January 7, 2010
Denver’s Bhutanese, Burmese community need your help
It's amazing how many coats and jackets a family can accumulate over the years, and how many are left hanging in the closet, hardly ever worn. This week, I took a bunch of coats to the Asian Pacific Development Center to be distributed to one of Denver's newest immigrant communities, the Burmese. The APDC is a non-profit that offers health and social services to the local Asian communities, and Erin serves its the board of directors. The APDC conducted a food and goods drive for the Burmese over the holiday season, and is still accepting donations at its three locations: 1544 Elmira Street in Aurora, 1825 York Street in Denver and 6055 Lehman Drive, Suite 103 in Colorado Springs. Last summer, the APDC helped collect donated school supplies for students from both the Burmese and another Asian immigrant community, the Bhutanese. Because many Asian communities have been in the U.S. for two, three or even four or more generations and we've assimilated into American society, it's easy to forget that there are recent immigrants from Asia who are not as fortunate as those of us from Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and other countries, whose families came here to seek better opportunities. In the case of the Burmese, and also the Bhutanese, another recent Asian immigrant group, they've arrived in America as refugees, like the waves of Vietnamese, Laotians and Hmong in the 1980s and '90s. The Bhutanese and Burmese refugees fled an oppressive regime or have been resettled from refugee camps across the globe. But unfortunately, once here, they're facing more oppression: In the past year, both Bhutanese and Burmese students were singled out and attacked in the Denver area. The first attacks were reported last spring; on December 11, a group of Bhutanese students were beaten and robbed after getting off a bus and one required emergency room treatment. The Denver Police Department distributed special cell phones to Bhutanese that are set to dial 911 in case of future attacks, but the community understandably would prefer the violence just stop. In the Denver Post story following the attacks, one Bhutanese refugee said:"If they kill me and my son, what will my daughter and wife do?" said Dambar Bhujel, father of an 18-year-old victim, who is now wary of letting his son go to school. "At first, I was happy to come to the United States. After one year, I'm feeling very bad and I don't want to stay longer. But we can't go back to Bhutan and we can't go back to Nepal," Bhujel said. "They told us America was secure."
I know I spend a lot of posts writing about the ongoing racism and stereotypes that Asians face in the United States. That's my passion, and it's important to me. But I'm also aware that racism exists all over the world. At its worst, that's why genocide still goes on, after all. And, I'm sad to say, racism is rife in Asia, even (especially?) in Japan, the country of my birth and family roots. It's a tribal instinct to separate people by ethnicity, and we just have to constantly work at rising above those instincts in the 21st century, when we live in a much smaller and much more intertwined world.
My mother, who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. in the mid-1960s with my two brothers and I when my father (himself Japanese but born in Hawai'i) was transferred stateside for his federal government job, is about as old-fashioned as they come. She's been in the U.S. for over 40 years, but she's still FOBish ("Fresh Off the Boat") in a lot of her values, even today. When I called my parents to announce that my first wife -- who was European American -- and I were going to get a divorce, her first comment wasn't anything sympathetic. She said bluntly, "See? I told you you should marry Japanese."
Thanks mom, for the support.
So I was saddened but not exactly surprised to follow the controversy in China over Lou Jing, the Shanghai-born college student who's shown in the video above, singing on "Go! Oriental Angel," China's version of "American Idol." Lou (pronounced "LOH") is mixed-race. Her mother is Chinese and her father, whom she's never met, was African American. She's a beautiful young woman, and a talented singer (her favorite performer is Beyonce). That's a picture of Lou with her mother on the TV show, above.
But she's such an unusual sight in China that the TV show labeled her "Black Pearl" and "Chocolate Girl," and the media picked up on her inclusion in the show and made her a national racial sideshow. In a cultural switch from the "You speak such good English" line that Asian Americans get in the U.S., she's grown up hearing people ask how she can speak such good Chinese. "Because I'm Chinese" is her answer, of course.
Following her appearances on the TV show, the Chinese blogosphere became filled with hateful comments aimed at both mother and daughter, venting outrage that her mother would have sex with a black man and calling Lou all manner of names and telling her to leave China (she will if she gets her wish for post-graduate study in the U.S.).
There are a lot of different ethnic groups in China, and they don't all get along, as witnessed by the recent 
UPDATE: THIS EVENT IS NOW 
I should just shake my head and mutter, "Kids these days, what were they thinking." But I have deeper feelings than that, and I'm terribly saddened by the 
We attended a birthday party of sorts last night, except there was no cake. Ever since Japan stationed a 
The new movie "
On our recent trip to LA, and a previous trip to San Francisco, I've been obsessed with buying various versions of the Maneki Neko, the iconic Japanese cat statues with upraised paw, holding on to a gold coin with the other paw.
"Maneki Neko" translates literally to "welcoming cat," and its paw beckons to people in the Asian style, palm out and fingers moving down to say "yo! come here!"
I grew up seeing these cat statuettes everywhere in Japan, so they're a part of my childhood memories. I always liked seeing them in Japaneses businesses here in the U.S. But in recent years, the Maneki Neko, which is supposed to bring good fortune, wealth (if the right paw's raised) or more customers (if the left paw's raised), has become a familiar site at all sorts of Asian businesses from Korean restaurants to Asian gift stores and souvenir shops. There are a dizzying array of neko styles, shaoes and sizes.
I keep buying tiny porcelain ones, but this time in LA, I had to have a silly plastic one that's solar-powered with three cats -- one large one and two kittens -- whose heads bob back and forth. Some solar powered ones wave their paws, but something about the bobbing heads makes me smile, so I have it on my cube wall at the office.
Unlike the many Chinatowns that serve as ethnic cultural enclaves in many American cities from coast to coast, and the increasing numbers of districts variously called "Koreatowns" and "Little Saigons," you won't find many Nihonmachi, or Japantowns. There are lots of reasons for this, but the main one is probably the Japanese American community's need to assimilate into mainstream America after the shame and humiliation of being imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. In the 1950s and '60s, most JAs moved into suburban America and avoided clustering in ethnic Japanese areas.
Denver has