising the minimum wage and investing in small businesses.”
For the full statement, go here.
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Posted in Weekly Poll at 2:02 am by admin
On Tuesday, May 29 2007, NPR reported a story entitled:
Chinatown Resists Gentrification
From the article:
Shing Wah Yeung is a developer who’s worked on several residential projects in Chinatown. …Yeung brought 61 condos onto the market two years ago, selling at 400-thousand to 1.6 million dollars. More than 90 percent of the buyers, he says, were Chinese-American. So even when new apartments come online, the racial demographics of Chinatown don’t change.- The lofts are selling for 1.6 million up to 5 million dollars for the penthouses.
- Gary Tai points to a six-story building, owned by the Chew Lun Family Association. There’s a large Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, and several small businesses above. Tai walks down Mott Street and points out several other buildings owned by the associations. They have 50 in all - about a quarter of the buildings in Chinatown’s historic core.
- I think there is going to be more of a higher-end retail because you have a lot of tourists, there’s a lot of traffic on Canal Street.
To some, this sounds like the story of young Asian American professionals who are actively investing in real estate in their community, Chinatown. However, to further drill in the headline “Chinatown Resists Gentrification,” the article uses phrases such as:
- “…one place that appears to be resisting the forces of gentrification.”
- “…Chinatown’s been resistant to gentrification.”
- “…these nonprofit groups own real estate, and they’re not likely to give it up.”
- “It doesn’t appear to have opened up, yet it occupies prime New York real estate.”
Why did NPR use this headline and this type of phrasing for this article?
- A) White Americans are beginning to move into Chinatown now, and that is the reason for the positive changes we see. The Asian Americans who have lived in Chinatown for more than 100 years have not improved the Chinatown as much as white Americans have. Therefore, Asian Americans living in Chinatown are considered a negative influence (resisting), whereas white Americans living in chinatown are considered a positive influence (gentrification).
- B) Main stream media likes perpetuating the idea that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners who are unassimilable into mainstream culture. By repeating phrasing such as “resisting the forces of gentrification,” “resistant to gentrification,” and “not likely to give it up,” it ensures that this idea remains in the public’s psyche so that Asian Americans will continue to be looked upon as outsiders. Highlighting the fact that 90% of new condo purchases in Chinatown were made by Chinese Americans or the fact that positive changes are brought about by Asian Americans living in Chinatown today would cast Asian Americans in a positive light, which is something that mainstream media doesn’t want to do.
- C) Asian Americans raised in this country are repeatedly fed images, news, text, ads, TV shows, and movies which teach them to be ashamed of themselves or the accomplishments of the Asian American community at large. By attributing positive changes in the community to a (mostly non-participating) white American main stream as well as down-playing the positive changes in Chinatown brought about by Asian Americans, the mainstream media ensures that we remain ashamed of ourselves. In doing this, mainstream media accomplishes two objectives: praising the accomplishments of white Americans while simultaneously obscuring and de-centralizing Asian Americans.
- D) An influx of white Americans in any ethnic neighborhood (a process also called “gentrification”) is always a good thing. In the cases of neighborhoods which were predominantly African American or Latino American, an influx of white Americans has always been the definitive cause of positive economic change in that community. Therefore, the phrasing used by this article is completely appropriate in the case of New York City’s Chinatown. Chinatown needs white Americans to raise its economic profile.
- Some other reason. Click here to type a different answer
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05.30.07
Posted in Activism and Empowerment, Community Alerts at 7:36 pm by albert_lim
Right: Vincent Chin, 1955-1982
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Vincent Chin’s murder next month, Asian Pacific Americans for Progress will host a “national townhall” on hate crimes, in at least four cities.
The events will feature panel discussions with community leaders, along with rare screenings of Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena’s Oscar-nominated 1988 documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?”
Confirmed dates and details are below, with more to follow:
- June 19 New York at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas with Councilman John Liu, New York Urban League CEO and President Darwin Davis, and OCA Executive Vice President Elizabeth Ouyang
- June 19 Grand Rapids, Mich., at the St. Mary Magdalen Family Center, co-sponsored by the Asian Victims Relief Fund
- June 21 San Francisco
- June 24 L.A. at the Japanese American National Museum with Renee Tajima-Pena, Stewart Kwoh of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Robin Toma of the L.A. County Commission on Human Rights
Imaginasian TV will sponsor receptions at the New York, San Francisco and L.A. events. For more information, go to the official APAs for Progress site.
APAs for Progress also invites you to host your own screening and discussion. Write APAFP [at] apaforprogress [dot] org for details.
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Posted in Politics at 6:48 pm by albert_lim
An Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) study finds that Asian Americans in L.A. County are hitting the polls in larger numbers, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports.
APALC, based in L.A., determined that the number of Asian American voters grew 28% between 2002 and 2006, compared with overall growth of 14% for all voters in the county. Asian Americans accounted for 9.1% of recent voters in the county, compared with 8.1% in the 2002 general elections.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Culture at 5:22 am by albert_lim
Right: Student Phuoc Tran hangs a South Vietnamese flag at UT Arlington in 2006, protesting the university’s flying of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s flag.
The Michigan Legislature has decided to let the flag of former South Vietnam represent the state’s Vietnamese American community and its contributions, and more than 1,000 Vietnamese Americans from throughout the nation have come to Holt, near Lansing, to celebrate.
The decision came after two years of lobbying by the state’s Vietnamese American community.
Thi Tran, 25, of Grand Rapids, is simple in explaining why the flag is important to him: “It’s the flag symbolizing the freedom we had before the war,” he says, and “the reason everyone came here was freedom.”
Update: On Tuesday, the City Council of Rosemead in L.A. County also voted to recognize the South Vietnamese flag.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:54 am by albert_lim
“The Romance of Magno Rubio,” Lonnie Carter’s Obie-winning one-act about migrant Filipino American farm workers in the ’20s and ’30s, has opened at The Culture Project in New York, with Ma-Yi Theater Company producing.
The play, which originally ran in 2003, is based on a short story by Filipino American novelist Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956). In it, the 4-foot-6 title character lives in poverty with other farm laborers, but dares to reach for happiness when he answers a personal ad from an Arkansas farm girl.
“Magno Rubio” tells a story of deflated American dreams, but also features distinctly Filipino elements like the Balagtasan poetic form and an escrima-stick rhythm section.
The play runs through June 17. Read Variety magazine’s stellar review here, and get your tickets here.
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Posted in Culture at 4:19 am by albert_lim
June 2 will see the ribbon-cutting for the Martial Arts History Museum in Santa Clarita, Calif., the first of its kind in the world.
The museum, eight years in the making, will trace the history of Asian martial arts through 7,000 square feet of space, touching on aspects like the Shaolin Temple, the samurai, films, TV shows and even video games. If the official Web site is any indication, the museum should be a slammin’ place to visit.
In the Atlanta suburb of Doraville, construction is scheduled to begin this fall on a planned 84-acre Asian Village. Chinese-born architect Yong Pan designed the complex, which is described as an Asian-influenced Epcot Center. (It will likely be divided into Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean areas.) The Village should be under construction for several years.
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05.29.07
Posted in Politics at 3:54 pm by albert_lim
Professors James G. Gimpel and Wendy K. Tam Cho, writing for D.C.-based political journalism organization The Politico, urge Democrats and Republicans alike to take APA voters seriously.
As Gimpel and Cho point out, APAs make up the fastest-growing minority population and are an important presence in the elections of many states. Also, APAs are a legitimate swing constituency: They’re much more equally divided in their party identification than Latinos are, and they split their support evenly in the latest gubernatorial elections and more or less evenly in the latest House contests.
For politicians seeking to win the Asian American vote, Gimpel and Cho recommend doing community outreach and acknowledging differences between nationality-specific voting blocs.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 3:40 pm by albert_lim
Right: Doing business at Nara Bank in L.A.
The L.A. Times reports on the community banks of Koreatown, which are increasingly losing business to bigger institutions.
According to the article, mainstream banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo have muscled in on the neighborhood as L.A.’s Korean Americans have prospered and blended into the social and economic scene, and this has hurt the smaller lenders that have served the community since the ’80s. (Call it the Financial Wal-Mart Effect.)
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Posted in Chinatown at 3:30 pm by albert_lim
Above: Man-li Kuo leads a weekly Mandarin class in Flushing.
The New York Times reports on non-Asian residents of Flushing, Queens, who are learning Mandarin to adapt to the population shift in their neighborhood.
“Kind of like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’” says one Italian American woman student quoted in the article. Another student profiled is an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland who hopes to hold a conversation in Mandarin by the time he’s 95.
Stories like this go to show, America’s WASP-oriented mentality is a sinking ship, and people had better learn how to swim.
Don’t believe us? Check out this story from Reuters, which goes over the latest census data: “U.S. minority population tops 100 million.”
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