Update: 15-year-old Korean Canadian reinstated at school after being charge w/ assault; bully apologizes

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The Korean Canadian teen who fought back against a bully and won the support of his classmates has been allowed back in school.

Last week I wrote about the 15-year-old, who was suspended from school and charged with assault by the York Regional Police in a town north of Toronto, for breaking the nose of another student. The other student had been bullying him, and called him a “fucking Chinese” before hitting the boy. Unfortunately for the bully, the Korean kid (his ethnicity wasn’t identified in the earlier story) is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, the Korean martial art (his father is a master), and he defended himself with his weaker left hand, but still broke the bully’s nose.

Because the bully wasn’t initially charged (both were suspended form school however), 400 students at Keswick High School protested last week to point out the injustice. A racial bias investigation was kicked off (no word on what happened to that).

Although the school board initially recommended expulsion and blocking the Korean Canadian student from any of the district’s schools (seem pretty harsh to me — any racial bias there on the part of the administration?), they changed their minds since last week.
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Google runs into Japan’s historical prejudice over burakumin

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Google ran into trouble in japan over the use of historical maps of Tokyo that showed areas where burakumin, or the lowest caste, used to live.

Poor Google. They’re in a tough spot this time. The Internet giant has hit some cultural snags in Japan before, over how it rolled out its products in the Land of the Rising Sun. This time, they’re in trouble because Google used publicly available historical maps of Tokyo and Osaka in an overlay for its popular (and amazing) Google Earth program.

The problem is, the maps showed the locations of former villages where the “burakumin” used to live in feudal times. The locations have long since been developed with the concrete, steel and glass of modern Tokyo, but the antique map has dredged up centuries and shame, and a fresh spate of anger from the descendants of burakumin as well as government officials who’d just as soon forget that such prejudice ever existed — and apparently still exists.
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Is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month a bad idea?

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A Japanese American festival in Seabrook, NJ where the community performs a traditional Japanese obon dance

It’s May. Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I wonder, though, if this celebration of our heritage is an idea whose time has passed. I’m glad that we have our month every year, but I’m worried that we’re emphasizing the wrong things year after year.

Erin and I are starting to feel that APA Heritage Month may be counter-productive. The Pacific Citizen published a well-written piece last week, “Time to Rethink Asian Pacific American Heritage Month?” and I agree, it’s time to re-think the tradition even though it’s only 31 years old.

Last year, I wrote about how a 10-year-old Denver event, an Asian community celebration held in downtown Denver every May, needed to evolve from just Asians performing for other Asians.

It was a useful educational display back when our many communities stayed cloistered and Japanese didn’t know much about Vietnamese, and Vietnamese didn’t know much about Filipinos, and Filipinos didn’t know much about Cambodians and Cambodians didn’t know much about Koreans… you get the idea. But today, with especially young people mixing a lot more outside their own communities, it seems like a closed celebration, like preaching to the choir about the richness of our heritage. If you attend the annual event, you’ve seen many of the same performers year after year.

Even if the audience was expanded outside the Asian community, though, to the wider non-Asian population, I wonder if that would be good or bad for Asian Americans.
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Boulder, Colo. 13-year-old boys arrested for threatening to rape, kill 12-year-old Asian girl

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Two 13-year-old boys in Boulder, Colorado have been arrested (police plan a to arrest a third boy, 10) for calling a 12-year-old girl’s cell phone and threatening to rape and kill her because she’s Asian. Here’s the story from the Boulder Daily Camera. It’s more evidence that race in America is still an unsettled issue, lying just below the placid surface of even politically-correct communities.

According to Boulder police spokesperson Sarah Huntley, the three boys dialed the girl’s phone and described a violent sexual attack using explicit language:

The girl hung up, Huntley said, and they called back and left two messages telling her that she would die because of what they were going to do to her.

“The girl answered the first call, but her parents intercepted the other messages,” Huntley said. “They didn’t pick up the phone, but they listened to the messages and shielded their daughter from hearing them.”

The messages included details about damaging the girl’s female organs, Huntley said.

“In the messages, they indicated that they wanted to have sex with her because she was Asian,” Huntley said. “That is the basis for charging them with a bias-motivated crime.”

Boulder may be liberal politically and environmentally, but not always racially. In recent years, the University of Colorado — where most of the city’s Asians and other people of color can be found — has suffered a series of embarrassing racial incidents that range from vioelnce against minorities to a campus news website columnist satirically declaring “war against Asians.”
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Asian Canadian 15-year-old fights back against racist schoolyard bully

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If you’ve ever been taunted or attacked by a bully but never fought back, you have to applaud this kid as a hero. A 15-year-old Asian Canadian (the newspaper story by the Globe and Mail never states the kid’s or his family’s name) fought back at a bully and broke his tormentor’s nose, got suspended from school but inspired a walkout of 400 fellow students in support.

The 15-year-old black belt thought he was doing his tormentor a favour when he elected to fight back with his weaker left hand.

He had heard his white classmate throw an angry racial slur in his direction after an argument during a gym class game of speedball, and now the student was shoving him backward, refusing to retract the smear.

The white student swung first, hitting the 15-year-old with a punch to the mouth.

The 15-year-old heard his father’s voice running through his head: Fight only as a last resort, only in self-defence, only if given no choice, and only with the left hand.

His swing was short and compact, a left-handed dart that hit the white student square on the nose.

The nose broke under his fist, igniting a sequence of events – from arrest to suspension to possible expulsion – that has left the Asian student and his family wondering whether they are welcome in this small, rural and mostly white community north of Toronto, one that has been touched by anti-Asian attacks in the past.

The 15-year-old, the only person charged in connection with the April 21 school fight, faces one count of assault causing bodily harm.

This week, 400 students at his high school walked out in protest — even though he is shy and hadn’t made a lot of friends, they supported his defiance of bullying and racism.
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