Tag Archives: hmong

My New Year column written for the JACL’s Pacific Citizen newspaper

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I’m the chair of the editorial board of Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper of the JACL. Below is my column in the New Year’s issue of the PC. I wanted to post it here and also add even more current concerns given President Trump’s rocky first three weeks, his eyebrow-raising relationships with world leaders (including Japan’s Shinzo Abe, which merits a separate blog post), the currently on-hold Muslim travel ban, and the wild ride of national security issues climaxing — with possibly more climaxes to come — in the resignation of Trump’s National Security Adviser. On top of all the political insanity in a dangerous and shifting world, racism and prejudice still loom large, not just against African Americans, Latinos, Muslims and Jews but also against Asians in America.

The photos at the top are mirror images of anti-Asian ignorance. The first is from a news story today about racist graffiti on the Minneapolis home of a Hmong American family; the other is a very similar message on a Japanese American family’s home 75 years ago. This year we mark the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066. We need to think about that document’s impact on America, and hope we don’t make the same mistake today.

Here’s my column:
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It never stops: Minneapolis radio station’s racist parody stereotypes Hmong

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Racist morning show team in Minneapolis

Via Angry Asian Man: Look at this nice-looking, monochromatic morning show team and tell me you’re not surprised that they came up with a racist parody of an Eric Clapton song that stereotypes the Hmong, a population that’s concentrated in the Twin Cities area.

I dare you to listen to the song and not be disgusted, saddened and appalled.

Here are the lyrics:
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Minneapolis rally to announce Supreme Court case over police brutality in the death of 19-year-old Fong Lee

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The family of Fong Lee, a Minneapolis Hmong teenager who was killed in 2006, is holding a press conference and rally this weekend to announce they’re taking the fight for justice to theSupreme Court of the United States.

They say that Lee, who was 19 years old when he was shot by a Minneapolis Police Department officer, was wrongfully killed when he was riding his bike with some friends. Lee was shot eight times — five after he was already down on the ground. The MPD claims Fong was selling drugs near an elementary school and pulled a gun on the cops.

The officer, Jason Andersen, a rookie at the time, was later accused of unnecessary force in another case, and has been fired twice from the MPD. An all-white jury found that Andersen didn’t use excessive force, and the family appeal was denied. So now Lee’s family is taking their wrongful death case to the Supreme Court.

Fong Lee was sot 8 times by the Minneapolis Police DepartmentThere are a lot of hinky elements to this story. The family claims the police planted the gun, which was in the possession of police from an earlier robbery. There are clips of surveillance video at the school, which shows Andersen in pursuit of Fong, and Fong doesn’t appear to have a gun. The shooting happened out of the camera’s range. There are no fingerprints on the gun.

The large Twin Cities Hmong community is understandably upset and rallying behind the Lee family, and even the media are questioning the official version of the killing. This will be a SCOTUS case to follow.

Thanks to Slanty at Slant Eye for the Round Eye, who lives in Minneapolis and wants to bring the case some national attention.

If you’re in the Minneapolis area, you should try to make the announcement and rally on Saturday. It’s being held at 2 pm at the elementary school where Fong Lee was killed: Cityview Elementary School, 3350 North 4th Street, Minneapolis.

Here’s the full text of the press release announcing the rally:

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Mee Moua next up on visualizAsian.com’s AAPI interview series

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Minnesota State Senator Mee Moua is the first Hmong elected official in the U.S.A couple of months ago, when Erin gave a training workshop for young Asian Americans at the Rise Conference in Denver, she asked the assembled youths their ethnic backgrounds. One woman stod up and said she was Hmong. She said all hger life, she’s had to explain her heritage when people ask “What’s a Hmong? There’s no country called Hmong!”

But now, she said, “I just tell people, H-M-O-N-G. Google it.”

That got a big laugh out of the crowd, most of whom were familiar with the history of the Hmong. But most people in the U.S. are woefully unaware of the Hmong.

Clint Eastwood’s mostly terrific movie from earlier this year, “Gran Torino,” exposed more people than ever before to the history of the mountain tribe of Southeast Asia, and how the CIA recruited them to fight a shadow front out of Laos during the Vietnam War. When the US pulled out of Vietnam, we left the Hmong hanging, and the Communist Pathet Lao government rained retribution on the Hmong.

Although we’ve relocated many Hmong refugees in various communities in America, thousands are still trapped in refugee camps in neighboring Thailand where they escaped from Laos. The communities are where the US government resettled the Hmong include Michigan, where “Gran Torino” takes place, California, Texas, Colorado (we have a thriving Hmong population in the Denver area) and Minnesota, where the first-ever Hmong American elected to office is a state senator.

So, Erin and I are thrilled to announce the next guest on visualizAsian.com’s AAPI Empowerment Series: Minnesota State Senator Mee Moua. The interview will be held Tuesday, July 7 at 6 pm PDT (9 pm EDT). Continue reading →

‘Gran Torino’: Clint Eastwood among the Hmong

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Clint Eastwood in a scene from his new movie, "Gran Torino."

Clint Eastwood, who looked at one of the most famous battles of World War II through the eyes of doomed Japanese soldiers in the 2006 film, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” is now lookng at Asian Americans and racism in an upcoming movie, “Gran Torino.”

Eastwood plays a racist Korean War veteran and retired Ford factory employee, Walt Kowalski, who’s been beaten down by life. The only two steadfast things in his life are his 1972 Gran Torino, an artifact from the glory days of Ford muscle, and his M-1 rifle, an artifact from the glory days of American muscle. Everything else around him is going to hell: his wife has recently died, he’s estranged from his grown kids, and to his dismay, his rundown neighborhood is becoming over-run by Asians.

The incoming foreigners are Hmong, not Korean. Eastwood’s character gets to know the Hmong family that moves in next door after their 16-year-old son tries to steal his Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. Predictably, Eastwood at first hates them but then grows close, and protects them against the gang.

The movie’s trailer shows some typical interactions between a cranky white man and black neighborhood punks and scary-looking Asian gang members. Knowing Eastwood, I bet the plot is more complicated than the predictable scenes in the trailer, though.

This is the first time a Hollywood movie has taken a deep dive into the Hmong community, so it’s an opportunity to teach Americans about their history and culture, and of the AAPI culture of second generation Hmong Americans.

Besides Eastwood, the movie stars a group of first-time actors, most if not all Hmong (no hiring of non-ethnically accurate actors just for the right “talent” or “star power” a la “Memoirs of a Geisha”), and the casting was featured in a series of interviews in a Hmong news site, Suab Hmong Radio:
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