One of the great benefits of today’s social media – and why I urge everyone, young and old, to at least be on Facebook – is that it can connect you to people you know, people you don’t know, and maybe most surprisingly, to people you used to know. When baby boomers starting logging into Facebook about a decade ago, I...
Now that the Pew Research Center announced that Asian Americans are the "highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States," and since the buzz on the Democratic victory is the changing demographics of the American electorate, I was hoping that the national media would include our voice more in the coverage of the elections last night. Nope. Not...
It's been a hectic week and I've been traveling, so I didn't get to post any updates on Tuesday's elections. Asian Americans are making strides and gaining visibility in politics, which makes me very happy. You can keep up with Asian American politics at one of the best sources for information, APAs for Progress. In particular, New York City has a...
I love New York City's Chinatown. I spent many afternoons wandering its streets when I was an art school student in the 1970s in Brooklyn, and I spent nights wandering its streets when I worked for six months in Jersey City on the other side of Manhattan several years ago. There's no feeling like it -- crowded streets teeming with people, shops overflowing onto the sidewalks, amazing arrays of food and enticements everywhere, the sound of Cantonese and now, more often Mandarin, echoing everywhere. The streets are a tangle; they start out like a grid but then alleyways curve off and what looks like nooks hide more restaurants to try.
San Francisco's Chinatown is more of a straight line, and though it's also great, it doesn't hold the same sense of discovery that New York's does. Chicago's is good. LA's is nice. Boston's is cool too. DC's is kinda pitiful.
But New York -- THAT's Chinatown! Carved out as if it were its own country with Canal Street serving as the hard boundary between it and Little Italy just to the north, Chinatown rises above New York's energy with a spirit that's its own, and unique.
So imagine my surprise when I found out recently that that bustling district of Manhattan, along with the Wall Street area south of Chinatown, has never had a Chinese American representing its citizens and businesses in New York's City Council.
Until now, that is. Margaret Chin, a 56-year-old longtime community activist who was born in Hong Kong, is the front-runner to win that pioneering position this Tuesday. (Thanks to APA for Progress for turning me on to the CNN story about Chin.)
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).
MSNBC.com this afternoon reported that an Asian American, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had turned from studying quantum physics to combating global warming, will be named next week as President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for the cabinet post of Energy Secretary.
Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley since 2004, is the 60-year-old son of Chinese immigrants who came to the US in the 1940s for post-graduate studies at MIT. He'll be the second Chinese American cabinet member; the first is Elaine Chao, who's currently serving as President Bush's Secretary of Labor.
It's pretty cool to think that a scientist -- the ultimate geek and somewhat unfortunately, a living testament to the persistence of the "Model Minority" myth -- is going to be in charge of the greening of our country. We can call him the top national nerd. Huffington Post reports:
The national organization APIA Vote made it abundantly clear during both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, where they did a lot of recruiting and convened caucuses: Asian American Pacific Islanders are not involved enough in politics.
We're not great at getting the vote out, we don't participate as much as we could at the grassroots local level, and not enough Asian Americans run for and serve in elected office. A lot of that is cultural -- many of us are raised with the admonition: Don't bring attention to yourself. Don't make waves. The nail that sticks out gets nailed down (a particularly vivid Japanese saying that my mom has used on me).
This logic steers us away from public career fields such as news media (oops, sorry, screwed that one up, mom) and politics. Given the range of offices and opportunities, relatively few AAPI politicians have national profiles.
They include former Congressman and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, Former washington Governor Gary Locke, Congressman Mike Honda of California, current Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, Illinois Veterans Affiars Director Tammy Duckworth, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawai'i, Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawai'i... OK, Hawai'i skews the curve.
But Louisiana, which is probably not on most peoples' list of Asian-rich states, now boasts two AAPIs in nationally notable positions: Bobby Jindal (left) is the country's first-ever Indian American Governor, and as of last weekend, Ahn Joseph Cao (above right) is the country's first Vietnamese American Congressman.
The kicker: both are Republicans, which really shouldn't surprise anyone but still has some people pondering the preponderance of party affiliations among the Asian American community.
Jindal, for one, was one of John McCain's possible choices for running mate, and he's been touted as a possible presidential candidate for 2012, given his moderate social agenda and conservative fiscal outlook. Cao fled Vietnam during the Saigon with his mother (his father was imprisoned by the Viet Cong for seven years) with the wave of "boat people" refugees, and managed to defeat an incumbent Democrat in a Democratic stronghold district.
Erin and I have seen Barack Obama speak three times. We were at Invesco Field for the climactic speech he gave during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We were in the audience for his interview with CNN during the Unity Conference of journalists of color in Chicago in July. And, almost two years ago, we attended a rally in Aurora, Colorado, we were entranced by his public-speaking ability when he stumped for Ed Perlmutter, the Democratic Congressional candidate in our district.
That was months before Obama officially announced his intention to run for President of the United States, but Erin knew right then and there she'd vote for thr guy. I held out for some months, cynically thinking that because of his race, Hillary Clinton would be the more likely Democrat to win over voters. How wrong I was.
We met Ed Perlmutter the other day, when he and San Jose Congressman Mike Honda, a leader among Asian American pols, came to Sakura Square in downtown Denver, campaigning on Obama's behalf (Perlmutter is also on the ballot, but although he wasn't leaving anything to chance, Erin and I had honestly never even heard of his GOP opponent). The two men were in the area trying to ignite interest for the election in the Asian American Pacific Islander community.
