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AsianAmericanTiger |
| "Kimchee-scented Kleenex Fiction" |
| 2011.04.18 19:13:51 | |
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by AsianAmericanTiger
When the novel, Please Look After Mom, an emotionally charged story about seemingly outdated unconditional love and sacrifice of motherhood against the backdrop of narcissistic modern society, by Korean author, Kyung-Sook Shin, made a sensation in America, as well as in Korea earlier, it did so enough to reach the #21 spot on the hardcover fiction category of the New York Times Best Sellers list, only five days after its English version, published by Knopf, officially went on sale in the U.S. on April 5 until April 9, when the list for April 24, 2011, publication was completed.1 However, its "unofficial" initial copies released prior to April 5 by Knopf had already been selected by Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Oprah for their recommended reading lists.2 Notable among the rave reviews by many literary critics and readers of Shin's novel is that by the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Geraldine Brooks, who wrote: “Here is a wonderful, original new voice, by turns plangent and piquant. Please Look After Mom takes us on a dual journey, to the unfamiliar corners of a foreign culture and into the shadowy recesses of the heart. In spare, exquisite prose, Kyung-sook Shin penetrates the very essence of what it means to be a family, and a human being.”2 Unfortunately, its phenomenal sales and rave reviews notwithstanding, Shin's novel was, nevertheless, subjected to a scathing, culturally insensitive criticism by the resident book reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air and a professor of English at Georgetown University, Maureen Corrigan, who is also well known for her ultra-feminist values and specializes in critiquing literary works about empowerment of women.3 On the same day of the novel's official U.S. sales, Corrigan aired her critique that described it derisively as "guilt trip", "anti-city", "anti-modernist", and "anti-feminist", among others.4 Her strong contempt for the novel and resentment towards its popularity is evidenced by her comment, “If there's a literary genre in Korean that translates into "manipulative sob sister melodrama," Please Look After Mom is surely its reigning queen. I'm mystified as to why this guilt-laden morality tale has become such a sensation in Korea and why a literary house like Knopf would embrace it. (Although, as women are the biggest audience for literary fiction, Please Look After Mom must be anticipated to be a book club hit in this country.) But, why wallow in cross-cultural self-pity, ladies?"4 Corrigan ended her review with now infamous label, "the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction", that has instantly been incorporated into the titles of articles on her review, by major news media, blogs, and forums in Korea and elsewhere. It goes without saying that neither Maureen Corrigan nor anyone else is obligated to write a favorable review of Shin's novel. Whether the main theme of Shin's novel is traditional Asian values versus modern American values, as Corrigan implies, is still left up to much perspectives and serious debates among its readers, both in and outside of academia. But, in an age when globalism and multiculturalism has become the norm with the aid of digital revolution, it is particularly disturbing to see that she, as a long-time professor at a major, urban university, with students and employees from broad ethnic and cultural backgrounds, located in the capital of arguably the most ethnically and culturally diverse nation on Earth, has, nevertheless, resorted to such culturally insensitive and slighting style to criticize a work by an Asian writer which she apparently views as antithetical to her own social beliefs and values. Would Corrigan dared to describe the novel as a "watermelon-scented Kleenex fiction" if the author was African or African-American, or as a "bean-scented Kleenex fiction" if the author was a Latina? If not, have Asians become the new, politically acceptable, ethnic group to be stereotyped or picked on? Does her behavior reflect a growing uneasiness or fear towards Chinese and other Asians by the European-Americans, due to the increasing loss of economic, political, and cultural powers by the U.S. to Asia? Or, is it simply as a result of ethnocentric bigotry by at least some Westerners that has always been there, but only thinly veiled under superficial political correctness? Maybe one should not over-react, but, rather, whenever something happens, in supposedly colorblind America, that has a negative racial or ethnic overtone particularly against the disadvantaged or marginalized minorities in America, that one should simply dismiss it as just another "isolated" incident and assure himself or herself that racial relations are much better than as it appears on the surface. And, as such, must one, then, dismiss Corrigan's review as yet another isolated incident, as well, and simply move on? 1. http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2011-04-24/hardcover-fiction/list.html 2. http://www.korea.net/news.do?mode=detail&guid=54370 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Corrigan 4. http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135120998/please-look-after-mom-a-guilt-trip-to-the-big-city
Tags: korea | globalism | multiculturalism | racial relations | bigotry | culturally insensitive | Asian-Americans | Asians | Knopf | Discover New Great Writers | Barnes & Noble | Oprah’s Book Club | Amazon Best Books of the Month | Georgetown University | New York Times Best Sellers | Fresh Air | NPR | Kyung-Sook Shin | Korean author | Korean novel | Please Look After Mom
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| Unions & Racism: An Age-Old, Institutional Problem Continues Unabated |
| 2011.04.17 20:44:02 | |
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It is rather ironic that, last week, union bosses used the anniversary Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination to try to drum up support for the union cause. You see, even after all these years, racism and discrimination within the walls of the House of Labor is still very real. As noted by UnionFacts.com, since 2000, there have been over 4,200 complaints filed against unions for racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. In some cities, it is a bigger problem than in others. However, the one area where union racism seems to rear its ugly head the most often is with the construction trade unions, where African Americans are often excluded from work. Systemic racism in the building trades has been built into the construction industry as Harry Alford, President & CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, has noted
This exclusionary racial system is still prevalent today and has been the subject of much controversy in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia.
While one Philadelphia-area local has had a more than 30-year history of discriminatory practices, in 2007, the controversy erupted again when a hangman’s noose was discovered on Philadelphia’s union-only Comcast construction project. The incident prompted construction workers and city officials to rally in anger, calling for the city’s construction industry to be more racially balanced.
Rather than union bosses addressing the problem of racism, however, the offender continued working, while the victim had to go find other work.
Across the country, in California, the exclusion of minorities has led to the Aboriginal Blackmen United pushing back at the IBEW for solar-panel work. Now, in Las Vagas, it is not necessarily the workers themselves who are creating a ruckus over racist unions, but the minority owners of businesses.
Laborers’ local 872’s business manager, Tommy White, denied the group’s assertions, claiming that the black business owners are playing the race card.
Were the most recent allegations of discrimination in Las Vegas an isolated case, one might possibly believe the union boss out of hand. However, with a history of union racism prevalent among construction trade unions, it is not without reason to believe that the business owners have a legitimate case. Union bosses [most of whom are white] are trying to lay claim to Reverend King’s legacy. Yet, racism is still very prevalent in certain unions. Given this, minorities might want to consider whose interests are really being served by pairing Reverend King with today’s union bosses—and who will ultimately lose if that King’s legacy is given up.
Tags: labor | unions | racism | exclusion | African-American | workers | Pan-Asian Chamber of Commerce | American-Asian Contractors Associat
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| Diversity defines Silicon Valley, except at town halls |
| 2011.04.17 19:21:48 | |
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Posted: 04/16/2011 11:20:42 PM PDT
 Silicon Valley may have the most dynamic, multiracial society on earth, but you wouldn't know it at city hall. With the 2010 census in, minorities now outnumber whites almost 2-to-1 in Santa Clara County. Yet non-Hispanic whites hold the vast majority of local city council seats, as well as every city manager's office in Santa Clara County's 15 towns and cities. "I cried when I saw those numbers," said Ed Sanchez, a veteran community and voting-rights activist in Gilroy. A look at who holds the most powerful positions in municipal governments shows that the political representation of Asians and Latinos -- the largest minority groups in the county -- lags far behind their surging populations. Countywide, three out of four city council members are white. "It's a little bit shocking to me," said James Lai, an associate professor of Asian studies and political science at Santa Clara University. "It's a fair, rational request -- should the pool of elected officials reflect the population?" Especially since minorities together had eclipsed the number of whites in the county a decade ago and in some cities before that. The question of political equality is long-running. San Jose, for example, switched from citywide to district elections in 1981 in part to give minorities a better chance at council seats. Thirty years later, minorities hold half the city's 10 seats, but the level of racial diversity has dipped lower in every other town hall but one. Cupertino's City Council, with three Asian-American members, comes closest to reflecting the population it serves.
A number of forces and reasons, from entrenched incumbents and at-large elections to the diminished power of voting-rights organizations and low voter turnout for some minority groups, have emerged to keep local governments from reflecting the real face of the valley. At the same time, enough minorities have won election to foster some degree of optimism in new political strategies. Countywide, non-Hispanic whites make up 35 percent of the population in the county's 15 cities but hold 76 percent of city council seats. All but three mayors are white. Every city manager, the top administrator appointed by a town's council, is white. The picture of diversity doesn't improve much in the seven cities where Asians, Latinos, blacks and other people of color outnumber whites: Minorities on average hold only a third of city council seats. Moreover, five municipalities -- Santa Clara, Los Altos, Monte Sereno, Los Gatos and Los Altos Hills -- have no minorities on their councils. Terry Christensen, a political scientist at San Jose State, said there is a natural lag time of a generation or so before immigrant communities show some power at the polls. But lag time doesn't explain the dearth of Mexican-American officeholders with deeper roots here. "By 2010, the numbers should be higher," he said. The census results threw some towns into new demographic and political territory as minority-majority towns, or close to it. For the first time, whites became a minority group -- 36 percent -- in Santa Clara, a city of 116,500 blessed with some of the world's largest high-tech companies. While its long-established Latino population grew steadily to 19 percent, the Asian population skyrocketed to 37 percent. Yet the town's all-white power structure remains. Asking why sparks furious arguments here, with many  fingers pointing at incumbents for manipulating an at-large voting system to stay in power. As opposed to district voting, where candidates run to represent their neighborhoods, at-large systems force them to run citywide. Around the country, at-large voting has come under attack for allowing voting blocs to keep power long after their populations have plummeted.
Some at-large systems are tougher for nonwhite candidates than others. In cities such as Campbell, all the candidates run in a pool, and the top vote-getters fill the number of council seats that are open. But in Santa Clara, candidates must run for specific seats -- a system that diffuses the influence of newcomers. The successful candidates in Santa Clara often are members of political families with a network of connections: council members Lisa Gillmor and Patricia Mahan are the offspring of former city councilmen, and city clerk Rod Diridon Jr. is the son of a longtime county supervisor. "Santa Clara is the place with the most entrenched old-boy and old-girl network," Christensen said. Nine years ago, Mike Rod- riguez seemed to have everything going for him when he ran for Santa Clara City Council. The Latino candidate had grown up in town, gone to college and paid his dues on the city's Planning Commission. But when the incumbents didn't back him, Rodriguez said it was game over. "Even though I never had a chance after that," he recalled, "I still felt I was the best-qualified candidate." Mayor Jamie Matthews rejected any notion of racial politics. "We don't select people here by race or ethnicity," Matthews said. He pointed instead to weak Latino political activism in town, and he said he expects a more energized Indo-American community to produce a winning candidate soon. One interested outsider has the proven ability to turn Santa Clara politics inside out. Voting-rights attorney Joaquin Avila, who once lived in Fremont, won a prestigious "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation for forcing cities with "racially polarized" at-large elections to adopt district voting. He has been watching Santa Clara from his perch at Seattle University. "Santa Clara is vulnerable" to a voting rights lawsuit, he said. Avila's observation raises a question: Where have the Latino and Asian political watchdogs been? One of them, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, closed its Bay Area office several years ago. Alberto Carrillo, a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said Latino politicos became complacent after winning the battle in San Jose for district elections. "We need to take responsibility ourselves, too," Carrillo said. Meanwhile, the Asian Law Alliance in San Jose concentrated on redrawing the lines for state and congressional offices. At the same time, the county's Asian population was becoming more diverse, with many newcomers arriving from India and parts of Southeast Asia. SCU's Lai says Asians increasingly arrive and settle in new "21st-century gateway cities," where they tend to fan out as opposed to clustering in enclaves as they once did. That also makes it more difficult to build Asian political power. Consequently, Asian and Latino officeholders in some gateway cities don't see district voting as the answer. They see what state Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Mountain View, calls "pipeline development." One believer is Otto Lee, a Chinese-American and the only minority on the Sunnyvale City Council. The at-large system in Sunnyvale has been more open in practice than Santa Clara's. He and another Asian were elected in 2003, three short years after Sunnyvale became a minority-majority city. Lee said he believes district elections might get one Latino elected, but he'd rather recruit and groom minority candidates on local boards and commissions -- a pipeline to the City Council -- where they can learn how to appeal to all voters, not just minorities. That would deliver racial parity at City Hall sooner, Lee said. In another seismic result from the 2010 census, Milpitas joined Cupertino as the only cities in the county with clear Asian majorities. Both have become more than 60 percent Asian, but with very different town hall complexions. According to Lai, Cupertino's first Asian council members succeeded in feeding a pipeline to the council, which now has an Asian majority. However, Milpitas' elected minorities failed to groom successors. Today, non-Hispanic whites make up only 15 percent of Milpitas residents but have a majority on the council. Meanwhile, in South County, Gilroy became the only town with a Latino majority -- 58 percent. However, only two Latinos sit on the mostly white seven-member council. Next door in Morgan Hill, the Latino population grew to 34 percent, but there are no Latinos on the council. The city does have a black council member. Ed Sanchez, the semiretired founder of the Gilroy Citizenship Educational Program, said Gilroy Latinos should look for a model nearby in Salinas, a Monterey County town that elected a majority of Latinos to its City Council in 2004 after adopting district elections. But Sanchez says the Latino community also has to help itself, by persuading Mexican immigrants to become citizens and getting more Latinos to the polls. For a host of reasons, many of them socioeconomic, Latinos tend to turn out on election day in smaller percentages than whites, and white-controlled town halls won't fix that on their own, Sanchez said. "It has to come from the Latino leadership. It has to come from the heart." Contact Joe Rodriguez at 408-920-5767.
Tags: asian-american | asian | Latino | minorities | politics | Silicone Valley | Santa Clara | California | diversity | city council | representation
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| Competitive disadvantage |
| 2011.04.17 18:28:07 | |
High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like now?By Jon Marcus April 17, 2011
Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she’s lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong’s younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn’t sound Asian. Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet. The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed – provoked over the winter by Amy Chua’s controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces. And parents aren’t happy about it. “The entry barriers are higher for us than for everybody else,” says Chi Chi Wu, one of the organizers of the Brookline Asian American Family Network. “There’s a form of redlining or holding Asian-American students to higher standards than any other group.” Although Asian-Americans represent less than 5 percent of the US population (and slightly more than 5 percent in Massachusetts), they make up as much as 20 percent of students at many highly selective private research universities – the kind of schools that make it into top 50 national rankings. But, critics charge, Asian-American students would constitute an even larger share if many weren’t being filtered out during the admissions process. Since the University of California system moved to a race-blind system 14 years ago, the percentage of Asian-American students in some competitive schools there has reached 40, even 50 percent. On these campuses, the so-called “model minority” is becoming the majority. High-achieving Asian-Americans may be running into obstacles precisely because they work so hard. Mitchell Chang, an Asian-American studies professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the attention given Chua’s book will only make things worse. “Her characterization can further tax Asian-American college applicants by reducing the chances that they will be viewed as self-starters, risk takers, and independent thinkers – attributes that are often favored by admissions officers but rarely associated with Asian-American applicants,” Chang wrote in a January Op-Ed in The Sacramento Bee. Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that universities can continue to consider race in admissions in the interest of diversity, admissions officers deny they’re screening out Asian-Americans. However, in researching their 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans. What about the argument that, in relation to the general population, Asian-Americans are already overrepresented at universities? “It’s both true that Asians are overrepresented and that they’re being discriminated against,” says Stephen Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon who speaks out against discrimination he says Asian-Americans face in university admissions. Both things can happen at the same time, he says. Hsu and others allege that universities are more concerned about boosting black and Hispanic enrollment than admitting qualified Asian-Americans, and that old-fashioned xenophobia comes into play as well. “My personal perspective is that if institutions are using race to keep Asian-American students out, it’s based on a fear [among non-minorities] that these ‘other’ students are taking over our institutions or taking ‘our spots’ at the best institutions,” says Sam Museus, a professor in the Asian-American studies program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. At Harvard, the overall acceptance rate for the incoming class of 2015 was 6.2 percent, a record low. William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, says that among different racial groups, there are “not radical differences” in the proportions of students who got in. “We’re looking for excellence, first and foremost. And there’s excellence in every community in America and certainly lots of excellence within each one of the minority communities,” Fitzsimmons says. “We would not be doing our jobs if we were not looking for the best applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds.” Asian-Americans represent 17.8 percent, or 383, of the students admitted to Harvard last month, which is up from 14.1 percent a decade ago. During the last five years, however, the proportion there and at other Ivies has remained relatively flat or increased only slightly, even after an Asian-American student at Yale filed a federal complaint in 2006 against Princeton, where he applied but was not accepted, alleging it discriminated against him because of his race. Despite perfect SAT scores and nine Advanced Placement courses, the student said he was also rejected by Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT. (That complaint has not been resolved, a US Department of Education spokesman says.) By contrast, at California’s competitive – and race-blind – state schools, Asian-Americans are much better represented: 52 percent of the student population at the University of California at Irvine, 40 percent at Berkeley, and 37 percent at UCLA. (The ban on admissions committees considering race was upheld by a federal judge in December.) The difference suggests that, where considering race is allowed, elite universities may be handicapping Asian-American applicants. “They just all sort of magically end up with under 20 percent Asian students,” Hsu says. One Princeton lecturer has asked if that number represents the “Asian ceiling.” This issue has gotten some recent attention in the United States, but much more across the border in Canada, where it stirred a national controversy in the fall when students in a Maclean’s article asked whether Canadian universities were becoming, as the headline put it, “Too Asian?” With spiraling Asian enrollments, the magazine reported, Canadian universities were becoming “so academically focused that some [non-Asian] students feel they can no longer compete or have fun.” Some white students told Maclean’s they wouldn’t choose the University of Toronto because it has so many Asians. “You can’t really overestimate the power of stereotypes,” Museus says. (A university spokeswoman reports it hasn’t seen a backlash.) In the end, Wong’s son got into most of the colleges he applied to, including Boston University, UMass-Amherst, Ithaca College, and Drexel University. But other Asian-American high school seniors in this singularly competitive corner of the country – not only the children of middle- and upper-income parents in Brookline and other expensive suburbs, but also sons and daughters of low-income families such as Southeast Asian refugees in cities including Lowell – have had a traumatic spring. “These kids are getting pretty immense pressure from their families, because there is some truth to the idea that Asian families value education highly as a way of progress and success,” says Museus. “Then they’re getting pressure from this competitive environment that exists around Boston. On top of that, they’re getting pressure from this stereotype, which sets up the expectation that they always have to be the best. The pressure does facilitate success, up to a certain point. But it also gets to a point where it makes them feel that they can’t do anything right.” Brookline organizer Chi Chi Wu, who is a lawyer and the mother of an 11-year-old, says it may be time to fight back, using a legal theory called disparate impact. “In other areas of civil rights law, when you have statistical disparities, you can often make a case. You don’t have to prove the university is saying, ‘We don’t want all these Asians,’ but just having those statistics and being able to point to disparities is enough.” She adds, “If we Asian-Americans don’t organize, there’s no amount of piano practicing that will help us.” Send comments to
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Tags: asian-american | model minority | academia | schools | colleges | universities | admission | discrimination | students
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