These pages were recently updated:

Key Contests: 7/18/10
Asian-American Candidates: 8/20/10
2010 Election Results: 8/12/10 

Agenda for America: 5/8/10

Obama on Asian American Issues: 6/13/10
APA Vote in Presidential Elections: 5/23/09

Hot Topics: 1/12/08


Affirmative Action Backfires: 7/3/10
Asian American Faculty: 5/8/10
"Asian American Politics" in the News: 12/23/09
Black Women's Plight: 5/8/10
Colleges: 4/11/10
Colleges: 2009: 5/3/09
Colleges: 2010: 6/2/10
Free The North Koreans: 7/10/09
Hall of Shame: Asian American Associations Which Support 
Reverse Discrimination Against Asian Americans: 6/3/07
Hall of Shame: College Admission Officers: 4/11/08
Hall of Shame: Dime a Dozen: 3/9/09
Hall of Shame: Regents of the University of California: 6/24/09
Hall of Shame: Roy Pearson: 8/4/09
Hall of Shame: South Philadelphia High School: 7/7/10
Hall of Shame: TV Medical Shows (Bigots for the Left: 
Asian American men do not exist): 5/2/10
Hate Crimes: 8/20/10
Law Schools 2009: 10/25/09
Laws Against Asian Americans: 8/14/10
Links: 12/30/09
Medical Schools: 12/24/09
Medical Schools 2009: 11/3/09
News: 8/20/10
Statistics: 5/23/10
Statistics: Asian Americans in California: 5/16/09
Statistics on Reverse Discrimination: 7/18/10
Universities Against Asian Americans: 7/5/09
Veterans: 7/5/10
Voting Records: 8/17/10

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    Bigots for the Left who cast Asian American men as doctors in TV medical shows: only two in 50+ years: "Three Rivers": Daniel Henney as Dr. David Lee; “House, M.D.”: Kai Penn as Dr. Lawrence Kutner; Kenneth Choi as obstetrician in first season, episode “Maternity” which aired December 7, 2004, and anonymous Asian American men who appeared on the hospital’s board of directors and disciplinary 
board.  
    See  Hall of Shame: TV Medical Shows    

    Evil corporations which feature Asian Americans in commercials: 
    Asian American men: AT&T, Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser),  Bank of America, Barclays Global Investors, Capital One, Careerbuilder.com, Circuit City, Cisco, Citibank, Comcast, CSX, Dodge, Domino's, Edward Jones (stock brokerage), eHarmony, ESPN, FedEx, Gillette, GlaxoSmithKline, Hillshire Farm, HughesNet, Intel, Kashi (health foods), Mars (candy), McDonald's, NFL Network, Nortel, Procter & Gamble (Bounce sheets), Range Rover, Schick, Solvay Pharmaceuticals (Trilipix), State Farm, Subway restaurants, UBS, UPS, U.S. Postal Service, Verizon Wireless, Volkswagen, Wendy’s
    Asian American women: American Express, Audi, Bank of America, Bausch & Lomb, Best Buy, Brittoni, Cisco, Cort, CVS pharmacy, Dunkin’ Donuts, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Franklin Templeton, Geico, General Motors (Cadillac), Hyundai, IBM, Ikea, Intel, Kellogg, Kraft,  Lowe's, Marriott, 
MassMutual, McDonald's, MFS Investment Management, Michelin, Microsoft, New York Times, Pfizer, Quiznos, SAP (software), S.C. Johnson, State Farm, Target, TD Waterhouse,  U.S. Trust, Visa, Volvo, Wells Fargo
    Both: American Express, Boeing, Citigroup, Disney, Geico, Hartford, Hilton, Lowe's, Olay, Priceline, Samsung, Shell



8/20/10 Philadelphia Inquirer: "Radnor family assaulted and robbed, possibly because they are Asian,"
by Bonnie L. Cook
    Lisa Lee, 17, thought she was dreaming at 3 a.m. Wednesday when she opened her bedroom door in Radnor Township to find a stranger wearing a bandanna across his face and holding a gun.
    "Make a noise and I'll hurt you," said the intruder, pointing the gun to her head.
    Struggling to emerge from sleep, Lee heard the sound of a scuffle downstairs and her father, Jei Lee, crying out in pain.
    "I began crying and screaming, 'Don't hurt my dad,' " she said Thursday during a doorstep interview in the three-generation family's tree-lined neighborhood near Bryn Mawr Avenue and Glenwyn Road.
    "Tell your dad to cooperate, or I'll hurt you," the bandit said. "Give me the money."
    And the family did, Lee said, handing over to four armed and masked bandits $3,000 in cash from Jei Lee's wallet and $23,000 saved by Lee's aunt in her room upstairs.
    In all, the four men escaped with $26,000, a computer owned by Lee's brother, the family's jewelry, and a 52-inch TV. The men were described by police as wearing dark clothing with white or black-and-white bandannas, with two more than six feet tall.
    Jei Lee, who works at a dry cleaners in Wayne, was pistol-whipped by one of the intruders and was bleeding profusely from a scalp wound when officers arrived, his daughter said. He required treatment at a nearby hospital, but was able to work Thursday.
    John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp., said Thursday that Asian American business people were being targeted by criminals, and that the activity seems to run in cycles.
    "I'm not sure why they come in spurts, but they do, and it's unfortunate. Part of the pattern is that the criminals follow the merchants home," he said.
    Investigators spent from 3:37 until 9 a.m. Wednesday processing the house, but could find few clues because the intruders wore gloves, Lee said.
    Police Sgt. Andrew J. Block, of the Radnor investigations unit, said by e-mail Thursday that no arrests had been made. No one saw a fleeing vehicle, Block said, and the TV had not turned up.
    He said that officers were trying to learn if the family was targeted because it is Asian. All four robbers were described as African American.
    But Lisa Lee said she had been told by police that the businesses her two uncles own - a dry cleaners at 15 W. Seventh St. in Chester, and Brewers Outlet, a beer distributor at 48th and Spruce Streets - may have been the link.
    "If you have an OK-looking car and own a business, they think you might have money," Lee said she was told, adding it was possible the bandits followed her uncles home.
    Other Asian families have been targeted for home invasions in recent years. One resulted in the death of businessman Robert Chae, who suffocated after being bound too tightly with duct tape by intruders on Jan. 9, 2009.
    Chae, 58, of Montgomeryville, owned a beauty supply store in Center City. He and his family were tied up and robbed of $15,000 to $20,000 in cash, jewelry, and a bank book.
    Seven people were arrested in connection with the crime. Two are serving life prison sentences for second-degree murder, a third is serving 16 to 32 years, a fourth was acquitted, and the others, including Chae's nephew, are awaiting sentencing.
    Chin said part of the problem may be the economic downturn. Another piece, he said, may be the reluctance of recent immigrant merchants to call police when they see suspicious activity.
    "Maybe these perpetrators know this," Chin said. In Chinatown, neighborhood watches are being formed, but it's difficult to protect merchants who are targeted at home, Chin said.
    He called Wednesday's crime at the Lee home "brazen."
    "It's one thing to rob a house where nobody is home," Chin said. "It's another thing to break into a house where people are sleeping."
    What struck Lisa Lee about the home invasion was the viciousness of the attack and the way the men tied up frail family members with telephone cords and corralled them into a room upstairs.
    Lee would not disclose her family's names, but said that her father, two uncles, aunt, brother, grandmother, and grandfather reside in the house. Lee, who lives in Massachusetts with her mother, was visiting her relatives.
    The grandfather, 96, and the grandmother, who walks with a three-point cane, were made to lie facedown on the floor with their hands tied behind their backs, 
    Lee said. Her aunt and uncle were forced to lie face down on a bed.
    The bandits gained entry through an unlocked basement door that opens to Lee's brother's apartment. Lee said the intruders tied her brother up before casing the rest of the house.
    As the bandits left, they made sure her aunt's and an uncle's hands were tied loosely enough to allow them to get free and call for help, Lee said. Once they were gone, her father crawled upstairs to help the others, Lee said.
    Asked if she had any advice in the wake of the attack, Lee didn't hesitate.
    "Lock your doors," she said. "You never know what will happen anymore."
    Radnor police are asking anyone with information to call 610-688-0503.



8/19/10 Orange County Weekly: "Vietnamese American Scores Film's Lead Role,"
by R. Scott Moxley 
    John Wynn takes the lead 
    Move over Bruce Lee? 
    It's not often when an Asian lands a leading role in a movie and so the folks working publicity for "Beyond the Mat" are proud that John Wynn is the main character.
    More to the point: Wynn--a Virginia native born from a Vietnamese mother and a half-Vietnamese and half French father--won't be playing any stereotypical character, they say.
    I guess they'll be no scenes in a nail salon.
    "An Asian American male protagonist that is neither martial artist nor computer nerd," is how Wynn's character is being billed.
    "John Wynn has that star quality that captivates you from the moment he's first on screen," said Susan Wren, head of marketing for Catch 22 Entertainment based in Los Angeles. "His performance showcases not only a keen dramatic sense as well as athletic prowess, but also demonstrates his universal appeal."
    The film's plot centers on high school wrestlers and their struggles over friendship, competition and romance. Says a press statement, the "subplot of romantic quandary places Aaron (Wynn) squarely in the middle as the object of desire."
    Wait! 
    I thought Asians were tired of being objectified . . .
    By the way, Wynn--who attended the University of Virginia--is a multi-talented dude. He's a musician, model, actor, singer and TV show host. No wonder nobody else can get a job nowadays,
    You can see a clip of director Van M. Pham's film at http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi923796505 

8/18/10 Delaware County, PA Daily Times "Asian business owners worried about robberies: 
Upper Darby police are on alert after three Asian-American business owners were recently 
targeted in home invasions,"
By Linda Reilly
    Upper Darby — Asian-American business owners in the 69th Street area are again being 
targeted by robbers who believe the entrepreneurs don’t use banks, police said.
    Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood cited three home invasions involving owners of 
shops on South 69th and Market streets.
“The most recent home invasion involving 69th Street stores occurred 2:30 a.m. Aug. 8 in 
Haverford,” Chitwood said.
    Others were reported on the July 27 on Hampden Road, Upper Darby, and on July 22 
in Ridley Township.
    “All three are business owners in the 69th Street area,” Chitwood said.
    The targeted victims are owners of a nail salon, restaurant and beer distributor.
    According to an Asian-American beauty shop owner on 69th Street, most business owners 
do not share information and only hear about the home invasions when it’s in the newspaper.
    “I am aware robbers target Asian owners,” the proprietor said, asking her name not be used. 
“I used to have a business in West Philadelphia for six years and never had a problem. It’s worse 
here. I’m very afraid here. I’ve been here for nine months and it seems we are just targeted in 
Delaware County.”
    The woman utilizes a security door for patrons to enter and exit her store and had an alarm installed.
    “I live in Drexel Hill and never drive straight to my house,” the woman said. 
    “And when I get there, I drive around the block to make sure I wasn’t followed and I look around 
before I get out of the car. One time I did see a man sitting in a parked car. He ducked down when 
I saw him.
    “Robbers have experience. They’re crazy. We don’t save our money at home. We use 
banks. I do see the cops constantly driving around here.”
    An employee at the Asian Supermarket on South 69th Street reported a recent attempt at a 
break-in at the store when an intruder smashed the front glass window and door.
    The Indian, Pakistani and Bangladesh grocery store sells fruits, vegetables, candy, audio and 
videotapes and household goods.
    “I knew (about the home invasions),” Amarjit Singh said.
    Singh added he was worried, citing a recent purse snatching on the street and damage to the 
front window of the store.
    Employees of the targeted beer distributor could only say they have told others about the home 
invasion, but declined to talk about the incident.
    A police alert was issued regarding the attacks against Asian business owners.
    According to Chitwood, the Haverford incident involved owners of a beer distributor targeted in 
the middle of the night by three to five black male intruders, with no further description.
    “The victims are not sure if they were followed home,” Chitwood said. “It looks like the individuals 
were targeted and more than likely followed home. Why else would that house be hit? The common 
thread is they are all Asians and have businesses in the area of 69th Street.



8/17/10 International Business Times: "Asian-Americans in the Ivy League: A Portrait of Privilege 
and Discrimination,"
By Palash R. Ghosh 
    Reflecting their growing social and economic prominence in the U.S., Asian-Americans are disproportionately represented at the most elite universities in the land, relative to their numbers in the total population.
    While "Asians" -- defined broadly as people who can trace their ancestry to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Pacific Islands -- account for only about 5 percent of the U.S. populace, they are believed to represent up to 20 percent of the enrollment at the top Ivy League schools.
    However, the irony is that if the admission criteria and process in all U.S. universities were completely fair and equitable -- that is, based purely on academic qualifications -- the Asian weighting in the elite colleges would likely be significantly higher.
    In an article in the Boston Globe, Kara Miller, a history professor at Babson College, wrote that Asian-Americans score an average of 1623 -- out of a possible 2400 -- on SAT tests. By comparison, Hispanics and blacks average 1,364 and 1,276 on the SAT, respectively, while whites average 1,581.
    Quite a conundrum, indeed. Are Asians being celebrated and rewarded for their hard work, intelligence and success? Or are they being discriminated against?
    It depends on who you ask.
    Consider what happened in California -- a state with a very high Asian population of about 13 percent -- in late 1996. Voters passed Proposition 209, a referendum that essentially revoked Affirmative Action measures and deemed that entry into public colleges -- including the huge University of California (UC) system -- should be entirely race-blind.
    "A direct consequence of this was that the percentage of Asian-Americans at universities like Berkeley, UC-Irvine, and UCLA immediately skyrocketed," said Stephen D.H. Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon in Eugene. 
    "At those institutions, the Asian-American representation currently approaches 50 percent."
    Not surprisingly, the passage of "209" led to a political backlash and resentment against Asian-Americans -- from whites, but particularly from African-Americans and Hispanics, who saw their numbers plunge at these institutions."
    The administration at UC is now under significant pressure to remove the current system, Hsu noted.
    "They've responded to the criticism by tweaking the admission process," he said. 
    "Test scores are not weighted as heavily as high school GPA, and the top few percent of graduates at each high school are admitted to UC, even if, in absolute terms, they are not as strong as higher scoring students from top high schools."
    Of course, Hsu adds, Asian-Americans are generally happy with things as they are -- since they both find it fair and beneficial to them.
    Moreover, California's top two private schools, Stanford University and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) also boast disproportionately high Asian-American representation.
    "At my alma mater, Caltech, which has a heavy focus on science and engineering and a completely meritocratic admission process, Asian-Americans account for 30 percent-40 percent of the student body," Hsu added.
    Hsu concludes that Affirmative Action probably hurts both whites and Asians since it arbitrarily takes class slots away from them.
    This is quite ironic since Asian-Americans have long been discriminated in most other ways throughout their long history in this country.
    The word "quota" is controversial and politically-charged; one must be careful when using it.
However it's difficult not to conclude that some elite universities do indeed impose a quota -- officially or subconsciously -- upon Asian enrollment in order to control their numbers at some specified levels.
    Consider a recent study undertaken by Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist. He calculated that in 1997 African-Americans who achieved scores of 1150 scores on two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges as whites who scored in the 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s.
    Or put it another way, Asian applicants typically need to score an extra 140 or so points on their SATs to compete "equally" with white students.
    Miller of Babson College also wrote that "most elite universities appear determined to keep their Asian American totals in a narrow range. Yale's class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard and 17.6 percent at Princeton."
    However, white students are similarly victimized by admission policies at some elite schools.
Espenshade discovered that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities: whites were three times as likely to get accepted as Asians; Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites. and African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites.
    Moreover, if all elite private universities enacted race-blind admissions, the percentage of Asian students would jump from 24 percent to 39 percent (similar to what they already are now at Caltech and Berkeley, two elite institutions with race-blind admissions; the former due to a belief in meritocracy, the latter due to Proposition 209).
    What Asian-Americans are enduring now is reminiscent of the travails of American Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, when colleges like Harvard and Yale imposed quotas to limit their numbers at these elite institutions. And like many of those Jews from seven or eight decades ago, numerous Asian-American students today come from poor, humble immigrant households.
    Perhaps the bottom line in all this discussion is that entry into and success in top-flight schools -- regardless of the surrounding circumstances and controversies -- are pushing more and more Asian-Americans into prominent positions in corporate America, Wall Street and even the corridors of power in Washington D.C.



8/17/10 Washington Post: "U-Md. names new president: Iowa provost Loh,"
    Wallace D. Loh, provost at the University of Iowa, has been appointed president of the University of Maryland, university officials announced Tuesday.
    Loh will take the lead of Maryland's flagship public university Nov. 1, replacing C.D. (Dan) Mote, who is retiring after 12 years. News of the appointment leaked out late Monday in e-mails sent to members of the university community. Nariman Farvardin, provost at University of Maryland, will serve as interim president until Loh arrives.
    "Dr. Loh is the right person to lead our flagship university to its next level of greatness," said Clifford Kendall, chair of the governing board of the state university system, in a prepared statement. "His wealth of experience and achievements in higher education demonstrate his strong commitment to excellence in teaching, research, and service as well as his exceptional ability to move institutions forward."
    In a note to the Iowa university community, Loh said his short tenure there had been "the most professionally and personally fulfilling of my entire career." He also stressed that he had not been job-hunting.
    "This new opportunity is not one that I sought," he wrote. "The institution and the search consultants recruited me to take part in a relatively quick and confidential search process. I was -- and still am -- rather stunned, while honored to have been appointed."
    Loh has more than three decades of higher education experience. As second in command at the University of Iowa since 2008, he has overseen personnel and budgets for the state university's 11 colleges. The University of Iowa has 30,000 students and a $2.6 billion budget.
    At College Park, Loh will join an institution that has ascended to the highest rank of public universities. Once known as a "safety school," U-Md.rose in stature under Mote and now ranks among the top 20 public universities in the annual U.S. News Best Colleges rankings. The university has 37,000 students and is the largest public institution of higher education in Maryland.
    Mote has said he would take a one-year leave and then return to the university to participate "in any way that is helpful to the campus." He retains his status as an engineering professor.
    Loh earns at least $350,000 a year as provost. Mote, by comparison, earned $464,600 in 2009, according to a report in the Diamondback, the U-Md. student newspaper. Loh's salary at U-Md. has not been disclosed.
    Loh, 65, is an accomplished academician with an unusual life story. He was born in Shanghai and emigrated at a young age to Lima, Peru, following his diplomat father. After high school, he journeyed alone to the United States. He earned a bachelor's degree at Grinnell College in Iowa, a master's from Cornell, a doctorate in psychology from the University of MIchigan and a law degree from Yale.
    He served as dean of the University of Washington Law School, vice chancellor of the University of Colorado and a dean at Seattle University before becoming provost of Iowa's flagship in 2008.
    At Iowa, Loh has been front and center in a campaign to curb excessive student drinking. He and the university have played an unusually public role in advocating for tougher underage drinking laws.
He was also involved in an initiative to hire faculty in "clusters" to serve evolving research areas, and in an effort to build learning communities for freshmen to live and study together within the large state university, according to Iowa news accounts.
    Loh is married and has a daughter at Occidental College in California.
    According to the U-Md. statement, the University of Iowa has "increased the number of honor, minority, and international students; improved retention; expanded international exchanges; and increased administrative efficiencies and effectiveness" under Loh's lead.
    "Dr. Loh brings a remarkable intellect, talent and life experience to the University of Maryland, College Park, the University System of Maryland, and the state," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, in a prepared statement. "His commitment to excellence, inclusion, internationalization of higher education, cross-disciplinary research, and outreach to the communities we serve align perfectly with the priorities of the system and the campus."
    Loh said in a prepared comment that he is "thrilled to join the University System of Maryland to work together with the other presidents -- under the leadership of the Regents and Chancellor Kirwan -- for the advancement of the state's public higher education system."
    His appointment at College Park drew mostly favorable reaction overnight, although a few comments appended to news accounts hinted that he might be too old to begin a presidency, or that U-Md. might have been better-served by a leader drawn from a more prestigious university. The University of Iowa ranks 29th among national public universities on the U.S. News & World Report rankings released Tuesday, 11 places behind U-Md.
    Loh is the university's first Asian American president. Student leaders voiced hope that he will raise its currency on the global stage.
    "He brings a worldly perspective that any university would relish," said Kevin Ford, a member of the university's Student Government Association, in a statement.
    There has been at least one hint of controversy in Loh's long career, a reverse discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Washington law school while Loh was dean there. Three white applicants sued the school, claiming they were denied admission in the mid-1990s because of their race, according to an account in the Iowa City Press-Citizen newspaper. An appeals court ruled in the university's favor, but state officials barred public universities from considering race in admissions.
    University officials plan a reception for the president-elect and his wife at 1 p.m. Wednesday at the university's alumni center.
    

8/13/10 press release: "AAA-Fund Calls for Resignation of GOP Staffer over Racist Message:
Campaign used Twitter, Facebook to Spread Hate-Filled Rant,"
    Washington, DC - Earlier this week, the campaign to elect Republican congressional candidate Mike Pompeo used Twitter and Facebook to direct its supporters to read an inflammatory blog post. The post called Kansas State Representative and congressional candidate Raj Goyle a "turban topper" and questioned his ability to govern due to his ethnicity and alleged religious beliefs. The AAA-Fund executive director Gautam Dutta demanded that Pompeo immediately fire all staff responsible for sending the racist attack.
    "This conduct is simply unacceptable and has no place in American politics," said Dutta. "By allowing the communications director to remain, Mike Pompeo is sanctioning his staff's actions and sending a message to his supporters that racism and hatred are a real part of his politics and campaign."
    Raj Goyle is currently serving his second term as Kansas State Representative and is running for United States Congress in the Fourth District against RNC committeeman Mike Pompeo.
    The AAA-Fund endorsed Goyle at the beginning of his congressional campaign.
    For media inquiries, please contact Elizabeth Wu at (510) 295-9859.



8/11/10 Huffington Post: "White Men Still Better Off than Asian Americans in U.S. labor market,"
by Algernon Austin
    The blog 8asians recently posted an article stating that Asian men have the highest salary. This statement is both correct and misleading at the same time. 
    It is correct that Asian American men have the highest median wage. But to the extent that it suggests that Asian Americans are economically advantaged relative to whites, it is incorrect.
    As I pointed out in my examination of Asian American unemployment over the recession, Asian Americans experience hidden disadvantages in the U.S. labor market. To see this disadvantage, one must disaggregate the data by education level. The Asian American unemployment disadvantage appears upon examining those with a bachelor's degree or higher level of education. In 2009, the annual unemployment rate for Asian Americans with a bachelor's degree was 6.7 percent. 
For whites with a bachelor's degree is was 2.1 percentage points lower at 4.6 percent. 
    A larger share of Asian Americans has a college degree than other groups, including whites. People with college degrees are more likely to be employed and, on average, have higher earnings than people without college degrees. The high educational attainment of Asian Americans means that their aggregate statistics, like the overall unemployment rate or the median income for the entire group, looks better than the aggregate statistics for whites. But the picture changes when one compares Asian Americans with whites of the same educational level. 
    The wage report discussed on 8asians.com does not allow one to disaggregate the data by sex, race, and education level. But the Census Bureau does provide this disaggregation in its detailed income tables. We can compare white and Asian American full-time, year-round male workers with each other by education level. 
    The median income for non-Hispanic white male high school graduates in 2008 was $42,234. For Asian American male high school graduates it was 21 percent lower at $33,358. Comparing individuals with bachelor's degrees, white males earned $71,672 and Asian males $63,172, or 12 percent less. When one disaggregates by educational level, the apparent Asian American advantage turns to an Asian American disadvantage.
    One comment in response to the 8asians.com piece (on the New American Media re-posting of the article) stated that since Asian American men work harder, they deserve to have the highest salary. There are a number of problems with this statement, but if one assumes that Asian American men work the hardest, the disaggregated income data suggests that they are not being rewarded for their hard work. 
    Asian American "success" stories are often used to argue that the United States is a post-racial society where anyone can be successful provided that they are willing to work hard. The reality is, of course, more complicated than that. The 
    Asian American "success" stories sometimes do not look at all like success stories when one disaggregates the data. And while hard work matters, and there are a great deal of opportunities for people of all races 



7/12/10 Op-Ed: "UC proves Prop. 209's point: Admissions records show that minorities don't need affirmative action,"
by David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks
    The next few weeks will see renewed interest in a 14-year-old initiative that was, in its day, among the most hotly contested California ballot measures ever, Proposition 209. It prohibits the state from discriminating against or giving preferences to anyone on the basis of "race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting." The measure was approved 54% to 45%. It was tested in the courts, and its constitutionality was affirmed by the California Supreme Court in 2000.
    But another legal challenge to 209 was mounted earlier this year, specifically to allow the University of California to use affirmative-action criteria for admissions, as it did before the proposition passed in 1996.
    The author of 209, Ward Connerly, is seeking to intervene in the case because of his fear that neither the university (whose officials have, on occasion, called for the repeal of 209) nor Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown (whose office filed a brief with the California Supreme Court opining that 209 violates the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment) will vigorously defend the measure. Connerly's motion is scheduled to be heard this month.
    As proponents of Proposition 209 in 1996, we could only have hoped that the "underrepresented" minorities at the center of the debate would ultimately be admitted to the UC — without preferences — in numbers approximating their rate of admission with the benefit of preferences. Our argument then, as now, was that granting preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity was wrong and that, ultimately, in a bias-free environment, students would figure out what had to be done and would qualify for admission on their merits. That argument was right.
    Here are the facts: The number of minority admissions to the University of California for this fall — without the benefit of preferences — exceeds that of 1996, in absolute numbers and, more important, as a percentage of all "admits." The numbers are, in almost every category, quite staggering.
    Latino students have gone from 15.4% (5,744 students) of freshman undergraduate admissions in 1996 to 23% (14,081) in 2010 (a 145% increase). Asian students have gone from 29.8% (11,085) of the freshman admits to 37.47% (22,877). Native American admits have declined slightly, from 0.9% to 0.8%, but their absolute number increased, from 360 to 531. African American admits have gone from 4% (1,628) to 4.2% (2,624), a modest gain in percentage but nearly a 61% increase in numbers of freshmen admitted.
    The only major category that declined in percentage terms was whites, who went from 44% (16,465) of the freshmen admits to 34% (20,807).
    But the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which filed this year's lawsuit, finds little solace in these data: "The percentage of Latina/o, black and Native American students in the UC as a whole has not kept pace with the rising percentage of those groups among high school graduates of the state," the suit says.
    That argument alone reveals the agenda of the coalition. They seem to believe that the percentage of minority high school graduates in the state —- without regard to SATs, GPAs or overall academic achievement — is what should determine the makeup of the admissions to the university. But the truth is that qualifications, not demographics, should determine admissions.
    One subtext of the coalition's complaint is that as a result of Proposition 209, the "flagship" UC campuses, UC Berkeley and UCLA, have become elitist, segregated institutions, out of reach for minorities and the poor, who are relegated to the "newer, less-selective schools."
    It is true that UC Berkeley and UCLA have fewer African American freshman admits in 2010 than pre-Proposition 209. Compared with 1996, at Berkeley the difference is 572 to 392; and at UCLA, 606 to 435. — but it's not because those campuses aren't reaching out to the disadvantaged or are enclaves of elitism.
    In fact, at Berkeley and UCLA, more than 30% of undergraduates are Pell Grant recipients whose parents' incomes fall below $45,000 annually. Overall, the University of California enrolled a higher percentage of Pell Grant recipients than any of its public or private competitive institutions nationwide. This fall, 39.4% of incoming freshman at the university will come from low-income families, 38% from families where neither parent has a four-year degree.
    Moreover, according to the U.S. News & World Report rankings, four of the 25 most diverse among the so-called national universities are UC campuses, including UCLA (No. 11), Berkeley (No. 16) and San Diego (No. 22). In terms of economic diversity among "top-ranked" national universities, U.S. News ranks UCLA and Berkeley No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.
    In fact, the University of California is an unequaled example of a world-class institution of higher learning maintaining its preeminent status while also addressing the needs of disadvantaged students who have academic potential, a record of success and a desire to succeed — not an easy task, especially in economically tough times. This year's admits have an average GPA of 3.84.
    In reality, despite the coalition's lawsuit, the principles that underlay Proposition 209 have proved themselves correct. The belief that minorities could and would succeed in a system free of discrimination and preferential biases is true. The presence of minorities and disadvantaged students throughout UC is vindication of a traditional American concept: The state should not discriminate against anyone or give preferences to anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color or sex, a concept Californians understand, enacted into law and are now reaping the benefits of.
    David A. Lehrer is the president and Joe R. Hicks the vice president of Community Advocates Inc. , a human relations organization based in Los Angeles that is chaired by former Mayor Richard Riordan.


7/8/10 Northwest Asian Weekly: "Obama’s immigration reform will benefit the APA community, says local groups,"
By Jocelyn Chui
        The Asian Pacific American (APA) community will benefit from the comprehensive immigration reform address given by President Barack Obama last week, APA advocacy groups have said.
    On July 1, Obama addressed issues of the nation’s immigration system, saying the “system is broken” and that we will need bipartisan support from the Congress “to shape a system that reflects our values as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.”
    “I believe we can put politics aside and finally have an immigration system that’s accountable. I believe we can appeal not to people’s fears but to their hopes, to their highest ideals, because that’s who we are as Americans,” Obama said.
    Pramila Jayapal, Diane Narasaki, and Bettie Luke — executive directors of OneAmerica, the Asian Counseling and Referral Service, and the Organization of Chinese Americans, respectively — thought the president’s speech was significant to the APA community.
    “I think it is really important for the president to address the need of immigration reform in front of the whole country,” Jayapal said.
    “I think a lot of communities of color have been waiting for President Obama to make immigration a priority topic,” Luke said.
    The president said the immigration reform should focus on three key issues — reuniting families, providing opportunities for children of undocumented parents to earn an education and stay in the country where they have been raised, and encouraging firms to hire workers legally, putting a stop to the inflow of illegal immigrants.
    “The DREAM Act would do this, and that’s why I supported this bill as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator — and why I continue to support it as president,” Obama said.
    Narasaki said that Asians are disproportionately affected by the visa backlogs of the current system.
    “There are over 4 million family members in the visa backlogs waiting to rejoin their families in the U.S. Over half of them are Asian. There are youth in our community who languish in limbo due to the lack of legal status, unable to use their college education and skills because of our broken system,” said Narasaki. “They would benefit from the reform.”
    The president also acknowledged the existence of a large population — 11 million — of illegal immigrants in the country who work hard in low-wage sectors of the economy, seeking a better life. He acknowledged the contribution that these illegal workers have made to America’s economy, but he stressed that it is only fair for them to get in line like any other immigration applicant.
    “No matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable,” Obama said.
    Narasaki said that at least one million of the estimated 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants are Asian.
    “Following whatever process is legislated by Congress, qualifying members of our community, like other eligible undocumented immigrants, would be able to come out of the shadows and seek legal status,” Narasaki said.
    “Stopping illegal immigration must go hand in hand with reforming our creaky system of legal immigration,” Obama said.
    The president said that people living in the country illegally, as well as employers that hire and exploit illegal workers, have a responsibility to follow the law.
    “Being a citizen of this country comes not only with rights but also with certain fundamental responsibilities. We can create a pathway for legal status that is fair, reflective of our values, and works.”
    Luke said, “It is interesting that there is overt effort to prevent possible illegal entry of Asians, but what about possible illegal entry of white Canadians? What about visa-overstays of Irish and Canadians?”
    Joint efforts from political parties are crucial to the success of the reform.
    “It is a shame that Republicans in Congress seem determined to undermine immigration reform on basis of political party power — instead of based on what is best for the county and what is morally right. They seem to forget that their past Republican president also supported immigration reform and the DREAM Act,” Luke said.
    Narasaki said, “Our community members, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, must make it clear to Congress that comprehensive immigration reform is a key priority to our community and we want them to pass it this year.”
    Though the majority of the online community seems to disagree with Obama’s speech, Jayapal said, according to the polling, 70 percent of the people believe that we need a solution to the immigration problem.
    “I believe we have the support of the majority of Americans, really believing that the immigration reform is absolutely good for the country,” Jayapal said. “It will add $1.5 trillion dollars in the next 10 years. Money will start to flow in once you take away the horrible suppression and fear that exists right now.”
    OneAmerica is a nonprofit organization formed directly after September 11, 2001, in response to the hate crimes and discrimination targeting Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. Called Hate Free Zone at the time, the organization has now grown into a leading force for immigrant, civil, and human rights of particular communities.
    The Asian Counseling and Referral Service is the largest nationally recognized nonprofit organization that serves all the different Asian Pacific American communities — immigrants, refugees, and American-born — in the Pacific Northwest.
    The Organization of Chinese Americans is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the social, political, and economic well-being of all Asian Pacific Americans.

7/8/10 Washington Post: "N.Y. challenger Saujani embraces Wall Street in bid to unseat Rep. Maloney,"
By Philip Rucker
    New York -- It's cocktail hour on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and dozens of rich New Yorkers are gathered around a grand piano, sipping white wine in the living room of an elegant high-rise apartment. There is plenty of gossip to be heard, but this is not a social event. The city's moneyed elite have come to commiserate about their growing distaste for their longtime congresswoman, Rep. Maloney-- and to open their wallets for the unlikely 34-year-old challenger they hope will defeat her.
    They did not always feel this way about Maloney. The 64-year-old Democratic representative hasn't faced a serious challenge to her seat since she was first elected in 1992. For nearly two decades, they have viewed her as a solid, if unremarkable, member of Congress. But to the dismay of her ultra-rich constituents -- among them more than a few Wall Street billionaires -- Maloney has become one of the Capitol's leading advocates for tough new restrictions on the banking and credit card industries. The way the people at the cocktail party see it, Maloney betrayed them. And they want her fired.
    Into this scene of despair steps Reshma Saujani, an Ivy League-educated lawyer with a compelling biography. She is the daughter of Indian parents who fled political persecution while living in Uganda and wound up in the United States. But that isn't the compelling part, at least not to this crowd. Rather, it's that Saujani is a Wall Street veteran. She has worked at three hedge funds. She speaks the arcane language of derivatives and basis points and mortgage-backed securities. Saujani has positioned herself as the anti-Maloney, the only candidate who understands how stressful and difficult the past few years have been for some of the wealthiest people in America.
    Unknown just a few months ago, Saujani has gotten the attention of many of the city's boldface names, and her Democratic primary challenge to Maloney, who was long seen as unbeatable, has turned a sleeper contest into a closely watched curiosity.
    "We need to extend a hand rather than a fist" to Wall Street, Saujani tells the guests at the apartment. "In New York, it's complicated because 35 percent of our revenue comes from the financial services industry. We need to have transparency and reform, but we also need to understand that . . . it's just as easy to go work in Singapore and London and Bangalore, and we can't make it so difficult to do business here that people will vote with their feet."
    Only on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where a run-of-the-mill penthouse goes for $13 million (Rush Limbaugh's place on Fifth Avenue is available for about that much, FYI), would a politician find it a plus to run this year as the candidate of Wall Street.
    Since she entered the race in November, Saujani has received more than $800,000 in campaign contributions, an impressive tally for an untested candidate. Many of those checks came from New York financiers and their spouses.
    Former Morgan Stanley chief executive John Mack has given her money. So has Apollo Management founder Leon Black and the wife of J.P. Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon. Hedge fund mogul Marc Lasry hosted a fundraiser for her featuring singer John Legend that brought in $100,000.
    Saujani has also attracted help from prominent New Yorkers. Maureen White, a major Democratic donor and wife of financier Steven Rattner, is introducing her to potential donors. Diana Taylor, a Republican former investment banker and the longtime companion of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), is advising her campaign.
    "Reshma has a strong fundamental understanding about how the industry works," Taylor said. "You've got these people [in Congress] yelling and screaming who know nothing about what they're talking about -- nothing. And it just creates a huge problem."
    Maloney isn't going out of her way to apologize. "I support any institution when I think they're correct, and I point out ways it can be improved if I feel it can be improved," she said. "I think that passing this financial regulatory reform bill will be good for the economy and therefore very good for Wall Street."
    Maloney, who chairs the Joint Economic Committee, authored last year's credit card reform bill ("my credit card bill of rights," she called it). She added, "We had a bill signing in the Rose Garden, and [President Obama] gave me the pen and a kiss."
    This is not a politician who sounds worried about losing an election. And at this point, she does not seem to be taking her challenger very seriously. (Whoever wins the Sept. 14 primary is virtually assured to be elected in this overwhelmingly Democratic district.) Maloney might have lost the support of many former Wall Streeters, but the rest of her constituents aren't at all upset at her efforts to rein in the banking industry. Maloney has raised more than $2 million this election cycle.
    "It's hard to see how [Saujani] wins," said Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. "People are not running down the street screaming, 'Reshma! Reshma!' These kinds of insurgent campaigns require that kind of energy."
    In a survey that Democratic pollster Celinda Lake took for Maloney in mid-May, she beat Saujani with 75 percent of the vote. "I have wide support," Maloney said. "I don't even know what I won by in my last election. It's something like 80 percent. I'd have to fact-check it."
    But Saujani thinks Maloney has overreached in her attacks on Wall Street. In the back seat of a taxicab racing down Park Avenue after the fundraiser, she said the financial industry has been unfairly demonized in Congress.
    "Populism for the sake of populism, to increase poll numbers, is not helpful," she said. "We need to have people in Washington who feel comfortable with understanding regulatory markets, economic terms. . . . I don't think that she has practical real-world experience." (At the same time, Saujani's campaign would like it known that financiers are not the only New Yorkers the candidate has attracted. She has also drawn support from young voters and tech entrepreneurs.)
    The campaign is getting personal. Saujani's supporters openly question Maloney's fitness to serve and her intellectual heft. In an interview, White, the major Democratic donor, called Maloney "a good person." But she said, "There's a lot more to being a good representative: leadership, intelligence, hard work, a creative approach to policy, thinking things through.
    "When you look at this district, it should have a star," White added. "We need the best of the best, and I think Reshma is in that category in a way Carolyn isn't."
    Maloney, who lost her husband of 33 years in September when he died while mountain climbing in the Himalayas, isn't sniping back. In a 30-minute interview, she never mentioned her opponent by name and did not disparage her former supporters.
    "I'm just working hard," Maloney said. "I have successfully fought and passed bills and movements and issues that have helped bring stability to our economy and will help Wall Street remain successful in the long run."

7/5/10 Associated Press: "Chinese court sentences US geologist to 8 years,"
by Charles Hutzler
    Beijing – An American geologist held by Chinese state security agents who stubbed lit cigarettes on his arms was sentenced to eight years in prison Monday for gathering data on China's oil industry — a case that highlights the government's use of vague secrets laws to restrict business information.
In pronouncing Xue Feng guilty of spying and collecting state secrets, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said his actions "endangered our country's national security."
    Its verdict said Xue received documents on geological conditions of onshore oil wells and a database that gave the coordinates of more than 30,000 oil and gas wells belonging to China National Petroleum Corporation and listed subsidiary PetroChina Ltd. That information, it said, was sold to IHS Energy, the U.S. consultancy Xue worked for and now known as IHS Inc.
    The sentence of eight years is close to the recommended legal limit of 10 years for all but extremely serious violations. Though Xue, now 45 and known as a meticulous, driven researcher, showed no emotion when the court announced the verdict, it stunned his lawyer and his sister, his only family member allowed in the courtroom.
    "I can't describe how I feel. It's definitely unacceptable," Xue's wife, Nan Kang, said by telephone, sobbing, from their home in a Houston, Texas, suburb where she lives with their two children.
U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman attended the hearing to display Washington's interest in the case. He left without commenting and the U.S. Embassy issued a statement calling for Xue's immediate release and deportation to the United States.
    Xue's sentence punctuates a case that has dragged on for more than two-and-a-half years and is likely to alarm foreign businesses unsure when normal business activities elsewhere might conflict with China's vague state security laws.
    Chinese officials have wide authority to classify information as state secrets. Draft regulations released by the government in April said business secrets of major state companies qualify as state secrets.
    "This is a very harsh sentence," said John Kamm, an American human rights campaigner whom the State Department turned to for help last year to lobby for Xue's release. "It's a huge disappointment and will send very real shivers up the spines of businesses that do business in China."
    Agents from China's internal security agency detained Xue in November 2007. During the early days of his detention they stubbed lit cigarettes into his arms and hit him on the head with an ashtray. His case first became public when The Associated Press reported on it last November.
    Like IHS, many multinationals have come to rely on people like Xue to run their China operations. Another China-born foreign national, Australian Stern Hu who worked for the global mining firm Rio Tinto, was sentenced in March to 10 years for bribery and infringing trade secrets that dealt with iron ore sales to Chinese companies.
    Born in China, Xue earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago and became a U.S. citizen, returning to his native country to work. By all accounts, including witness statements cited in the court verdict, Xue poured his energies into his work for IHS, trying to gather information on China's oil industry, contacting former school mates from his university days in China.
    Two of the three other defendants sentenced along with Xue on Monday were school mates. Chen Mengjin and Li Dongxu, who worked for research institutes affiliated with PetroChina were each given two-and-a-half-year sentences and fined 50,000 yuan ($7,500). The other defendant, Li Yongbo, a manager at Beijing Licheng Zhongyou Oil Technology Development Co., was sentenced to eight years and fined 200,000 yuan ($30,000). Xue was also fined 200,000 yuan.
    Li and Xue arranged the sale of the database — which was originally prepared by a Chinese company for sale to PetroChina's parent company and contained details on the coordinates and volume of reserves for the 30,000 wells — to IHS for $228,500, the court's sentencing document said.
    A spokesman for IHS, which is based in Englewood, Colorado, said the company is disappointed by the news yet declined to comment on China's broad interpretation of state secrets. In the past, the spokesman, Ed Mattix, has said that Chinese authorities never notified IHS that it was involved in any wrongdoing.
    During Xue's closed-door trial, which ran over three dates last July and in December, the court document said he defended himself, arguing that the information he gathered "is data that the oil sector in countries around the world make public."
    David Rowley, Xue's thesis adviser at University of Chicago and a geologist, said that the location and seismic and other data of oil wells is commonly available and could not compromise Chinese security since the government controls access.
    "What frightens me most about this is that Xue Feng is, in my experience, a straight-up individual who worked hard, who didn't push limits, or try to pull a fast one by, but was simply honest and entirely well meaning," Rowley said in an e-mail. "That's IHS's business — acquiring and redistributing data (bases) so he was simply doing his job." 
    In rejecting Xue and his lawyer's arguments that no crime had been committed, the court cited the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets as saying that the information Xue received on China National Petroleum Corp. was classified as either secret or confidential. 
    The court document indirectly acknowledged the difficulties Xue and IHS would have collecting data in such a restrictive environment. 
    "IHS Co. has information exchange agreements with many oil companies, but exchanging information with Chinese oil companies is very difficult. Because China controls energy information relatively strictly, IHS Co.'s information and data on China are not very complete," the sentencing statement cited one witness as telling the court.

6/30/10 VOA News: "Indian Americans Making an Ever Bigger Impact in U.S. Elections," 
    American politics may be going through somewhat of a transformation. This transformation appears to be a change in the way Americans accept who may politically represent them.
    "It is my great pleasure...," remarks Nikki Haley. "It is with humility and respect that I accept the Republican Party's nomination to be your next governor of South Carolina (cheers)."
    Nikki Haley won the party's nomination in a runoff election by garnering 65 percent of the primary vote in the southern state of South Carolina. Haley was born Nimrata Randhawa, daughter of Indian Americans. Should she win the November general election, she would become the second governor of Asian Indian descent in the United States, the other being Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. 
    Haley is only one in a record number of Indian Americans running for office this year. There are currently at least eight such candidates vying for political office this year, including Manan Trivedi in Pennsylvania, Raj Goyle in Kansas and Ami Bera in California. Haley told VOA she knew the path to election would not be an easy journey. "I knew that I had everything against me, I knew the fact that I was a woman was tough, I knew the fact that I wasn't from Lexington was tough, I knew that fact that I was Indian was tough," says Haley. "I knew that there was a lot I had to do to let people know who I am."
    But, South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson told VOA that being Indian American was a help for Haley. "It's a reflection truly of the impact of the Indian-American population on the United States," Wilson said. "It's the fourth largest immigrant group in the United States, nearly two million people have Indian-American background in the United States. They also have the highest per capita income of any immigrant group in the United States and it's a reflection again of the assimilation into American society."
    Paul Ong is a professor of Public Affairs at the University of California Los Angeles. He says immigrants from Asia had for decades faced what had been insurmountable obstacles in seeking office in the United States. "If you go back far enough, Asian Americans, including Asian Indians, were precluded from participating," Ong said. "They were precluded from gaining citizenship, certainly, if you go back to after World War Two, an enormous amount of racial prejudice. It was very difficult for Asian Americans, including Asian Indians, to be accepted socially, as well as politically."
    But that, says Ong, has recently changed. "We have seen over the last decade or so an increase in political participation," he adds. "We have seen it in acquiring citizenship, we've seen it in the growing numbers of Asian-Americans running for office. We still have a long ways to go. We're still, overall, under-represented among elected officials. But, I think, it's been very remarkable about the progress that's been made."
    But, why Indian Americans as opposed to immigrants from other areas? "What we saw is a population that was highly-educated," said Ong. "They probably came from much more affluent background from India and we also noticed that they come from a country with a long history and participation in a democratic process. And so, I think those things translate, as well as the fact that most of the Indian immigrants and their children certainly are much more accustomed to American culture, the language and so forth." 
    Professor Ong, who is of Chinese descent, says the recent success of Indian-American politicians could be just the beginning.


7/6/10 Washington Post: "More Indian Americans seeking office this year,"
By Krissah Thompson
    Five years ago, a group of Indian Americans who worked as staffers on Capitol Hill started up a club. They called themselves the "Desi Power Hour," and met to share their experiences and help each other get a leg up in Washington. Small in number and short on experience, they may have been Desis -- children or grandchildren of immigrants from India -- but they had little power.
    Today, though, that once-casual gathering of legislative aides, communications consultants, tech gurus and fundraisers has grown into an influential political network that undergirds the record number of Indian Americans running for political office this year.
    Gautam Raghavan, for instance, is deputy White House liaison at the Department of Defense and has helped build a network of young Indian American political donors. Toby Chaudhuri, former director of communications at the Campaign for America's Future, is a political strategist who helps candidates craft their messages. Anil Mammen is a direct-mail consultant and the go-to guy for those in the community who aspire to political office.
    In addition to Nikki Haley, the barrier-breaking Republican nominee for governor of South Carolina, Indian Americans are campaigning this year for congressional seats in Pennsylvania, Kansas, California, New York and Ohio. More than a dozen serve in senior positions in the Obama administration, including U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and USAID chief Rajiv Shah. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the first Indian American governor, made the Republican short list for vice president in 2008.
    "We used to be accused of being those that wrote checks and had photo ops, but never actually did anything in policy," said Shekar Narasimhan, co-chair of the Democratic Party's Indo-American Leadership council. "It is now very legitimized for people to run for office in our community. Five years ago, it wasn't."
    That legitimacy came from winning elections, as Jindal did in 2007, and through the tangential success of political operatives, said Parag Mehta, who attended many Desi Hour lunches and later worked as the Democratic Party's director of internal communications.
    "We've built the bench up," Mehta said. "We are in senior positions and can help each other. There's a camaraderie."
    Like Haley, most of the politicians in races this year are second-generation immigrants who volunteered for local political campaigns, served in state legislatures or worked on Capitol Hill.
    Manan Trivedi, a doctor and Iraq war veteran, recently won the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania's 6th Congressional District.
    Before running for Congress, he served as a health-care adviser to the Obama campaign.
    Raj Goyle, who has served in the Kansas legislature for three years, is running in the Democratic primary in the 4th Congressional District, which includes his home town of Wichita. Reshma Saujani, a Democratic fundraiser in the South Asian community, says she is the first Indian American woman to run for Congress.
    "I always wanted to serve, but I never thought someone with my name could actually run," said Saujani, who is challenging Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) in the Sept. 14 primary.
    The increased political involvement is an indication of "successful assimilation into mainstream American society," said Dino Teppara, chair of the Indian American Conservative Council and former chief of staff for Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).
    The nation's 2.5 million Indian Americans rank among the most highly educated ethnic groups in the United States, according to Census figures, and they have the highest per-capita income.
    Although the community leans Democratic, according to a 2009 survey by the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, its wealth has attracted aspiring candidates of both parties.
    Individual donors connected to Teppara's council have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Indian American conservatives and other Republicans, he said. Democratic candidates get financial support through the decade-old Indian American Leadership Initiative. That group has endorsed both congressional and local candidates this year, and late last year it formed a political action committee, which has raised $100,000.
    The money "obviously" makes a big difference, said Sanjay Puri, chairman of the nonpartisan US India Political Action Committee, which raised $75,000 in the first quarter of the year and $300,000 in 2008 to support Indian American candidates and others who have pro-India views. "The money is there. The candidates just have to prove that they are credible."
    Still, Indian American candidates remain sensitive to being viewed as outsiders. Questions arose about Jindal's and Haley's religious beliefs; Jay Goyal (D), now the 29-year-old majority whip of the Ohio legislature, emphasized in his first political campaign four years ago his family's decades of work in their central Ohio town. Similarly, Trivedi and Goyle emphasize on their Web sites deep roots in their respective communities.
    The clear signs of political progress impress the man known as the dean of Indian American politics: Kumar P. Barve, majority leader in the Maryland House of Delegates. When he ran for office in 1990, few in the Indian American community would contribute money or time to his campaign. "Most believed it was really idiotic," he said.
    Although Barve worries that many of the Indian American candidates will probably lose this year, he sees their efforts as an investment in the future. "Regardless of the outcome," he said, "you have to see this as a big victory for the Indian American, which is becoming a part of the political landscape."



6/28/10 Las Vegas Review-Journal: "Head of Asian American Group gets politicians' attention,"
by Jane Ann Morrison
    Mike Vaswani is all about unity. His business card reads: Unity Is Our Priority & Strength. You'd expect no less from the president of the Asian American Group, an umbrella group of more than 30 diverse Asian associations.
    AAG now includes Koreans, Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Malaysians, Thai, Laotians, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesians, Singaporeans and Middle Easterners.
    AAG's political clout is such that both Rory Reid and Brian Sandoval are vying for its gubernatorial endorsement.
    Asian-American voters are desirable on two levels. Many are campaign contributors, and they vote in proportionately larger numbers than other minorities.
    In 2008, Vaswani said proudly, 95 percent of the candidates endorsed by AAG won their elections. Asian-Americans support both Democrats and Republicans, so parties can't take AAG's endorsement for granted.
    "Mike is a really, really hard worker and AAG holds incredible events," Reid said. "When he says, 'Show up,' a lot of people do. For anyone in the political world, that's significant."
    Vaswani, 66, left India for Africa when he was 17 and lived all over the world before immigrating to the United States in 1970. He moved to Las Vegas in 1995, joining his wife, Rita.
    AAG was formed in 1993 by Dr. Peter Lok, Vaswani's mentor, and Vaswani took over as president in 2002. He also heads the Asian American Coalition of Las Vegas, which raises money to support charitable efforts.
    Vaswani has become a conduit linking the Asian community with the law enforcement community and this spring was honored by FBI Director Robert Mueller with the Director's Community Leadership Award, the first Las Vegan to be so honored.
    "I am blessed by the FBI award," Vaswani said. "I don't think I deserve it."
    Holly James, the FBI's community coordinator, disagreed. "Mike's been very helpful to the FBI. He's letting his community know not to be afraid of law enforcement."
    When mortgage fraud cases were being investigated, Vaswani said he gave some leads to the FBI about friends who had been ripped off.
    "It's known in the community, I help everybody."
    Vaswani works for unity, not only within the Asian community, but with the Hispanic and African-American community. When the Asian community was overlooked in a 2008 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas addressing minority issues, he complained to the Democrat hierarchy.
    They quickly corrected their faux pas.
    Currently, his political priority is to see more Asian-Americans appointed to boards and commissions by governors, county commissioners and city council members. He estimates there are more than 150,000 Asians in Las Vegas and they are not well-represented through appointments.
    Vaswani owns three small group homes for Alzheimer's patients called Happy Adult Care and works as a zoning consultant. He said he is not interested in being appointed himself. "I try to stay low key," he said.
    During a party recently to celebrate his FBI award, one of only 51 leadership awards for 2009, speakers talked about his humility. But being humble doesn't mean he won't use statistics like bullets.
    "In the United States, 60 to 70 percent of motels are owned by Indians, 40 percent of the top hotels are owned by Indians, 90 percent of smoke shops are owned by Indians, 70 percent of 7-Eleven's are owned by Indians, 40 percent of gas stations are owned by Indians.
    There are 42,000 Indian doctors in the U.S. After all that achievement, we don't get recognized."
    Although he is widely known in political, law enforcement and Asian circles, Vaswani isn't a household word in Las Vegas. It took the FBI to recognize his achievements on a national level.


6/26/10 Philadelphia Inquirer: "South Philadelphia High aide who protected students from attack is laid off,"
By Jeff Gammage and Kristen A. Graham
    When South Philadelphia High School exploded in racial violence on Dec. 3, community liaison Violet Sutton-Lawson twice risked serious injury to protect Asian students who were being beaten by mobs.
    She was disappointed that School District officials never sent her so much as a thank-you note.
This week, they sent her something else: A layoff notice.
    "I put my life in danger," an angry, disbelieving Sutton-Lawson said in an interview. "They just laid me right off."
    Sutton-Lawson, who worked with pregnant students and teenage mothers, was bumped from her job by seniority rules, among 61 support staffers who were laid off to save money and consolidate duties.
    Eleven community-relations jobs were eliminated, said spokesperson Evelyn Sample-Oates. But some of those employees had seniority that allowed them to displace other workers. Sutton-Lawson's job at South Philadelphia High will be filled by one of those longer-tenured workers.
    "It's unfortunate," Sample-Oates said. "Ms. Sutton-Lawson is welcome to apply for another position with the district."
    Sutton-Lawson earned about $36,000 a year, barely a decimal point in the $3.2 billion school budget but crucial to a woman who doesn't own a car and lives in a tough area on Wharton Street.
    The slashing of those 61 jobs from the payroll has been controversial because the move largely targeted employees who focus on student safety. Laid off with the 11 community-relations workers were 17 nonteaching assistants and 33 climate managers, who help keep schools calm.
    It was not immediately clear how much the job cuts would save the district.
    A teachers' union official criticized the layoffs.
    "They laid off the lowest-paid people in the district at a time when you read about bonuses for top administrators and additional people in the superintendent's cabinet," said Arlene Kempin, a vice president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.
    "Clearly," Kempin said of Sutton-Lawson, "this is a lady who has put the kids first. It doesn't seem like the district does."
    Sutton-Lawson, 58, said she was saddened and surprised to lose her job, particularly given her actions on Dec. 3. That day, about 30 Asian students were attacked during a daylong series of assaults carried out by groups of mostly African American students.
    Sutton-Lawson, who is African American, said that in her job she sees only children, not color.
The violence spawned national headlines, a request from the government of Vietnam that Vietnamese students be protected, and investigations by the School District, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, and the U.S. Justice Department.
    The district responded by adding security staff and programming, and spending $685,000 to install 126 more security cameras.
    The official district report on the violence said that several adults had tried to stop the assaults and help students, and that Sutton-Lawson was particularly courageous.
    On Friday, Sutton-Lawson said that after Dec. 3, she had expected to hear from ranking district officials or even Superintendent Arlene Ackerman.
    "I'm nothing to them," she said. "Dr. Ackerman never recognized me, never sent me a letter, never a word of thank you, never shook my hand and said thank you."
    Sutton-Lawson said she learned she had lost her job from a June 9 letter signed by Estelle Matthews, the district's chief talent and development officer. It said her job was being eliminated because of a reduction in staff and she would not be paid after June 30.
    She had just completed her second year at Southern, as the school is known, providing a variety of support to pregnant students and teenage mothers so they may get their diplomas. She worked in a program called ELECT, an acronym for Education Leading to Employment and Career Training.
    On Dec. 3, at 12:31, she was drawn from her basement classroom to the hallway, where she saw an Asian student sprawled on the floor, being beaten by a mob. Sutton-Lawson dove into the crowd, wrapped her arms around the boy, then glared up at the eight to 10 attackers.
    Two minutes later, in the cafeteria, she stepped in front of a group that was punching and kicking a group of other Asian students.
    Sutton-Lawson said she was disappointed she had received no warning that her job was in jeopardy.
    "The bottom line: I'm doing my job, and doing pretty good. What is this madness?"


6/22/10 Associated Press: "Haley win in SC ensures a place on national stage,"
By Jim Davenport
    Columbia, S.C. – Nikki Haley's victory in South Carolina's bruising GOP primary for governor moves the state lawmaker closer to becoming her state's first woman chief executive and America's first Sikh-born governor, while assuring her a place on the national political scene.
    Like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who immediately touched off presidential talk when he won his state's governorship, Haley's primary victory sets off talk of a possible vice presidential campaign in 2012. As an Indian-American woman from an early primary state, she would bring a combination of diversity and conservatism that many in the GOP have been seeking.
    Little known even in her own state just months ago, Haley got a crucial boost with early support from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the tea party movement.
    Along the way, she weathered rumors of infidelity and questions about her religious and ethnic background.
    During the past month, state Sen. Jake Knotts, a self-described "redneck," called Haley a "raghead" and questioned whether she was a Christian. Earlier, a lobbyist and a blogger both claimed to have had affairs with her. Haley, a married mother of two, categorically denied the unsubstantiated claims and made it clear she was baptized in the Methodist church.
    A backlash against the state's notorious rough-and-tumble political gamesmanship propelled Haley to within 4,800 votes of winning the June
8 primary outright.
    Haley grew up in a state where black and white define history and divide politics — even beauty contests.
    At 5, Haley's parents entered her and her sister, Simran, in the Little Miss Bamberg Pageant and they were the only children of Indian immigrants in town.
    "They had a Little Miss White Bamberg and they had a Little Miss African-American Bamberg, and, you know they disqualified us because they didn't know what category to put us in," Haley said.
    Her father, who wears the traditional Sikh turban, was a biology professor at a historically black college and her mother taught middle school social studies. By the time Haley was in high school, she was keeping the books at the family's upscale clothing business.
    "What was frustrating to me is I felt like government should strengthen businesses," Haley said. "You know, we were paying too much in taxes. The worker's comp rates were unbelievable."
    She spoke with some female lawmakers and decided to run for the state House. In a GOP runoff race against a 30-year incumbent, Haley confronted fliers that played up her family name, Randhawa. She won that 2004 election and easily won re-election in 2006 and 2008.
    Haley aligned herself with Gov. Mark Sanford, whose bickering with the Legislature left him with few fans in the Statehouse. She riled the GOP House leadership in 2008 by bucking their resistance to restrictions on payday lending companies and by pushing for more recorded votes. She toured the state with Sanford to highlight that issue. It made her a thorn in leadership's side and secured her reputation as a boat-rocker.



6/15/10 Huffington Post: "I Called Amy Tan A Dirty Word--And Then She Friended Me,"
by Deanna Fei, Author of A Thread of Sky
    The day that a review of my first novel ran in the New York Times, I received a Facebook friend request from Amy Tan. It seemed she was welcoming me into the club--of novelists, Chinese American novelists, Chinese American female novelists reviewed in the Times. I was about to eagerly accept when I remembered that during my first radio interview a few days earlier--an interview I'd posted to my website, Twitter, and Facebook--I'd called her a dirty word.
    Well, I hadn't called her a dirty word. I'd said that among a younger generation of Asian Americans, her name had become a dirty word. Let me explain.
    While Amy Tan had just become marginally aware of my existence, I'd already had a long and complicated relationship with her. I was ten when she published The Joy Luck Club. My mother, my sisters, and I took turns devouring it. At a time when Publishers Weekly thought it seemly to praise the novel's "Oriental orientation," when my New York City public school still circulated a social studies textbook that described the Chinese as a yellow-skinned and slanty-eyed people, those vibrant, complex portraits of present-day Chinese Americans were revelatory.
    But by the time I was a high school senior, a teacher's mention of Amy Tan unleashed vitriol from every Asian American in the classroom. We were sick of having our personal essays, our anecdotes about our mothers, our every mention of Asian travels, customs, or dishes, summarily compared to The Joy Luck Club. There was something too easy, too knowing, about white Americans' embrace of the story.
    "Is that Amy Tan's fault?" the teacher asked. This mostly silenced us, but if there was a general, inarticulate feeling, it was: Well, yeah.
    We had no idea that this feeling had already mutated into a rancorous debate, notably led by Frank Chin, who attributed the acclaim and popularity of The Joy Luck Club to its depictions of Chinese culture as cruel, backwards, and misogynistic--depictions that, according to him, not only play to racist assumptions but also lack authenticity.
    The caveats and counterarguments here could (and should) fill entire books. But for my generation of Asian Americans, widespread ardor for Amy Tan dovetailed with the fetishization of Asian women, the denigration of Asian men, essentialist ideas about Asian cultures, the abiding preference for preconceived notions of who we are. Whether or not we bought Chin's argument, whether or not we'd even heard it, we knew the feeling behind it.
    So we formed a backlash--and what a backlash. Until now, I've never publicly admitted to being moved by Amy Tan's work. Few of my peers would be caught dead with one of her books. I can't recall the last time I heard an Asian American mention her name without a grimace, a smirk, a rolling of the eyes. And I've never felt bad about this, until now.
    More than twenty years after I first read The Joy Luck Club, I've just published my first novel, A Thread of Sky. The story of a family of six strong-willed Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home, uncovering political history and family secrets that have shaped each of their lives, it was inspired by a trip that I took through China with the women in my own family.
    The moment I conceived of the idea--perhaps while I was still on that trip--I worried about being compared to Amy Tan. But this was my story, and I needed to write it. For more than five years, I immersed myself in the work--moving to China, viewing the landmarks through the eyes of my characters, researching contemporary Chinese history, revising and writing and revising.
    I eventually wrote a scene in which my characters reference The Joy Luck Club because they feel the weight of those expectations on their own journey, but I didn't think of myself as writing in Amy Tan's shadow. Other people sometimes invoked her name to me, but it was usually ironic. I thought that maybe, as a society, we could finally allow for plurality.
    When the time came to market my novel, my publisher finally mentioned The Joy Luck Club as a comparison title. Of course: Chinese American women, mothers and daughters, a return to the homeland. I couldn't argue with the comparison as long as it wasn't meant to be all-encompassing. I hoped readers, once reached, would see that in my novel, setting foot in China is the beginning of a complicated story, not the end; that a major storyline is how the American-born daughters, having assumed their strength and independence are the result of their Westernization, now learn about a Chinese tradition of female heroism and their own grandmother's buried past as a feminist leader and revolutionary; that, all in all, my story was my own.
    Then the reviews started to come in. Library Journal: "This novel will appeal to fans of Amy Tan." Booklist: "Fei stakes a claim in Amy Tan territory." Even the local publications simply listing my events couldn't resist--the Portland Mercury, for instance: "Somewhere, Amy Tan's ears are burning."
    As a debut novelist, I was in no position to scorn any review, any mention, any attention at all. And it was some consolation that the reviewers allotted more than a paragraph read the novel on its own terms (the Times, the Chicago Tribune) or tackled the Amy Tan thing head-on (Feminist Review).
    But it wasn't just that I was being pigeonholed. I feared that white Americans would assume they already knew the story, while my own cohort wouldn't go near it. A few reader comments bore out that fear: an Amy Tan fan complaining that my novel wasn't what she'd expected, an Asian American wondering if I was "a sellout." The latter accusation might've been easier to swallow if my novel was actually selling out.
    So when I was invited for that radio interview, I was grateful for the opportunity to speak for myself. I read an excerpt, discussed my characters, described my process. Then, with about one minute left, my interviewer--a young, incisive Asian American--asked me about those Amy Tan comparisons, which she called "obnoxious." At last, I was being given the chance to defend myself--by sneering at Amy Tan.
    I didn't want to. I wanted to say that I knew where my interviewer was coming from, but that in blaming Amy Tan for how we get pigeonholed, we also pigeonhole her. We impose on her the burden we loathe: that of being representative. And my hope was that we'd soon reach a place where each work of literature would be read on its own terms, just as we as individuals would like to be known.
    When I said that "Amy Tan" had become a dirty word, I meant it in the full sense: a taboo, a line drawn in the sand, a barrier to understanding. I don't know if that came through.
    As for Amy Tan's friend request, I accepted it, of course. The truth is, I felt honored. And while I occasionally worry that someday she'll listen to that interview and hate me, I know she has much better things to do--writing her novels, simply being herself. May we all avail ourselves of that privilege.



6/13/10 Biloxi Sun-Herald: "Fishermen's tempers flare at BP, national media oil spill coverage,"
By Leigh Coleman
    Pass Christian, Miss. — Tempers flared at a town meeting led by U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker here on Sunday.
    Commercial fishermen, out-of-work charter boat captains, city leaders, grass roots organization members and weary residents gathered at Shaggy’s restaurant on the harbor seeking answers from Wicker and other officials about BP’s response to the oil spill. 
    The fishermen’s anger was directed at BP, which they believe is giving jobs to recreational fishermen instead of them, and at national media reports, which they say give the impression the Mississippi Coast is covered in oil.
    “We have reached the boiling point,” said Wade Blackwell, a lifelong fisherman in Pass Christian. “Those of us who are working fisherman are not being called back to work this oil spill. We only see recreational boats and retired folks being used. This is our life and nobody will call us back from BP and now the phone numbers they gave us are disconnected. We have not seen any money, either.”
    Wicker responded by saying BP is now a new kind of bureaucracy.
    “But we will try to get these problems resolved,” Wicker told the crowd.
    Leonie Johnston of Fins and Grins Charters said he believes the fight against the oil offshore now is too little, too late.
    “We are dead in the water,” Johnston told the senator. “We are thrilled with the coverage on the Coast that our waters are safe and open but the national news is telling America we are closed. The message is not getting out that we are open, and we are all starving.”
    Asian-American fishermen in attendance told officials they are without work now because of the BP oil spill, and some of them are still feeling the effects of Hurricane Katrina. There is also the language barrier.
    “The Asian-American community does not understand the federal process and help for them is not clear, because they do not understand. There needs to be help breaking down this language barrier,” said Kaitlin Truong, chairman for the Asian Americans for Change.
    Wicker said BP is trying to help, but agreed there is a language barrier.
    “We will take all of these comments back to BP and try to address all of them,” Wicker again told the group. “Although we are not responsible for BP’s actions we know they are in trouble.”
    Department of Marine Resources Executive Director Bill Walker said tar balls recently discovered off Horn Island and Petit Bois are in manageable amounts and are being cleaned up and taken to the landfill.
    “We are not seeing a great amount of oil in our waters at all,” Walker reassured the group.
    “The NOAA lines on the maps tell us that they are 95 percent sure the oil is not there. The national news is just coloring the entire region brown so that it looks like the oil is all over this area, and it is not.”



6/13/10 MainJustice.com: "Asian Americans See Opportunity in Kagan Nomination,"
By Joe Palazzolo 
    Three Indian-Americans are in the running to replace Solicitor General Elena Kagan (left): Neal Katyal; Sri Srinavasan; and Preeta Bansal.
    For the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court presents an opportunity to make history.
    No Asian or Pacific American has ever served in any of the Justice Department’s top four slots — Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, Associate Attorney General or Solicitor General — but if Kagan is confirmed, odds are good that will change.
    Three of the four candidates often mentioned as Kagan’s possible replacement as Solicitor General– Preeta Bansal, Neal Katyal and Sri Srinivasan — are Asian Americans, and all have been involved with NAPABA.
    “This is an exciting time for us,” said John Yang, who co-chairs the NAPABA’s judiciary committee. ”This obviously would be at the highest level any Asian American has ever attained in the Justice Department.”
    Katyal, acting Solicitor General (who had been Principal Deputy Solicitor General since the start of the administration), and Donald Verrilli Jr., senior counsel to President Barack Obama, are thought to be the top contenders for the post, though no decision has been made.
    Yang’s group has aggressively pushed Asian and Pacific Americans for key legal posts in the Obama administration, as well as federal judgeships. In some cases, the group has recruited and helped shepherd nominees through the confirmation process. (On the federal bench, there are nine Asian or Pacific American district judges and one appellate judge.)
    While they hold no Senate-confirmed positions in the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters, Asian Pacific Americans are represented in the field by U.S. Attorneys Preet Bharara in New York’s Southern District, Florence Nakakuni in Hawaii and Alicia G. Limtiaco in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
    In the Clinton and Bush administrations, Asian Pacific Americans served as Assistant Attorneys General, the department’s middle managers. Bill Lan Lee ran the Civil Rights Division from 1997 to 2001 but was never confirmed by the Senate, Viet Dinh oversaw the department’s Office of Legal Policy from 2001 to 2003, and Wan Kim led the Civil Rights Division from 2005 to 2007.
    The NAPABA has been more active in judicial nominations than executive nominations, but both are stepping stones — if not exactly prerequisites – to fulfilling the group’s highest ambition. ”There are obviously implications for a future Asian Pacific American Supreme Court justice, which we hope is very close in the coming,” Yang said.
    Kagan is the first Solicitor General to be nominated to the Supreme Court since the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked.
    Bansal was a finalist for the Solicitor General’s post at the start of the Obama administration, when Attorney General Eric Holder was considering Kagan as his Deputy Attorney General. Bansal, former New York Solicitor General and partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, was instead tapped as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget.
    Judith Kaye, of counsel at Skadden and former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, called Bansal “one of New York’s big stars.” As Solicitor General in New York, Bansal enjoyed a strong relationship with the court of appeals, Kaye said, adding that Bansal often came to her with ideas for improving the New York court system.
    “She’s an excellent manager,” Kaye said. “I’ve seen her footprints at Skadden, too. She has a group of great fans here.”
    With his appointment as Principal Deputy Solicitor General, Katyal, who successful argued the landmark detainee case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, became the highest-ranking Asian American at Main Justice.
    Katyal, who has a strong relationship with Holder, has handled some of the office’s toughest assignments, including successfully arguing that detainees in Afghanistan should not be able to challenge their confinement in U.S. courts as their counterparts in Guantanamo Bay can — a deeply unpopular position among human rights advocates.
    “He has hit the ball out of the park in terms of gravitas and responsibility,” said Tom Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and founder of SCOTUSblog.
    Goldstein, who met Katyal in high school when the two were on debate teams, pointed to Katyal’s reception in the office as evidence of his qualifications. It was telling, he said, that Katyal settled in so comfortably with the office’s experienced deputies – Michael Dreeben, Edwin Kneedler, Malcolm Stewart — whom Goldstein described as “icons of the Supreme Court bar.
    Srinivasan, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, has argued 17 cases before the Supreme Court, including former Enron Corp. executive Jeffrey Skilling’s challenge this term to the “honest services” fraud statute, one of the Justice Department’s favorite anti-corruption tools.
    He worked stints in the Solicitor General’s office in the Clinton and Bush administrations, taking a break in between to help former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger launch O’Melveny & Myers’ appellate group.
    Dellinger has called Srinivasan the smartest person he ever worked with at the SG’s office, high praise from one of the nation’s top advocates.
    Of the three candidates, he brings the most breadth of experience before the high court, having argued matters related to federal preemption, federal court jurisdiction, banking law, federal contracting law, administrative law, criminal law and procedure, immigration law and education law.



6/11/10 Christian Science Monitor: "The rise of the Indian-American candidate, 
as Nikki Haley and others run,"
by Tarini Parti, Contributor
    Since Tuesday’s primaries, much has been said about the boost for Republican women candidates. But another group got a lift as well: Indian-Americans.
    With Nikki Haley advancing to a GOP runoff in South Carolina’s gubernatorial race, the spotlight 
is on those of Indian descent and their increased involvement in US politics.
    Ms. Haley – born Nimrata Randhawa – is expected to clear the runoff and gain the Republican Party nomination. In right-leaning South Carolina, she stands a good chance of winning in the fall and becoming the second Indian-American governor, after Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R).
    Haley is one of a record number of Indian-Americans in pursuit of a political office this year. Six Indian-Americans are running for Congress in hopes of filling the void that was created after Mr. Jindal, the only Indian congressman, left the House in 2008.
    This is the most number of viable Indian candidates running for Congress ever, says David Wasserman, political analyst for The Cook Political Report.
    “It’s a positive sign. Very competitive candidates are running, and even if they don't win, they'll be on the map,” he says.
    Jindal was only the second Indian congressman. He was elected 42 years after the first Indian congressman, Dalip Singh Saund, left the House.
    Now, Surya Yalamanchili, in Ohio, and Manan Trivedi, in Pennsylvania, have received the Democratic nomination for their congressional districts. The other four Indian candidates – all Democrats – still have to go through the primary process, where they will have tough competition: Raj Goyle in Kansas, Ami Bera in California, Ravi Sangisetty in Louisiana, and Reshma Saujani in New York.
    "This is a sign of growth for the community in the political realm," says Bhavna Pandit, a Democratic fundraiser in Washington, D.C. "The Indian community is such a big part of the country, and we don't have anyone in Congress."
    Surveys have shown that Southeast Asians, which include Indians, politically align more with the left than the right, says Madhulika Khandelwal, director of the Asian/American Center at Queens College in New York. But two of the most successful Indian-American politicians – Jindal and Haley – are Republicans receiving support from two conservative states.
    Indians, both Democrat and Republican, are becoming more politically involved at all levels by running for local and state offices, ranging from school boards to state legislatures, Ms. Pandit says.
    Although Jindal’s success could have given other Indian-Americans an impetus, she attributes the recent activism to the evolution of the community, which now numbers 2.5 million.
    Indians, she says, started becoming politically active in the 1990s. Prior to that, most Indians were first-generation immigrants, who were more focused on establishing themselves in foreign country. But now, second-generation immigrants, who do not have the same anxieties as their parents, have the luxury of spending the time and money that are needed to run for office.
    Indians first started becoming involved in politics mainly through fundraising, Ms. Khandelwal says. That was a noteworthy development, she says, because most communities start off through grass-roots mobilization and not through financial contributions.
    US India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) is a bipartisan group based in the Washington, D.C., area that provides support for Indian candidates. It’s played a big role in recent years in encouraging Indians to run for local, state, and federal offices.
    The organization puts candidates in contact with big donors in the Indian community and helps them plan fundraisers and events, says Sanjay Puri, chairman of USINPAC.
    Political financial contributions made by the community have steadily increased in the past two decades. And now, Indians are contributing to candidates of all origins, not just their own, Pandit says.
    The Indian-American community is more affluent than some other immigrant groups. In 2007, the US Census Bureau found, the median income of Indian-American families was $69,470 – well above the median income of all American families.
    According to Mr. Puri, the election of Jindal was a defining moment for Indians, and since then, his organization has seen a dramatic increase in Indians wanting to become more politically active.
    The financial support from the community, along with its desire to see Indian representation in Congress, will intensify the trend of Indians becoming more politically active, Pandit says.
    "As each election cycle goes on, we'll have more and more Indian-Americans running for office," she says.
    For the Indian candidates currently running for Congress, their biggest hurdle may not be their ethnicity, but rather their Democratic Party affiliation. Many constituents are dissatisfied with the Democratic administration, notes Mr. Wasserman of The Cook Political Report.
    “I don't think their ethnicity will become an issue in any of the elections,” he says. “Bobby Jindal's election is proof that even in the Deep South, Indian-American candidates can prove themselves to voters.”


6/28/10 Las Vegas Review-Journal: "Head of Asian American Group gets politicians' attention,"
by Jane Ann Morrison
    Mike Vaswani is all about unity. His business card reads: Unity Is Our Priority & Strength. You'd expect no less from the president of the Asian American Group, an umbrella group of more than 30 diverse Asian associations.
    AAG now includes Koreans, Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Malaysians, Thai, Laotians, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesians, Singaporeans and Middle Easterners.
    AAG's political clout is such that both Rory Reid and Brian Sandoval are vying for its gubernatorial endorsement.
    Asian-American voters are desirable on two levels. Many are campaign contributors, and they vote in proportionately larger numbers than other minorities.
    In 2008, Vaswani said proudly, 95 percent of the candidates endorsed by AAG won their elections. Asian-Americans support both Democrats and Republicans, so parties can't take AAG's endorsement for granted.
    "Mike is a really, really hard worker and AAG holds incredible events," Reid said. "When he says, 'Show up,' a lot of people do. For anyone in the political world, that's significant."
    Vaswani, 66, left India for Africa when he was 17 and lived all over the world before immigrating to the United States in 1970. He moved to Las Vegas in 1995, joining his wife, Rita.
    AAG was formed in 1993 by Dr. Peter Lok, Vaswani's mentor, and Vaswani took over as president in 2002. He also heads the Asian American Coalition of Las Vegas, which raises money to support charitable efforts.
    Vaswani has become a conduit linking the Asian community with the law enforcement community and this spring was honored by FBI Director Robert Mueller with the Director's Community Leadership Award, the first Las Vegan to be so honored.
    "I am blessed by the FBI award," Vaswani said. "I don't think I deserve it."
    Holly James, the FBI's community coordinator, disagreed. "Mike's been very helpful to the FBI. He's letting his community know not to be afraid of law enforcement."
    When mortgage fraud cases were being investigated, Vaswani said he gave some leads to the FBI about friends who had been ripped off.
    "It's known in the community, I help everybody."
    Vaswani works for unity, not only within the Asian community, but with the Hispanic and African-American community. When the Asian community was overlooked in a 2008 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas addressing minority issues, he complained to the Democrat hierarchy.
    They quickly corrected their faux pas.
    Currently, his political priority is to see more Asian-Americans appointed to boards and commissions by governors, county commissioners and city council members. He estimates there are more than 150,000 Asians in Las Vegas and they are not well-represented through appointments.
    Vaswani owns three small group homes for Alzheimer's patients called Happy Adult Care and works as a zoning consultant. He said he is not interested in being appointed himself. "I try to stay low key," he said.
    During a party recently to celebrate his FBI award, one of only 51 leadership awards for 2009, speakers talked about his humility. But being humble doesn't mean he won't use statistics like bullets.
    "In the United States, 60 to 70 percent of motels are owned by Indians, 40 percent of the top hotels are owned by Indians, 90 percent of smoke shops are owned by Indians, 70 percent of 7-Eleven's are owned by Indians, 40 percent of gas stations are owned by Indians.
    There are 42,000 Indian doctors in the U.S. After all that achievement, we don't get recognized."
    Although he is widely known in political, law enforcement and Asian circles, Vaswani isn't a household word in Las Vegas. It took the FBI to recognize his achievements on a national level.



6/7/10 NAPABA press release: "Judge Lucy H. Koh Becomes First Korean American Confirmed to be U.S. District Court Judge and the First Asian Pacific American Article III Judge Confirmed in the Greater Bay Area,"
    Washington – Today, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed The Honorable Lucy H. Koh to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, making her the first Korean American U.S. District Court Judge in United States history and the first Asian Pacific American Article III judge in the 160-year history of the Northern District of California. Magistrate Judge Edward M. Chen, whose nomination to the Northern District of California is still pending, was the first Asian Pacific American judge to serve on the court.
    “This is a historic achievement for the Asian Pacific American community,” said Joseph J. Centeno, president of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. “The glaring absence of an Asian Pacific American Article III in the Northern District California for over 160 years makes Judge Koh’s confirmation very meaningful to our community.”
    Judge Koh was appointed to the California Superior Court for Santa Clara County in January 2008 by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Prior to her appointment, she was a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in Silicon Valley, where she specialized in intellectual property and commercial litigation. Judge Koh began her legal career in the public sector, serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles in the major frauds section, and in several positions at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., including Special Assistant to the U.S. Deputy Attorney General. Then FBI Director Louis Freeh gave Judge Koh an award for prosecuting a $54 million securities fraud case. She also worked on the staff of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. 
    “It is exciting to see Judge Koh confirmed as the first female Korean American Article III Judge in the United States,” said Karen K. Narasaki, president and executive director of the Asian American Justice Center. “Women and Asian Pacific Americans have long been underrepresented among federal judges, and five out of the nine Asian Pacific Americans the President has nominated to serve as federal judges have been women. It is heartening to see that the President is committed to increasing diversity on the federal bench.” 
    Judge Koh’s nomination received broad bipartisan support, including support from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, and Viet Dinh, former George W. Bush Administration Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy.
    AAJC and NAPABA congratulate Judge Koh upon her historic confirmation. The organizations thank President Obama for nominating her and Senator Barbara Boxer for recommending her.
    The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) is the national association of Asian Pacific American attorneys, judges, law professors and law students. NAPABA represents the interests of over 40,000 attorneys and 63 local Asian Pacific American bar associations. Its members represent solo practitioners, large firm lawyers, corporate counsel, legal service and non-profit attorneys, and lawyers serving at all levels of government. NAPABA continues to be a leader in addressing civil rights issues confronting Asian Pacific American communities. Through its national network of committees and affiliates, NAPABA provides a strong voice for increased diversity of federal and state judiciaries, advocates for equal opportunity in the workplace, works to eliminate hate crimes and anti-immigrant sentiment, and promotes professional development of minorities in the legal profession.



5/31/10 Los Angeles Times: "A tale of Korean War heroism: U.S. Marine Chew-Een Lee's bravery at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir is a focus of Smithsonian Channel documentary,"
by Tony Perry 
    When Chew-Een Lee was growing up in western Sacramento during World War II, he was eager to enlist in the military to fight for his country. He joined the ROTC in high school and enlisted in the Marine Corps as soon as he graduated. 
    "I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek and obsequious," said Lee, whose father was a farmer and prominent figure in the Chinese community in Northern California.
    But to Lee's disappointment, he was given a job in a language school rather than a combat billet. He stayed in the Marine Corps after the war and in 1950, as an infantry platoon leader, he got his long-awaited chance for combat as Marines from Camp Pendleton were deployed to Korea. His bravery at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir — a Chinese American officer battling Chinese army troops who had surrounded the American forces — is part of Marine Corps lore.
    And now it is the subject of a documentary, "Uncommon Courage: Breakout at Chosin," set for broadcast on Memorial Day on the Smithsonian Channel.
    "His fighting style was ferocious and his leadership was inspirational," Joe Owen, who fought beside Lee and is now 85 and retired in upstate New York, said in a telephone interview. He said Lee "was always up with the assault squad." 
    The weather was frigid; the mountainous terrain was rugged; weaponry was often unreliable at subzero temperatures. The Marines were mostly untested in battle, but Lee had driven them hard during training to make them sharp.
    The Chinese regulars, disciplined and numerous, assaulted in waves. Fighting was close in and fierce, including with bayonets. Lee, a lieutenant, was assigned to lead several hundred troops to reinforce a Marine company holding a position that was key to allowing thousands of Marines to move southward and escape the Chinese encirclement.
    "I would have kicked ass and done whatever was necessary," said Lee, 84, retired and living in Washington, D.C. "To me, it didn't matter whether those were Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, whatever — they were the enemy."
    Wounded, he refused to be evacuated and, after getting medical attention, stole a jeep to get back to the front. While other officers shed all insignia to avoid being targets for snipers, Lee donned an orange vest so that his men could see him in the blinding white of the snow.
    David Royle, Smithsonian Channel executive vice president for programming and producing, said he was drawn to Lee's story as emblematic of the courage and loyalty that is central to Marine Corps culture. The documentary makers rounded up former Marines who served with Lee and whose memories of the battle remain sharp.
    "A lot of them have waited years to tell the story of Chew-Een Lee," Royle said. "And many believe he should have been awarded the Medal of Honor."
    Instead, Lee received the Navy Cross, the second highest medal awarded to Marines for combat bravery. Then as now, the Medal of Honor selection process is shrouded in mystery; Owen believes that Lee may not have been selected because the company commander was killed before he could nominate him.
    Lee said he was motivated by a Chinese tradition that says the only truly honorable death for a warrior is in battle. Wounded a second time, he had to be evacuated — but not before his Marines had fought their way to their objective.
    Lee retired from the Marine Corps as a major in 1968 and went on to work as a training supervisor for an insurance company and then as a compliance officer for an electricity cooperative.
    He remains proud of what he accomplished at Chosin and prouder still of the Marines under him, who may not have liked their taskmaster but who respected him.
    "They were outstanding — they were my Marines," he said.


5/28/10 huffingtonpost.com and VictoriaMoy.net: "You Must Remember This"
by Victoria Moy
    Surrounded by an abundance of Cantonese-style roast meats and lomein, as well as the standard American Thanksgiving fare of turkey and cranberry sauce, I stare up at a wall lined with portraits of Chinese men in military uniforms and squadron hats. The room is decorated with award plaques, photos of soldiers, and the American flag. While Grandpa shoots the breeze with hordes of other Chinese grandpas who wear fedoras and speak Dick Tracy style (like the black-and-white Hollywood movies--in old timer's slang and accents), Grandma chats gaily with the other wives in sing-song Toishanese (a dialect of Cantonese). Within that one room, there's a men's language, and a women's language; an "English world" and "Chinese world." I don't get why grandpas speak English and grandmas speak Chinese, why there's a linguistic divide along gender lines in my grandparents' generation. This is my life growing up in New York's Chinatown in the 1980s.
    The Thanksgiving and Christmas parties my grandparents took me to were at the American Legion on Canal Street, which Chinese American vets set up in Chinatown after World War II.
    When I was eight, I interviewed Grandpa for a school project on Ellis Island and immigration. He looked straight ahead, avoiding my eyes, when he answered my questions.
    It took four generations in America before my entire nuclear family could live on one continent, where my parents could watch their children grow under their own care. The pain suffered by previous generations takes a long time to erase. The realization that it's history and not fate--a result of politics and prejudice that not any one person can prevent or evade--makes it somewhat easier to bear. Yet I cannot help but wonder: When does this end? What groups of hyphenated Americans are in line to go through the same anguish?



5/28/10 Bergen County, New Jersey Record: "Fallen soldier memorialized at ceremony in River Vale," 
by Brian Aberback
    River Vale -Min Soo Choi died in Iraq trying to spread the freedom that allowed him and his family to come here - the same freedom that American soldiers died for in Choi's native Korea more than 50 years ago.
    Army Pfc. Choi's sacrifice, and that of all veterans, was honored Saturday at a ceremony following the township's Memorial Day parade at Veterans Memorial Park.
"He wished to do for America what American troops did for Korea," Jong Dae Choi, Min Soo's father, said through a translator after the emotional program. "If American troops had not gone to Korea, we wouldn't be here."
    The Choi family came to River Vale from South Korea seven years ago.
    Min Soo Choi, 21, was killed by an explosive device while on patrol in Abertha, Iraq.
He had hoped to become an American citizen after leaving the military and was granted his wish posthumously. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Nearly 60 immigrant soldiers have received citizenship after being killed in the Iraq war, according to national officials.
    "Because of Min Soo and other heroes just like him, the people, and especially the children, of Iraq will know and experience freedom," said Angela Harris, wife of Lt. Col. Michael J. Harris, the commander of Min Soo's regiment. "Min Soo is our hero and will never be forgotten."
    Mayor George Paschalis recalled a Memorial Day speech by former President Ronald Reagan honoring fallen veterans. "They gave up two lives," Paschalis told a crowd of about 150. "The one they were living and the one they would have lived. They gave up the chance to be husbands, fathers and grandfathers. They gave up everything for their country."
    A Japanese maple tree provided by the Asian American Political Coalition, the Korean American Association and the Organization of Chinese Americans was dedicated with a plaque that reads: "In Memory of Pfc. Min Soo Choi and All the Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom."
    A shaky Jong Dae Choi laid a bouquet of red carnations, white daisies and violet irises by the tree as Min Soo's mother, Jae Wha, and sister, Mirry, stood behind him, tears rolling down their cheeks.
    Choi was a 2003 graduate of Pascack Valley High School and attended the Holdrum School. He had hoped to pursue a career in law enforcement, either as a police officer or with the FBI. He enlisted in February 2004 while attending John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. He was deployed to Iraq in January and died one month later.
    More than 1,600 Americans have died in the Iraq war, including 38 from New Jersey. Choi was the first Korean-American to die in the two-year-old conflict.
    Palisades Park Councilman Jason Kim, who last fall became the first Korean-American elected to municipal office in New Jersey, attended the ceremony and said he was moved by River Vale's outpouring of support for the Choi family.
    "I saw a total stranger who had never met [the Choi family] come down and hug Mrs. Choi and cry with her," Kim said. "I felt the warmth and camaraderie and compassion of the community, which was wonderful."
    Chris Carbone, a National Guardsman from North Haledon who has served in Iraq, said he found the observance somber, yet uplifting.
    "I remember guys we lost in my battalion, buddies of mine," Carbone said.
    "It's hard. One day they're there; you're talking and joking with them. The next day there's an empty bunk."
    Knowing that he may be heading back to Iraq, Carbone said he has been heartened by the support he has received at home.
    "It's really an honor to be a part of this," he said of the ceremony. "There's so much love and support. It's awesome."



5/28/10 New York Times: "After Governor’s Pardon, an Immigrant Is Sworn in as a Citizen,"
by Nina Bernstein
    It was his application for United States citizenship that derailed the American life of Qing Hong Wu, an information-technology executive who had risen from poverty and street crime in Chinatown. He had fulfilled the promise he made to the judge who sentenced him for teenage muggings, but immigration authorities jailed him for mandatory deportation to China, a country he had left at age 5. 
It took a governor’s pardon to free him. And on Friday, with his mother at his side and the judge cheering him on, Mr. Wu, 29, was sworn in as a citizen with the approval of the same immigration authorities who had tried to expel him from the country. 
    “I can now officially say I’m an American,” said Mr. Wu, who immigrated legally to the United States as a child, in a prepared statement he read at a news conference outside a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. “I can finally have peace that I am safe and won’t be forced to leave my home and my family.” 
    He thanked immigration officials who decided to swiftly reconsider his rejected citizenship application after a pardon by Gov. David A. Paterson cleared the way. And Mr. Wu pledged to “keep doing the right thing” and to “give back to my community in any way I can.” 
    The case of Mr. Wu had drawn support from many, including the judge who sentenced him to a reformatory in 1996 for a series of muggings committed at age 15, and who promised to stand by him if he redeemed himself. The judge, Michael A. Corriero, since retired, wrote to Mr. Paterson appealing for the pardon. 
    Inspired in part by Mr. Wu’s case, the governor created a Special Immigrant Board of Pardons on May 5 to review cases of legal immigrants threatened with deportation for old or minor crimes. 
The governor’s office has said that hundreds of pardons are expected before the end of the year, but advocates considering petitions in several cases have yet to file them. Such petitions are difficult to draft, and Elizabeth R. OuYang, the president of OCA-NY, an Asian-American civil rights organization that championed Mr. Wu, said his naturalization was an important step in encouraging advocacy groups and law firms to try to help. 
    As Judge Corriero walked to the federal courthouse where Mr. Wu took the oath of citizenship, he paused to draw a larger lesson from the celebration. “It’s truly a magnificent affirmation of American values and justice,” Judge Corriero said. “It’s taken a little while for us to get here. But today demonstrates what can be done when so many people see the way to justice, in a situation that was crying out for it.” 



5/27/10 www.theawl.com: "Real America: "Red Dawn" Remade: China is Coming for Our Children,"
by Abe Sauer
    Later this year, America’s dream factory will foist upon an already blooded-up America a remake of 1984’s Red Dawn. It's probably the most unnecessary, irresponsible, Sinophobic film in America’s history, and that's saying a lot. And it will be just in time for midterm elections already foul with the tea party's red-white-and-blue jingoism. What a time for it—America’s relationship with China hasn't been this crucial since, say, 1941. 
    The film is, indeed, just a film. Or as the MGM executive I spoke with described it: "just an action film." Nonetheless, it is a bald example of how one-dimensionally America generally, at all levels, thinks about China and Chinese people.
    And now, Red Dawn. Just the latest bit of escalation in the villainization of China, propaganda that's sure to turn frothy in the next decade.
    I obtained a copy of the script. In it, the Chinese invade and subjugate Americans to pinko commie rule all under the guise of “helping” the nation that has become too irresponsible to take care of itself. It is a paranoia tale of an America where our children no longer get stupid Chinese character tattoos because they want to; they get them because they have to. It’s basically porn for survivalist militia types who believe it is “real” scenarios like this that justify everything from the sale of assault rifles to electing nationalist fear-mongers. 
    Even worse, it’s just another in a long, tired, example of how America’s thinking about China has not progressed past Rohmer’s "Fu Manchu."
    When I contacted MGM, and expressed these concerns about the film, spokesman Grey Munford told me, "Red Dawn is an action film, it is not xenophobic and it is far too early in the process to make assumptions about the film that will appear in theatres." He also told me the copy I had was stolen and a draft. (They declined to share a final copy or shooting script.)
    That's not the message the movie's PR is putting out there though. Josh Hutcherson, who stars in the film, recently told MTV that "We've changed quite a bit of the story, but the heart of the story is there. The American, patriotic feel of the original, rising up against the invaders, is still definitely there. The Chinese are invading now, so we're switching that up just to stay with the times a little bit."
    The film's producer, Tripp Vinson, claims that "a lot of research" went into the China invasion scenario, including input from military "experts." One of those experts was the RAND Corporation. RAND's involvement may be the detail that most connects the remake to the original. Maybe no single organization went further and did more to architect and, more importantly, justify the anti-Communist military industrial complex and anti-Reds mindset that defined 20th-century America and that still in many ways defines America's military structure. The Obama socialism/communism scare tactics the nation has seen recently all have their roots in the Cold War; RAND was the fertilizer for those roots.
     That, 20 years after the Cold War ended, RAND has its hand in a hawkish right-wing paranoid wank fantasy about China taking military action against the U.S. speaks to the persistent Red-Scare roots of an organization that still shapes policy (Iraq's Ahmed Chalabi pooch-screw has its connections to RAND). 
    When I pointed out the remake to Jeff Yang, the "Asian Pop" columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a trendwatcher for Iconoculture, he was appalled. Of MGM's "action film" reasoning, Yang said, "The notion that 'action' and 'xenophobia' are somehow contrasting principles is idiotic." Then he told me what he really thought: "The action genre tends to be Manichaean — there's good, evil, and little or nothing in between — and archetypal — characters are drawn big, iconic, and cartoony to eliminate anything that might distract from the mayhem. Your catharsis comes from rooting for the pure-hearted heroes and hating on the corrupt, inhuman villains. Unfortunately, the combination of these factors tends to turn action cinema into a cesspit of ultra-nationalism and, in the case of films where the villains are uniformly of another color, racism. It's a short slide over from hating the evil Chinese villains in a film like this to subconsciously or consciously seeing all Chinese as evil villains, and hating them as well. The promotional campaign, which basically steals a page from the miniseries 'V' but with Chinese people rather than lizard aliens as the bearers of Trojan gifts, makes things even worse."
    America’s direct mistreatment of its own Asian (especially Chinese) populations is not so well known by Americans. While most are probably aware that our liberty-loving government interned over 100,000 Americans (who happened to have Japanese ancestry) during WWII, few are aware that the Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943 (and even then Chinese immigration was effectively hobbled by low quotas). To this day the Aliens and Nationality section of the United States Code has only one entry specifically targeting a nationality; it is "Chinese." Off the books and under the radar, there also continues a relentless unconscious drive to stereotype and dehumanize Asian populations both inside and outside the United States.
    The must-read book on the subject of America’s dehumanization of its Pacific enemies, War Without Mercy, prophetically notes that even though "vicious racial stereotypes were transformed" after Vietnam, it "does not mean that they were dispelled. They remain latent, capable of being revived by both sides in times of crisis and tension." In the 1980s that meant fear of Japan buying up America, which prompted the Foreign Ownership Disclosure Act and saw the oh-so-open-minded Gore Vidal warning of "the long-feared Asiatic colossus…." The New York Times Magazine ran a feature titled "The Danger From Japan." Two laid-off Detroit auto workers got only probation and $3,000 fines after beating a Japanese-American to death with baseball bats. The original judge noted that the men were partially justified, as it was Japanese automakers that put them out of work. The dead man turned out to have Chinese heritage. 



5/27/10 http://race.change.org/blog: "10 Facts You May Not Know About Asian-American History,"
by Jenn Fang
    It's almost the end of May. Do you know your Asian-American history?
    Most of America isn't aware that May is Asian-American Heritage Month. It's a celebration that started in 1978, when Congress urged President Jimmy Carter to declare the week of May 4th "Asian-American Heritage Week." (That date was chosen to coincide with the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants on May 7, 1843, and with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad — built largely by Chinese laborers — on May 10, 1869.) More recently in 1990, following another vote by Congress, President George H.W. Bush expanded Asian-American Heritage Week to encompass the entire month of May.
    Sadly, Asian-American history and heritage is rarely taught in U.S. public schools. So for those of you who've missed such curriculum, here's a list of 10 factoids you may not have known about the history of Asian-Americans in this country:
    1). The first Asians whose arrival in America was documented were Filipinos who escaped a Spanish galleon in 1763. They formed the first Asian-American settlement in U.S. history, in the swamps surrounding modern-day New Orleans.
    2). In the years between 1917 and 1965, Uncle Sam explicitly outlawed immigration to the U.S. of all Asian people. Immigration from China, for example, was banned as early as 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. It wasn't until the Immigration Act of 1965 — which abolished national origins as a basis for immigration decisions — that nearly 50 years of race-based discrimination against Asian immigrants ended.
    3). Because of their race, Asians immigrants were denied the right to naturalize as U.S. citizens, until the 1943 Magnuson Act was passed. Consequently, for nearly a century of U.S. history, Asians were barred from owning land and testifying in court by laws that specifically targeted "aliens ineligible to citizenship." Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, American-born children of Chinese immigrants were not regarded as American citizens until the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that the Fourteen Amendment also applied to people of Asian descent.
    4). Among the earliest Asian immigrants, virtually all ethnicities worked together as physical laborers, particularly on Hawaii's sugar cane plantations. On these plantations, a unique hybrid language — pidgin — developed that contained elements of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and English. Today, pidgin is one of the official languages of Hawaii, a state that is itself 40% Asian.
    5). Despite the Alien Land Law, which specifically prevented Asians from owning their own land, Japanese farmers were highly successful in the West Coast where they put into practice their knowledge of cultivating nutrient-poor soil to yield profitable harvests. By the 1920s, Japanese farmers (working their own land, or land held by white landowners that they managed) were the chief agricultural producers of many West Coast crops. In fact, the success of Japanese farmers is often cited as one of the reasons white landowners in California lobbied to support Japanese-American internment following the declaration of World War II.
    6). Many of the early Asian immigrants who worked as laborers on plantations and in factories were instrumental in the formation of the American labour movement, helping to organize some of the first strikes and unions throughout the country. Japanese plantation workers, for example, engaged in the first organized strike in Hawaii in 1904.
    7). Anti-miscegenation laws that denied marriage licenses between interracial couples specifically prohibited intermarriage between whites and Asians. For example, the 1922 Cable Act revoked the citizenship of any female U.S. citizen who married an "alien ineligible to citizenship," a phrase repeatedly used in legal documents to refer to Asians.
    8). Unlike Irish immigrants, who predominantly entered the United States via the Ellis Island immigration center, most Asian immigrants entered America by way of Angel Island Immigration Station. Unlike at Ellis Island, where immigrants might spend between two and five hours waiting to be processed, the Angel Island facility's unspoken goal was to limit the flow of Asian immigrants into the country. Between 1910 and 1940, many prospective Asian immigrants were detained for as long as two years at Angel Island, stymied by U.S. immigration officials hoping to find reasons to deport them. Some of the detainees wrote poems in Chinese on the walls of the Angel Island detention facility; these poems have since been translated and collected into anthologies.
    9). During World War II, Japanese American internees — including both Japanese immigrants and their American children — were forcibly relocated from their homes in the West Coast to remote relocation camps. Even still, several young Japanese-American men went on to successfully lobby the American government to be allowed to volunteer as soldiers in World War II, often to prove their loyalty to the United States. The 442nd infantry regiment, a segregated Asian-American unit composed almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, fought in Italy, France and Germany and is still the most highly decorated regiment in United States Armed Forces history.
    10). In 1982, a young Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin was brutally clubbed to death by two white men in Detroit, Michigan. The crime was motivated, in part, by anti-Asian sentiment stemming from widespread loss of auto manufacturing jobs to Japanese competitors; Ronald Ebens, one of the attackers, was heard saying "it's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work" to Chin moments before the attack. Despite pleading guilty to second-degree murder, Chin's killers did not serve any jail time for Chin's murder, and were only fined $3,000. Vincent Chin's death served as a flashpoint that ignited the modern Asian-American political movement.
Know anyone else who might benefit from an Asian-American history lesson? Tell your friends, pass it on — and leave any other key moments you think I missed in the comments.
    Jenn Fang founded and currently blogs at Reappropriate.com, one of the first feminism- and activism-focused Asian-American blogs. 



5/23/10 Honolulu Advertiser: "Djou heading to D.C.,"
By Derrick DePledge
    Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou punctured the Democrats' hold on the state's congressional delegation last night, winning a special election for Congress and becoming the first Republican in two decades to represent the Islands in Washington, D.C.
    Djou earned 39.4 percent of the vote in the winner-take-all special election in urban Honolulu's 1st Congressional District and took advantage of a bitter split among Democrats between state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa and former congressman Ed Case.
    Hanabusa, who had been trailing in third in most public and private polls, finished second with 30.8 percent, positioning herself well for the September primary.
    Case took 27.6 percent and will have to climb back against a wall of opposition from establishment Democrats and labor unions who will help Hanabusa in the primary.
    The winner of the primary will take on Djou again in the November general election, when Djou will need to appeal to more independents and moderate Democrats if he is to stay in office.
    "I think we sent a clear message to Washington, D.C., that we are spending too much money and that we need more fiscal responsibility, and I look forward to going to Washington, D.C., and Congress to do exactly that," Djou said outside the state GOP's headquarters.
    Djou will fill out the remaining months of former congressman Neil Abercrombie's term, which expires in January 2011. Djou will have to run in the Republican primary in September, but is expected to win easily.
    Djou becomes the third Republican — after former U.S. Rep. Pat Saiki and the late U.S. Sen. Hiram Fong — to represent Hawai'i in Washington since statehood.
    Hanabusa said she believes her campaign had the most effective grassroots organization.
    "This is what defines Hawai'i politics — it's the personal touch," she said.
    Hanabusa said she had heard anecdotally that some people may have voted for her after watching television advertisements critical of Djou and Case and also after national Democrats suggested privately that she should step aside for Case.
    Her supporters, gathered at her campaign headquarters off Ward Avenue, regarded second place as a victory.
    "From the volunteers' standpoint, it's a win," Hanabusa said. "You have to think about what they and this campaign have had to deal with in terms of the adversity, the naysayers and everyone else who came in and said we didn't have a chance. We come in second even despite that."
    Case had been describing the campaign as between him and Djou for the past several weeks, particularly after several national Democrats indicated that they thought he was the Demo-crat with the best chance of beating Djou.
    Case was the target of negative television ads from Djou, Hanabusa and Mainland groups such as the conservative Independent Women's Voice.
    "I think what happened is the sum total of probably $1 million worth of attack ads leveled at us by both Hanabusa and Djou, especially Djou," Case said. "She got a free pass on the attack ads. She was basically not attacked at all, and I was.
    "She just kind of flew under the radar and I took the hit. Charles obviously viewed me as the principal threat, otherwise he would have been attacking her."
    Voter turnout was 54 percent of the 317,337 eligible voters in the state's first all-mail special election for Congress after two Honolulu City Council special elections last year.
    Many voters interviewed said they were looking for change.
    "He has bright ideas and he's a fresh face," Beris Paik, a retired school teacher who lives in Kāhala said of Djou, adding that she believed he would resist pressure from the labor unions that often influence majority Demo-crats.
    "I believe that people are pretty tired of the old faces."
    Cherylynn Gatiuan, a homemaker who lives in Pearl City, said she shares Djou's conservative values and likes that he was the only one among the three leading candidates to oppose civil unions. She also said the state could benefit from a change in Democratic control of the congressional delegation.
    "I think it would help in certain areas, because sometimes it's just so overrun with the Democratic Party instead of listening to other things that might work," she said.
    Joey Lee, a carpenter who lives in Waipahu, believed Hanabusa was more in tune with the concerns of average workers struggling through the economic downturn.
    Lee said Hanabusa was "closer to us."
    Don Kroessig, a private school teacher who lives in Hawai'i Kai, said he liked what Djou and Hanabusa have accomplished in local and state politics but believed Case was ready to go to Washington.
    "My political perceptions are similar to what he presents," he said of Case's moderate views. "To me, it's being pragmatic. If you're going to get things done, it's about negotiations."
    Gov. Linda Lingle, who was able to attract independents and moderate Democrats in her two Republican victories for governor, said Djou should continue with his message that he would put Hawai'i before his political party.
    "What I did, and what he has done, is told people in a very sincere way, 'I'll do what's best for everybody, I'm not going to go with any special interest, even if it's my own party sometimes that might want me to do a certain thing,' " the governor said.
    Lingle said "that's the key message that everyone should recognize. While we all run from a political party, you've got to be able to show that you would do what's best for everyone."
    U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawai'i, who endorsed Hanabusa, said the odds were against her given the dynamics of the special election. But he said her second-place finish indicate that she will be competitive against Djou.
    "The results would indicate that in November she should do very well," Inouye said by phone from Los Angeles.
    Inouye, who resisted pressure from national Democrats who wanted a clear path for Case, said the results showed they were behind the wrong candidate.
    "Well, I think the results would indicate that if they had just stayed silent the result could have been a little different," he said.
    Inouye urged local Democrats to concentrate on Djou in November.
    "Just be a little patient because we'll do well this fall," Inouye said.
    Abercrombie, who resigned in February so he could concentrate on his campaign in the Democratic primary for governor, also predicted that Democrats will prevail in November.
    "The majority of voters in the district supported Democratic candidates in this special election," he said in a statement. "I am confident that a Democrat will win the congressional race in the general election.
    "The people of Hawai'i need a representative who will support President Obama's agenda and who will not cancel Hawai'i's other vote in the U.S. House."
    Djou started as an underdog. A poll taken in January for the Star-Bulletin and KITV by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research of Washington found the Republican trailing Case and Hanabusa with just 17 percent of the vote.
    At the time, national and local political analysts believed the race favored Democrats but warned about the uncertainty of the special election and the potential for Democrats to split their vote.
    After Scott Brown's upset GOP victory in a special election for U.S. Senate in traditionally Democratic Massachusetts in late January, Djou and local Republicans said a Djou victory in Hawai'i would send an equally "profound statement" nationally.
    While national Republicans helped Djou with fundraising and advice, the National Republican Congressional Committee did not air television ads in the Islands and instead focused on a special election for Congress this month in Pennsylvania.
    "I congratulate Charles Djou for his victory and a successful campaign based on the widely shared values of cutting spending, shrinking government and creating real, permanent American jobs," U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, the NRCC chairman, said in a statement. "I have no doubt that Hawai'i families will be well-represented in Congress as he joins our fight to return commonsense economic policies and fiscal sanity to Washington."
    The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $314,000 on television ads in Hawai'i against Djou but pulled out earlier this month after concluding that Case and Hanabusa were splitting the Democratic vote. Inouye moved $150,000 of his campaign money to the DCCC to help finance the ad campaign and keep the group neutral.
    "Rather than reflecting a true contest of ideas, the outcome of this election reflects the unusual nature of a race that put two strong Demo-crats competing against one Republican in a winner-take-all contest," U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the chairman of the DCCC, said in a statement.
    "As a result, the DCCC decided not to compete in this special election but to focus on the general election in November.
    "The fact that the Democratic candidates together received over 50 percent of the vote demonstrates that Democratic prospects are very good in November."
    In May, the Hawai'i Poll taken for The Advertiser and a private poll taken for the Democratic National Committee found Djou leading and Case and Hanabusa splitting the Democratic vote. National political analysts changed their outlook to Republican.
    With Djou as the front-runner, Democrats shifted their focus to the September primary and November general election, when they will have a chance to take back the district.
    Dan Boylan, a University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu history professor and political analyst, said he does not know if unity is possible given the personalities involved.
    "It's going to be tough. I think it's going to be much tougher than they realize," he said. "It seems to me that there is no love lost, obviously, between Ed Case and Colleen Hanabusa."
    Staff writer Gordon Y.K. Pang contributed to this report.

5/22/10 Los Angeles Times: "A whitewash for 'Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time' and 'The Last Airbender': Two of the season's most expensive films spark controversy by casting white actors in ethnic parts, a practice seen before in Hollywood,"
by Chris Lee
    Since its release, the video game franchise Prince of Persia has become notable for the acrobatic grace of its dagger-wielding, balloon pants-wearing hero as well as for what the games didn't do: affront gamers of Middle Eastern and Muslim descent with stereotypical depictions of people from the region as terrorists or religious zealots.
    Independent filmmaker and blogger Jehanzeb Dar, to name one such player, remembers his favorable first reaction to the swashbuckling action game, which is set amid the sands and ancient cities of Persia (as ancient Iran is known) and follows a hero with a magic sword caught between forces of good and evil. "You could see clearly the protagonist had distinct Middle Eastern features and darker skin," said Dar, 26, who pens the blog Muslim Reverie from Langhorne, Pa. "People could develop some respect for that culture instead of seeing it vilified."
    So when Disney studios announced plans for a live-action adaptation of Prince, Dar held out hope it would be a "serious story that would dispel a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions." Then came the bad news regarding "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" (the movie which arrives in theaters on Friday). None of its principle cast members are of Iranian, Middle Eastern or Muslim descent. And playing Dastan, the hero and titular heir to the Persian throne in the $200-million tent-pole film, is none other than Hancock Park's own Swedish-Jewish-American prince, Jake Gyllenhaal.
    "My first reaction was, 'Really?!' " said Dar. "It's insulting that people of color — especially Middle Easterners or South Asians — are not allowed to portray ourselves in these roles. That's a big problem a lot of people in the community are having with this film."
    Of course, Hollywood, has a rich history with this kind of thing. Think: John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror," Peter Sellers' bumbling Indian character in "The Party" or even more notoriously, Mickey Rooney's buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi character from "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the grandfather of all "Yellowface" stereotypes.
    Although these portrayals took place decades ago, their legacy lives on. Even now, in the age of Obama — when the newly installed Miss USA Rima Fakih is Lebanese American, Will Smith is the biggest movie star in the world and Sonia Sotomayor became the first Latina to sit on the Supreme Court — the movie industry can still seem woefully behind the times when it comes to matters of race.
    Consider the latest evidence. This summer, two of the season's biggest budgeted films have sparked controversy by installing white actors in decidedly "ethnic" parts. And some early fan reactions have varied from indignation to righteous fury to organized revolt over a perceived "whitewashing" of multi-culti characters, a practice that has come to be known as "racebending."
    In addition to Gyllenhaal and British actress Gemma Arterton's portrayal of Iranian characters in the swords-and-sandals action epic "Prince of Persia," Paramount has come under attack for its live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon animated series " Avatar: The Last Airbender." 
Directed by "Sixth Sense" auteur M. Night Shyamalan, "The Last Airbender" (as the movie is called to distinguish it from a certain James Cameron-directed 3-D blockbuster) has enraged some of the show's aficionados by casting white actors in three of four principle roles — characters that fans of the original property insist are Asian and Native American.
    And with just weeks until the movie's July 2 release — after a year-and-a-half-long letter-writing campaign to the film's producers and a correspondence with Paramount President Adam Goodman to underscore the importance of casting Asian actors in designated Asian roles — members of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans and an organization called http://www.racebending.com are urging fans to boycott "Airbender."
    The movie's detractors have spoken against the film at six college campuses, including M.I.T., New York University and UCLA, also setting up booths at events such as San Francisco's WonderCon pop culture expo to publicize their discontent. At last count, the group's Facebook group had 7,125 supporters and attracted petitioners against the movie's casting in 55 countries. The stated goal: to prevent "Airbender" from blooming into a lucrative three-part franchise via negative word of mouth.
    "It's unfortunate that it's come to this," said Racebending.com spokesman Michael Le. "They've constructed a film that is contrary not only to what fans expected to see but is also contrary to what America expects to see in a film released in 2010 featuring Asian culture and Asian and Native American characters as heroes.
    "We want to raise awareness of the discriminatory practices of Hollywood," Le continued. "We want to tell people this is important. It really matters."
    Guy Aoki, head and co-founder of MANAA — a crusading organization that has skirmished with TV networks and movie studios for a decade for more positive representations of Asian Americans — put a finer point on the boycotters' concerns. "If 'The Last Airbender' does really well, it sends the message in Hollywood that discriminating against Asian Americans works," he said.
    Although the studios behind both "Prince of Persia" and "Airbender" have taken costly steps to not seem insensitive toward — or out of touch with — the minority constituencies represented in their respective films, no Disney or Paramount executives would comment for this article. Nor would the producers — "Prince of Persia's" Jerry Bruckheimer or "Airbender's" Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Directors Mike Newell and Shyamalan similarly declined.
    Camille Alick, project manager for MOST — Muslims On Screen & Television, a resource center providing Hollywood productions with connections to Muslim actors and accurate information on Muslim populations — had not seen the films but remains sympathetic to the studios' decisions, and contends that her experience in the field allows her insight into such casting choices.
    "The hope is to have an authentic depiction, but casting directors have huge jobs in front of them," Alick said. "They're trying to find the best person for the part. And when it's a big budget movie, it's going to come down to a business decision. If a major actor can carry a film, that plays a big part. It's not malicious intent."
    Still, those among the anti-racebending camp feel that such rationalization provides a convenient excuse for keeping the prevailing system — a glass ceiling for actors of color in major movies — firmly in place.
    "Hollywood can make anybody into a hero," Aoki said. "And yet these people continue to use a conservative attitude. When are they ever going to put an Asian American as a star to disprove that thinking? For Paramount to assume people wouldn't pay to see Asians as leads is presumptuous and insulting."
    For the uninitiated, the cartoon series "Avatar: The Last Airbender" was aimed at children but enjoyed broad crossover to all ages — earning a zealous Asian American following — during its 2005-08 TV run. Set in a Pan-Asian universe, identifiably Asian and Native American, anime-inspired characters battle one another using martial arts manipulation of the four elements. The series follows a 12-year-old named Aang (played by non-Asian actor Noah Ringer in the movie) and his band of youthful cohorts who must save the world by toppling the evil Fire Lord and ending war with the Fire Nation.
    But when word leaked out last year that a casting call had gone out for the movie version requesting "Caucasians and other ethnicities," "Airbender" fans freaked. Moreover, many of the film's detractors felt that Shyamalan, an Indian American, had betrayed his own.
    On the "Airbender" set in Philadelphia, Shyamalan took issue with the accusation that "Airbender" was anything less than inclusionary to characters of color. "Ultimately, this movie, and then the three movies, will be the most culturally diverse tent-pole movies ever released, period," he told The Times last summer.
    Paramount provided a statement about "Airbender's" casting choices. "The movie has 23 credited speaking roles — more than half of which feature Asian and Pan Asian actors of Korean, Japanese and Indian decent," it reads. "The filmmaker's interpretation reflects the myriad qualities that have made this series a global phenomenon. We believe fans of the original and new audiences alike will respond positively once they see it."
    (In an effort to short-circuit further criticism, the studio says it will screen a print of the film to Racebending.com boycotters once its last-minute conversion from 2-D to 3-D is complete.)
    During "Prince of Persia's" scripting process, Disney hired BoomGen Studios, a consultation and niche marketing firm specializing in creative content about the Middle East, to help address issues of historical congruity and cultural contexts. Consultants advised the filmmakers to avoid specifically characterizing religion by setting "Prince" in a "mythological time" before the arrival of Islam. As well, the company worked to assure members of the Iranian American community that the film was the antithesis of a recent action-adventure movie felt to vilify the people of Persia.
    "We said, 'This is the anti-'300,' " said BoomGen's co-founder Reza Aslan.
    Asked point blank by the Times of London, "Isn't Gyllenhaal a bit pale to play a Persian?" Bruckheimer delivered this history lecture.   "Persians were very light skinned," he said. "The Turks kind of changed everything. But back in the 6th century, a lot of them were blond and blue-eyed."
    Aslan confirmed the veracity of Bruckheimer's historical appraisal. 
    "Iranians are Aryans," Aslan asserted. "If we went back in time 1,700 years to the mythological era, all Iranians would look like Jake Gyllenhaal."
    Gyllenhaal maintains that "Prince of Persia" is simply a slice of old-fashioned Hollywood fantasy, a bit of cinema escapism that's as light in spirit as the vintage serials. That heritage — along with the fact that it's based on a video game — took precedence over any real-world context for his character. 
    "To me, it's not something I gave a lot of thought because all of it such a fantasy," Gyllenhaal said last month at San Francisco's WonderCon. "It's based on a video game, not something out of history. 
There's nothing real about this. It's just an adventure and it's fun and it's strange in a way to hold one part of it and say, 'That's not real or right.' "
    Jack Shaheen, author of "Reel Bad Arabs" and a frequent commentator on Hollywood's distortions of Muslim cultures and people, refused to condemn "Prince of Persia's" depiction of ancient Iranians until seeing the film. But he critiqued the film industry's conventional wisdom that mainstream audiences won't shell out to see a non-white lead in a big-budget film.
    "Hollywood is making a mistake," Shaheen said. "As a society, we're not seeing color like we used to. We're more integrated than we used to be.  The country is changing. But I don't think Hollywood is at the forefront of that change."

5/16/10 Associated Press: "Attacks on Asian-Americans lead to racial tension,"
By Juliana Barbassa
    San Francisco — Mrs. Cheng feels like she's living under siege in her own home.
    In January, an 83-year-old neighbor, also a Chinese immigrant, was beaten into a coma. Days after he died in March, Mrs. Cheng, 53, was attacked and pushed off a public transit platform, coming to minutes later with front teeth knocked out and her mouth full of blood.
    Both attacks happened within a block of her house. Now Mrs. Cheng avoids going out, gets rides to work, and keeps her two daughters close to home. She doesn't want to be identified for fear of retaliation, but she doesn't want too much to be made of what happened to her, either. She repeatedly said through a translator that she just wants everyone to live in peace.
    Still, such attacks and the death of a Chinese immigrant from San Francisco who was assaulted during a visit to Oakland have focused the anger of Asian-Americans here, pushing them to vent in emotional rallies their long-simmering perception that they are targets of racially motivated violence. In all cases, the perpetrators were black teenagers, police said.
    "This just sent them over the top. This is an activist city, but this isn't an activist population at all," said Chia-Chi Li, one of the organizers of a rally that drew hundreds of mostly older Chinese-Americans to the steps of San Francisco City Hall bearing signs saying, "Asians are not punching bags," and "Stop attacking the elders and the vulnerable."
    In this bastion of diversity and tolerance, the tension between two of its minorities has become painful.
    Although both groups have suffered discrimination over the decades, the African-American community has been declining here faster than in any other major city, while the Asian-American community has been growing, partly due to immigration.
    Now almost one in three San Franciscans is of Asian descent, and many have moved into affordable, historically black neighborhoods.
    Street violence in these neighborhoods is not new, say people in the black community. They've suffered it for years. It just never drew much attention, they said.
    But seeing this violence serve as a wedge dividing two ethnic minorities that have much more to gain from working together is particularly hard, said Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who represents the district where Mrs. Cheng lives.
    "It is so sad — in a wealthy city, in this city of St. Francis that harbors everyone, to see that our children are in such distress, our communities are in such distress," said Maxwell, who is African-American.
    Maxwell emphasized race was not a factor in the attacks — the problem was the violence inflicted on a neighborhood.
    "These kids need help. They are perpetrating violence against all of us," she said. "How are we going to protect each other and be responsible for each other?"
    Police Chief George Gascon has played down the role of race in the attacks, and pointed to statistics to show Asian Americans are not disproportionately targeted in street crimes in San Francisco.
    Asian Americans make up 30 percent of the city's population, and account for 19 percent of the victims, Gason said. African Americans are 7 percent of the population, but make up 21 percent of victims.
    These are crimes of opportunity, agreed Greg Suhr, police captain of the Bayview district where Mrs. Cheng lives. Victims tend to be vulnerable — the elderly, the young, women, "whoever's easiest."
Mrs. Cheng is about 4 feet 10 inches tall, he said. One of her assailants, a 15-year-old who was arrested and charged with felony assault, is 6 feet tall.
    Thirty-two officers have been reassigned to foot patrol to reduce violence in Mrs. Cheng's neighborhood and other areas where assaults have occurred.
    The department opened drop-in centers where Chinese-Americans can find officers who speak their language and who will take reports of crimes and offer information.
    These measures were welcomed by Asians and blacks alike. The announcement led to some frustration on the part of black residents, however, who questioned the police chief at a community town hall on Wednesday about why such measures weren't taken when African-Americans were the victims.
    Some of the violence suffered by Asian-Americans in San Francisco comes from the fact they are moving into neighborhoods that have crime, said Rev. Amos Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco and head of the city's NAACP chapter.
    "Without diminishing the seriousness of what happened to the Asian seniors — this has been happening to African-American seniors for a long time," Brown said. "If you move into a community where there is violence, you will be a victim."
    In Mrs. Cheng's family, she says her elderly mother, her 13-year-old daughter, her husband, her brother and her sister have been mugged over the last 10 years.
    Racism is not a word thrown around carelessly in this politically correct city. Accusations of that sort are hard for Mrs. Cheng to square with the smiles she trades with her African-American neighbors of 20 years, or with her teenage daughter's black friends, who walk her home to keep her safe.
    When Asian-Americans moved into black neighborhoods like Mrs. Cheng's, it may have created tensions that were exacerbated by economic stresses and deep language and cultural barriers, experts say.
    "From the African-American community's perspective, they feel like they're being invaded by outsiders, and they want to defend their own turf," said Edward Chang, a University of California, Irvine, professor who has studied race relations. "It invites a sense of resentment."
    The incidents have led community organizations to develop a plan, as summer approaches, to involve as many kids as possible in jobs, programs and community organizations.
    San Francisco can't arrest its way out of this, said Joe Marshall, president of the San Francisco Police Commission.
    "You have kids that are hurt, who don't have adult guidance. said Marshall, who is African-American, and directs Omega Boys Club, an organization that steers teenagers away from street violence. "They take that out on everybody. If you lock them up, they get out, do the same thing."
    Zhirui Wang — whose husband, Tian Sheng Yu, died in April — is quietly calling for an end to violence.
    The San Francisco painter and contractor hit his head on the sidewalk after being punched in broad daylight in Oakland. Two 18-year-olds were arrested with help from numerous witnesses, who were outraged by the attack.
    "Everyone is asking what about justice? To the Yu family, it is simple," she said through a translator. "True justice is when there will be no more violence."



5/16/10 Philadelphia Inquirer: "Next leader at S. Phila. High sees a long haul: Problems have created "a tough road, but one I'm looking forward to traveling," said Otis Hackney III, who will become principal July 1,"
By Jeff Gammage and Kristen A. Graham 
    If Otis Hackney III knows one thing about taking over as principal of troubled South Philadelphia High School, it's this: Nobody can change the place overnight.
    The problems are real, deep, and long-standing.
    "This is going to be a gradual process. It's a tough road, but one I'm looking forward to traveling," Hackney said in an interview, his first extended remarks after the abrupt resignation of principal LaGreta Brown.
    Brown quit Thursday after The Inquirer raised questions about her lack of an active Pennsylvania principal's certificate, and just ahead of a no-confidence vote by teachers and staff.
    She left a school that made national headlines Dec. 3, when groups of mostly African American students carried out a daylong series of assaults on about 30 Asians. Seven Asian students went to hospitals, and about 50 boycotted classes for a week.
    The violence triggered inquiries by the Philadelphia School District, the state Human Relations Commission, and the Justice Department. Even now, despite administrators' statements to the contrary, Asian students say they remain targets of taunts, petty abuses, and outright violence.
"It's still happening," said Duong Nghe Ly, a junior from Vietnam. "It's still happening every single day at school."
    Hackney, a former math teacher and basketball coach at Germantown High School, is principal of Springfield Township High School in Montgomery County. He will take over at Southern, as the school is known, on July 1.
    "I'm going in with a mind-set of success," he said. "I still have faith in Philadelphia public schools."
One important job, he said, will be to listen - to students, to teachers, to community groups. "People need to be heard," he said.
    Hackney said he planned a close look at academics in the school, which for years has failed to meet state performance standards and been labeled "persistently dangerous" under federal law.
    Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said in an interview Friday that she had told Brown in March that she would not be returning - and had personally hired Hackney, impressed by his intelligence, energy, and enthusiasm.
    "He's bright, and willing to take on a challenge," she said.
    Advocates for some of the city's Asian communities, however, said they were disappointed to have been left out of the conversation about Brown's replacement.
    "We've been here before, so we're kind of guarded," said Ellen Somekawa, executive director of Asian Americans United, who said her group was not among those who helped the district select Brown.
    Brown's departure by itself "doesn't really solve anything. It gets rid of what we perceived to be an obstacle," Somekawa said.
    Ackerman said she had not involved the broader community in hiring the new principal for a specific reason: "We did that last year, and it didn't work."
    She said Brown had been chosen by a committee of educators, parents, and students. "If I'm going to take responsibility in the end for who is hired, then this time I'm going to make sure I have the last say-so.
    "Last year, that's exactly what we did. Now people seem to have amnesia."
    She said groups that opposed Brown's leadership "now have an opportunity. The person they felt was the primary person responsible for all that has gone wrong in that school is gone."
Somekawa said - and Asian students concurred - that problems big and small had existed before    Brown arrived and remained today.
    For instance, notes and letters sent home from the school continue to be written in English, which many immigrant families cannot read. The same applies to most public-address announcements and written school policies - such as whom to contact if assaulted in school.
    "A clear protocol for reporting harassment, proper interpretation - all these things don't change just because Principal Brown is no longer in charge," said Cecilia Chen, a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF).
    Brown could not be reached for comment.
    In January, Chen's agency filed a federal civil-rights complaint against the district, saying it acted with "intentional disregard" to the welfare of Asian students. District officials said those allegations were hurtful and untrue.
    As part of the complaint, AALDEF identified at least 26 assaults committed against Asian students during the 2008-09 school year. Federal investigators have since spoken with dozens of students, teachers, and other staff members.
    Ackerman acknowledged that problems at the school ran deep, including a teaching staff that she said was racially divided.
    Still, she insisted that "a lot of people have been working very hard to improve the climate." She promised to continue making what she said were positive changes, and to review aspects of the school operation and personnel.
    She said she had told teachers Thursday: "If you think that moving LaGreta Brown means there is not going to be change in this school, then you need to take another job somewhere else, because there is going to be change at this school."
    That day Ackerman issued a statement saying district efforts have "brought about an improved climate for all students at the school" - an assertion that some Asian student dispute. Some say they're frightened to go to school, worried they may be next to be punched, tripped, or slurred.
    Ozzie Wright, a retired district principal who had assisted Brown since December, took over Friday as interim principal.
    Hackney, 37, grew up in West Philadelphia, graduated from West Philadelphia High and Temple University, and earned a master's degree from Lehigh University. He's married and lives in Philadelphia, where a daughter attends public school. He's a longtime member of Church of the Redeemer Baptist at 24th and Dickinson Streets in South Philadelphia.
    Hackney said he loved working in Springfield, where he became an administrator in 2007, but couldn't resist the chance to return to Philadelphia. He was an assistant principal at Southern four years ago and held other district summer and interim principal assignments.
    At Germantown, Hackney was "loved by the students, loved by the faculty," said the Rev. LeRoi Simmons, coordinator of the Germantown Clergy Initiative, which works closely with school leaders and teachers.
    Simmons said he believed Hackney offered Southern its best chance for success. That's if the district keeps Wright in place as a mentor, and if the school leadership becomes more proactive than it has been since Dec. 3.
    "They could have taught classes that have been a model for the rest of the School District - how to deal with folks just coming to the country, how to be a real melting pot," Simmons said. "Now, let's go back and do it right."



5/14/10 Associated Press: "Asian judge nominee shows community's progress,"
by Jesse Washington
    When Wendy Chang told her parents she wanted to become a lawyer, they were not enthused.
"They wanted me to do the medicine thing," said Chang, who immigrated to America from Taiwan with her parents as a child and is now a partner at a Los Angeles firm. "The sciences were an established way of succeeding. They were less familiar with how a lawyer could succeed."
    That cultural gap is one reason why there are few Asian-Americans in the legal profession, and why Chang was watching closely as Goodwin Liu cleared a hurdle in his nomination to become only the second Asian judge currently on the nation's federal appeals courts.
    Liu's parents came to the United States from Taiwan, and he was born in Georgia. Now 39 and associate dean and professor at the University of California at Berkeley law school, he was nominated by President Barack Obama to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
    The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-7 along party lines Thursday to recommend Liu be confirmed. Unless Republicans filibuster, the full Senate will vote on Liu next, although it's unclear when that will happen.
    Asian-Americans are 5 percent of the U.S. population and 15 percent of the doctors, but about 3 percent of the lawyers. When it comes to lawyers becoming federal judges, which requires strong networks and political connections, Asian-American representation is even smaller.
    Ten of 875 active federal judges, just over 1 percent, are Asian-American, according to the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA). On the appeals court level, which has outsized influence in shaping the nation's laws, only one of 175 judges is Asian: Denny Chin, who was confirmed just last month.
    If Liu is confirmed, he would join Chin and Harold Koh, former dean of Yale Law School and currently a State Department legal adviser, as potential candidates to be the first Asian judge on the Supreme Court.
    Chang helped organize a gathering in Los Angeles to watch Liu's confirmation hearings on television, and similar events were organized in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Houston.
"He's a big deal simply because we only have one (appeals court) judge out of 175," Chang said.
    "There is a perception of fairness when the authority figure in a position of power is reflective of the community," Chang said. "It helps people feel that the law and the power and how it is applied in this country is fair."
    Asians did not come to America in large numbers until a 1965 change in immigration laws, so they have had relatively little time to attain "pipeline" positions that lead to federal judgeships, such as federal prosecutor, partner in a large law firm, dean of a law school or tenured law professor.
Credentials are only one part of the equation. When it's time to nominate a judge — a process usually driven by senators — a decision can be made before the vacancy is even announced, according to a November 2009 report from NAPAPA, which has been working to identify, connect and support Asian candidates.
    "In earlier years there were most assuredly racial considerations" that kept Asians out, said Dr. Sheldon Goldman, author of "Picking Federal Judges" and a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
    "More recently, I would say it's the lack of political networking, that Asian-Americans have more difficulty becoming more politically socialized and mobilized so that they would become a political force," Goldman said.
    There also are cultural differences. John Tran, born in Vietnam and now a partner at a Virginia firm, said many Asians value patience, quietness, deference, humility and listening — which are not qualities usually associated with lawyers.
    Tran also contrasted the Western emphasis on the individual with the high value placed by many Asians on family, ancestral and community relationships. So while an American concept of justice might be to delineate rights beforehand and refer to that agreement in case of conflict, an Eastern perspective might be, "Let's get together and figure out what's best for both of us," Tran said.
    But he did not see those traits as a barrier for Asians in the law: "To be effective, you have to learn how to take your habits and strengths and apply them differently."
    Early in Tran's career, he would tell prospective clients to meet him in the Fairfax County courthouse cafeteria. "I'll be the Asian person there," he would say.
    That doesn't work any more. "There is a growing number of younger Asian lawyers," he said. "If they recall their cultural roots and the strengths they can gain from those roots, I believe the legal profession will become better for it."
    Asian-Americans constituted 8.1 percent of law school students in the fall of 2009, up from 7 percent in the fall of 2000, according to the Law School Admissions Council. And Obama has accelerated the pace of Asian nominations to the federal bench. George W. Bush placed four Asians on the bench and Bill Clinton five; Obama has nominated eight so far, including Liu.
    Republicans have strongly opposed Liu's nomination, calling him a liberal activist who would rewrite the Constitution — possibly from the Supreme Court.
    The fierce opposition is actually exciting, said Karen Narasaki, president of the Asian American Justice Center.
    "Wow, people are afraid he might get on the Supreme Court! That's a new problem," she said. "It's a breakthrough, in a way."



5/14/10 Philadelphia Daily News: "S. Philly High principal resigns over missing certification,"
By Dafney Tales
    Beleaguered South Philly High principal LaGreta Brown resigned yesterday after it was revealed that she has not been certified to work as an administrator since 2005.
    Brown's state principal and English certificates have been inactive since July 1, 2005, said Leah Harris, spokeswoman for the state Department of Education. The certificates are inactive because she has not complied with ACT 48 requirements, which require public school educators in Pennsylvania to participate in ongoing professional education, Harris said.
    State education officials say that they have no record that Brown had been working under an emergency permit. A district spokeswoman confirmed that Brown had never applied for an emergency permit since joining the district at the beginning of the school year.
    An educator cannot work in the state without a certificate or an emergency permit - regardless of whether he or she has out-of-state credentials, Harris added.
    In a letter to Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, Brown wrote that "it has become apparent that I have been made the focus of a controversy that continues to impede the education process to the detriment of the students."
    District officials said that Brown and Ackerman had agreed a couple months ago that she would resign at the end of the school year due to the controversy over racially tinged attacks that erupted at her school in December.
    But when news broke of her inactive certificate, she decided to step down immediately, a district spokesman said.
    Otis D. Hackney III, principal of Springfield Township High School, in Erdenheim, Pa., will take over the job on July 1. In the meantime, Ozzie Wright, the school's interim assistant principal, will assume leadership.
   State law mandates that school districts check the certificates of their employees.
    District officials seemed as perplexed as anyone about Brown's lack of certification and said they will investigate why Brown was able to work even with an inactive certificate.
    Brown had been principal at South Philly High for less than a year. Her short term had been marred by racial violence between Asian and African-American students on Dec. 2 and 3 that spurred a federal probe and prompted students angry over the response to the attacks to stage a weeklong boycott.
    The conflict also drew attention from the city and state human-relations commissions.
    A report commissioned by the district and compiled by a retired federal judge chronicled the events over the two days of violence and found that school officials had an uncertain response to the clashes.
    Asian students who were victimized said the principal and other school personnel had ignored their earlier warnings that they were being targeted, the report said.
    Since then, the district has spent $689,000 on 126 new security cameras, has added security personnel and diversity programs, and has reported a decrease in incidents of violence.
    Attempts to reach Brown yesterday were unsuccessful, but in March she defended herself at a School Reform Commission meeting after an Inquirer editorial cartoon depicted her as asleep on the job while the school was in disarray. Several people attending the SRC meeting, including principals union president Michael Lerner, condemned the cartoon and offered their support for Brown.
    Ackerman also stood by Brown and her handling of the violence, but yesterday she endorsed Hackney's taking the reins.
    "We have spent the past several months making positive changes at South Philly High," she said in a statement. "These changes have brought about an improved climate for all students at the school. The interviewing committee and I were so impressed by [Hackney] that it determined he was the right person to manage and lead South Philadelphia High next school year."
    Helen Gym, of Asian Americans United, said that any changes weren't enough, claiming that Asian students continue to face "a hostile environment" in the school.
    "We hope for the sake of students, staff and community of South Philadelphia that this change in the administration will signal a renewed effort to address the real and deeply rooted problems which plague this learning community," Gym said in an e-mailed statement.
    Principals union president Lerner believes that Brown was "unjustly singled out for a problem that's been going on for years" but noted that the issue of certification was a deal-breaker.
    "If in fact she does not have a valid certificate, whether emergency or otherwise, it certainly calls into question her ability as an administrator," he said.
    Ackerman was able to dissuade staff yesterday afternoon from casting a "no confidence" vote directed at Brown, at the school at Broad Street and Snyder Avenue, said Michael Silverman, regional superintendent for comprehensive high schools.
    He said that staff and students don't want to dwell in the past.



5/13/10 Philadelphia Inquirer: "South Phila. High principal resigns,"
by Kristen A. Graham and Jeff Gammage
    Embattled South Philadelphia High principal LaGreta Brown resigned Thursday amid questions about her certification.
    According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, Brown holds a state principal certificate but it is currently inactive.
    A district official said that Brown had agreed to resign after the end of this school year, but after The Inquirer raised questions about her certification, she decided to leave the school Thursday, the official said.
    In her resignation letter, Brown wrote that "it has become apparent that I have been made the focus of a controversy that continues to impede the education process to the detriment of the students."
    For the short-term, Brown will be replaced by Ozzie Wright, a retired district principal who has been at the school in an administrative role since December.
    Otis D. Hackney III, the current principal of Springfield Township High, will become the permanent principal. Hackney is a former district teacher who worked at South Philadelphia High as an assistant principal on a summer assignment.
    Superintendent Arlene Ackerman met with staff at the high school this afternoon. As she left the building at 4 p.m. she said she had already spoken with the principal and told her she would not be returning to the high school next year.
    "I felt the school needed new leadership," she said.
    She said that right now "it's not a good learning environment for the children," and that "the children have to come to school tomorrow with another distraction."
    Ackerman added that the school staff is deeply divided racially. "I'm going to go into that school and get to the bottom of it," she said
    She promised to hold individual meetings with teachers about the direction of the school.
    When asked how Brown was taking the ouster, Ackerman said "She's not happy. Would you be happy? She's resigning in the middle of the year."
    Regional Superintendent Michael Silverman said the whole situation was sad.
    Asked if the school system bore responsibility for not checking Brown's credentials more closely, he said "I'm not going to answer that one."
    In a statement issued earlier in the day, Ackerman said the school has moved forward since Dec. 3 racial violence.
    "We have spent the past several months making positive changes at South Philly High. These changes have brought about an improved climate for all students at the school. Violent incidents have decreased and more students are involved in after school activities," Ackerman said in the statement.
    "I initially interviewed Mr. Hackney as a candidate for one of the Promise Academies," Ackerman said in the statement. "The interviewing committee and I were so impressed by him that it determined he was the right person to manage and lead South Philadelphia High next school year."
    At the high school, Ackerman described Hackney as student-oriented, a former coach and someone with a great reputation.
    Brown, who has been on the job less than year, has been a controversial figure. The school was rocked by racial violence on Dec. 3, when groups of mostly African American students carried out a daylong series of assaults on about 30 Asians.
    Seven Asian students were taken to hospitals, and about 50 staged a seven-day boycott of classes.
    Brown grew up in West Philadelphia and graduated from Girls High in 1979. In fall 2009 she became South Philadelphia High's fourth principal in five years, taking over a school that has long failed to meet state performance standards and been labeled "persistently dangerous" under federal law.
    A federal civil-rights complaint filed against the district in January leveled several accusations directly at Brown, claiming she showed a discriminatory attitude toward Asian students.
    Teachers reported that at a staff meeting before the start of the school term, Brown referred to the English-learners program, centered on the second floor, as, "That dynasty." Teachers believed that Brown had used the term as a disparaging reference to Chinese dynasties, the complaint said.
    In the days after Dec. 3, the complaint said, Brown described community support for the students as "the Asian agenda." She repeated the phrase in front of teachers before a School Reform Commission meeting on Dec. 9, the complaint said.
    The complaint alleged that as school ended on Dec. 3, and large crowds of students milled outside, Brown led and then abandoned a frightened group of about 10 Vietnamese students. The students were subsequently chased, surrounded by a mob of 100 and beaten. However, the official district inquiry said no evidence existed to show that Brown deliberately left the students. Instead, a gap developed between the Vietnamese and their adult escorts, the report said.
    The district report on the violence said the assailants in the massive, dismissal-time assault included some white students and a female Cambodian. Asian community advocates said the key point was not the races of the attackers, but that all the victims were Asian.
    Teachers had planned to take a no-confidence vote on Brown after school Thursday.
    Instead, district officials arrived at the school to announce her departure.
    Leah Harris, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education, said Brown's principal certificate was issued in 2000 but was inactive "because she has not complied with ACT 48 requirements. Educators with inactive certificates are not permitted to serve in a professional position, they may only substitute teach for 90 days per school year until they comply with ACT 48."
    Act 48 requires teachers and principals to complete continuing education.
    Districts can be penalized for having teachers or principals without proper certification. The discipline, generally, comes in the form of the state withholding subsidies, Harris said.



5/13/10 UCLA Newsroom (press release): "Japanese American interned during World War II gives $50 million to UCLA.  Paul Terasaki donates $50 million to UCLA's Life Sciences: Life Sciences Building to be named for organ transplant pioneer from L.A.'s Boyle Heights neighborhood,"
By Stuart Wolpert 
    Paul Ichiro Terasaki, who as a teenager and young adult worked as a busboy, gardener and handyman and who spent three years interned with his family in a Japanese American relocation camp during World War II, has given $50 million to the Division of Life Sciences in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
    Terasaki's gift is the largest ever given to the UCLA College and is among the largest received by the university in its 91-year history.
    In recognition of the gift, UCLA's new Life Sciences Building will be named the Terasaki Life Sciences Building for the UCLA professor emeritus of surgery and pioneer in organ transplant medicine who in 1964 developed the test that became the international standard method for tissue typing, a procedure that assesses the compatibility of organ donors and recipients.
    Terasaki's gift includes $2 million to endow the Paul I. Terasaki Chair in Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, whose funds initially will support two postdoctoral fellowships in transplantation.
    "I owe my whole career to UCLA," Terasaki said. "UCLA gave me the opportunity to do the research that led to the development of tissue typing. At many other universities, I would not have had that kind of freedom in the lab."
    "Dr. Terasaki is an inspirational role model and a great scientist who has had a nearly lifelong relationship with UCLA, as a student, professor, donor and father of UCLA alumni," UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said. "The Life Sciences under Dean Victoria Sork are at the core of UCLA's excellence, and I am absolutely delighted that our new Life Sciences building will be named for Dr. Terasaki. I am extremely grateful for his visionary philanthropy."
    "Most advances in medicine are rooted in the life sciences," Terasaki said. "That background opened the door to my research and proved vital to my medical discoveries."
    The Terasaki Life Sciences Building includes 33 laboratories, where hundreds of scientists will conduct state-of-the-science research integrating such fields as cell biology, neuroscience, genomics and stem cell research. It is scheduled to open in October.
    "The Terasaki Life Sciences Building is a metaphor for what UCLA is doing in the Life Sciences, the essential science of the 21st century," Sork said. "This building is designed to enhance interactions among scientists with different tools, approaches and ways of thinking. Increasingly, scientists across disciplines are sharing in empirical and computation approaches that benefit from exchange. The new life sciences provide the foundations for understanding biomedical innovations, applied human health problems and biodiversity challenges facing our planet, and this research will lead to improvements in how we live. The translation of this deep research across all areas into applications is becoming increasingly common, and interdisciplinary collaboration of the kind we will see in this new building is key.
    "I am pleased that Dr. Terasaki will continue his research, which has extended the lives of so many people, at UCLA," Sork added. "Indeed, just this month, at a major scientific conference in San Diego, he reported an important advance on 16 patients who had kidney transplants and have survived for two years without drugs since their surgeries — a significant advance known as achieving the 'holy grail of tolerance' with transplants."
    Dr. Terasaki's 'iconic' contributions to organ transplantation
    Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, executive chairman of UCLA's Department of Surgery and chief of the division of liver and pancreas transplantation, has been a colleague of Terasaki's for nearly three decades.
    "Dr. Paul Terasaki's contributions to solid-organ transplantation over the last 50 years are iconic," said Busuttil, a distinguished professor who holds UCLA's William P. Longmire Jr. Chair in Surgery. "Only a select few individuals have impacted our field in such a profound way. In particular, his seminal work in tissue typing was revolutionary and universally improved transplant patient outcomes and saved lives.
    "The Terasaki gift will be directed toward furthering our basic science research in the areas of liver and intestinal transplantation through two postdoctoral fellowships," he said. "Paul Terasaki's generosity and support are inspirational, and we are honored to have been selected as partners in his UCLA legacy."
    For the past 40 years, all kidney, heart, liver, pancreas, lung and bone marrow donors and recipients were typed using the tissue typing test Terasaki developed.
    "Not only has tissue typing been key to the success of bone marrow transplants and prolonged graft survival for patients fortunate enough to receive a well-matched kidney transplant, but the cross-match test he developed in the 1960s is still used today for all kidney transplant patients and select candidates for hearts, lungs, pancreata, bowels and sometimes liver transplantation to avoid catastrophic rejections that are mediated by antibodies against the donor's human leukocyte antigens (HLA)," said Terasaki's colleague Dr. J. Michael Cecka, a UCLA professor of pathology and laboratory medicine.
    "Paul also developed new technologies to identify anti-HLA antibodies with a precision and certainty that permits us to predict cross-match compatibility accurately. This research contributed to the success of paired kidney exchanges around the country for transplanting highly sensitized kidney patients," Cecka said.
    The UCLA Kidney Transplant Registry, established by Terasaki in the 1970s, was the first and largest in the world until the establishment of federal registries. The UCLA data on kidney recipients submitted from some 200 transplant centers enabled doctors to monitor and improve transplant patient outcomes.
    Terasaki was the first person to devise a method to perform tissue typing and to develop antibodies to be used for tissue typing. In 1984, he started a company called One Lambda with eight of his former students; the eight still work there, running the company, which now has 270 employees, and Terasaki serves as chairman of the board. He and One Lambda have played a central role in the development and advancement of tissue typing.
    Just as each person has a blood type, each person has a tissue type, which is much more complex, since there are more than 1,000 different tissue types, Terasaki noted.
    "I developed this method for tissue typing, spun the company out, and stayed at UCLA another 15 years continuing my transplantation research," Terasaki said. "Although I'm involved in this business, I'm not really a businessman; I prefer to be doing research."
    During the first two decades of his life, however, prosperity seemed far from assured.
    Terasaki was born into a poor immigrant family in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in September 1929. His parents' primary goal, Terasaki said, was to earn a living and educate their children.
    In 1941, his father opened a cake shop in Little Tokyo that was very successful, but he was forced to sell the shop at a tremendous loss during World War II, when his family lost most of its possessions and was forced to relocate to an internment camp under federal orders.
    'The horse came back'
    For three years, beginning at age 12, Terasaki lived in the Gila River relocation camp in Arizona with his parents, two brothers and an aunt in a single modest room that was about the size of his current office. They were allowed to bring to the camp only what they could carry. Terasaki described his education there with a single word: "deficient."
    "There were no worries about crime or drugs or any other negative influences that most kids face today, and young children, without proper schooling, were left to play. But for those older, who were drafted into the army while their families were in camp, life was much more difficult," he said. "For the adults, who lost everything and who had no resources or ability to be productive for themselves or their families, life was changed forever."
    Asked how he has dealt so well with adversity in his life, Terasaki tells a story with a lesson.
    "Do you know the story about the Chinese farmer with only one son?" he asked. "Riding a horse, the son fell off and broke his leg, which was very sad for the farmer. But then war broke out, and all the sons went to war except his son. Then the horse ran away, and again the famer was very sad. A few days later, the horse came back with another horse. That's how it is. A lot of times things go bad, but eventually they work out."
    After World War II, the family, uncomfortable moving back to California, moved to the south side of Chicago. From age 16 on, Terasaki worked constantly. During his senior year in high school, he worked 10 to 12 hours a day as a restaurant busboy on Saturdays and Sundays, earning 40 cents an hour plus tips. He proudly gave the money to his mother, who kept his paycheck and gave him an allowance until he got married.
    "I worked to help my family, and it never occurred to me to keep any of my earnings," he said.
    When he graduated from high school in Chicago, Terasaki thought of attending radio repair school. However, his mother thought he should go into medicine, and he entered the University of Illinois at Navy Pier as a pre-med student. When the family felt it was safe to move back to Los Angeles, Terasaki applied to UCLA and was admitted as a transfer student in 1948, at age 19.
    "I did not consider any university other than UCLA," said Terasaki, who noted that fees back then were $39 per semester and the campus had only a dozen buildings.
    Terasaki's father worked at an antique repair shop, and his mother worked in garment factories. When his father became an apartment manager in Los Angeles, Terasaki was the handyman, repairing toilets and painting the rooms.
    "It was enough to convince me that I needed to continue my education, because I did not want to get trapped doing this kind of work forever," he recalled.
    'Impossible to think about'
    What would he have thought back then if someone had told him that one day he would give $50 million to UCLA and have one of the major buildings on campus named for him?
    "It would be impossible to think about that — to think that I would ever donate anything to UCLA would have been impossible," he said. "It's quite a distance I've travelled. After the camps, we did not have enough money to afford much of anything."
    Terasaki earned his bachelor's degree, master's degree and Ph.D. from UCLA in zoology. He then received a postdoctoral fellowship in London for a year, where he worked under Peter Medawar, who later received a Nobel Prize and is often considered the founder of the field of transplantation. (Terasaki later won the Medawar Prize from the Transplantation Society.)
    "He did not take many foreign students; I was one of the lucky few," Terasaki said. "The training I received in England influenced most of my work since then."
    Terasaki started transplant work in 1950, with his master's thesis.
    "Sixty years ago," he said with a laugh, "my parents wanted me to go into medicine, but I knew I was not suited to be a good doctor. I was more comfortable working on problems to be solved in the lab."
    Terasaki got his first car in the early 1950s — a 1939 Plymouth whose clutch was always breaking. He drove it without a floor, which made it easier for him to repair it. However, he could see the road when driving, which embarrassed him when he went out with Hisako, his future wife; he recalls that she did not complain about it. They married in January 1954.
    Terasaki, after being promoted from researcher, served as a UCLA professor of surgery from 1969 until 1999, when he retired. Within a year, he resumed his academic pursuits with the creation of the Terasaki Foundation Laboratory, a research center dedicated to the study of antibodies to transplants.
    He has published more than 900 scientific articles and has trained some 100 postdoctoral scholars at UCLA. Today, Terasaki is aided by more than 100 laboratory workers who have worked with him for 10 to 40 years at One Lambda and the Terasaki Foundation.
    "I owe any success I had to a large group of colleagues who toiled with me for the past 40 years," he said.
    While nearly every faculty member in surgery departments at UCLA and elsewhere had M.D. degrees, Terasaki was an exception, with a Ph.D.
    "It was an important promotion for me because I was not an M.D. or a surgeon," he said. "It was very rare, and I was very pleased. In the whole country, there were not many other Ph.D.s who were professors of surgery. I am grateful to Dr. William Longmire, who was UCLA's chairman of surgery. It was because of the freedom that he allowed me in my research that I was able to develop tissue typing. Dean Sherman Mellinkoff provided the medical school with the environment that encouraged innovation."
    UCLA has played a major role in Terasaki's life and the life of his family. His children have spent a total of 22 years at UCLA. His first son earned a bachelor's degree from UCLA (and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley); his second son earned his bachelor's, master's and M.D. from UCLA; and his daughter earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from UCLA (and an M.D. from Oxford). Terasaki's third son earned bachelor's and master's degrees from UC Irvine.
    Terasaki's generosity to UCLA goes back years and covers many parts of the university. In 2001, he established an endowed chair in U.S.–Japan relations, and in 2006, he and his wife contributed $5 million to UCLA to promote better understanding between the United States and Japan at the renamed Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at the UCLA International Institute.
    Now 80 years old, he is still looking to the future.
    "I'm happy to have my name on this state-of-the-art Life Sciences Building at UCLA, where many new and amazing discoveries will take place," he said. "For me, it is exciting to know that the clinical research I began in the life sciences will continue in collaboration with the transplant groups at UCLA."
    UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Five alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.


5/12/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "S.F. police chief gets an earful in Bayview,"
by Bob Egelko
    Police Chief George Gascón held a town hall meeting Tuesday evening that was supposed to focus on crime against Asian Americans. The response from many African Americans was, "Where were you when we were the victims?"
    Gascón brought his top brass and San Francisco's chief hate-crimes prosecutor to Southeast Community College in the Bayview district and spoke about new crime-prevention efforts in response to a wave of violence, including the killing of an 83-year-old Chinese American. 
    Police have redeployed 32 officers to Bayview and Ingleside and opened a drop-in center in each neighborhood one afternoon a week, starting today, the chief said. Officers handed out $100,000 reward posters for the juveniles who fatally beat Huan Chen at a nearby bus stop Jan. 24.
    It was the first large police-community meeting since the killing of Chen and the assault, three days later, on a 58-year-old Chinese American woman who was thrown off a Muni platform.
    Some in the audience responded indignantly during the question-and-answer session.
"You ain't never seen a black person offered $100,000," said Ingrid Wynn, to shouts of approval from other African Americans.
    "It is an insult to us in this community to see all this police force," said Geoffrea Simpson Morris, a Board of Supervisors candidate. Another speaker, Charlie Walker, said top police commanders have never met with the community after the violent deaths of African Americans, including his grandson in November.
    Other speakers called for unity.
    "Don't let them divide and conquer. If they do, nothing will change," said Chia-Chi Li, a San Francisco attorney. 
    "We're one family. ...We're not required to compare blood for blood," said Sharon Hewitt, who counsels African American homicide victims. 
    She spoke alongside Teresa Duque of the Asian American Community Center, who urged the audience to put racial differences aside. "The police are working for all of us," she said.
    Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who represents the district, also pleaded for togetherness.
"We are an integrated community," she said. "There are issues facing us and we will face them together."
    For the most part, though, the city's top law enforcement officials appeared to touch raw nerves in the standing-room-only audience of about 200. A majority of the attendees were Asian Americans, many of whom listened to interpreters on headsets.
    In response to demands by some Asian Americans for hate-crime prosecutions, Gascón renewed his assertion that the attacks have been "mostly crimes of opportunity" that were not motivated by race.
    He presented the city's latest statistics on aggravated assaults and robberies through April 24, showing that Asians, who make up 30 percent of San Francisco's population, accounted for 19 percent of the victims; African Americans, 7 percent of the population, made up 21 percent of the victims.
    Figures for Bayview and Ingleside were similar, Gascón said.
    "This is not to minimize the concern, but ... to put things into context," the chief said.
    The transfer of 32 officers from other districts to walk foot patrols in the Bayview and Ingleside was a four-week experiment that will be renewed if it works, Gascón said.


5/10/10 cbs5.com (San Francisco): "Bay Area Ex-Con Admits To Targeting Asians,"
http://cbs5.com/local/asian.crime.targets.2.1686348.html  
    Recent attacks on Asian-Americans have stoked racial tensions in some Bay Area communities. One African-American ex-con admits to targeting Asians, but says he didn't do it out of hate. 
    Ananze Emenike talks about robbing Asians like it was no big deal - during his teen years, it wasn't. 
    "We got busted for a hate crime, due to the fact that when they linked us to the other robberies…they were 75-85 per cent Asian," recalled Emenike. 
    Emenike's reign of terror ended with his arrest in 2007 at the age of 17. Ananze said he once targeted Asians, but not because he had any animosity toward his victims. He said he chose Asian victims due to a perception that they carried a lot of money, wouldn't fight back, and wouldn't go to police because of a language barrier. 
    "We would go places where we knew Asians would carry a lot of money. Like for a good example Stonestown. That was a place we knew lots of Asians came and spent a lot of money," he recalled. 
    Race played a part in Emenike's robberies. His victims were targeted because of race, but for specific reasons, they presented for him a crime of opportunity. We can't tell you about all such crimes, but it does offer a different perspective to the debate.
    Emenike has cleaned up his act, after spending time in prison. He's now a video producer for the news agency Youth Outlook. 


5/6/10 China Daily: "New Arizona law has Asian communities concerned,"
by Kelly Chung Dawson 
    New York - A controversial new immigration law in Arizona has fanned public furor over its perceived anti-Latino aspects, but increasing arrests of Chinese illegal immigrants has brought the issue to Asian communities. 
    "The Arizona law is an affront to all people of color and all Americans, and especially people of color who have been subjected to racial profiling," said Norman Eng, spokesperson for the New York Immigration Coalition. "Chinese people are no strangers to that." The act requires law enforcement to request immigration papers from anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. It has been denounced by politicians and advocacy groups as racist and unconstitutional. 
    "What is happening in Arizona is a very familiar pattern of anti-immigrant efforts on the local level to discourage immigrants from coming to the US," said Bill Ong Hing, an immigration expert and law professor at the University of San Francisco and UC Davis.
    "It's analogous to what happened first against Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration for 10 years, and later against Japanese immigrants." 
According to border patrol stats, 332 Chinese immigrants were arrested in Arizona in 2009, up from 30 in 2008. 
    "It's the norm to associate illegal immigrants with Mexicans, but the number of Chinese illegal immigrants is also significant," said Peter Chan, former president of the Tucson Chinese Association. 
Estimates have put the number of illegal immigrants in the US at 10 to 12 million, with 10 percent Asians, said Hing. Of them, about half are Chinese or Filipino, he said. 
    "Characteristics like language fluency, accent and style of dress will be major factors in whether a police officer decides a person is worthy of suspicion," said Ronald Lee, senior attorney for the Asian American Justice Center.
    According to Lee, about one-fourth of Asian Americans in Arizona are classified as limited-language proficient.
    "Learning English is not required by the constitution," Hing said. "But beyond that, what people don't understand is that a lot of ESL programs are over-subscribed, and a lot of immigrants simply don't have the opportunity. All immigrant parents want their children to learn English and become members of society. People forget that."
    Experts attribute the rapid rise in illegal Chinese immigration to various factors. 
    Peter Kwong, a Hunter College professor and author of "Chinese Americans: An Immigrant Experience," believes smugglers are preying on a pervasive fear that US laws will soon be tightened to prevent amnesty for immigrants already living in the US. 
    Widespread myths about the US remain in China, Hing said. Many immigrants from Fujian province told him they had been promised high-paying jobs but were forced to work in restaurants, grocery stores or factories to repay their debts. Smugglers reportedly receive up to $40,000 for each smuggled person. 
    "These immigrants come here in hopes of finding Gold Mountain," Hing said. 
    Some view the need for protest as urgent, in light of a long history of anti-immigration bias and legislation in the US.
    "We look back on the Chinese Exclusion acts, and we realize it was such a shame that our nation acted in that way," Eng said. "I think we'll do the same looking back at the Arizona law. Hopefully the courts will strike it down."


5/6/10 New America Media: "San Francisco's 'Black on Chinese' Violence Goes Back Decades."
Commentary by Hubert V. Yee
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=dbcb572a81ab28c969cae0c307f408ae
    African-American and Asian-American elected and appointed officials have failed to address the growing racial tensions in southeast San Francisco.
    Growing up as an Asian American in southeast San Francisco was not easy. Safety was a huge issue for all residents. We heard gunshots at night and sirens wailing past our homes. Our neighbors and family members heard stories about other neighbors and family members becoming victims of crimes by a segment of the African-American community.
    When I was 16, I was attacked by eight African Americans while riding Muni’s 15 Third bus line. I was spit on. We fought. I was beaten unconscious and remained out for a few seconds. I am reminded every day that I was beaten for no apparent reason when I look in the mirror and see my scar.
    My mother and father were also victims. I remember waking up hearing my mom and dad screaming. I ran downstairs to see my mom and dad being robbed and assaulted in front of our home by two African Americans. 
    These criminals target Asian Americans because we are seen as weak, unorganized, foreign, and as “walking ATM machines.” We are racialized in many of these instances of violence.
    Our pain has not been felt or heard by so-called elected representatives, black and Asian alike. Sophie Maxwell, who represents District 10 on the Board of Supervisors, has said little. Others, like Human Rights Commissioner Yvonne Lee, have provided a false historical narrative of the violence. At a recent commission meeting, Lee said these incidents have only occurred in the “past several years.”
    As a resident of the neighborhood for more than 25 years, I disagree.
    Supervisor David Chiu said on TV that these instances were not racially motivated. I disagree. The violence is racial. Asian Americans are seen as easy victims.
    In order to heal, these “racialized” assumptions and misperceptions about Asian Americans need to be acknowledged. We need community development projects that involve multiracial interaction to dispel such racist stereotypes. In 2005, I created a youth program, APIYLDP, that explored the African-American experience and the Asian-American experience in District 10 with a group of multiracial youth and multiple nonprofits. Asian-American youth learned about the African-American experience through community immersion, fieldwork and research. Research conducted by youth documented racial misunderstandings between Asian-American and African-American youth. Results showed that the youth participating in this project better understood the commonalities and the struggles the two communities shared.
    Efforts to continue the dialogue between Asian-American and African-American youth are hopeful solutions to the growing despair facing many Asian Americans in the Bay View and Visitation Valley. We must focus on developing our community through multiracial coalitions and continually hold accountable not only District 10 Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, but also those who claim to be our voice: Asian-American elected and appointed officials.
    All San Francisco residents, including those in District 10, should feel safe riding a bus, walking to school and being in their homes.
    Hubert V. Yee has been a resident of San Francisco's District 10 for more than 25 years. As a community activist with a Master of Arts in Asian American Studies, he has worked on multiple projects to develop healthier community relations.



5/5/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Asian community rally supports end to violence,"
by C.W. Nevius
    The issue of African American violence against Asian residents continues to build momentum, and leaders in the Asian community are beginning to show political and media savvy. Tuesday night there was a rally in front of City Hall calling for an end to violence. 
    The rally created so much buzz that spokesman Chai-Chi Li says that some Chinatown shops closed early so workers could attend.
    While organizers admit that the victims have been reluctant to report and express public outrage over incidents in the past, the community seems united now. 
    At Tuesday's rally, victims were encouraged to record their stories on video and write out the details on cards. Li says the hope is the notes and the videos will eventually be posted on a Web site. 
    Organizers say they want to end the problem of chronic under-reporting of crime and violent incidents, but they stress that they also have ideas to help. 
    "A lot of the kids who are perpetrators are not strangers to the community," Li said. "We know who they are, but they don't have the resources to provide services for them."
    Li says his group has discovered a federal grant that provides funds for underserved communities. 
    "We are hoping to make this a positive," he said. 



5/4/10 New York Times: "The Limits of Policy,"
by David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist
    Roughly a century ago, many Swedes immigrated to America. They’ve done very well here. Only about 6.7 percent of Swedish-Americans live in poverty. Also a century ago, many Swedes decided to remain in Sweden. They’ve done well there, too. When two economists calculated Swedish poverty rates according to the American standard, they found that 6.7 percent of the Swedes in Sweden were living in poverty.
    In other words, you had two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems, and the poverty outcomes were the same.
    A similar pattern applies to health care. In 1950, Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans. Over the next half-century, Sweden and the U.S. diverged politically. Sweden built a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not. The result? There was basically no change in the life expectancy gap.     Swedes now live 2.7 years longer.
    Again, huge policy differences. Not huge outcome differences.
    This is not to say that policy choices are meaningless. But we should be realistic about them. The influence of politics and policy is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology and a dozen other factors.
    You can observe the same phenomenon when looking within the U.S. Last week, the American Human Development Project came out with its “A Century Apart” survey of life in the United States. As you’d expect, ethnicity correlates to huge differences in how people live. Nationally, 50 percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites, 17 percent of African-Americans and 13 percent of Hispanics.
    Asian-Americans have a life expectancy of 87 years compared with 79 years for whites and 73 years for African-Americans.
    Even in struggling parts of the country, Asian-Americans do well. In Michigan, for example, the Asian-American life expectancy is 90, while for the average white person it’s 79 and for the average African-American it’s 73. Income and education levels are also much higher.
    The region you live in also makes a gigantic difference in how you will live. There are certain high-trust regions where highly educated people congregate, producing positive feedback loops of good culture and good human capital programs. This mostly happens in the northeastern states like New Jersey and Connecticut. There are other regions with low social trust, low education levels and negative feedback loops. This mostly happens in southern states like Arkansas and West Virginia.
    If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.
    When you try to account for life outcome differences this gigantic, you find yourself beyond narrow economic incentives and in the murky world of social capital. What matters are historical experiences, cultural attitudes, child-rearing practices, family formation patterns, expectations about the future, work ethics and the quality of social bonds.
    Researchers have tried to disaggregate the influence of these soft factors and have found it nearly impossible. All we can say for sure is that different psychological, cultural and social factors combine in myriad ways to produce different viewpoints. As a result of these different viewpoints, the average behavior is different between different ethnic and geographic groups, leading to different life outcomes.
    It is very hard for policy makers to use money to directly alter these viewpoints. In her book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” Susan E. Mayer of the University of Chicago calculated what would happen if you could double the income of the poorest Americans. The results would be disappointingly small. Doubling parental income would barely reduce dropout rates of the children. It would have a small effect on reducing teen pregnancy. It would barely improve child outcomes overall.
    So when we’re arguing about politics, we should be aware of how policy fits into the larger scheme of cultural and social influences. Bad policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it. 
    Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.    
    Second, try to establish basic security. If the government can establish a basic level of economic and physical security, people may create a culture of achievement — if you’re lucky. Third, try to use policy to strengthen relationships. The best policies, like good preschool and military service, fortify emotional bonds.
    Finally, we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore. 

5/4/10 KGO-TV San Francisco: "Hundreds gather to protest violence against Asian-Americans,"
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/san_francisco&id=7423389
    San Francisco -- Hundreds of people gathered on the steps of City Hall this evening to condemn violence against Asian-Americans and call for unity in the wake of several recent attacks. 
The animated crowd spilled across Polk Street, holding signs with messages including "Stop the Violence," "Asians are not punching bags," and "Stop attacking the elders and vulnerable."
Andy Lee, 39, carried a sign bearing images of Oscar Grant III and Tian Sheng Yu, a 59-year-old San Francisco man who died last month after being beaten in a random attack in downtown Oakland while he was shopping with his son. Two suspects have been arrested in the attack.
    Grant, who was shot and killed by former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle at an Oakland BART station in 2009, is black. 
    Lee, a San Francisco resident, said he simply wants the suspects in both cases to pay for their alleged crimes. 
    "It's not a color issue ... there should be justice for what they did," he said. 
    In San Francisco, there have been at least three recent attacks against Asian-Americans at or near San Francisco Municipal Railway T-Third light rail stops. One of the victims, 83-year-old Huan Chen, died in March after being beaten at a bus stop near Third Street and Oakdale Avenue.
    "No matter what, if (the victims) are Chinese, Caucasian, you don't have the right to come out and beat up other people," Lee said. 
    A number of city supervisors attended the rally, including Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who called the recent violence "tragic" and "horrific."
    Chiu mentioned a number of positive changes since the recent attacks, including meetings between politicians and community leaders, more police officers assigned to the southeastern part of the city and a bilingual drop-in center where Asian victims can go to report crimes.
    "The Chinese character for crisis is opportunity, and I want to thank you for being part of the change that we are going to see," Chiu told the crowd. 
    "This is our problem. This is our city," Chiu said. "We have to take our city back."
    Supervisor Carmen Chu said the board understands that people are angry not only about the recent violence but about other traumatic experiences they have had over the years. 
    She said it is the board's responsibility to make sure residents feel safe doing things like going to the grocery store and riding Muni. 
    "When you need us to be in the community to listen to you, we will be there," she said. 


5/4/10 South Florida Business Journal: "Asian-Americans becoming economic force in Florida,"
by Bill Frogameni 
    Asian-Americans are an increasingly important demographic in South Florida and statewide.
    That was the message delivered during a Tuesday telephone conference conducted by a group of prominent Asian-American leaders in honor of National Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
    The group included George Yap, whose Miami-based company, Leasa Industries, is the largest grower of bean sprouts and alfalfa sprouts, and the largest manufacturer of tofu in the state of Florida.
    Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties are among the largest centers of     Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders in Florida. According to the 2000 census, Broward had the highest concentration, at 36,581. That was followed by Miami-Dade, with 31,753. Palm Beach County had 17,127, the group noted.
    Asian-Americans are among the fastest-growing minority communities in Florida, said Thayumana Somasundaram, president of the India Association of Tallahassee. “The 2010 census data will also paint a very similar picture.” Members stressed the importance of returning the census so that minorities become better represented.
    “If citizens haven’t mailed back their census forms we hope that they will speak with a census taker in the coming days. The 2010 Census is our opportunity to paint an accurate picture of our demographic and help determine Florida’s portion of more than $400 billion in federal funds, Kimi Springsteen, chair of Asian-American Coalition of Florida and partner in the 2010 Sunshine Census effort.
    The group noted that in 2008, Asian-American and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander Floridians’ buying power totaled $15.8 billion – outpacing the growth of any other ethnic group’s buying power. Nationwide, thirty-five percent of the Asian-American and NHOPI population have household incomes of $75,000 or more, the group said.
    As the state moves toward a more knowledge-driven economy, Asian-Americans are becoming more important to Florida’s growth, said Ravi Behara, a business professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. They are taking critical roles in high-technology industries, he noted.
    “The future of Florida is changing, and Florida’s leadership is seeking new engines for growth,” he said.
    Behara noted that the state is expanding trade relationships with Asia. China, for instance, is Florida’s fourth-largest trading partner.
    South Florida’s trade with Asia is expected to spike in 2014 when the Panama Canal is expanded, making way for supersize cargo ships from the Far East that will come here, instead of the West Coast.


5/3/10 New York Times: "Learning to Love the Sea, Then Torn From It,"
by Dan Barry
    Where the world runs out of road and into bayou, and all that is left beyond is the Gulf of Mexico, dozens of docked shrimp boats bob in place, restless. They should be out right now, green nets trawling for cash in crustaceans. But here they sit, their dry nets not even catching the air. 
    Among these many boats — actually, between the Capt. Andy and the Capt. James — there rocks the St. Martin. And on the St. Martin, there lives its owner, a small, muscular Vietnamese-born American named Thuong Nguyen, whose right forearm bears a tattoo that says, in his native language:  “Life is difficult.” 
    Now his difficult, amazing life has been capsized by events not of his doing. Again. 
Here is where Mr. Nguyen, 50, should be: on another 10-day trip out near Breton Sound, his two deckhands beside him, his lucky hurricane dog at his feet, trawling through the day and into the night, when all he can see is the celestial display he calls a “star soup.” 
    But in another lesson of how all is connected, an offshore oil rig leased by a multibillion-dollar corporation exploded nearly two weeks ago. Which, in addition to killing 11 workers, ruptured a well. Which caused an ever-mushrooming oil slick. Which led to the closing of the country’s most fecund fishing grounds, from the Mississippi River to Florida’s Pensacola Bay, for at least 10 days. 
    Which has stalled, and possibly ruined, the livelihoods of thousands, including this diminutive man living on his boat at the very end of a place that calls itself the “end of the world.” All he can do is paint, knock down some rust, and accept his boat’s lullaby sway. 
    The pause fills Mr. Nguyen with anger, yes, but also guilt. In addition to providing for his family, he takes to heart the job of gathering some of the food you may eat tonight. “And now I cannot help out, so I feel like I’m — fail,” he says. “I cannot bring in more seafood from here.” 
    To find Mr. Nguyen in his fitful rest, take Louisiana Highway 23 south, the instructive road that bisects narrow Plaquemines Parish. The passing seafood shacks and oil tanks, the boat storage yards and the parked trucks of offshore riggers reflect the shared interests in the gulf’s bounty. 
    Continue past the Riverside Restaurant, where Hurricane Katrina tried but failed to scrub away the marshland mural painted by an itinerant artist; past the damaged and ghostly shopping center; past the Katrina debris jutting from a landfill. The hurricane that defined 2005 nearly wiped this community away, but the people came back; adapted; are trying again. 
    The road unwinds and frays at the bottom, with one last strand ending at the Venice Marina. Many of the boats here are owned by Vietnamese men and women who, some 20 years ago, added a Southeast Asian flavor to the Cajun-Croatian stew of the parish. It took a while, but the stew has settled, mostly. 
    In 1991, Mr. Nguyen became another unfamiliar presence on the docks, altering the way things had always been. He would go out on his uncle’s boat, chock-full of Dramamine, and hear the Asian slurs of other shrimpers coming across the ship-to-shore radio. 
    How do you respond? How do you quickly explain: I fled the Communists in a boat smaller than the one you are on now, crammed with three dozen others for 11 days. Little water. Vomiting. People praying to Jesus and Buddha. You cannot imagine. 
    How do you say: I am an American citizen now. I am married to an American. I have children. I was working at a battery factory in St. Joseph, Mo., when my uncle asked me to help him on his shrimp boat. So we live here now, in Plaquemines Parish. 
    Time washed away most of the tension. Mr. Nguyen, his wife, Dorothy, and their four children lived in a double-wide trailer in Buras, a few miles north of Venice. Eventually, he raised enough money to buy the St. Martin, a 65-foot used boat found in Houma; the purchase allowed him to promote himself to captain. 
    Once he was a man whose only maritime experience was a horrifying slog toward freedom; now Mr. Nguyen lived to be on the water. He would joyously tell his wife how, on the first day of shrimp season, the lights of the many boats gathered in the predawn looked like a city afloat. 
    Katrina hit while the family was out of town. Mr. Nguyen returned to a collapsed double-wide, two dead family dogs, and the absence of irreplaceable family photographs from Vietnam and Missouri. But he eventually found the St. Martin a mile from its slip, damaged yet upright. And he took in an abandoned puppy cowering near the dock; Lucky, he called it. 
    Mr. Nguyen insisted that his family start over in Missouri, while he repaired his boat. After several months, the rhythm returned. He would collect his two deckhands, buy ice, fill the fuel tank and the rice box, and head out. 
    The men would take turns steering, cooking and sleeping, as the boat moved, back and forth, back and forth, around the clock. The heavy chain dragged at the back would “scare” the shrimp into the nets, he says. And every four hours, the men would haul in, rinse clean the catch, and dump the take into the ice-laden hold, while Lucky chased away the hungry birds. 
    Sometimes, at sea, Mr. Nguyen would talk by cellphone — uninterrupted — to his wife and youngest son in Missouri, or to his daughter, married to a soldier, in Kansas, or to his oldest son, who works for an oil company, in New Orleans. 
    Sometimes, standing at the wheel, where bouquets of plastic flowers adorn the dashboard, he would talk to his second-oldest son, Bo — a soldier, he says, who has done two tours of war and is now preparing for a third. 
    Sometimes, under the starry soup that could make him feel as small as the creatures he pursued, Mr. Nguyen would forget about the threat of foreign imports, the fluctuating prices, the lingering tension along the docks. He would feel peace in his mission. 
    “I go out there, and I bring back seafood for this country,” he says. 
    Several days ago, Mr. Nguyen learned of the large event disrupting his small world, an event that has denied him those offshore moments that fulfill him. He has no high school degree, no other training: hauling shrimp is what he does. 
    He says he understands that oil is essential; it fuels his boat. What he doesn’t understand is the delay and uncertainty, as shrimp boats remain tethered. “The company don’t have a right answer,” he says. “And the government don’t have a right answer.” 
    On Friday, Mr. Nguyen went to a meeting at a local school that focused on how to clean up hazardous materials. 
    On Saturday, he attended another meeting, this one held by the corporation whose accident has made his difficult life more difficult. He received a piece of paper saying that, according to the “BP Gulf of Mexico Operations,” he had completed all requirements for “GoM Spill Response Efforts” — should his services be needed. 
    And on Sunday, as President Obama visited the Coast Guard station a half mile away, this tattooed man worked hard to suppress the call of the sea. He rinsed out some shirts, painted a boom and shared fresh catfish with his hurricane dog, Lucky



5/2/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Dirty secret of black-on-Asian violence is out,"
by C.W. Nevius
    San Francisco's hidden truth is out. That's what community organizer Carol Mo calls the realization that Asian residents are being targeted for robberies, burglaries and intimidation by young black men.
    "It is San Francisco's dirty little secret," said Mo, a former Safety Network Community organizer in the Sunset District. "It's not news to us."
    Hundreds of people marched into Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting to express their fear, frustration and outrage. But so far the response has been disappointing, particularly from the San Francisco Police Department. It seems intent on downplaying the role of race and its impact in the community. 
    The recent incidents of black violence against Asians is the perfect opportunity to open a dialogue about racism. Instead, they are attempting to close the door.
    City officials, including the Police Department, say these assaults are part of a larger crime picture where gangs of kids take advantage of a vulnerable group of small stature. But Mo participated in a 2008 survey by the Police Department in which about 300 strong-arm robberies were analyzed. "In 85 percent of the physical assault crimes, the victims were Asian and the perpetrators were African American," she said.
    The squeamishness city officials are experiencing about confronting those numbers doesn't reflect well on anyone. No one is saying the entire African American community is violent. But ignoring the legitimate anger and frustration from Asians is disingenuous and unfair.
    "We love San Francisco," said the Rev. Norman Fong, a Presbyterian minister. "And we don't want to do anything to divide the communities. But at the same time, our community is hurting and we feel like our voices are not being heard."
    Now that the Asian community has found its voice, city leaders must listen and respond. What should be done? Here are a few suggestions:
    -- Understand the underlying conflict: This isn't just about stealing iPods. There's a deep divide between the two communities. Edward Chang, who lectures on civil unrest and race relations at UC Riverside, has studied the contentious history of Korean-African American relations in Los Angeles when Korean store owners moved into black neighborhoods.
    "There was this sense of being invaded by someone else," Chang said. "There was a sense of needing to protect and defend their turf."
    Another factor is the way the two cultures are perceived. Lee Mun Wah, a Berkeley-based documentary filmmaker and diversity trainer for large corporations, said there is resentment over how Asians are seen as "the favored minority."
    "We are pitted against each other," Wah said. "African Americans sometimes say, 'We did all the work in civil rights, and they get all the benefits.' "
    -- Create a dialogue: As Chang said, "In order to build trust, you must do things together." Wah suggests hiring black employees in Asian stores. Board of Supervisors President David Chiu is pushing a summer program to hire black and Asian youths to work together in community patrols.
    -- Speak up: Chiu thinks the language barrier is a huge part of the reason Asian victims do not report crimes. He stresses the need for multilingual police officers. 
But the Chinese community also needs to overcome its reticence to go to the police.     They are only making themselves more vulnerable by being seen, as one officer put it, as "silent, vulnerable and unwilling to fight back."
    -- Listen to Mrs. Cheng: The 52-year-old woman was attacked March 22 when a 15-year-old boy allegedly threw her off the Muni platform at Third Street and Oakdale Avenue. She was injured, but she says she doesn't want retribution.
    "This is my simple request," she wrote in an e-mail with the help of an interpreter. "That we can all live safely in our own homes without being burglarized. I feel ashamed that this horrible bad luck has happened to me. I only hope that my bad luck will fend off future bad luck situations for other people."
    And then she added one more thought.
    "My neighbor is black," she said. "Though we can't communicate much, he is a good person and a good friend. He often jokes that he would teach me English and I Chinese to him."
    That would be a great start - two people talking.



5/2/10 Daily Princetonian blog: "Princeton Civil Rights review continues under Obama administration," 
http://blogs.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/05/officials-at-education-departments.html
    Officials at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said they plan to ramp up their efforts to stop discrimination in higher education, and will continue an investigation focusing on the University’s admission policies. 
    The Princeton investigation focused on claims of bias against Asian-American students in the admission process. Jian Li, a Chinese-American student with perfect SAT scores, was waitlisted and then rejected by Princeton in 2006. He filed a federal civil-rights complaint, arguing that Princeton imposed higher standards for Asians than other groups. In 2008, the investigation was expanded to a broader review of the University’s admission policies for Asian-American students. The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights said the office will be reviewing the Bush administration’s policies on race-conscious admissions policies and handling a larger volume of cases, so four years after it was issued Li’s complaint may finally get a determination.
    University spokeswoman Emily Aronson told the Princeton Alumni Weekly that the University believes the review is unfounded, but others have raised concerns about recognition of the minority group in other aspects of campus life. The graduate school’s “hosting weekend” for admitted minority doctoral candidates doesn’t include Asian prospective grad students, and in 2008 alumni, faculty and students petitioned for more Asian-American focused courses and the creation of a certificate program. This year Princeton offered two Asian-American studies courses, including “Chinatown USA,” but alumni are still working on the creation of a department, along the lines of the Center for African American Studies or the Program in Latino Studies. 



5/2/10 Los Angeles Times: "On the set: Casting of ‘Last Airbender’ stirs controversy:
Although the source material is rooted in Far Eastern myth, M. Night Shyamalan’s film cross-casts non-Asians,"
by Sam Adams
    Philadelphia - By now, the movie industry has plenty of practice weathering the complaints of fans who object to the inevitable departures that accompany the adaptation of a pre-existing property to a big-screen franchise. But the concerns that surfaced as M. Night Shyamalan went into production on "The Last Airbender" were more serious than the usual nitpicking. Amid the kvetching about the shape and size of the facial scar sported by the film's chief villain were accusations that Shyamalan had whitewashed the story, which was influenced by Asian art and mythology, by casting Caucasian actors in many leading roles.
    Noah Ringer, a tween tae kwon do champion from Texas, was chosen for the role of Aang, a high-spirited boy who discovers that he is the last surviving member of the Air Nation; "Twlight's" Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz ("Deck the Halls") were cast as his best friends, Water Nation siblings Sokka and Katara.
    The "Airbender" outcry was not unusual — the controversy over Broadway's "Miss Saigon" is but one of many forerunners. The source material for the Paramount Pictures film (which opens July 2, and if all goes well will have two succeeding installments) is " Avatar: The Last Airbender," an animated series that aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008. (The first word was dropped from the big-screen project for obvious reasons.)
    Although creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were heavily influenced by Asian martial arts lore and incorporated elements of Chinese and Tibetan cultures, the characters had no explicit race. But some Asian Americans saw the film's casting as the latest in a string of insults from an industry in which it was once common for white actors to squint their eyes and spout fortune-cookie wisdom while Asian actors were confined to playing opium-den extras.
    On the film's Philadelphia set last summer, Shyamalan took issue with the idea that "The Last Airbender" presents a lily-white version of the cartoon's universe. "Ultimately, this movie, and then the three movies, will be the most culturally diverse tentpole movies ever released, period," he said. "So if I'm failing the bar, I'm not sure whose bar is set higher than this movie." At the time when the criticisms first surfaced early last year, boy-band heartthrob Jesse McCartney was set to play the villainous Prince Zuko. But when he dropped out over conflicts with his touring schedule, the role was recast with " Slumdog Millionaire's" Dev Patel and the Fire Nation took on a darker hue. Iranian-born Shaun Toub was cast as Patel's uncle and Maori actor Cliff Curtis as his father.
    Toub, whose lengthy resume includes " Iron Man" and " Crash," said that race-based casting would have come with its own problems. "If they would have put all Asians in a certain nation, I think then there would be people who come out and said, ‘Well, now you're stereotyping, saying that anything that has to do with martial arts has to do with Asians and chop suey and all that.' So it's nice to mix it up and just do the unexpected."
    Doing the unexpected extends to tapping perhaps the most recognizable writer-director since Quentin Tarantino to film his first adaptation as well as the first movie to step away from his patented (and, some critics would say, tapped-out) thrillers.
    "The long-form story was always really interesting to me, but the idea of going away for three years to write a long-form movie didn't seem realistic, at least right now," Shyamalan said. "One thing that's very interesting is that, because it hasn't been mine from the inception, I've had a little bit more perspective, so it isn't as painful to adapt or change something. Just a hair more acceptance of the ability to do that is real healthy, and now I can bring that to the movies I write as well."
    Together with "Lord of the Rings" cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, Shyamalan worked to strike a balance between the extensive CGI demanded by the otherworldly setting of the story and a tactile reality conveyed through long takes and real fight scenes. (Patel, like Ringer, has been practicing martial arts since childhood.) His goal was to transfer the aesthetic and work ethics of his earlier films onto the much larger stage of a summer blockbuster, a task endorsed by producer Frank Marshall, who last worked with Shyamalan on 2002's "Signs."
    "I think what he's learned is how to take the ideas he has, which were small before, and realize them in a movie like this without losing the spirituality of the other movies," Marshall said. "He's been able to keep that tone and that feeling and not be overwhelmed by the process. There's still a lot of humanity in what we're doing and a lot of warmth and depth to the characters. It's not overwhelmed by the fact that there's a lot of special effects."


4/30/10 New York Times: "Attacks on Asians Highlight New Racial Tensions,"
by Gerry Shih
    The Chinese who had gathered at San Francisco’s City Hall — several hundred of them, chanting and waving bilingual placards under a persistent drizzle — were mad. Their words and signs said they felt under attack, vulnerable, unheard by the police, city officials and even their own community leaders.
    Their grievances included these in March: An 83-year old Chinese man beaten to death by five boys on a Bayview street and a 57-year-old woman injured after being thrown off a Third Street Muni platform. On April 16, two teenagers in Oakland assaulted Tian Sheng Yu, a 59-year-old Chinese immigrant, in broad daylight. A punch knocked him to the ground; the fall killed him.
    Tammy Tan, the executive director of the Asian Pacific American Community Center, watched as Chinese leaders took up the megaphone to vent their fury in lilting Cantonese tones.
    But something hung in midair, unspoken.
    “We recommend our staff not to say it,” Ms. Tan said, looking over the crowd. “We don’t want to escalate with African-Americans, so we don’t say it.” Then she turned and faced a reporter. “But it is racial,” she said. “That’s fact.”
    It has been years since race relations in the Bay Area, where diversity and tolerance are pillars of the civic religion, have taken such a sharp turn for the worse.
    The recent spate of highly publicized attacks on elderly Asians by black teenagers has abruptly enhanced a longstanding perception among Asians that they are disproportionately targets of racially motivated violence.
    George Gascón, the San Francisco police chief, announced last week the emergency deployment of 32 additional beat officers to the Bayview-Visitación Valley neighborhood. Although “crime numbers have not gone up,” Chief Gascón said in an interview, he wanted to address the “tremendous amount of fear and apprehension” among Asians.
    It is these historically black neighborhoods in southeast San Francisco that have undergone the sharpest demographic changes in the city in the past 20 years. Decades after Koreans transformed the Fillmore district from what it once was — the “Harlem of the West,” its blocks lined by the swaggering, smoky haunts of jazz lore — Chinese started moving to the Bayview in large numbers.
    Community leaders predict that the 2010 census will show the Asian population, almost all Chinese, now making up 40 percent of the Bayview’s residents and as many as 60 percent of Visitación Valley’s.
    “At one point, one group may emerge because they’ve got greater population and another group feels pushed out — feels like they don’t have any voice anymore,” said the Rev. A. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church. “It involves a kind of power shift. That, of course, creates some of the tension.”
    The rapidly deteriorating climate has alarmed local leaders. The president of the Board of Supervisors, David Chiu, noted that on Wednesday, hundreds of Chinese lined up at a board meeting to tell stories of assaults and intimidation, sometimes without clear motivation, by young African-Americans.
    Two days later, a young black man, Amanze Emenike, 21, said he was 12 when he heard older boys talking about why they singled out Asian and Latino immigrants: they would not report the crime and had no gangs to back them up. On Friday morning, on a Hunters Point hilltop with a breathtaking view of the Bay, Mr. Emenike and his sister, Sherry Blunt, 22, recounted their “spree” of crime against Asian and Latino immigrants several years ago.
    By the time he was 15, Mr. Emenike said, he and his brother, Armani Bolmer, would get up at 5 a.m. to rob Mexican day laborers who got off the 23 Monterey bus from the Mission district.
    They began to single out Chinese, he said, because they had more money. In 2006, they stalked a Chinese man at the last Muni stop, robbed him, and were arrested hours later.
    Black civic leaders say they are troubled by the rash of crimes and have repeatedly emerged at rallies alongside Chinese to show solidarity. They also point out that black-on-black crime remains, statistically, a far bigger problem.
    But at these Chinese rallies and vigils, beneath the megaphone-amplified din of positive rhetoric, there are worrying murmurs about revenge, said Henry Der, who was the executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, an influential Chinatown organization, for more than two decades.
    “I’m getting e-mails saying, ‘We need to retaliate, it’s time we pick up arms,’ ”Mr. Der said. “And these are from grown, supposedly responsible adults.”
    At such a fraught time, leaders like Ms. Tan say they must tread a narrow path between irresponsibly amplifying racial tensions and dishonestly ignoring them.
    Part of the frustration, some say, is fueled precisely by the reluctance — both among Chinese and among San Franciscans generally — to discuss such issues.
    “Because San Francisco sees itself as very progressive, people just don’t want to talk about these issues,” Mr. Der said. “But that’s how people feel about it. You can’t argue it away.”
    An alternative narrative, emerging from places like the Asian Law Caucus or the Rev. Amos Brown of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter, argues that race played no role in the disparate attacks.
    “They’re not the same perpetrators, and they’re not in the same neighborhood,” Angela Chan of the caucus said. “So it’s not a very advanced way of thinking about things.”
    And the widow of Mr. Yu, Zhirui Wang, has repeatedly tried to play down any racial overtones in the attack on him, the Chinese-language press reported. “We are not separated by race or skin color,” she said in an interview with The World Journal. “I hope everyone can treat others as family members, so tragedy does not happen again.”
    Mr. Emenike and his sister, Ms. Blunt, said the teenagers involved in the recent attacks were following in his footsteps, as he had followed older boys.
    “It’s not ‘this is an Asian person let’s get him,’ ” Mr. Emenike said. “It’s we thinking, ‘this Asian person is probably carrying a large amount of money. And this is our neighborhood, this is our home, why not?’ ”
    But if the motivations were largely strategic, and not out of unadulterated racial hatred, they were also influenced by complex emotions and a wariness of change.
    “I wake up and I’m hungry, my stomach growling,” Ms. Blunt said. “Why am I just getting by when there’s this Asian walking out of the house with a laptop going to the cafe?”
    There is also the frustration at perceived prejudice by Asians. Ms. Blunt still recalls a Chinese classmate in junior high ignoring her requests to borrow a pencil.
    “You approach them, and they just keep giving you the cold shoulder,” Ms. Blunt said.
    Last week, New America Media, a nonprofit coalition of ethnic news media outlets, published an essay in which Mr. Emenike talked of his past. It was soon translated and republished in both The Singtao Daily and The World Journal, the two main Chinese-language newspapers.
    Mr. Emenike is a proud new father with a 3-month-old son, so he has “calmed down,” he said. He edits video for New America Media. He also projects an almost avuncular sense of responsibility for the teenagers in his neighborhood, and has come to terms — if grudgingly — with the changes there.
    “We tell them that’s so played out, there’s no use anymore,” Mr. Emenike said. “They’re a part of the neighborhood, so it don’t make no sense to rob them. Like you see them everyday.”
    He paused, then added, “But that’s the way I guess it’s supposed to be.” 


4/29/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Oakland Street Killing: Anger"
by William Wong
    If there was any doubt about continuing anger and frustration among some in the ethnic Chinese community over the beating and killing of a San Francisco Chinese immigrant man allegedly by two African American teenage males on an uptown Oakland (California) street in broad daylight, an Oakland Chinatown town-hall meeting Wednesday night (April 28) should dispell those doubts.
    Organized by Oakland Chinese American organizations, the meeting drew a crowd in the several hundreds to the Restaurant Peony, one of Chinatown's finest seafood and dim sum palaces. Even though it was the dinner hour, no food was served at the meeting in the restaurant's large main dining room. Everyone was there for serious business, not for a typical Chinatown social activity like a sumptuous seafood banquet. (The restaurant did serve diners in smaller side areas adjacent to the meeting space.)
    The vast majority of the meeting crowd was of Chinese descent, many of them elderly. The fact that the dominant language used at the meeting was Cantonese indicates a significant portion of the audience that isn't fluent in English.
    The attraction was new Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts and some in his high command, along with the two detectives investigating the April 16 beating of Tian Sheng Yu. Mr. Yu died days later from hitting his head on the pavement after being punched in the face allegedly by one of the two young people at 18th Street and Telegraph Avenue near the heart of a reviving uptown area. 
    The seemingly random and senseless crime shocked many in a city that knows well the heavy human toll of crime and violence. Especially shocked and frightened were many in the Oakland Chinese community. 
    Ostensibly, the meeting was to hear from Oakland Chinese about their visceral fears for their safety on the streets of Oakland. A few San Francisco Chinese attended as well, as there have been recent assaults, at least one fatal, of San Francisco Chinese allegedly by African Americans. 
    For the first 90 minutes of the scheduled two-hour meeting, barely a peep was heard from the crowd, which was polite and attentive. It applauded at introductions of Chief Batts, who is African American, and his colleagues, some of whom are also African Americans. It applauded when the speakers made their major points, among them condolences to Mr. Yu's widow and family, and Chief Batts' announcement that police patrols in Chinatown would be strengthened, at least in the short term.
    Instead, the organizer -- Carl Chan, long active in the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, a long-ago immigrant from Hong Kong, and a bilingual real estate agent -- and police officials held forth. They delivered their messages in measured, even solicitous, tones. 
    In his opening remarks, Chan didn't shy away from the matter of tense race relations between Chinese/Asians and the African American communities, exacerbated by the Yu killing. He said this meeting should deal with that volatile issue, but do so in "a positive way."
    He recounted sympathetic feelings and gestures from African Americans in Oakland to the Yu tragedy. He urged the crowd to not blame the African American community and admonished the Chinese and other Asian American communities to reach out to other communities, including African Americans.
    Chief Batts offered condolences to the Yu family and said he was "angry over the loss of life in our city, and I am committed to bringing justice, regardless of race."
Police officials gave crime statistics (assaults and robbery, in particular) that do not indicate a disproportionate victimization of Chinese and other Asian Americans in Oakland. 
    On the sensitive matter of whether Mr. Yu was a victim of a hate crime, the lead detective on the case, Sgt. Mike Gantt said he and his partner repeatedly asked the suspects, now under arrest, if they attacked Mr. Yu and his son because of the latter's race, and the two young men said no. Deputy Chief Jeff Israel, who heads the police department's investigative unit, said, "There is no evidence of a hate crime against Mr. Yu."
    There wasn't any unusual crowd reaction to those answers given by the police officials. When Sgt. Galindo, Gantt's partner, said it might take anywhere from six months to five years to bring the suspects to justice, the crowd let out its loudest audible outburst to that point in the evening. 
    Finally, at about 7 p.m., moderator Chan told audience members it was their turn to speak. He asked audience members to be respectful. He also said he gets calls all the time from other Oakland Chinese who tell him they or family members have been victims of crimes. He said many do not report these crimes to the police. He urged the crowd to step forward to report crimes against them.
    This is when the meeting's polite tone changed in an instant. From the back of the restaurant's large dining room, a bespectacled middle-aged Chinese man strode purposefully. He stepped onto the podium and took the wireless microphone from Chan, and immediately started shouting, "This is a hate crime! This is a hate crime!"
He started gesticulating wildly, turning around to face the rows of police officials on either side of lectern and yelled that he didn't believe the crime statistics offered by them.
    He carried on in an angry voice for several more minutes, drawing cheers from parts of the crowd and a few jeers from others. When he returned to his seat, he continued bellowing his accusation that Mr. Yu was a hate-crime victim. He even accused Chinese community leaders who counseled racial unity during these racially charged times of being "chickens."
    That set off the usually mild-mannered Chan, who told the protester to leave. Several police officers descended from the podium to begin escorting the protester out. You could feel the emotional temperature in the large room rise unsettlingly.
    Outside the restaurant, I caught up with the protester, who was surrounded by a few Chinese men, animatedly talking in Cantonese. He told me his name is Young Kong. He said he was a radio talk show at a San Francisco Cantonese-language radio station.
He told me in English that authorities "know" this is a hate crime against Chinese, adding, "it's becoming a trend in the Bay Area...This is just the tip of the iceberg."
I asked him what he wanted to happen in the Yu case. "Maximum punishment" against the suspects, he said, seething still.
    Back inside the meeting, the room was still buzzing. A line-up of other speakers, all Chinese or other Asians, awaited their turn to say something. One woman recounted in tearful Cantonese the time she was beaten on the head in front of where she lived.
I left at about 7:45 p.m., before the meeting broke up, trying to digest what I had just seen and heard. 
    Unlike Young Kong and other Chinese and Asians, I don't know for certain whether Mr. Yu was a hate-crime victim, in a strictly legal sense. But what I learned -- again -- from the meeting was that for some in my own ethnic community, a legal definition of hate crime is largely irrelevant.
    Young Kong's sentiments and those who share his views are coming from another social universe. They base their raw emotions on knowing and learning about Chinese and other Asian victims of street crimes like assault and robbery. In many cases, perpetrators are African American males.
    That fact alone convinces some in my own ethnic community to believe, to know, that Chinese and Asian victims of street crimes are targeted because of their race or ethnicity.
    As I indicated in my previous blog on the Yu killing, these matters of interracial relationships, in general, are complex and frequently defy rational thought.
    I am not unaware of the brutal reality that some Chinese and Asian elderly get mugged on our urban streets and that some of the bad guys are African American. A scary purse-snatching happened to one of my sisters at the San Leandro BART parking lot in broad daylight several years ago. That is an upsetting and unsettling reality, as is any act of violence by one person against another.
    Yet I am not ready to ascribe a hate motive to these black-on-Asian crimes unless there is irrefutable evidence that the perpetrator asserted his motive in some manner before committing the crime.
    Is it possible that some disaffected African American males have racist feelings toward Chinese and Asians? Sure, just as it is possible for the converse -- Chinese and other Asians having racist feelings toward African Americans. 
    Beyond possibility, these attitudes are real in the case of Chinese and Asians on one side, and African Americans on the other. Another reality is that criminal acts are carried out not only by African Americans, but by people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, yes, even Chinese and other Asians.
    And that's not the end-all of the rancid racist and sociopathic scenarios that we humans create or have created. Prejudice, bigotry, and racism have, unfortunately, been a part of the human condition, as well as social and political institutional policies and practices, throughout the entire existence of our flawed species. So also are violent outbursts between and among us, individually and collectively.
    That should not be a new or profound revelation. But I believe it's safe to say that some of us have progressed in modern times. It is not only possible, but an everyday reality that some of us flawed humans have friendship, affection, and even love that transcend race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality.
    The tragic Tian Sheng Yu case, and those in San Francisco with a similar profile, jolt us in ways that can be ugly, unpleasant, clannish, ignorant, myopic, inhumane, exclusionary, and downright stupid and incomprehensible. 
    But this is also an opportunity to reexamine ourselves, who we are, what we truly stand for and what we truly value -- living and co-existing in close proximity with people who don't look like us, who don't share cultural traits, who don't believe in the same religious doctrine, who don't speak the same language, who don't have the same privileges and opportunities.
    Generally speaking, it's much easier for us to stay within our own comfort zones, perhaps an extension of the womb. But that's not Oakland. That's not San Francisco, nor is it New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and increasingly other cities and communities, large and small throughout these United States of America, a great social experiment that is yet far from finished and far from perfection.


4/29/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Asian American attacks focus at City Hall,"
by C.W. Nevius
    On Tuesday, Mrs. Cheng came to City Hall for the first time in the 20 years she's lived in the city. She intended to speak to the Board of Supervisors through a translator, but she uttered just a few words before she began sobbing uncontrollably.
    On March 22, Cheng was checking on her daughter who was late coming home on the bus. Standing on the Third and Oakdale Muni platform, she recalls being grabbed from behind, choked and thrown off the 5-foot-high metro stop and into the street.
    The impact knocked her unconscious, shattered some of her teeth and left her lying in the path of a bus. The attacker was identified as a 15-year-old African American boy who was charged with robbery. But he threw her to the ground for no apparent reason. 
    Cheng was just one of the nearly 300 Asian Americans who showed up at City Hall to share story after story about being assaulted, robbed and intimidated. The two hours of testimony were tearful and angry. The need to share their stories was triggered by Cheng's experience; the January beating death of Huan Chen, 83, as he left a bus station at Third Street and Oakdale Avenue; and Tian Sheng Yu, who died after he was punched by an 18-year-old African American man in Oakland. 
    The stories highlighted what will be a difficult conversation. The speakers said they felt they were being targeted by African American teenage boys.
    "I live in constant fear," Cheng wrote in her first interview, which was conducted over e-mail. "I am afraid to go out any more. I can't eat because I have no lower teeth. I have a big lump on the back of my head ... I walk with a limp and need help to move around. I am afraid I may lose my job. I came from China 20 years ago. I came because it offers its people freedom, freedom of speech, good education. How would I have imagined I would become a crime victim? I have lost confidence in America."
    African Americans attacking Asians is a reality, said Young Kong, a local talk radio show host on a Chinese language station.
    "This is a hate crime," he said. "The supervisors don't want to say it because they don't want to exacerbate the tension. They are too chicken, too politically correct."
Cheng says she has a long-term relationship with her neighbor, who is black, and the people who rushed to her aid were all African American. This isn't a race war. But something is happening here.
    "Let's face it, if older black men were being killed by marauding groups of kids, we'd be going crazy," said Lynette Sweet, a lifelong resident of District 10 and candidate for supervisor there. "We in the black community have to take responsibility for our kids." The concern, however, is that the discussion is too polarizing. 
    No truly great city can allow this. It is time to take a break from debating boycotting Arizona for its immigration policy and look at our own streets.
    "This is the immigrant's voice not being heard in a city of immigrants," said Yvonne Lee, a former police commissioner who helped translate for Cheng. "This is years of frustration and fear that has burned into anger."
    Bayview police station Capt. Greg Suhr says the police are responding, including adding 32 officers to his station to make Muni safer. But he thinks the racial issue is clouding perceptions. 
    "We are seeing large kids or kids in large numbers taking advantage of people of smaller stature," Suhr said. We have Hispanics in the neighborhood who are targeted fairly frequently."
    That may be, but Supervisor Carmen Chu said she's heard stories of Asians being pushed on the bus, or insulted or spit on.
    "Some of the perceptions are based on reality and some on stereotypes," said Chu. "The reality is that they exist. This is something we need to talk about." 
    Sweet believes there's potential for resolution. She sees hope in the fact that when Cheng was injured, members of the black community quickly identified the attacker, who has admitted the crime.
    "People in the Asian community need to vent, and we need to listen to them," Sweet said. "But I have found that after we give people that opportunity, it very often turns into a chance for the community to come together."
    That would be great. Because right now the two sides couldn't be much further apart.
    C.W. Nevius' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.


4/29/2010 The Associated Press: "SF police adds patrols following attacks on Asians,"
    San Francisco—San Francisco police is boosting foot patrols in neighborhoods where Asian-Americans have been attacked recently. 
    Police Chief George Gascon said Wednesday that the 32 extra officers will be deployed around transit stops in the Bayview and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods. They will remain in place for at least the next month. 
    Gascon says the added officers will help reassure Asian-American residents in the aftermath of multiple attacks along Muni's T-Third Metro line, including one that left an 83-year-old man dead. 
    The incidents have sparked concerns that Asian-Americans are being targeted for racial reasons. 
    Gascon has downplayed race as a factor in Bayview crime, saying blacks and Latinos there are victimized more frequently than Asian-Americans. 


4/28/10 San Francisco Public Press: "Asians denounce suspected hate crimes,"
by Dana Sherne 
    Hundreds of Asian Americans joined city supervisors and Mayor Gavin Newsom at a rally Tuesday to call for safer neighborhoods after a rash of attacks against Asians, with much of the blame being focused on African Americans.
    Newsom promised a $100,000 reward for finding the youths who assaulted and fatally injured Huan Chen on Jan. 24. Chen, an 83-year-old San Francisco resident, was attacked after he left a bus stop at Third Street and Oakdale Avenue on Jan. 24, according to police. He died on March 19.
    After the rally, on the steps of City Hall, Asian Americans who say they have been victims of racial violence addressed the supervisors, some tearfully relating their stories and demanding action from the city.
    “I feel I am not protected properly — I am afraid to go out,” said one woman who was beaten by five black youths and declined to give her name. “I felt like I lost my human rights when I was attacked. I ask that city government paid more attention to the Asians.”
    A 57-year-old Chinese woman was thrown off the Muni platform at Third Street and Oakdale on March 22, police say. Not giving her name, she spoke haltingly at the board meeting through her tears.
    “I came to the U.S. because I hoped I would be able to have a good life and achieve the American dream,” she said, echoing many other speakers’ disillusionment with their adopted country.
    Many in the audience called for increased police presence and attention from the city government. Some of the speakers said the District 10 supervisor, Sophie Maxwell, was absent from this meeting. The ethnically diverse district, includes Potrero Hill, Bayview Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Silver Terrace, Dogpatch, Little Hollywood and the Portola districts.
    Many of the speakers emphasized that these attacks were alleged to have predominantly been committed by African Americans.
    One woman spoke of how her image of African Americans changed after she and a friend were surrounded and robbed by a couple of black teenagers. Attending high school with blacks, she had never been afraid before, but now had a different perspective.
    “My entire image of African Americans changed. They could be violent. They could be stealing things around,” she said. “I still can be friends with them, but there’s just something bad in my heart that feels like they could be dangerous sometimes.”
    Other speakers addressed the need for dialogue and communication between races.
“But I think we also need to understand that in America, race matters,” said Vincent Pan, the executive director of the San Francisco-based advocacy group Chinese for Affirmative Action. “It always matters, and the question is how we make race matter in a way that moves us toward positive solutions as opposed to negative solutions.” 
    Earlier Tuesday, at a press conference, Police Chief George Gascon noted that there is not enough evidence to call these attacks hate crimes. Instead, they might be “crimes of opportunity” and robberies.
    But he acknowledged: “There was clearly race, and race factors there.”


4/28/10 Palm Beach Post: "2 Boca business owners indicted for allegedly running slave labor operation,"
By Michael LaForgia
    Already fighting a lawsuit filed by the Florida Attorney General's Office, two Boca Raton business owners accused of pressing Filipino workers into slavery now are facing federal criminal charges, prosecutors said in documents unsealed today.
    A federal grand jury in West Palm Beach last week indicted Sophia Manuel and Alfonso Baldonado Jr.on four counts of organizing a forced labor conspiracy, organizing a document servitude conspiracy, committing visa fraud and submitting false written statements to the government.
    As owners of Quality Staffing Services Corp., Manuel and Baldonado pressed about 39 Filipino nationals into slavery in South Florida, forced them to sleep on kitchen and garage floors, fed them rotten vegetables and chicken innards and threatened to have them deported, according to documents filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Shaniek M. Maynard.
    Manuel and Baldonado planned for and committed the crimes between June 2006 and February 2008, when 13 workers ran away from the operation, prosecutors said.
The duo would bar the hungry workers from opening the refrigerator except to cook. They would wake workers in the middle of the night and quiz them on drink recipes and table set ups before sending them to work for a pittance in South Florida clubs, prosecutors said.
    They said one worker fell and broke his wrist in January 2008, and another coughed up blood between October 2007 and February 2008, but Manuel and Baldonado refused to let them see a doctor.
    The indictment is only the latest problem for the duo, who were named as defendants along with their company, a Miami-based staffing services company and the Boca Woods Country Club Association in a lawsuit filed by the Florida Attorney General's office. In that complaint, the state sought to dissolve the businesses, asked for damages and civil penalties of $10,000 for each act the workers were forced to do.
That case still is pending in Circuit Court.


4/28/10 Gothamist: "Jean Kwok, Author of Girl in Translation,"
    Jean Kwok's poignant debut novel Girl in Translation, which has been called "reminiscent of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." The book follows the path of young Kimberly Chang who has just immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn with her mother and Kimberly's double life, trying to learn English and succeed in school while helping her mother in a sweatshop and living in poverty. The main character's struggle mirrors Kwok's own experience: Kwok moved to New York when she was five years old and would go to a Chinatown sweatshop with her family and return back home to a rat- and roach-infested apartment. 
    Through her hard work, Kwok attended Hunter College High School, later attending Harvard on scholarship and eventually earning her MFA in fiction at Columbia. We spoke to Kwok ahead of her reading at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble tomorrow night and asked her about growing up as an immigrant in NYC, being a professional ballroom dancer after college and more.
    What inspired you to write Girl in Translation? 
    I suppose I started by wanting to write this book for my mother. When I was a child and we were working in the clothing factory, she stayed in the kitchen, tying sashes on skirts and tagging pants until late into the night. And no matter how wise she was in Chinese, my mother could only manage a few words of broken English. 
    We all take the subway, and there are those foreigners on the train with the weird clothes, and they’re holding plastic bags that smell funny, and they can hardly speak English. Well, I’ve been that foreign person and my mother’s English is still non-existent. I wanted to tell the other side of the story, to put English-speaking readers into the mind and heart of a Chinese immigrant, so that readers could experience what it was like to be on the other side of the language barrier. I wanted them to feel how it was to have to struggle to comprehend English, and yet to understand Chinese as easily as a native speaker does. I hoped that maybe the next time someone saw a foreign person on the train, they might realize that that person could be wise, articulate and funny in their own language. 
    Can you describe some of your experience in New York after you immigrated?  For instance, did you really live in a roach- and rat-infested apartment and work in a Chinatown sweatshop? 
    Yes, we did. We’d been fairly well-off in Hong Kong but when we came to New York, we had to start all over again. My family started working in a clothing factory in Chinatown and my father brought me there after school each day. I started when I was five years old. My story wasn’t unusual - there were many children in the sweatshop. I remember the constant layer of fabric dust that settled on my hair and arms, and the incredible heat of the factory due to the steamers. We also lived in an apartment without central heating, where we kept the oven door open as our only source of warmth. I really don’t want to talk about the roaches and rats because I’m still terrified of them! 
The unusual part of my story is that we were lucky enough to get out of that life. 
    Do you think New York opened its arms to you? 
    New York taught me how hard you have to work to be the best that you can be. It showed me an incredible world of art, music and culture. It introduced me to friends from many cultures and backgrounds. It gave me a tremendous amount of freedom, to succeed and to fail.  A friend of mine once told me, “Living in New York City is like living on Krypton. Once you learn how to walk in NY, you can fly everywhere else.”  
    Your book acknowledges Kimberly's challenges with understanding English by distorting some words to convey how she hears the language. How difficult was it for you to learn English? 
    I remember wishing more than anything that I could speak English. In my first elementary school in Queens, I was completely lost and no attempt was made to help me whatsoever. Every exercise I did was simply marked with a zero, even though it was impossible for me to do them correctly since I didn’t understand a word of English. After we moved to Brooklyn, my second elementary school was much kinder and the teachers made a real effort to help me integrate. I could learn fairly quickly at that point since I was still so young. However, I’m the youngest of seven children and I saw how much harder it was for my parents and older siblings to learn English. 
    Tell us about attending Hunter College High School. 
    I’d gone to a public elementary school and like Kimberly Chang in my novel, I was tested by several exclusive private schools in sixth grade. I won scholarships to all of them, but I think that it would have been very hard for me to fit in socially at that point in my life. That’s where Kimberly’s story takes place - I imagined what it would have been like if I’d accepted one of those scholarships.  I was thrilled when I got into Hunter, which is a public school for gifted kids. I still felt quite out of place in many ways, because some of my clothes were homemade and there were a number of American customs I didn’t understand then. However, I was in a community of teachers and students who were vitally interested in learning. It was challenging and fun, although I was sometimes very afraid, because I knew that if I slipped and couldn’t keep up with the rest of the class, there would be no one at home who could help me.  From the moment I entered Hunter, I also had the intention of going to Harvard when I left. I wasn’t at all sure that I would be able to achieve my goal, but I understood I had no other choice. If I didn’t get into Harvard or a comparable school with a need-blind admissions policy, it would have been impossible for us to pay any part of the tuition and I wouldn’t have gone to college at all. 
    Even though you loved English and literature, you devoted your high school studies to science, because you didn't think English was practical and you needed to get a full financial aid package, which Harvard gave you. Then you changed your major from Physics to English. What did your parents think? How did you manage? 
    You have to understand that although I did quite well in school, I was a disaster as a Chinese daughter at home. I burned and spilled everything in the kitchen, took apart appliances I wasn’t supposed to, and was (and still am) the worst housekeeper anyone had ever seen. My family didn’t think I was smart, because I was dreamy and impractical. My parents were absolutely stunned when I got into Harvard, especially since it was by early admissions.  They were so relieved by the Harvard thing that they were quite calm about the switch from physics to English. I was already putting myself though Harvard then, working up to four jobs at a time. I started by banging dishes in the freshman cafeteria, then cleaned rooms (which I was also very bad at), read to the blind, and worked in the library. I also wanted to give something back to the Chinese community and taught English as a Second Language to adult immigrants, worked as a Big Sister, and became the director of a summer program for Chinatown kids. I loved that program because we tutored the kids and took them to beaches and museums. It was an alternative to going to the workplace, whether that was a sweatshop or a restaurant, with their parents.  It was only at Harvard that I realized I never would have to go back to the factory. I felt safe enough to do what I really wanted to do, which was to become a writer. 


4/27/10 San Francisco Examiner: "Mayor addresses violence against Asian Americans,"
by Erin Sherbert
    Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday pledged to crack down on the violence against members of the Asian American community, especially elderly who have been the recent targets of violent crimes.
    On Monday, the mayor met with community leaders, the police chief and city supervisors all of whom condemned the recent violence and talked about efforts to reach out to minority communities and educate them about reporting crimes.
    “The issue of tensions that have come to the surface has been not only disturbing but alarming because it heightened concerns, stress and fear that exist in our city,” Newsom said at a press conference Monday. “We have work to do, as a city, to reconcile and move The City closer together.”
Newsom said The City plans to offer a reward to help close the murder case of 83-year-old Huan Chen, who died after he was kicked and punched on a T-Third Street Muni platform in January.



4/26/10 New America Media: "Where Are Chinese-American Elected Officials?"
by Vivian Po
    After being targeted and victimized by African-American teenagers in a series of recent attacks, especially in the wake of the death of Tian Sheng Yu, 59, members of the Bay Area Chinese American community have reacted angrily to the violence.
    Last Tuesday, Yu died from severe injuries after being beaten by two 18-year-old African-American men in Oakland on April 16, Friday. Yu had confronted them for attacking his 27-year-old son earlier.
    “The Chinese community is very angry,” said Cindy Yip, anchor of Sing Tao Chinese Radio, one of the most popular Chinese radio stations in the Bay Area. Yip said that since these attacks, many listeners have called in to her show to voice their concerns and share their experiences of similar attacks or robberies in the streets and public transit in San Francisco and Oakland. “Many of them demanded justice and severe punishments on the attackers,” said Yip.
    However, Chinese elected officials have been virtually silent on the issue.
    Chinese media are criticizing the lack of visibility of elected Chinese officials in the Bay Area in response to these recent attacks on Asians. On April 25, Kai Ping Liu, an editor of World Journal San Francisco, wrote an editorial, “Where Are the Chinese Elected Officials?” Liu wondered why, given a significant number of elected officials of Chinese descent in the Bay Area, none have taken an active role in organizing any events or rallies in the wake of these attacks.
    “Interestingly, these Chinese-American officials,” Liu noted, “who said they would fight for the rights of Chinese Americans during their campaigns, have remained silent or become partially voiceless, as if these acts of violence, which are directly related to the lives of Chinese Americans, are unrelated to one’s rights.” 
    Liu suspected that Chinese-American officials have not been vocal because these violent crimes touched the sensitive topic of race relations. But he also pointed out that law enforcement in San Francisco and Oakland have declared the series of recent attacks on Chinese in San Francisco and Oakland are not hate crimes.
    The Chinese media have also been careful that their coverage not further inflame racial tensions. 
    Recognizing increasing tensions and resentment from community members, which can easily be interpreted as messages to provoke further racial tensions, the Chinese media tried to balance their reports with positive representations of African Americans expressing their support to the victims.
    On April 23, the day after the two suspects were charged with murder, World Journal published a top story “Suspects Who Attacked Yu are in Court” on its front page. 
    Apart from reporting on the details of what happened in court, the article also highlighted the fact that members of the African-American community have shown sympathy for Yu’s family. It mentioned Monique Agnow, an African-American woman who approached Yu’s widow and son in Oakland’s Chinatown after the two left the courthouse. “She said to Yu’s wife, Wang Zhirui, ‘We [African Americans] are not all bad. We are also minority group. We don’t want to see racial confrontations. I am glad you understand that, god bless you.” The photo displayed with the article on the front page showed Agnow’s right hand rested on Yu Jincheng’s left shoulder as she expressed her condolences to the family.
    Similar coverage was evident in Sing Tao Daily Bay Area. On April 24, Sing Tao Daily reported on a Buddhist vigil and fundraising event for the Yu family organized by SEIU last Friday. The article focused on the presence of support from the African-American community. It wrote, “Donors included African American residents. They especially expressed their support and concern to Yu’s wife, who just arrived at the vigil.” The photo of the story also showed two women, one Asian, the other African, joining hands with a “Rest in Peace” sign in the background.
    In fact, earlier reporting written by Sing Tao Daily also indicated the Yu family did not wish to racialize the incident. Wang Zhirui has worked as an In Home Support Services (IHSS) home care provider for an African-American senior before the attack happened. In the article “Yu’s Wife Holding Her Tears Back Symbolizes Strength within Chinese Community,” published on April 22, the reporter noted, “She [Wang] said she has stopped working for the African American senior because of her current health condition. However, she will not allow this incident to change her attitude in serving her previous employer or any future employers regardless of their ethnicity.” 
    Apart from that, Chinese media also helped Chinese community leaders promote the message of resolving the problem without raising racial tensions.
    On the day Yu’s death was announced, World Journal published an article on Oakland Chinatown Community leader Carl Chan, who is also chair of the Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council. “Carl Chan pointed out, although Asians were attacked by African Americans in this incident,” the article noted, “and Asian seniors are always the targeted group, this incident is much more serious than most cases. However, not all African Americans are bad, he did not want to see hatred emerge between the Chinese and African Americans.”
    In fact, Chan has asked the Chinese community to learn from the African-American community and to urge reforms in law enforcement to prevent similar crimes from happening again.
    In a Sing Tao article “Oakland Residents Declare War on Acts of Violence in Rally,” published last Tuesday, Chan was also quoted as saying, “Chinese Americans should learn from African Americans. In the Oscar Grant BART incident, many came out to demonstrate and gained the attention of City Hall and lawmakers to take measures to limit the power of the police. We Chinese Americans have experienced fatal attacks repeatedly, but we lack any form of large-scale protest, we do not cause trouble. As a result, tragic incidents happen again and again.”
    The Chinese media said they would continue to monitor the development of the issue and help to address public concerns about future actions. 
    “The Chinese community will keep on urging public officials and law enforcement officials to honestly address the issue of Asian victimization in these crimes,” said Yip.
    Today, both World Journal and Sing Tao Daily reported on Wang’s appearance at the Sunday services in Allen Temple Baptist Church, the largest African-American church in Oakland. According to the reports, Wang was invited by the church and over 300 church members voiced their condemnation of similar violent crimes. During the service, prayers and donations were also offered to the Yu family, and Wang showed her appreciation to the African-American community. “We all live in America," she said in the World Journal. "We are one family. We are not separated by race or skin color. I hope everyone can treat others as family members, so [this kind of] tragedy will never happen again.”



4/26/10 Philadelphia Inquirer: "Pain for Asian youth didn't end with school assault,"
by Jeff Gammage
    On March 16, ninth grader Lindi Liu was exiting a bathroom stall at South Philadelphia High when another boy kicked the door inward, bashing him in the head.
   As Liu picked himself up off the floor, he could hear the boy laughing.
    The incident lasted only seconds, but for Liu, a 16-year-old immigrant from China, the consequences have been profound.
    His vision frequently turns blurry, to where he can't count fingers held in front of his face. He forgets conversations that occurred moments earlier, and sometimes struggles to identify everyday objects, like the chicken on his dinner plate. He gets sudden nose bleeds.
    District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the school inquiry showed Liu was injured carelessly but unintentionally. The boy was kicking the doors of the stalls in turn, and did not realize Liu was there, he said.
    "It seems it was not intended as an assault or intended to injure anyone," he said.
    However, a student who was in the bathroom at the time contradicted that.
    Dong Chen, 19, said the assailant kicked only one of five doors, the one with a broken lock, behind which stood Liu. Chen said when the door hit Liu's head, "we could hear it, it was so loud. Pow!"
    Liu's parents are frightened for their son's health.
    "I'm so upset," Liu's mother, Hui Qin Chen, said through a translator as she wiped tears from her eyes. "I don't know what to do."
    On Dec. 3, South Philadelphia High generated national headlines when Asian students suffered a daylong series of assaults carried out by groups of mostly African American classmates. About 50 students staged a weeklong boycott.
    School district administrators suspended 19 students, installed more security cameras, and added school police. The district report on the violence, issued Feb. 23, noted that following that response, "there has been no repeat of the Dec. 3 activities."
    But Liu's case illustrates that violence continues against Asian students.
    "Very little has changed in how the school handles immigrant students' concerns, and how they handle incidents of anti-Asian violence and harassment," said Cecilia Chen, a lawyer with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which filed a federal complaint against the district.
    The district inquiry blamed the Dec. 3 violence on rumors that followed an altercation between Asian and African American students the previous day. But Asians say that they have been abused for years - and that administrators ignored their complaints.
    Community advocates say they know of at least seven post-Dec. 3 incidents against Asians, including three assaults.
    School district records differ: Since Dec. 3, only one serious incident that occurred in or around the school involved an Asian victim - Liu.
    Blurred vision
    The Inquirer reviewed school reports, medical records, and a police letter that outlined Liu's case. Since being injured, Liu said, he has struggled to perform simple mental tasks, like counting the money in his wallet.
    "My eyes are having problems," he said. "They get very unclear."
    "He'll say, 'Mom, I can't see right now,' " his mother said. "He forgets things. . . . When I ask him to do something, he'll walk over there and ask me, 'What did you want me to do?' "
    Liu was examined at Chinatown Medical Services on March 25, where the doctor wrote he had blurred vision and should be seen at a hospital. The next day, Liu underwent a CT scan of the head. A week later, a sudden loss of vision sent him to the emergency room for a second CT scan. More tests are pending.
    Liu worries that his condition is permanent - and that he could be hurt even worse at school. "I have this great fear that someone will attack me again," he said.
    Philadelphia police identified Liu's assailant, a 16-year-old student. They advised Liu's parents to pursue a complaint process aimed at mediation, common in simple-assault cases.
    No guidebook
    Liu and his older brother arrived at South Philadelphia High around Dec. 7. Liu said he received no orientation or guidebook, and no adult mentioned the violence of the previous week.
    The absence of a translated guide to explain school-safety procedures to new students was among the complaints filed with the Justice Department on Jan. 19.
    Asians make up 18 percent of the students at the school, which is 70 percent African American, 6 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent white.
    Liu's father had left Fuzhou, China, for the United States, to work and save money so his wife and sons could follow. The family spent about 13 years apart, typical among Chinese immigrant students. Today the parents run a small Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia.
    The witness, ninth grader Dong Chen, said that on March 16, he, Liu, and a third Chinese friend went to the five-stall bathroom. The youths took the middle three stalls, with Liu in the center, he said.
    Two African American students entered. There was no kick to the first door, which was unlocked, Chen said, and no kick to the third door, his stall, which was locked.
    "They only kicked the middle door," he said.
    When he heard the crash, Chen said, he rushed out and saw the youths, who "burst out laughing," he said.
    Chen said one boy laughingly shook his leg as if to indicate, "That really hurt."
    Liu said that when he fell, he injured his foot and elbow. He left the bathroom, borrowed a cell phone, and dialed his mother, who recalled him saying, "Mom, I'm attacked." She asked if he had hit anyone. "No," Liu responded. "I was in the bathroom, and they kicked the door at me, and I hit my head and now I'm bleeding."
    Chen said she and her husband hurried to the school, but were turned away by a security officer. No one fetched a translator.
    Liu, unsure what to do, returned to class. When he got home he had a headache, and that night he suffered one of what have become recurring nosebleeds.
    The next day, after a call from a bilingual counselor, Liu's mother went to the school about 1:30, but was again refused admittance, she said.
    Inside the building, Liu reported the incident to school authorities. The school police contacted the Philadelphia police.
    That day or the next - the timing is disputed - the parents received a second call from the school, this time from a staffer who spoke only English, the family said. Liu's parents had a coworker translate. They understood they were being asked to return to the school again, to meet with administrators.
    That's when Liu's brother contacted Xu Lin, an organizer with the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. Lin agreed to go to the school with the family the next day.
    Gallard, the spokesman, said the district reviewed videotapes of people who entered the front door of the school on the days in question, and Liu's mother did not appear on them. The school also interviewed security staff and found no evidence a visitor was kept out, he said.
    The tapes capture the interior of the main entrance, he said. The district did not review video of other exterior doors. The mother could have attempted to enter through a different door, he said.
    "We cannot explain how Liu's mom would be turned away," Gallard said. "We found that complaint to be worrisome. We just do not turn parents away. . . . We want to know if the parent can tell us exactly who they spoke to."
    On March 19, Liu, his mother, and Lin met with administrators. They said they were told Liu's assailant would be suspended and transferred to another school.
    Gallard said the family may have misunderstood. At that time, the inquiry was ongoing, and no administrator could have known the result. The school had begun disciplinary proceedings against the student, which terminated when he transferred out of the district on March 22, Gallard said.
    On March 26, city Police Detective Danielle Tolliver wrote to Liu's parents, advising them that if they wished to proceed, they should file a private criminal complaint. Her letter identified the "offender," whose name is being withheld by The Inquirer because of his age.
    In Philadelphia, cases of simple assault - involving no obvious, serious injury - typically are referred for private complaints, law enforcement officials said.
    Tolliver's letter advised the parents to contact Philadelphia Family Court. If that office accepted their complaint, it would schedule a mediation hearing. If mediation failed, the letter said, the case might be referred to the District Attorney's Office, which would decide whether to proceed with a prosecution.
    The detective's letter was written in English, which Liu's family could not understand. Once the letter was translated, Liu's mother was disappointed, not seeing how mediation could be useful.
    Police say the complaint process can help victims. In some cases, offering records that show internal injuries can result in more-serious charges being lodged.
    "I would advise anybody that's a victim of criminal simple assault to follow up, in this case with the juvenile process, with a private criminal complaint," said Capt. Larry Nodiff, commander of South Detective Division.
    Liu's mother said her priority is her son's health. An advocate agency, Victim/Witness Services of South Philadelphia, is helping the family file papers with the crime-victims compensation fund to pay medical bills.
    "As parents we're very, very concerned Lindi is about to lose his vision," Chen said, wiping her eyes. "The doctor says there's no damage outside, but there's probably damage inside. . . . I just want my son to be well."

4/26/10 San Francisco Examiner: "Recent attacks prompt calls to relieve tensions,"
by: Erin Sherbert
    Violent act: In March, a 57-year-old Asian woman was thrown from a Muni platform by several youths. (www.youtube.com)  
    In light of recent attacks against elderly Asians, community leaders are calling on politicians to respond to the concerns about violence and race.
    Today, Mayor Gavin Newsom is convening with leaders from the Asian-American and black communities to begin discussions about how to end the violence and smooth over relationships among minority communities. On Tuesday afternoon, members of the Asian-American community are planning to meet on the steps of City Hall to draw attention to increasing violence against members of their community.
    “We don’t need to point fingers, but we need to acknowledge that there is racial tension and we need to deal with it,” said Vincent Pan, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action.
    The growing tension is tied to a series of attacks against Asians in the past three months, including a Jan. 24 incident in which an 83-year-old man was kicked and punched on a T-Third Street Muni platform. The man, Huan Chen, died two months later.
    On March 22, a teenager threw a 57-year-old Asian woman off a 3-foot-high T-line platform and onto the street while several youths watched. Other people who were at the stop eventually helped the woman get out of the street. Five days later, a 39-year-old man told police he was attacked by five young men between the ages of 14 and 16 inside a Muni vehicle along Third Street.
    Two weeks ago, a San Francisco man, who was Asian, died after being beaten up in Oakland by two black teens he had confronted because they allegedly hit his son. Lavonte Drummer and Dominic Davis, both 18 and Oakland residents, were charged with murder.
    San Francisco Supervisor David Chiu, who has been working with community members in the past few weeks on the racial-tension issue, is calling on The City and community to offer a reward to solve the murder case involving Chen.
    “I am disturbed about the trend,” Newsom said of the recent attacks. “That’s important to me, and we are taking it very, very seriously.”
    Joe Marshall, executive director of the Omega Boys Club in the Bayview, said it’s time for the community and police to hold the perpetrators accountable.
    “In the end, the real peace is getting to the people who are doing it,” Marshall said. “That’s the only way to make people feel better.”



4/24/10  New America Media: "NAACP Hopes to Diffuse Tension Between Asians and Blacks in San Francisco,"
by Odette Keeley
    Editor’s Note: On Friday, Rev. Amos Brown, president of NAACP's San Francisco chapter, gathered members of the city's Asian and African-American community, church and business leaders to come up with a course of action to end the recent string of violent acts in the city involving the two communities. "New America Now’s" Odette Keeley talked to some of the leaders present at that meeting. 
    San Francisco -- Rev. Amos Brown and leaders of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convened a group of community, church and civil rights leaders from San Francisco’s Asian Pacific Islander and African-American communities to discuss and create a response to the recent string of violent incidents in the Bay Area involving members of the two communities. 
    Among those who attended the April 23 meeting at the 3rd Baptist Church were members of the city’s Human Rights Commission, leaders from Chinese for Affirmative Action, African-American Chamber of Commerce, and National Federation of Filipino-American Associations. New America Media interviewed the participants for a few minutes, before they went behind closed doors to speak away from the media. 
    Rev. Amos Brown told the group that the NAACP denounces these violent acts, saying “when young African Americans prey on vulnerable Asians, that’s a no – no”. He stressed the historic advocacy role of the NAACP in the outrage over these incidents saying, “when marginalized people like blacks, gays or Asians are wronged, somebody has to speak up on their behalf.” Brown says he called for this “no-nonsense, non-political meeting so that we can deal with the crisis to make sure it’s not just an issue of transition in our city, which means people move in and out, but instead it becomes an opportunity for transformation for all our peoples.”
    In January, 83-year old Huan Chen was kicked and beaten as he left the Muni stop at Third and Oakdale in Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco. He died about three months later. 
    Then in March, five teenagers surrounded a 57-year old woman at the same Muni stop. Surveillance camera video from the second incident shows one of her assailants grabbing the victim by the neck and throwing her from the platform. A few days later, a group of teenagers assaulted a Muni rider on Third and Williams streets. 
    Police say the alleged assailants in these cases in Bayview-Hunters Point were all African Americans while their victims were all Asians. 
But they also told news reporters that they don’t believe these attacks were racially motivated. 
    In Oakland, two 18-year-old African-American men were charged with murder last Thursday in the fatal beating of a 59-year-old Chinese-American who had come to the aid of his son. After the attack on April 16, both father and son were hospitalized and the father died on April 20. 
    Human Rights Commissioner Linda Richardson told New America Media that the commission held a hearing Thursday in Chinatown and that their executive director also had private meetings with Asian-American leaders with regard to the recent violent acts.
    “The commission will concentrate on education about this issue, and in bringing the Asian and African-American communities together to begin a healing process,” Robinson said.
    African-American leaders are already working on “our own [black-on-black] violence, but they also don’t want these recent incidents to lead to a general castigation of the entire African-American community as perpetrators of these racial crimes,” she said. “It is only a minority of the population responsible for these acts, and that is unacceptable.” 
    Jose Pecho, regional chair of the National Federation of Filipino-American Associations (NaFFAA) is one of those Asian community leaders who want to work with the Human Rights Commission and the NAACP to make a plan of action to end the violence. He also said he wants his fellow Filipinos to be more vigilant about their environment and take extra steps to protect themselves and their family members against any potential trouble. Pecho’s family had lived in Bayview-Hunters Point in the 1960’s, and he said growing up, “racism was prevalent even then.” 
    Now, Pecho said, what’s important is, “we are more aware of our surroundings and trust our gut feeling to get ourselves out of dangerous places.” 
    Out in the streets of Bayview-Hunters Point, near the Muni stop where Huan Chen was attacked, long-time resident Bernard Robinson says the community “needs jobs for young students...That’s why there’s so much violence and robbery here because they have nothing to do. Parents also don’t look out enough for their kids and guide them.”
    Robinson, 62, said he’s witnessed violent acts by African-American men on Asians, and he’s also seen black-on-black violence in his neighborhood. Robinson appealed to his neighbors to “live and work together to end the violence.” 
    The NAACP is expected to hold a press conference on Monday to release an official press statement condemning these violent acts, with support from the various groups present at Friday's meeting.
    Rudy Asercion, executive director of Westbay Pilipino Multi-Service Center, said the NAACP is primarily concerned with diffusing the tension between Asians and African Americans in the city so that there would not be any retaliation from Asian Americans and further violence from either group. Asercion supports the NAACP’s move and the belief of the convening group “that it will take a sustained and cooperative effort among all communities to stop the violence.”
    Odette Keeley is host and executive producer of "New America Now, NAM's TV program airing on COMCAST HOMETOWN NETWORK - CHN 104 & COMCAST ON DEMAND. She also hosts "Headlines from New America Media" on "New America Now", NAM's radio show airing on 91.7 FM KALW. Min Lee is a content producer for YO! Youth Outlook.



4/23/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Oakland Street Killing: Shocking,"
by William Wong
    I attended a vigil for Tian Sheng Yu in uptown Oakland (California) on Friday (April 23). I didn't know him, yet I was among about 100 people who gathered on a gorgeous spring afternoon at 18th Street and Telegraph Avenue, a few steps away from the grand entrance of beautifully restored Fox Oakland Theater, a former movie house where I used to pay a quarter to see double-features (in the late 1940s and early 1950s!).
    This was where Mr. Yu was beaten and later died in what has been described as a random attack by two 18-year-old men (boys?) exactly a week prior to the vigil.
    The beating and subsequent death of Mr. Yu, who was 59 years old, have shocked Oaklanders, especially those of Chinese and Asian descent, but from the looks of those attending the vigil, people of all ethnic backgrounds and ages were emotionally affected by this senseless street violence.
    Mr. Yu wasn't even an Oaklander. He was a home-care worker in San Francisco, a fairly recent immigrant from China.
    He and his 27-year-old son were in uptown Oakland to shop for coins.
    Then, suddenly, violence struck when the two teenagers, who happened to be African American, first slugged the son, then later the father, Mr. Yu, who fell hard to the pavement, hitting his head. That was a fatal blow.
    It was also another blow to Oakland's reputation. This city of about 400,000 residents, just across the bay from world famous San Francisco, has suffered for decades from both an inferiority complex and a negative regional and national image. Crime. Poverty. Bad schools. No there there.
    What's ironic about the scene of Mr. Yu's beating is that uptown Oakland, after so many years bereft of life, has been gaining favor with the urban hip -- restoration of the Fox Oakland, trendy restaurants, a lively art-gallery scene, new condominium developments.
    Whether this killing, which happened in broad daylight, plunges this part of Oakland back down in the dumps is hard to know.
    The killing also could potentially set back Oakland's chronic struggle with copacetic race relations.
    Until World War II, Oakland was mostly a white city with a no-nonsense, blue-collar, can-do attitude. Its Asian, African American, and Mexican populations were relatively small. The war years brought in large numbers of African Americans to work the shipyards.
    After the war, many white middle class families started moving to the burgeoning suburbs, aided by new freeways that sliced through Oakland.
    Gradually, Oakland's industrial base eroded, and its once robust economy began to weaken.
    Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing for the next several decades, the Chinese and other Asian population ballooned. So did its Latino population. The city became much blacker, browner, yellower.
    It still is with a population that is about two-thirds non-white. I wonder whether there's a direct correlation between that fact and my native city's bad rep.
    How people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds get along is a hugely complex matter that continues to befuddle Americans and recent immigrants, the election of Barack Obama as president notwithstanding.
    In Oakland, we see the gamut -- from loving, genuine, sincere cross-racial and cross-cultural interactions to irrational, emotional, ignorant, stupid and bigoted behavior.
    So was this attack by two black teenagers, reportedly intoxicated and raring for some action, on a Chinese immigrant father and son racially motivated?
    While that conclusion has been reached privately by some Oaklanders of Chinese descent, the reason the two youth beat up the son first, then the father, hasn't yet been revealed publicly, if it ever will be.
    It is so tempting for anyone to say, yeah, those black guys beat up the Yu father and son, killing the father, because they were Asian, but so far, there's no proof or evidence that that was the case.
    I know it's not a politically popular perspective, but I do wonder why those two teenagers behaved so badly and violently. Eighteen years is not a lot of years on Earth, but apparently they are enough to have poisoned those two young men in some way to take out their rage on innocent bystanders like Mr. Yu and his son.
    Chinese immigrants, Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans have been especially shaken by the beatings and killing. They gathered by the hundreds at two news conferences held at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in Chinatown in the days following the killing.
    I doubt if many Oakland Chinese knew the Yu family. Nonetheless, Mr. Yu's shocking death touched a deep chord with many of them, especially the immigrant elderly, because their personal safety on the streets near Chinatown and downtown -- and now uptown -- Oakland is a major worry.
    At the vigil, where Bo Hing, an Oakland Buddhist monk, chanted a lengthy prayer (Mr. Yu was a Buddhist), some African American men and women were in the crowd, along with a typical Oakland multicultural mix, in tribute to Mr. Yu's memory and his family's grief.
    David Bonner, SEIU member, remembers Tian Sheng Yu.  David Bonner, an African American and a member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), spoke to the crowd. He said he was a mentor to Mr. and Mrs. Yu, both home-care workers and SEIU members in San Francisco. Chinese and black members of United Healthcare Workers, an SEIU affliate, stood in silence during the one-hour vigil, and they have helped raise thousands of dollars to support Mr. Yu's survivors.
    I asked Mr. Bonner whether he thought the attack was racially motivated. "It was not a racial thing. It was so sad," he said.

4/23/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Rum, anger fueled slaying suspects, D.A. says," 
by Henry K. Lee
    Oakland -- Two young men were drinking rum on a downtown Oakland street, angry at life and looking for someone to punch, before they happened on a San Francisco man who had come to town with his father to shop, prosecutors said Thursday.
    Lavonte Drummer and Dominic Davis, both 18 and Oakland residents, were charged with murder in connection with what authorities called a random, unprovoked attack on the son on April 16 and the subsequent fatal beating of his father, Tian Sheng Yu, 59, of San Francisco.
    Although there has been speculation that the attack was motivated in part by race - Drummer and Davis are African American, and the elder Yu was a Chinese immigrant - Chief Deputy District Attorney Tom Rogers said the suspects could have sucker-punched anyone who crossed their path on Telegraph Avenue near the Fox Theater. He said there was no evidence the attack was a hate crime.
    Rogers painted a picture of the defendants as thugs with juvenile arrest records who were killing time on a Friday afternoon by sharing a bottle of Bacardi rum and grousing about their lives.
    Drummer in particular, he said, was "frustrated by personal circumstances."
    "Drummer stated that he had anger and frustration over his life and planned on hitting someone," police wrote in a statement that outlined grounds for the arrests.
    Shopping for coins
    It was random bad luck, Rogers said, that brought Yu and his son, Jin Cheng Yu, 27, into contact with the two as they were on their way to shop for coins at a jewelry store.
    The son was the first victim, being sucker-punched by Drummer as the elder Yu was parking his car, Rogers said. Tian Sheng Yu approached the two men and, in Mandarin, demanded an explanation.
    He "gestured to both suspects with his finger, but did not touch either suspect," the police statement said.
    Video of the attack shows Drummer punching the elder Yu with his right hand, Rogers said. Davis then hit him with a left hook, authorities said.
    Tian Sheng Yu "appeared dazed for just an instant, and fell straight backward and hit his head" on the concrete, Rogers said.
    Son steps in
    Jin Cheng Yu moved in and was punched by both attackers. The younger Yu returned punches, and both he and Drummer fell to the sidewalk, authorities said.
    Witnesses then chased the attackers away.
    Tian Sheng Yu never regained consciousness and died Tuesday of a skull fracture and a brain injury.
    A subsequent outpouring of tips, including some from people who knew the suspects and recognized them from a video released by police, led to the men's arrests, investigators said.
    Drummer and Davis appeared before Judge Robert McGuiness of Alameda County Superior Court but did not enter a plea. They are being held without bail.
    Among those attending Thursday's hearing were Police Chief Anthony Batts, Jin Cheng Yu and his mother, Zhi Rui Wang, 56.
    Oakland Chinatown organizer Carl Chan, speaking on the family's behalf, said they were saddened by their loss and that their "hearts go out to the families of the two young men."
    "True justice is no more violence," Chan said.
    In deciding against filing hate crime charges, prosecutors noted that the men's criminal histories did not appear to include racial overtones.
    Drummer has a felony assault conviction as a juvenile for punching a 55-year-old African American man from behind at an Oakland convenience store in September 2009. The victim hit his head on the pavement, lost consciousness and had to have seven stitches, Rogers said.
    Both Davis and Drummer were arrested in April 2007 for allegedly trying to rob a 31-year-old white man in Berkeley. They were released to their parents because charges were never filed.
    Donations to victim's family
    Donations to the Yu family can be made to the Yu Family Foundation, c/o Metropolitan Bank, 250 East 18th St., Oakland, CA 94606.

4/22/10 press release: Judge Denny Chin Becomes First Asian Pacific American
Federal Appellate Court Judge Nominated and Confirmed Outside of the Ninth Circuit
    Washington - Today, the Senate confirmed by a 98-0 vote Judge Denny Chin to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, making him the only active Asian Pacific American federal appellate court judge, out of approximately 175 such judges. Judge Chin is the first Asian Pacific American federal appellate court judge to be nominated and confirmed outside of the Ninth Circuit, and only the fifth overall in U.S. history. It has been over five years since an Asian Pacific American has served anywhere in the country as an active federal appellate court judge. Judge Chin is the first Asian Pacific American to have been nominated to serve on a federal appellate court in 14 years. 
    "This is a landmark day for us because Judge Chin is a leader and role model for us in NAPABA," said Joseph J. Centeno, president of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. "He is an extraordinary judge and a true trailblazer in our community."
    Judge Chin was nominated by President Obama on October 6, 2009, and he was unanimously voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 10, 2009. Judge Chin has been a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York since 1994, and was the longest serving Asian Pacific American federal district court judge to date. Judge Chin's nomination had strong bipartisan support, including from individuals such as former Mayor and U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, former U.S. Attorney General and Judge Michael Mukasey, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Comey, and former Judge and U.S. Attorney John S. Martin, Jr.
    "Born to a working class Chinese American family, Judge Chin has lived the American dream and is a great example to all Americans," said Karen K. Narasaki, president and executive director of the Asian American Justice Center. "We are extraordinarily proud of his achievement of this important legal milestone."
    Centeno and Narasaki thank President Obama for nominating Judge Chin and Sen. Schumer for recommending him.
    The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) is the national association of Asian Pacific American attorneys, judges, law professors and law students. NAPABA represents the interests of over 40,000 attorneys and 63 local Asian Pacific American bar associations. Its members represent solo practitioners, large firm lawyers, corporate counsel, legal service and non-profit attorneys, and lawyers serving at all levels of government. NAPABA continues to be a leader in addressing civil rights issues confronting Asian Pacific American communities. Through its national network of committees and affiliates, NAPABA provides a strong voice for increased diversity of federal and state judiciaries, advocates for equal opportunity in the workplace, works to eliminate hate crimes and anti-immigrant sentiment, and promotes professional development of minorities in the legal profession.
    The Asian American Justice Center is a national organization dedicated to defending and advancing the civil and human rights of Asian Americans. It works closely with three affiliates - the Asian American Institute in Chicago, the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles - and nearly 100 community partners in 47 cities, 25 states and the District of Columbia.



4/21/10 The Korea Times: "Asian American education achievements outstrip other racial groups,"
http://www.indypressny.org/nycma/voices/421/briefs/briefs_5/
By Jung-eun Lee, translated from Korean by Sun-Yong Reinish.
    On April 20, the U.S. Census released its analysis of data collected from the 2009 Current Population Survey. Between February 2009 and April 2009, 100,000 families were surveyed nationwide and asked for information, according to demographic and socioeconomic indicators, about age, sex, race, household relationships, marital status, and education level. The survey indicated, among other things, that 53 percent of Asians over 25-year-old hold a bachelor's degree, topping non-Hispanic whites, (33 percent), Blacks (19 percent), and Hispanics (13 percent).
    Within the 25- to 29-year-old age group, Asians have a high rate of education for both sexes. Indeed no noticeable statistical difference was found between men and women holding masters degrees (in law, or medicine), or doctoral degrees. Among whites, Blacks, and Hispanics in the same age group, women hold a three percent edge over men for such degrees (9 percent to 6 percent).
    There is a wider discrepancy between Asian women and men with bachelor degrees or higher – women surpass men by 8 percentage points (35 to 27 percent). This gap has increased over time; in 1999, it was only 3 percent, with women ahead of men (30 percent to 27 percent).
    The survey also found a high correlation between educational level and income.
In 2008, the average annual income for those with an advanced degree was $83,144, compared to an average annual income of $58,613 for those with a bachelor's degree. In the same year, the annual average income for high school degree diploma holders was $31,283.
    Marital status for 25-year-olds and above also had impact on the statistics for advanced degree holders: 66 percent of women and 76 percent of men with advanced degrees were married with a partner present. Of these, 65 percent of the women had bachelor's degrees compared to 71 percent for the men.
    These statistics clearly show a rise in the rate of college graduates among Asians in the past decade. In 1999, the number of those holding bachelor's degrees was 43,800,000. By 2009, this number had increased by 34 percent, reaching 58,600,000. The rate of high school diploma holders among those over 25 was 87 percent in 2009 of whom 30 percent hold at least a bachelor's degree.



4/21/10 New American Media: "Inside Black-Asian Violence -- It’s Not About Race,"
Commentary, Amanze Emenike
Editor's Note: Recent attacks on Asian Americans by Black teenagers in San Francisco have led some to speculate that ethnic tensions in the city are on the rise. But one young black man who was taught by his peers to rob Asians and Latinos in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood says it's not really about race. Amanze Emenike, 22, is a content producer for YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia.
    It’s gotten crazy in Hunters Point once again. A 57-year-old woman was attacked last month on a Muni T-line platform by a group of boys between the ages of 14 and 16. In January, an 83-year-old Chinese man was attacked on the same Third Street corridor. He died two months later in what is being investigated as a homicide.
    In certain hoods, crime is almost a routine part of life. Crime is like death; it’s inevitable. 
    When I was introduced to the crime scene, I was put on to rob Asians and Latinos on Third Street. We specifically preyed on Asians and Mexicans, and wouldn’t do anything to African Americans. 
    If young people try to rob an old black person in Hunters Point, they usually don’t know who they are messing with and they can fall into beef with the victim’s family or community. Robbing African Americans, it’s more likely that the family will come back and harm the robber. So young people go after Chinese and Mexicans. 
    This stems from us being too comfortable in our neighborhood and thinking that because we are at home, we can’t get caught. It also has something to do with not having what others have and holding some type of deep grudge against them for it. Different people get involved in crime for different reasons. A young boy may have an alright life where he needs for nothing but still just wants to do it because he wants more stuff, or just thinks it’s cool. This is the reason I did what I did. 
    Others just don't have it and never did, from nice clothes to electronics and just an alright life. The ones who are from the broken homes where they had no chance from the womb are the ones who do it for everyday necessities. Like money to survive and all. 
    Five years ago, I was convicted of robbing a Chinese student in Hunters Point. I was charged with a hate crime. I was a little embarrassed because I had Chinese friends I was locked up with and they made it look like I was after Chinese people. I was glad when the charge was dropped because a hate crime shines a whole different light on you. 
    The reason Asian kids are getting robbed is because there is an assumption that young Chinese kids on Third Street are filthy rich and have an i-Pod or laptop on them. To a young, broke black male, the appeal of nabbing a few hundred dollars from some Asian kid’s pocket is even greater during this recession. The young homies in Hunters Point need money for shoes and clothes. 
    There are a lot of Chinese neighbors who are a big part of the community in Hunters Point. They are accepted as Hunters Point residents and treated just fine. A couple of the Chinese food restaurants are just as black as us. Not all Chinese people are targeted, and not all Latinos are targeted. 



4/20/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "S.F. man beaten in Oakland dies; suspects held,"
by Henry K. Lee
    Oakland -- A San Francisco man who was beaten on an Oakland street died today, a day after two 18-year-old men were arrested on suspicion of attacking him, police said.
    Tian Sheng Yu, 59, had been in Oakland's Highland Hospital since he was attacked Friday afternoon in the Uptown neighborhood after asking the assailants why they had punched his son.
    Doctors at the hospital took Yu off of life-support this morning, said Carl Chan, an Oakland Chinatown organizer who has been working with Yu's family.
    "Mr. Yu is no longer with us. It truly is a tragic loss," Chan told several hundred people who gathered at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center for a rally originally scheduled to support Yu.
    When Chan contacted Yu's hospital room today, he said, "all I could hear was crying voices."
    Police confirmed that Yu died at 11:27 a.m.
    Alameda County prosecutors are expected to consider filing murder charges against the two men arrested Monday in connection with the attack.
    Lavonte Drummer and Dominic Davis, both of Oakland, were originally booked on suspicion of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury and battery causing great bodily injury.

    Drummer turned himself in about 5 p.m. Monday at Oakland police headquarters after a member of the clergy contacted investigators about his surrender, said Lt. Brian Medeiros of the homicide detail.
    Davis was arrested by Oakland police as he rode a bike near Carleton and Sacramento streets in Berkeley at about 7:50 p.m. Monday. Davis, who turned 18 on Saturday, the day after the attack, didn't give up immediately but cooperated once he was stopped, police said.
    "He knew he was on video, that he was on the news," Medeiros said.
    Medeiros would not disclose a motive for the attack but noted that both men have previous arrests as juveniles for robbery. Drummer lives on Castro Street, just four blocks from the attack, public records show.
    Both were identified with the help of tipsters, many of whom were outraged by the attack on the 1800 block of Telegraph Avenue, a relatively safe area increasingly known for its restaurants and nightclubs, authorities said.
    Video that police released over the weekend shows two young men walking on the street near the time of the attack; investigators described them as the suspects. Police said today that they have another video that shows the actual assault of Yu.
    "We had numerous people who called and gave us information that led us to the capture of these suspects, and I'd like to applaud this community," Police Chief Anthony Batts said at a news conference.
    Drummer is being held in lieu of $80,000 bail; Davis' bail is $530,000. They could be arraigned as early as Thursday.
    "There is no room in a civilized society for this kind of maddening, violent assault upon human beings," said Mayor Ron Dellums, who joined police officials at the news conference. "It should be beyond us as people."
    Yu and his son, 27-year-old Jin Cheng Yu, were beaten about 3 p.m. Friday as they headed to a coin and jewelry shop on Telegraph Avenue. The younger Yu told The Chronicle that a pair of young men had approached him on the sidewalk and punched him in the eye for no reason as his father parked his car. He said he had then told his father about the attack.
    The two men found the assailants, and the elder Yu, in Chinese, asked them why they had attacked his son. The assailants hit the older man in the face and he fell to the sidewalk, apparently injuring his head, his son said.
    Yu, who emigrated from China with his family in 1998, ran a painting and remodeling business. His son studied biochemistry at UC Davis.



4/20/10 http://abclocal.go.com/kgo: "59-year-old Oakland assault victim dies,"
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=7396508



    by Terry McSweeney and Cecilia Vega
    Oakland, CA (KGO) -- ABC7 has learned from a family friend, that the 59-year-old San Francisco man beaten during a brutal attack in Oakland Friday afternoon was taken off life support earlier today and has died.
    Two suspects have been arrested in the beating. They are accused of assaulting 27-year-old Jin Cheng Yu and sending his father, 59-year-old Tiansheng Yu, to intensive care.
    Both Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts thanked the public Tuesday for their help brining the case to what is, in their opinion, resolution.
    The two suspects, 18-year-old Lavonte Drummer and 18-year-old Dominic Davis, were both shown on surveillance video previously released by the Oakland Police Department. Drummer turned himself in to police around 5:00 Monday evening. Davis was caught in Berkeley Monday night by a gang task force.
    The assault occured around 3 p.m. Friday in front of the Fox Theater in the 1800 block of Telegraph Avenue in Oakland's Uptown neighborhood. Tiansheng and his son were shopping when Jin was attacked. Tiansheng stood up for his son and in turn was beaten and sustained a serious head injury.
    "One lived very close to where the crime occurred," Lt. Brian Mediros told reporters Tuesday morning, referring to the suspects. "I cannot get into exact details of the interview because it hasn't even been presented to the DA's office yet, but both have made admissions to the crime."
    "What brings us to this moment is extraordinary cooperation on behalf of a number of residents in this community who stepped up, who worked diligently with the Oakland Police Department, to bring us to this moment," Mayor Dellums said.
    The mayor and police chief both expressed their deepest regrets to the Yu family. The attack occurred in broad daylight in what is known to be a safe part of Oakland.
    Police say both suspects in the case have police records from when they were juveniles. The headline on their rap sheets is robbery.


4/20/10 huffingtonpost.com: "Why Harold Koh Should Be the Next Supreme Court Justice,"
by Frank Chi
    Republicans need a political victory. They couldn't stop President Obama's recovery package, they couldn't kill the health care bill, and too many are wandering close to agreement on financial reform. But the almighty Supreme Court has been the conservative goal for decades -- and the next justice is their next chance for a big win before the midterms. Any Democrat who's willing to believe that Republicans might make this confirmation smooth if Obama nominates a moderate "non-activist" should think twice.
    This nomination to replace Justice Stevens -- a staunch liberal on the court for 35 years -- can be more important than health care, the recovery bill and financial reform combined. That's why President Obama shouldn't just nominate someone who Republicans deem acceptable -- he should nominate someone that progressives would be proud to fight for.
    That's why we need Harold Koh.
    The son of first-generation immigrants from South Korea, Koh would be the first Asian-American nominated to the Supreme Court -- and his credentials speak for themselves. The former dean of Yale Law School and a renowned expert in international law, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor under President Clinton and is currently Legal Adviser to the State Department. In an increasingly global era where knowledge of international law will be crucial on the Court, Koh is the strongest candidate from this field and would also be the first Justice to hold such expertise. Beyond his roles at the State Department, Koh also worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department under President Reagan.
    Many have ruled out Koh of consideration because of his testy Senate confirmation last year to the State Department -- but that's exactly why he's most suited for this upcoming fight. Despite complaints from those on the far right who saw Koh's potential and sought to curb his aspirations, Koh's nomination was brought to a full vote and passed 62-35. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) went on the record saying, "after reading his answers to dozens of questions, attending his hearing in its entirety, meeting with him privately, and reviewing his writings, I believe that Dean Koh is unquestionably qualified." Conservative Supreme Court watchdogs knew then that such a confirmation then would make it difficult for those yea votes to flip to nays should Koh appear as a nominee for the Court. Given that Republicans will plan to obstruct any White House nominee, no matter how moderate, the Obama administration should force a vote on a strong candidate who crossed the 60-vote threshold just a year ago.
    Having just emerged from the stifling days of the health care debate, it would be understandable for the administration to seek a smoother ride on this confirmation process. But it won't happen -- especially for Justice Stevens's seat. The GOP needs a win too badly. The Court is its one trump card on a host of issues, an institution that conservatives have strategized for and invested in for too long. The question isn't whether a nominee will sail through confirmation -- it's how willing the left will be to fight for that nominee. For Democrats to successfully nominate anyone to the Court, the nominee must be someone who can arouse equal passion and effort from the left -- someone with a compelling narrative, an impeccable record, and a clear vision for the Court.
    As GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley said, nominating "Harold Koh would be equivalent to putting Louis Brandeis back on the court."
    Now that's a nominee worth fighting for.
    Frank Chi is a strategist specializing in political communications, online video and brand identity. He is a partner at the firm Chi/Donahoe + Cole/Duffey, based out of Washington, DC.  All opinions expressed here are his own.


4/19/10 http://abclocal.go.com: "Two suspects arrested in vicious Oakland assault,"
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=7396129
by Terry McSweeney
    Oakland, CA (KGO) -- Two suspects have been arrested in the beating of a 59-year-old San Francisco man who was assaulted while shopping with his son in Oakland.
    They are accused of assaulting 27-year-old Jin Cheng Yu and sending his father, 59-year-old Tiansheng Yu, to intensive care.
    Both Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts thanked the public Tuesday for their help brining the case to what is, in their opinion, resolution.
    The two suspects, 18-year-old Lavonte Drummer and 18-year-old Dominic Davis, were both shown on surveillance video previously released by the Oakland Police Department. Drummer turned himself in to police around 5:00 Monday evening. Davis was caught in Berkeley Monday night by a gang task force.
    The beating occurred around 3 p.m. Friday in front of the Fox Theater in the 1800 block of Telegraph Avenue in Oakland's Uptown neighborhood. Tiansheng and his son were shopping when Jin was attacked. Tiansheng stood up for his son and in turn was beaten and sustained a serious head injury.
    He was transported to Highland Hospital where he has remained on life support. A family spokesman says that barring a miracle, Yu may have to be taken off life support.
    "One lived very close to where the crime occurred. Lived off of Castro," Lt. Brian Mediros told reporters Tuesday morning. "I cannot get into exact details of the interview because it hasn't even been presented to the DA's office yet, but both have made admissions to the crime."
    "What brings us to this moment is extraordinary cooperation on behalf of a number of residents in this community who stepped up, who worked diligently with the Oakland Police Department, to bring us to this moment," Mayor Dellums said.
    The mayor and police chief both expressed their deepest regrets to the Yu family. The attack occurred in broad daylight in what is known to be a safe part of Oakland.
    Police say both suspects in the case have police records from when they were juveniles. The headline on their rap sheets is robbery. 

4/19/10 Wall Street Journal editorial: "Berkeley's Judge: A liberal nominee of illiberal temperament,"
    For a preview of the pitfalls facing President Obama if he nominates a liberal to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, yesterday's hearing for Goodwin Liu is instructive. As a nominee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the 39-year-old Berkeley law school professor is a prototype for those who believe the Constitution should be read to reflect what he has called the "evolving norms and social understandings of our country."
    If Mr. Liu's judicial philosophy wouldn't be familiar to the Framers, it is de rigueur in the elite colleges and law schools from which he hails. Speaking of the nomination of now Chief Justice John Roberts, Mr. Liu opined that words like "'free enterprise,' 'private ownership of property,' and 'limited government'" are "code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections." 
    On the nomination of now-Justice Samuel Alito, Professor Liu was even nastier. In a statement reminiscent of Ted Kennedy's slur against Robert Bork, Mr. Liu wrote that "Judge Alito's record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse; where federal agents may point guns at ordinary citizens during a raid, even after no sign of resistance . . . where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man . . . and where police may search what a warrant permits, and then some."
    Such statements included "unnecessarily flowery" and "colorful language," Mr. Liu said at yesterday's hearing, but they shouldn't trouble voters because they are irrelevant to being a judge. While professors are paid to be "provocative" and to probe and invent, he said, judges are supposed to be neutral arbiters. "Whatever I've written in books and articles would have no bearing on my role as a judge," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. So those polemics were merely for political show and tell?
    Mr. Obama once suggested that he would seek judicial nominees who used empathy in judging the cases that came before their courts, a sentiment Mr. Liu echoed yesterday. "Law affects people's lives. It's not just a bunch of words on paper" or cases in a book, he said. And while a judge should not be biased, he should decide cases based on an "appreciation of what's at stake in a particular case." 
    Of course that's right, but the real test of a judge is to decide cases based on the law, not on political ideology or human sympathies. Professor Liu sounds like a man with a political legal agenda.
    Mr. Liu has never served as a lower court judge and has limited experience arguing cases before the federal courts. While his background outside the judicial monastery should not be disqualifying, the Senate must consider the academic work that forms the basis of his legal expertise. When Justice Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court, the Berkeley professor said that intellect "is a necessary but not sufficient credential" for a seat on the bench. The same applies to Mr. Liu.

4/19/10 Philadelphia Inquirer: "Can Philadelphia learn from Lafayette High?"
By Liz Willen 
    New York - History teacher Patrick Compton is leafing through pages of the 1967 yearbook of Lafayette High School, alma mater of baseball great Sandy Koufax and broadcaster Larry King in a working-class enclave of Brooklyn. 
    Only 11 of the faces are black or Asian. Picking up Lafayette's 2007 yearbook, Compton finds that Jewish and Italian names are nearly gone, replaced by faces of African Americans and immigrants from South Asia, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America. 
    The ethnic sea change brought with it a spate of violence against Asian students by non-Asian classmates remarkably similar to the unrest and painful divisions plaguing South Philadelphia High. 
    "As neighborhoods change, schools have to change, and unless they address the needs of a new population systemically, the problems are just going to be reflected back into the schools and repeat themselves," says Compton, a resident of Burlington Township, who has spent 24 years teaching in the cavernous brick building in Bensonhurst, a densely populated area of semidetached two-family homes 16 miles from Midtown Manhattan. 
    Compton, who has been following events at South Philadelphia High, worries that lessons from Lafayette will be lost. "You can't just address this school by school." 
    Like Bensonhurst, the neighborhood surrounding South Philadelphia High has experienced radical population shifts in recent years, absorbing a steady influx of immigrants from China and Vietnam, and it is now 70 percent African American and 18 percent Asian. 
    As investigations into violence against Asian immigrants at South Philadelphia High continue, the school may find some disturbing parallels with Lafayette, which earned the nickname "Horror High" after about two dozen assaults in 2002, including the beating of valedictorian Siukwo Cheng. 
    The Justice Department investigated, leading a federal court in Brooklyn two years later to find "severe and pervasive" harassment of Asian students at Lafayette. 
School officials looked the other way while students threw food, cans, and even metal locks at Asian students, the court found, and it ordered Lafayette to address each case of violence and discrimination and investigate all reports of harassment. The school was also ordered to improve services for English-language learners and provide translation into Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bengali, Haitian, Creole, and Urdu. 
    The court order brought small improvements over the next two years, but violence continued. High turnover in leadership and a plummeting graduation rate finally led the New York City Department of Education to phase Lafayette out. In June, the neighborhood landmark, which had teemed with as many as 4,500 students in the days when the Brooklyn Dodgers called Ebbets Field home and kids played stickball in the streets, will graduate its last class. 
    Lafayette's painful demise poses questions for South Philadelphia High about what might heal divisions there. 
    "You can't just address these issues with security guards or cops in schools," says Pedro Noguera, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. "They need to create a sense of inclusion, so all kids feel like part of the community." 
    That was not the case at South Philadelphia High, where 13 Asian students were sent to a hospital after violence Dec. 3 that triggered a seven-day student boycott. In interviews, Asian students said they did not feel safe, and a report released in February by a retired federal judge found "race and ethnicity" were contributing factors. 
    Cecilia Chen, a staff lawyer for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), finds "striking similarities" between the violence at Lafayette, where the group closely monitored the 2004 court order, and South Philadelphia High. Chen hopes the Justice Department's investigation of South Philadelphia High will result in court action as it did at Lafayette. 
    In January, the AALDEF filed a civil-rights complaint alleging "deliberate indifference" to harassment complaints against Asian students. 
    Lafayette and South Philadelphia High "ignored signs that violence against Asian students was increasing and, despite repeated calls and pressure from community groups, refused to acknowledge that there was a problem," Chen told the Philadelphia School Reform Commission in December. 
    If the school wants to improve relations among ethnic groups, it must start by listening to students, which did not initially happen at Lafayette, says Steve Chung, copresident of the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn. 
    New immigrant students also need to learn how to defend themselves and recognize harassment, says Vincci Tai, who graduated from Lafayette in 2009; by that time the school was 43 percent African American, 23 percent Asian, and 24 percent Latino. Tai, a college freshman, says Asian immigrants "were afraid to fight back and afraid of getting into trouble." 
    Tai recently spoke to students at South Philadelphia. "I told them it's important to speak out and raise awareness," she says, "so this doesn't happen again." 
    At both schools, students and community leaders complained that the principal would not listen. At South Philadelphia in the fall, LaGreta Brown became the school's fourth principal in five years. She has declined to discuss the December violence or the report's findings, but defended her efforts to provide safety and order. 
    At Lafayette, the students - who received training and guidance from AALDEF, federal officials, and community groups - ultimately did the most to improve race relations, says Richard Mangone, a social-studies teacher and union representative. 
    "We had a strong group of youth," he says. "They organized, they asked for change, and they were clear in what they wanted from the adults." 
    Lafayette students gained confidence after the 2005 appointment of Iris Chiu as the school's first Asian administrator, Mangone recalls. Chiu spent her early months listening to students' concerns and urging different groups to learn more about one another, including their tastes in food, dance, and music. 
    But a year after the court intervened, change remained elusive at Lafayette. Students continued to complain of harassment during the 2004-05 school year. A freshman was beaten after school while waiting for a train; another student was choked by a classmate in the locker room. In other cases, students did not report incidents because they had no confidence in the school's ability to respond or to interview witnesses, says Khin Mai Aung, a staff lawyer at AALDEF. 
    Problems at Lafayette went deeper than violence. Asian immigrants complained they were not placed in classes for English-language learners and did not have access to guidance counselors. They had trouble enrolling in the courses required for graduation and could not get translation or interpretation services as required by law. 
    Connie Cuttle, director of professional development for the Office of School and Youth Development in New York City schools, says complaints went up after the 2004 court order in part because of better security and reporting of incidents. 
    Cuttle says the most important lesson learned at Lafayette is the need for social and emotional learning, which improves academics. But those lessons came too late for Lafayette, which is being replaced with small, themed academies. 
    Assistant principal Chiu savors small victories, including the progress of an immigrant student who stayed and won a full scholarship to Columbia University. Asian students at the time were afraid of African American students because they had no understanding of their culture, she recalls. And African American kids mimicked Asian students, making fun of the way they spoke, until they got to know them better. 
    A breakthrough came during one of many late nights at the school, amid preparations for a multicultural celebration in 2006. 
    "A security guard turned to me and said, 'I have been working in this building for more than 20 years, and this is the first time I have ever seen black and Asian students working together,' " Chiu recalls. 
    On the night of the celebration, 300 watched as Chinese New Year's celebrations and tai-chi sword demonstrations mingled with African dance, rap, and hip-hop. Lafayette alumnus and recent college graduate Siukwo Cheng, the valedictorian who had been beaten unconscious in 2002, sat in the audience. 
    Cheng "turned to me and said there had never been this type of cultural show when he was there," recalls Aung, the lawyer. 
    Aung wants students in South Philadelphia to stop seeing themselves as victims. "There are already student organizers who are active, but they can be trained to document incidents and really hold the district accountable for their actions." 
    At Lafayette, few ethnic tensions remain - because the school is almost empty. Compton and Mangone sometimes teach just two or three students a day. Compton wonders whether any lessons from Lafayette might help, not just at South Philadelphia High, but everywhere. "How is Philadelphia defending the rights of every student in their system?" he wonders. "That's what matters." 


4/17/10 San Francisco Chronicle: “GOP attacks appeals court nominee Goodwin Liu,
by Bob Egelko 
    Senate Republicans took turns flaying appeals court nominee Goodwin Liu at his confirmation hearing Friday, accusing the UC Berkeley law professor of planning to rewrite the Constitution to enlarge government, expand judicial power and invent new rights.
    The Senate Judiciary Committee's top Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said Liu's writings exemplified "intellectual judicial activism," and ridiculed his attempt to distinguish his academic role from the job he would do as a judge.
    Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Liu would bring a liberal agenda to the court, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said he might have held Liu in contempt when he was a trial judge for initially failing to produce some biographical material for the committee.
    Nominee unruffled
    Liu remained unruffled during the 3 1/2-hour hearing, saying repeatedly that he would set aside his personal views but not his human responses to the cases he would face if confirmed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
    "There is a human aspect to judging," he told Kyl. "That's why we don't put legal problems through a machine or through a computer."
    The committee has a 12-7 Democratic majority and is virtually certain to approve Liu's nomination in the next few weeks and send it to the full Senate. But Sessions, who has portrayed the appointment as an ideological test of President Obama's judicial choices, has all but promised a filibuster on the Senate floor.
    If that happens, Democrats would need at least one Republican to side with them to break the filibuster and bring Liu's nomination to a vote.
    Friday's hearing had been widely heralded as a forerunner of the battle expected this summer over Obama's candidate to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. It gave Republicans a test run for attacks - warnings of an activist judiciary magnifying federal authority and defying the people's will - that they're likely to level at a Supreme Court nominee.
    Key differences
    But that nominee is unlikely to resemble Liu, a liberal academic with no judicial experience and a trove of writings that potential foes can comb for hard-to-explain passages. 
    Friday's hearing "tells you the kinds of questions that will be asked," said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor. "But it all depends on the nominee."
    Liu, 39, a former Rhodes scholar and Supreme Court clerk, has received the American Bar Association's highest rating for his candidacy. Despite his liberal credentials - support for same-sex marriage and affirmative action, chairmanship of the left-leaning American Constitution Society - he has gained some conservative support outside Congress for his support of charter schools and vouchers.
    Cornyn referred Friday to Liu's "brilliance" and called him "an American success story," but questioned whether Liu was suited to be a judge. 
    He accused Liu of "sloppiness" for failing to list some of his past speeches in an initial response to a committee questionnaire, and said such conduct might have been grounds for contempt when Cornyn was a trial judge. 
    Republicans zeroed in on Liu's written work, including a 2009 book, "Keeping Faith With the Constitution," in which he and two co-authors argued that courts should interpret the nation's founding document flexibly in light of historical and societal changes.
    That view "gives all of the power to the judges" and lets them "decide what they want the Constitution to mean," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. 
    Liu replied that courts must apply legal doctrines to developments that the Constitution's drafters could not have foreseen, such as arguments involving speech and privacy on the Internet. 
    But he added that as a judge on the court that hears appeals from lower courts in California and eight other Western states, he would be bound by Supreme Court precedents. 
    Liu contrasted the role of a judge with that of a scholar, whose job is "to probe, criticize, invent, be creative."
    Sessions pressed Liu about a 2006 law review article in which he wrote that the Constitution might guarantee a right to receive welfare. 
    Liu said he had been writing about rights that would be established by Congress, not the courts, but Sessions insisted that the nominee had proposed to allow judges to "ignore the proper way to amend the Constitution." 
    2005 testimony
    The harshest criticism came from Kyl, who cited Liu's 2005 testimony against President George W. Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
    Liu criticized some of the death penalty opinions that Alito wrote as an appeals court judge, including a dissent that found no racial bias in a prosecutor's dismissal of every black member of a jury. Liu wrote that the case was a disturbing illustration of Alito's vision of America.
    "I see it as very vicious and emotionally and racially charged," Kyl said.
    Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the committee chairman, later called Kyl's racial reference "outrageous." He and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., both accused Republicans of setting a double standard, noting that they had approved numerous Bush appointees who lacked judicial experience and had supplied less information about themselves than Liu.
    Feinstein also sought to defuse Republican claims that Liu was anti-death penalty and asked whether he could vote to uphold a death sentence.
    None of his speeches or his writings, Liu replied, has ever questioned "the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty."

4/12/10 New York Times: "Before City’s Worst Fire in Years, History of Neglect: A fire that broke out in Chinatown on Sunday night injured 33 people and left 200 homeless," 
by Ray Rivera and Colin Moynihan
    The building in Chinatown where an enormous blaze started late Sunday night had more than two dozen open violations for hazardous conditions, including missing smoke detectors, lead paint and other problems that signified a history of neglect, city records show. 
    At seven alarms, the fire drew about 250 firefighters, who had it under control by 2:15 a.m. 
    Tenants had complained through the winter that they had no heat and that the building was riddled with mold and exposed wiring. At the same time, the owners had put the building on the market for the third time in five years with no apparent success. 
    There were no known fatalities in the fire, which spread to three other buildings, but an 89-year-old man, who lived on the top floor of one of them, was missing. Firefighters had been unable to get into the building to search because its structural integrity had been compromised. 
    At its peak, the fire was visible from across the East River. Hundreds of tenants were evacuated; it was a seven-alarm blaze, drawing some 250 firefighters to battle it. Fire officials said it was the largest blaze in the city in more than two years. 
    By the time the fire was under control, about 2:15 a.m. on Monday, some 200 people had been left homeless and dozens had been injured. 
    Two elderly men who lived in one of the buildings, on Grand Street, were treated for smoke inhalation and listed in serious to critical condition at Beth Israel Medical Center on Monday, said Firefighter James Long, a department spokesman. A Beth Israel spokeswoman said Monday night that the hospital had treated about a dozen people, and that all of them had been released except for one, who was in stable condition. 
    Investigators were trying to determine what started the fire, in which 33 people were hurt, including 29 firefighters who suffered minor injuries. Officials said there was no reason to believe the fire was arson, but as of Monday evening, fire marshals had not been able to go into the rubble to search for clues because of the danger of collapse. 
    Julie Chen, 26, who lived on the fourth floor of the building at 283 Grand Street, where the fire started, said, “I have everything up there.” Staring up at the smoldering hull on Monday, she added: “I’m lucky I have a pair of shoes right now. I don’t know where to go.” 
    Firefighters did not learn that the 89-year-old was missing until two women showed up at Councilwoman Margaret Chin’s district office about 3 p.m. seeking news about their father’s whereabouts. 
    “They went through every single hospital looking for him,” said Ms. Chin, who identified the missing man as Sing Ho. He lived on the top floor of 285 Grand Street with one of his daughters, who was at work when the fire broke out, Ms. Chin said. 
    In the chaos of the blaze, it took some time for the daughters to realize he was missing, Ms. Chin said. 
    Firefighter Long said the blaze broke out in the back of a store on the ground level of 283 Grand Street, a century-old, six-story building fronted by fire escapes. Pillars of flame shot over the rooftops as the fire quickly spread. By midnight, it had reached seven alarms, the first to do so since the Deutsche Bank building fire in August 2007, which sent plumes of smoke over ground zero and left two firefighters dead. 
    Ms. Chin, whose district includes the buildings, said 283 Grand Street and 285-287 Grand next door, suffered the brunt of the damage and would have to be demolished. The buildings are owned by Fair Only Realty, whose chief officers are listed variously in city records as Ralph Sherman and Solomon Scheinfeld, both at the same address in Flushing, Queens. They did not return phone calls seeking comment. 
    The owners put the buildings, which were home to two ground-level stores and 30 apartments, on sale for the third time in five years in December, asking $13.5 million, according to Central City Brokerage, which carried the listing. Before the fire, the asking price had been dropped to $9.25 million. Of the 30 apartments, five were rent-controlled, 23 were rent-stabilized and two were rented at market rate, according to the listing. 
    “Two of the buildings are in really bad shape,” Ms. Chin said. “There’s no roof; it’s really just a shell, so they’re going to have to tear them down.” 
    Also damaged in the fire were 281 and 289 Grand Street, fire officials said. 
    Ms. Chen, who paid $770 a month for a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, said residents had become frustrated with the landlord. “In the winter time, in the coldest days,” she said, “we would have no heat, no hot water.” 
    Trash also piled up in the basement, she said. 
    After a number of complaints to 311, the heat would be restored for a few days, then vanish again, she said. 
    “Excuse after excuse,” she said. “Very frustrating.” 
    Chris Kui, executive director of Asian Americans for Equality, a neighborhood advocacy group, said his organization had heard complaints about the building where the fire started. “We knew it had a lot of issues,” he said. 
    On Monday, the group was trying to find shelter for the people who had lost their homes, many of whom were elderly, Mr. Kui said. 
    Chen Hui, who lived on the third floor of 283 Grand Street, was talking with his wife in China on a Web cam when he realized that he and his parents, who also lived there, had to get out. 
    “I heard my mother yelling, ‘It’s fire! It’s fire!’ ” he said on Monday. Standing across the street from the building, he said, “Everything I own is gone.” 
    Zengjian Wang, who lived in the basement at 285 Grand Street, said he saw black smoke around 10 p.m. He said he grabbed some clothes and his Chinese passport and ran outside as the first fire trucks arrived. 
    James Barron and Barbara Gray contributed reporting.


4/12/10 Boston Globe: "Harvard Corporation elects leading lawyer: Commitment to innovation is Lee’s priority,"
By James F. Smith
    Harvard University announced yesterday that William F. Lee, a nationally known Boston lawyer with deep roots in the university, has been elected to the Harvard Corporation, the institution’s principal governing body.
    Lee, who is co-managing partner of the Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr law firm that employs 1,000 lawyers, will join the seven-member Harvard Corporation July 1, when James R. Houghton, 73, its longest-serving member, steps down after 15 years of service.
    Lee, twice named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal, graduated from Harvard in 1972 and taught courses at Harvard Law School for about five years. He served for six years on the Harvard Board of Overseers, the 30-member consultative body elected by university alumni.
    In a phone interview yesterday, Lee noted that as a Board of Overseers member he served on two joint committees with the corporation — the audit committee and the presidential search committee that chose Drew Gilpin Faust to succeed Lawrence Summers in 2007 — so he has worked with the seven current members of the corporation, which is led by Faust and picks new members when vacancies occur.
Lee said his overriding priority will be to keep all the institutions that make up Harvard innovative.
    “Harvard is the most unique and extraordinary institution in the world,’’ he said, “but . . . there’s also a lot of inertia that comes from age and traditions.’’
    Lee said his years of focus on intellectual property legal issues have made clear to him “there is nothing more important than the area of science and technology,’’ and he would work to make sure that Harvard is at the forefront of both those fields.
    The corporation oversees Harvard’s finances, and has come under fire for failing to anticipate and deal with the plunge in Harvard’s endowment during the recession.
    Two Harvard professors, Fred Abernathy and Harry Lewis, wrote in a Globe column in December that the Harvard Corporation “is a dangerous anachronism. It failed its most basic fiduciary and moral responsibilities. Some of its members should resign.’’
    They said the corporation is “too small, too closed, and too secretive to be intensely self-critical, as any responsible board must be.’’
    Lee, a Philadelphia-born son of Chinese immigrants who came to the United States in 1948, was named one of the 50 most influential minority lawyers in the United States in 2008 by the National Law Journal.
    “I grew up at a time when being Chinese was a little bit harder than it is today,’’ he said. “My parents came to the US when Chinese could not become naturalized citizens.’’
    He said he recalled sitting with his parents when they bought their first house and waiting anxiously to learn whether they would be accepted by the neighborhood association.
    “My father once told me to be proud that you are Chinese and don’t forget it, because nobody else ever will,’’ he said.
    Lee, an avid runner who just turned 60 and lives in Wellesley, has sent two of his children to Harvard and his two brothers teach at Harvard Medical School.
    He said he fully supports the steps over the past decade to make Harvard a more global organization, “and more importantly to make the student body more global.’’
    From 1987-89, Lee served as associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh in the Iran-Contra investigation, which led to several convictions of Reagan Administration officials.
    Lee co-leads one of the country’s leading law firms, a nearly $1 billion enterprise. He was managing partner of Hale and Dorr from 2000 to 2004, when it merged with Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering. He also is on the new board of the Broad Institute, the cutting-edge genomic medicine institute in Cambridge.



4/7/10 Miami Herald (McClatchy Newspapers): "Obama has plans for Asian-American judge: So does GOP,"
by Rob Hotakainen
    Washington — Goodwin Liu couldn't speak English until kindergarten, but he went on to become his high school's co-valedictorian, then a Rhodes Scholar and a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. 
    Now he's under attack on Capitol Hill, where Republicans are opposing his nomination to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. 
    Liu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, is attracting far more attention than most judicial nominees. While his backers are excited by his solidly liberal credentials, some of his opponents fear that President Barack Obama is preparing Liu for what would be a historic appointment: the first Asian-American on the U.S. Supreme Court. 
    "He's by far the most controversial nominee that Obama has named and he's clearly being groomed for the Supreme Court, so there's every reason to give him a full dose of scrutiny," said Curt Levey, executive director of the conservative Committee for Justice.
     "Look, he was picked because he's a darling of the left, and that's exactly the reason conservatives are up in arms about him." 
    Liu, now the associate dean of the law school at Berkeley, faces a difficult confirmation fight as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to take up his nomination. A hearing is set for April 16. 
    Liu has advocated many liberal causes, supporting national health care, affirmative action, gay marriage and slavery reparations. He angered conservatives by testifying against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. He's alarmed opponents by arguing that the Constitution should be interpreted based on "the evolving norms and traditions of our society," which conservatives say is code for judicial activism. His opposition to the death penalty drew fire from 42 of California's district attorneys, who sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging Liu's rejection. 
    Liu's record isn't universally liberal: He's backed charter schools and private school vouchers, which are opposed by teacher unions. He's received words of praise from conservatives such as Kenneth Starr, the lawyer who investigated President Bill Clinton, and California GOP Senate candidate Tom Campbell. 
    California's current senators, both Democrats, are enthusiastic supporters of Liu. Barbara Boxer called him an "inspired choice," while Dianne Feinstein said he's "as sharp as they come, with a kind demeanor and a good temperament." 
    Republicans are ready to make things tough for Liu. 
    While promising to withhold final judgment on the nominee, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said Liu was a former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union who was "far outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence." 
    "It seems to me that his judicial philosophy does not respect the American ideal of judges as neutral arbiters of the law," Sessions said. "I hope my initial impressions are wrong." 
    Liu is refusing all media interviews before his confirmation hearing. 
    He has plenty of supporters willing to speak for him, however. 
    Edwin Prather, president of the Asian Pacific Bar of California, said that GOP senators shouldn't be challenging Liu, calling him a well-respected and highly qualified nominee. 
    "We need an Asian-American on the 9th Circuit bench. We need Goodwin Liu on that bench," he said. 
    Vincent Eng, deputy director of the Washington-based Asian-American Justice Center, called Liu "a very exciting nominee" with exceptional qualifications. 
    Liu, 39, has already attracted a national following. Eng said that more than 400 "Goodwin hearing parties" were scheduled last month in anticipation of Liu's appearance before the Judiciary Committee. Republicans used procedural tactics to delay that hearing. 
    Liu, the child of two physicians, was born in Georgia and moved to Sacramento, Calif., when he was 7. He served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives, which sparked an interest in law and politics, and he has degrees from Stanford University and Yale Law School. He served as a Supreme Court clerk in 2000 for    Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and worked for the San Francisco Unified School District and the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton administration. 
    While it's common for a president to tap an appellate court judge as a Supreme Court nominee, Liu would stand out among the nearly 175 judges because of his relatively young age. His supporters say that appointing him after a short tenure on an appellate court would give Obama a chance to shape the Supreme Court for decades. 
    Levey predicted that the confirmation fight over Liu will be the biggest battle involving a lower-court judge this year. He said he wouldn't be surprised if it's a preview of an even bigger battle down the road. 
    He noted, however, that Liu has "zero courtroom experience" and shouldn't be rushed into a judgeship. 
    "Normally, you wouldn't rush someone along — unless there was a reason," Levey said. "And the reason is they're clearly grooming him for the Supreme Court while Obama is still in office. . . . Obama has already signaled that he likes to make demographically sexy picks. I think he'd love to appoint the first Asian." 
    For their part, Liu's supporters are focused on the present, saying it would be wrong to focus on what may be in the offing. 
    "The Supreme Court is sort of pie in the sky at this point," Prather said.



4/3/10 San Francisco Chronicle: "Man convicted in El Cerrito slaying,"
by Henry K. Lee
    El Cerrito -- A Richmond man was convicted Friday in the 2007 shooting death of a college student who was robbed while helping his father with repairs at an El Cerrito apartment complex.
    Marcellus Allen, 20, was found guilty in Contra Costa County Superior Court of first-degree murder, second-degree robbery and possession of an assault weapon in the slaying of Jinzhou Chang, 24, of Richmond. Jurors rejected an allegation that Allen personally used a firearm.
    Allen faces 25 years to life in prison when he is sentenced May 14, said his attorney, Daniel Cook. 
    "Mr. Allen was 17 at the time of the incident and had no arrest or conviction record," Cook said. "We are truly disappointed in the outcome of the trial."
    Two co-defendants, Christian Latimore, 19, and Dion Williams, 21, testified against Allen in exchange for pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter. A fourth defendant, Raymond Richard, 20, was declared incompetent to stand trial.
    The four were identified with the help of a security camera at a Chevron gas station, where they had gone in hopes of buying gas with a credit card belonging to Chang, authorities said. They had also had tried to get gas at another station.
    Chang was shot and killed about 6 p.m. July 30, 2007 as he worked with his father at an apartment complex on Belmont Avenue, less than a block behind the busy Pacific East Mall facing Interstate 80. 
    Huiquan Chang has said that he was on the second floor and had just sent his son to wash buckets downstairs when he heard three shots in close succession. He was horrified to find his only child fatally wounded in a stairwell, where he had staggered after being shot in the head, stomach and back. 
    "They shot me. They stole my wallet," his son shouted before collapsing. 
    The men fled in a car that was spotted on the gas station surveillance camera.
    Chang was raised by his father after his parents' divorce in China when he was 3 years old. After studying in England, Chang came to the United States to attend Contra Costa College in San Pablo and help his father earn money as a handyman. The victim had hoped to transfer to UC Berkeley and was interested in international trade. 



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