12/22/07 Wall Street Journal: The Weekend Interview with Michelle Rhee: Schoolhouse Rock,
by Collin Levy
    "I see it as a social justice issue -- I want them all to be in excellent schools. The kids in Tenleytown are getting a wildly different educational experience than the kids in Anacostia, so our schools are not serving their purpose."
    So says D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has brought an unusual sense of urgency to her new job.
    One of her first decisions was to get rid of the furniture. When she arrived last summer, she says, there was a whole area, complete with couch and chair and TV for lounging in her sprawling, pink-carpeted office. Wasted space, she thought, "When am I ever going to have time to sit?"
    That was a pretty good prediction for a woman whose first five months on the job have been a whirlwind of jousting with the dinosaurs in the city's education bureaucracy. So far, in her quest to turn around the public school system, she's taken on the unions, the city council and, most recently, hundreds of angry central-office workers.
    This week, the city council gave preliminary approval to Chancellor Rhee's request for authority to fire nonunion employees in the central office. She knew it was going to be a political firestorm, but she's worked hard to convince her skeptics that protecting an ossified bureaucracy isn't in anyone's best interests. "I think it's a critical piece of this equation," she says of the personnel legislation, "and if someone like me can come in, guns blazing, and make all the hard calls . . . we can actually see how much progress we can make for the kids."
    In a chic gray suit, with her black hair long and loose, the 37-year-old Korean-American does not fit the profile of the usual urban school superintendent.
    Nor does she have the most first-hand experience with the education bureaucracy she is trying to wrangle.
    After teaching for three years in a tough school in Baltimore , she spent the majority of her career running The New Teacher Project, a group that studies best practices in school systems nationwide. She figured her value was as an external player, poking and prodding from the outside, and her first thought about the chancellor job was "absolutely not." The reason she changed her mind was Washington , D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty.
    Her name first came to Mayor Fenty's attention through Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City School system. She was known as an out-of-the-box thinker, a relentless advocate of reform. And that made her just what the young mayor was looking for.
    The alliance she and the mayor formed that day is now one of the strongest cards in the chancellor's hand.
    Their agreement was that as long as she acted in the best interests of the kids, he would back her up no matter how loud the screaming of the unions and community groups. "And since then, he has been unwavering," Ms. Rhee says with a note of awe in her voice. "He has never ever said to me, well, we need to think of the political ramifications."
    That commitment is facing one of its toughest public tests, with the chancellor's plan to close 23 schools citywide -- 18 more than any other chancellor in the city's history dared propose. Parents and community groups are screaming bloody murder.
    The night before our interview, Ms. Rhee and her staff held their first local meeting to hear from her constituents directly. When several hundred irritable residents showed up, her staff was mapping the exits.
    "I came out of it and I was like, 'That wasn't that bad" the chancellor laughs now. "My staff looks at me like, 'You are crazy.'"
    Yes, she understands the grieving process. "People have to have the opportunity to vent, to be angry, and they want to do that at me specifically," she says.
    Less tolerable is the politics that always seems to run against real reform. "I sat in a meeting where one of the City Council members said, you can close down as many schools as you need to, just not in my ward."
    When she's not closing schools with low enrollment, she's building on those that are succeeding -- with expanded campuses and courses, from music classes to gifted programs. One she looks to as a model is Langdon Elementary, where the percentage of poor minority students is very high and so are achievement levels. Why? The answer begins with a committed principal communicating her priorities and standards to her staff.
    Another is Peabody, a small school on Capitol Hill that's pre-kindergarten through second grade, and running a program for three- and four-year-olds that has a long wait list. "People cry when they don't get in and that sort of thing," she says. With Ms. Rhee's help, the school's leadership and faculty are expanding to four more sites. "Why wouldn't we?"
    To be effective, Ms. Rhee believes, reforms must begin with the people closest to the children. When she first took the job, she made time to meet individually with all 159 principals in the school system. "People thought I was crazy, and it was very time consuming," she says, "but it was the best use of time . . . it was very telling."
    Telling of what? Ms. Rhee quickly came to the conclusion that principals who were succeeding in their schools were her best resource. They were the ones who could tell her what she needed to do. She called in a group of top-tier principals and asked them for their wish lists: "I called them together and told them, 'You're the unsung heroes. This place creates such a bureaucracy that you can't get stuff done efficiently. Be creative, tell me what you want to do.'"
    At first, the principals looked at her blankly. "They were like, what? And then when they got it, they were so excited." One principal asked for permission to run her school as a STEM school -- focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. And she said that she wanted to keep her kids all the way through 8th grade. She explained that if parents had a school they believed in, they'd be less likely to take them out of the public system.
    Those are important strides being made on the ground level. But reform also means, inevitably, taking an axe to dead wood elsewhere in the system. In the case of the plan to reclassify the 545 central-office workers as "at will" employees, Ms. Rhee's plan for reform is on delicate ground with the city's powerful public-sector unions.
    Though the administrative workers aren't union employees, her plan hasn't sat well with labor leaders, including those for bus drivers, cafeteria workers and clerical workers. Explains Ms. Rhee, they said, "We're opposed to this because our job is not just to protect our members but to protect the rights of all workers. We think you're going to start with them and then we're going to be next."
    She says she respects George Parker, head of the teachers union. "I believe he has the best interests of the kids at heart" and supports reform. But it's a struggle to bring along his rank and file, and the forces of inertia. "I think that somebody like me coming along has probably made his life more difficult."
    Ms. Rhee grew up in Toledo and went on to school at Cornell and Harvard before joining Teach for America , the program that landed in her at Harlem Park Elementary in Baltimore . She taught second grade, and the 36 kids in her class ran her ragged. "It was a life altering experience for me and the reason I'm here today."
    She says that she and a colleague worked day and night to prepare for their classes, and saw their group of kids go from the bottom of the heap to where 90% of them were scoring above the 90th percentile. "I don't believe you can do this work, or be engaged in it at any level, unless you believe in your core that poor minority kids can achieve at the highest level despite all the obstacles."
    Ms. Rhee says that her mission is not incremental change, and she doesn't plan on making being a school superintendent a career. "This is a one-time gig for me," she laughs, "so I can make every single decision in a way in which I think is in the best interests of the kids -- without the politics, without owing people, just with that in mind."
    And her motivation? She's a working mother with two daughters in the school system. "That gives me a different sense of urgency about my work."
    Mayor Fenty is the first D.C. mayor to have direct control of the city schools (in lieu of a school board) -- a set-up that's also been key to turnaround efforts in Chicago , New York and Boston . There's a powerful demand for quality education in the nation's capital that hasn't been met by the public school system, as evidenced by the 30% of the district's kids who attend charter schools. "For way too long in this country, choice in education was something that was reserved for rich people in the suburbs," Ms. Rhee says.
    That same desire for innovation in the schools has been behind the success of the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program -- the country's first federal voucher program. Signed by President Bush in 2004, the program gives around 1,900 students from low-income families up to $7,500 to attend private schools of their choice. The five-year pilot program is up for renewal next year, but Ms. Rhee doesn't see school choice as a threat to her mission in the public schools. She shakes her head. "I would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent's ability to make a choice for their child.  Ever."
    Instead, she sees the competition presented by school choice and charter schools as part of the process of raising standards in the public school system at large. "We have an excellent choice dynamic for parents here. . . . I'm a huge proponent of choice, but I'm also an unbelievably competitive person, and my goal is . . . to create schools within the system that I believe are the most compelling choices."
    People have tried to get her to commit to a ratio of public schools to charter schools. Ms. Rhee won't play that game. "I don't enter this with defensiveness, about protecting [D.C. public schools'] share of the market. I believe we should proliferate what's working and close down what's not. Period."
    She says she keeps hearing from worried city council members that some teachers and administrators are frightened of her. They are feeling pressure and that's a problem. Her answer? Get used to it. "I'm going to hold people accountable and I'm going to hold their feet to the fire. If they're feeling pressure -- good! I feel pressure every day because I have the education of 49,000 kids in my hands."
    Ms. Levy is a senior editorial writer at the Journal, based in Washington

12/20/07 www.politico.com: Asian-American youth trend Democratic, 
by: Ben Adler
    Carmen Wong, 21, is a Chinese-American senior at the University of Southern California . Her parents are Republicans and she used to be one, too, but she recently switched her voter registration to independent. 
    Although Wong is fiscally conservative, she is socially liberal and has turned against the Iraq war. She would vote for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for president, and shes not sure who shell support if he is not the Republican nominee. But she likes Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). 
    Wong epitomizes a recent trend among young Asian-Americans: their widespread abandonment of the Republican Party. 
    The Institute of Politics at Harvard University recently released data from an online survey of 2,525 18- to 24-year-olds. Among the surveys more notable statistics are those concerning party affiliation among Asian-Americans: 47 percent identify themselves as Democratic, 15 percent Republican and 39 percent independent making them more Democratic than any other ethnic group except African-Americans in the survey. 
    Betsy Kim, 44, a Korean-American who is executive director of the American Majority Partnership, the Democratic National Committees constituency outreach program, sees a clear generational shift toward Democrats among Asian-Americans. 
    Kim said that Asian-Americans her age and younger lean Democratic because Democrats do more to benefit communities of color. 
    Officials at the Republican National Committee say the GOP is responsive to the interests of the Asian-American community. Chairman [Mike] Duncan has met with leaders from the Asian-American community, and he and the RNC on the whole will continue to work with leaders from the community to discuss of issues of importance to them, said RNC spokesman Brian Walton. 
    But Kim said that as Asian-Americans have become more assimilated, young Asian Americans more closely reflect the views of their own generation. And, like Wong, they are particularly critical of the Bush administration for its policies on the Iraq war. 
    If it wasnt for the war, I dont think Asian-Americans my age would be Democratic, said Wong. 
    That is almost certainly an overstatement. Young Asian-Americans are significantly more Democratic than young whites, who are roughly evenly split between the two major parties. And Asian-Americans of all ages have been trending Democratic for years. But they were once a dependable Republican constituency. According to data from the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, former President George H.W. Bush got 24 percent more of the Asian-American vote than did Bill Clinton in 1992. 
    Asian-American political leaders of both parties agree about why Asian Americans leaned Republican back then. Many Korean and Vietnamese immigrants who fled Communism favored the Republicans hawkish anti-communist stance. More broadly, Republicans rhetoric as the party that supported business interests appealed to the many small business owners in Asian American communities. 
    For older Asian-American Republicans I know, it boils down to taxes and anti-Communism, said Curtis Chin, an 30-something we never say our age in Hollywood screenwriter in Los Angeles . In his spare time (which he has plenty of because hes on strike), Chin runs Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, a national network of progressive Asian Americans which came out of Howard Deans 2004 presidential campaign. 
    Chin points to the 1990s as a turning point. Asian-Americans became more Democratic in that decade and Al Gore carried the Asian-American vote in 2000. 
    In 2004, young Asian-Americans were more likely than their elders to support the Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts . Nearly two-thirds of Asian-Americans ages 18 to 29 voted for Kerry, while just over one-third voted for Bush.
    The breakdown was much closer among Asian Americans 30 and older: 53 percent chose Kerry, compared to 46 percent for Bush, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. 
    Asian-American Democrats cite immigration and domestic issues as primary reasons for the appeal of their party to younger Asian-Americans. 
    Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), a Japanese American who serves as a vice chairman at the DNC, says that perceived Republican intolerance in part around immigration issues has driven Asian-Americans away from the GOP. He cited the anti-immigrant movement in California which has the largest Asian-American population of any state in the 1990s as a watershed moment.
    Some politicians were trying to drive a wedge between communities, Honda said of California Republicans, like then-Gov.Pete Wilson , who were pushing the anti-immigrant ballot initiative Proposition 187. That started to cause resentment not only among the targeted group of Latinos, but Asian-Americans realized that affected them, too. 
    Incidents like George Allens infamous macaca moment when the former Republican senator from Virginia directed an ethnic slur at an Indian-American young man have also alienated Asian-Americans, Honda said. That touched a nerve with Asians across the country. 
    Young Republicans have not given up all hope for winning back Asian-Americans. Vince Fong, 28, is Chinese-American and works in a district office of Rep. Kevin O. McCarthy (R-Calif.). He is also the Western regional vice-chairman of the Young Republican National Federation. 
    "With the growth of the Asian American population in the West, I still think they are looking for the party that feels their values, said Fong. Asian Americans tend to be drawn to the entrepreneurial spirit of Republican Party. Young Republicans emphasize those values when trying to appeal to that demographic. 
    Fong also contends that if Republicans effectively present their immigration position to Asian-Americans, they can neutralize their disadvantage on the issue. If you talk to young Asian-Americans or young Americans in general, if their parents came through the legal process and you show the difference between legal and illegally [the politics of immigration] doesnt necessarily cut one way or the other, said Fong. 
    But a community of recent immigrants may see a closed-border policy as one that would have excluded their ancestors, as well as a proxy for racial intolerance, even if they themselves arrived legally. Even second to fourth generation Asian Americans know that closed borders would have kept them out, says Wilson Tong, 20, a Chinese-American junior at the University of Pennsylvania who is active in Democratic politics. 
    Even if they retain the strong party preference of Asian-Americans, Democrats will have to contend with low turnout rates in the Asian American community. 
    Language barriers are an issue, explains Alexandra Acker, executive director of the Young Democrats of America. With the Asian and Pacific Islander vote, youre dealing with so many different languages, different constituencies and media publications.

12/20/07 Dallas Morning News: This Christmas, reflecting on the past, future, 
by Esther Wu
    Christmas came early for the Wu family this year.
    On Monday, my great-nephew, Harrison Phillip Wu, was born in Austin . His parents are Dixon and Marian Wu.
    Dixon is the youngest son of my late brother, Harry Wu.
    There are already several great-nephews and nieces in the Wu clan including Harrison 's 3-year-old twin brother, D.J., and sister, Maddie.
    Having a newborn at Christmas seems so apropos.
    And it has brought up fond memories of Christmases past in my family.
    Christmas was always a big celebration in my house.
    Dad even owned his own Santa suit that he wore to try to convince my younger sisters and me that he was the real jolly St. Nick. Later, he would wear the suit to play Santa at all the Chinese community parties.
    My father Harrison 's great-grandfather was born in late December and the family would often celebrate his birthday at the same time we celebrated our Lord's birth.
    So Christmas dinner was always a production.
    My siblings and I always wanted an "American" menu while Mom did not consider it a proper banquet unless we had traditional Chinese foods. So the table was often laden with roast turkey as well a roasted suckling pig, candied yams and stir-fried bok choy, dressing as well as rice. And no meal was complete without one of Mom's medicinal herb soups.
    We had outgrown Mom and Dad's tiny dining room, and tables had to be set up throughout the house. It was chaos, but I can't remember a happier time for our family than Christmas.
    Dad passed away almost 15 years ago. My sisters and I found his Santa suit when we closed up the house after Mom died 10 years ago. 
    The family rarely gets together anymore.
    So I can't help but feel a little melancholy that Harrison will never experience a Christmas in the tiny house on Cincinnati Avenue in San Antonio . Nor will he ever know his grandfather Harry, or his great-grandfather Fred.
    Harrison represents the sixth generation of our family to live in the United States . The Wu family has been in the United States for almost 200 years.
    Harrison's great-great-great-grandfather, like tens of thousands of other Chinese sojourners, came to the U.S. in the 1800s to seek his fortune. I never learned this ancestor's given name, but he was always referred to as "Bok Gung," which means great-grandfather in Chinese. 
    Bok Gung left his small Toy San village in the Ugandan Province of south China to work on the railroad line in the Pacific Northwest . Saving enough money to send home was no easy task. Chinese laborers were paid about $20 a month and as immigrants, they were heavily taxed. Foreigners had to pay a work tax for the privilege of having a job. To save money, men would often share living quarters, and San Francisco foreigners had to pay an "air tax" for sharing space.
    When Bok Gung returned to China , he sent his eldest son, James, to take his place. But James had more brains than brawn, so he became a merchant in San Francisco 's Chinatown district. Among his many businesses, James would write letters for illiterate Chinese to be sent back to their families in China . He also helped coach people studying for the U.S. naturalization test. 
    In 1902, James sent for his eldest son, Fred, my father, to join him in America . Dad was only 9 years old when he journeyed across the Pacific alone. But he would cross the ocean several more times once to marry my mother and again to lead his family out of China before the Communist regime came to power.
    My parents settled in Texas , mainly because the climate was better for my brother, Harry, who had polio, and because my father thought his children would have a better chance of assimilating into mainstream America if they were away from San Francisco 's Chinatown .
    During the 1950s in many parts of the country, Chinese people were not allowed to own property, much less run their own businesses. In the South, the Chinese were subject to Jim Crow laws they could not sit at the front of the bus, be served at certain restaurants or sit outside the balcony level in movie houses.
    But Dad managed to buy his own home and eventually his own grocery store. He helped organize the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in San Antonio , as well as the Chinese Lions Club and Chinese Optimist Club. He started a Chinese school and was deacon and Sunday school teacher at the First Chinese Baptist Church .
    Of his seven children, there was one teacher, an accountant, two business owners, two buyers and a journalist. Among his 14 grandchildren are lawyers, software and mechanical engineers, merchandisers, marketing and accountant consultants, and an aspiring fashion designer.
    And the sky is the limit for their children.
    These days as the immigration debate continues, I wonder how it will affect little Harrison . While the issue centers on illegal immigrants, I can't help but think that the word "immigrant" conjures more negative feelings than positive ones these days. I also can't help but hope that in Harrison's lifetime, the issue will no longer be about where we come from, but how we act and what we do in this country that makes us Americans. 
    So from my family to yours, here's wishing each and every one a happy holiday season no matter where your family may be from.

12/17/07 Asian Week: Hearsts Ignorance of Chinese American Political Power,
by Samson Wong: Potstickers
    Because of reporters Vanessa Hua and Matthew Stannards myopic San Francisco Chinatown view in the Dec. 2 front-page story Asian Americans Flex Political Muscle in Wider Bay Area, the Hearst Corporations San Francisco Chronicle erroneously claimed that progress [in civil rights and immigration] has not translated into political power for city Chinese Americans. Its B.S. that the paper asserts that S.F. Chinese Americans are in a soon-to-be virtual [political] backwater.
    WE GOT THE POWER: Yes, only one Chinese and APA supervisor Carmen Chu is temporarily seated for the Sunset, but the Chronicle mostly ignored the citys accomplished elected Chinese American officials. State Senator Leland Yee and Assemblywoman Fiona Ma hold top posts in the California Legislature, and passed major child consumer protection laws in violent video games (Yee) and baby products (Ma). Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting has collected major revenues for the city budget. BART Director and AsianWeek President James Fang led efforts to link the Bay Area to S.F. City College board member Lawrence Wong brought the Chinatown community college campus closer to near reality. Betty Yee chairs the powerful California Board of Equalization. Also lets not forget Chinese American school board members Norman Yee and Eric Mar, who had installed the first APA school superintendent (albeit interim), Gwen Chan. Added to that, Mayor Gavin Newsom would not have been elected in 2003 had it not been for the overwhelming APA votes including Chinese Americans that gave him a slim four-point win over Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez. If thats not Chinese American political power, what is?
    CHINATOWN STEREOTYPE: Hua and Stannard interviewed mostly Chinatown institutional leaders, like the Chinese Six Companies, Chinese Chamber of Commerce and American Legions Cathay Post, which gave an impression that all Chinese American politicos originate from Chinatown . Thats a myth: Chu, Leland, Betty, Ma, Ting, Fang, Mar and Norman all reside in the west side of town. Chinatown is only one center of Chinese American power

12/17/07 press release: Senate Confirms First South Asian American Federal Judge
    Los Angeles , San Francisco & San Diego CA, Dec. 17, 2007 The South Asian Bar Associations throughout California applaud the confirmation of the first South Asian federal judge: federal prosecutor Amul Thapar. Having being confirmed by the U.S. Senate on December 13th, Thapar will join the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
    Its a historic day for our community. Were all thrilled that Amul Thapar is the first South Asian federal judge! said Shirish Gupta, SABA Northern California President. Amul has been a very good friend to SABA and a role model to South Asian and Asian American lawyers throughout the country in fact, he was a Keynote Speaker at both the 2007 NASABA and NAPABA Annual Conventions.
    Thapar has led a distinguished career in law and public service. Prior to his confirmation, Thapar served as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Previously, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of Ohio and the District of Columbia . Thapar has also worked for the prestigious law firms of Williams & Connolly in Washington , D.C. , and Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Cincinnati , Ohio .
    We thank President Bush and the U.S. Senate for nominating and confirming Judge Thapar. We look forward to having more South Asian attorneys join the state and federal bench, said Gautam Dutta, Public Policy Chair of SABA-Southern California. This is a proud day for South Asian attorneys and citizens alike. We applaud the U.S. Senates decision to appoint Judge Thapar, echoed Nita Mehta, SABA-San Diego President.
    For the past few months, the SABA California chapters and NASABA have been working to help secure Mr. Thapars confirmation via a letter writing campaign to urge their Senators to vote to confirm Mr. Thapar.
    Mr. Thapar received his undergraduate degree from Boston College and his law degree from the University of California . He has also taught at Georgetown University Law Center and University of Cincinnati College of Law.
    About SABAs: Representing nearly 2,000 South Asian attorneys in California , the South Asian Bar Associations of Northern California, Southern California and San Diego are the largest and oldest regional South Asian Bar Association in North America . They are dedicated to the advancement and development of South Asian attorneys as well as attorneys interested in issues affecting the South Asian community

12/12/2007 Los Angeles Daily Breeze: Furutani wins most votes in 55th Assembly race,
by Gene Maddaus
    This time, experience won.
    Warren Furutani, who lost his bid for the 55th Assembly seat last year, won on his second try Tuesday as he defeated newcomer Mike Gipson, a Carson councilman.
    Furutani, a Los Angeles community college district trustee, captured 49.2 percent of the vote to Gipson's 38.4 percent
    Turnout was low in the Carson-to-Long Beach district.
    "It's a real advantage to be able to run again and get a second chance," Furutani said after his victory speech Tuesday night. "I hope the voters realize I'm gonna bring some experience and understanding to the position."
    Furutani spoke in Lakewood before a large labor crowd, which included Maria Elena Durazo, the secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.
    "We worked very hard for Warren Furutani," said Omah Kirby, a Los Angeles janitor with Service Employees International Union Local 1877, who walked precincts as part of an independent expenditure campaign.
    "We put in a lot."
    Furutani accepted congratulations by phone from Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, and numerous Assembly members were on hand at his victory party at the union hall for Laborers and Plasterers Local 507.
    Furutani said he is interested in seeking a post in the Assembly leadership, but first he will have to formally win the seat in a Feb. 5 general election against two minor-party candidates. Had he collected more than 50 percent of the vote, Furutani would have won the seat outright and been sworn in as soon as the election tally was declared official. 
    Trailing Furutani and Gipson in the voting were Libertarian Herb Peters with 5.8 percent, American Independent Charlotte Gibson with 3.9 percent and Democrat Mervin Evans with 2.7 percent. No Republican candidates were on the ballot.
    The primary campaign pitted Furutani's experience against Gipson's fresh face, as both sought to serve out the term of Laura Richardson, who was elected to Congress last summer. Richardson beat Furutani for the Assembly seat last year, and backed Gipson in his campaign.
    The two candidates unloaded thousands of negative mailers on each other in the final days. Gipson sent out a mailer depicting Furutani in a Stetson hat, and accusing him of supporting the interests of tobacco companies.
    Furutani sent out a mailer with Gipson's picture on the side of a nuclear power reactor, in an effort to link him to energy companies that had contributed to his campaign.
    "Basically they're trying to define me, and I'm defining him," Furutani said. "You gotta put a shot across their bow, too."
    In the days leading up to the vote, independent expenditure groups poured money into Gipson's campaign, funding mailers, door hangers, phone banks and a get-out-the-vote effort.
    Alliance for California 's Tomorrow - a group whose donors include various corporate interests - spent $235,000 trying to elect Gipson, more than Gipson raised in direct contributions. About $115,000 of that was spent in the last week of the race.
    Minorities in Law Enforcement also spent $13,800 supporting Gipson's campaign.
    Furutani was the beneficiary of $251,000 in independent spending, most of it from the Service Employees International Union. Equality California , group that advocates for gay marriage, also sent out a mailer supporting Furutani.
    The state Democratic Party also contributed about $61,000 directly to Furutani's campaign, expanding Furutani's wide fundraising advantage.
    Furutani had the support of most of the area's lawmakers, while Gipson drew on his support from Richardson and the Legislative Black Caucus.
    But Gipson suffered a blow when the chair of the caucus, Mervyn Dymally, endorsed Furutani. Dymally was introduced Tuesday night to the theme from "The Godfather."
    "This victory is historic, it put an end to race politics," Dymally said. "I'm a happy man."
ELECTION RESULTS 
229 of 229 precincts  Votes  Pct. 
Warren Furutani (Dem)  8,620  49.2% 
Mike Gipson (Dem)  6,727  38.4% 
Herb Peters (Lib) 1,007  5.8%  
Charlotte Gibson (AI)  676  3.9% 
Mervin Evans (Dem)  477  2.7%

12/9/07 CBS Cold Case about Japanese American Internment

12/8/07 AFP: Asia immigration churns Canada 's cultural makeup,
by Deborah Jones
   Vancouver , Canada (AFP) - When Tung Chan immigrated here from Hong Kong in 1974 most people spoke English, there was one Chinese-language newspaper, and historic " Chinatown " was considered exotic.
    Waves of immigration from Asia have since turned this West Coast metropolis into an Asian-flavored, multicultural entrepot, with newcomers -- including growing numbers of mixed-race couples -- resident on virtually every street.
    English and French are Canada 's official languages. But Chinese and other languages have made steep gains in recent years, according to the latest census, released this week.
    News here is now delivered in 22 different languages through more than 144 different media outlets.
    Shops and bank machines post signs in English, Chinese, Punjabi and Farsi.
    Former "ethnic" goods are rarely differentiated, with grocery stores selling Bok Choy next to spinach, lemon grass alongside parsley, and Indian chutneys in the ketchup and mustard aisle.
    Even Vancouver 's city hall provides basic information about municipal services in Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Spanish and Vietnamese.
    " Vancouver has changed dramatically," said Chan. "We're really very lucky -- this is a microcosm of the world."
    In 150 short years Vancouver shot from being a largely aboriginal community, to becoming a resource-extraction outpost for mostly Britons and other Europeans, to one of the world's most multicultural destinations today for immigrants who speak a dizzying variety of languages.
    Chan came here at age 22, and eventually became a successful banker, member of the city council, and now a philanthropist and the head of an agency to help new immigrants.
    He said old and new residents here mostly get along well, and Canadians, especially in Vancouver , "should be very, very proud of ourselves in terms of how we integrate people."
    "The mentality here is integration rather than confrontation," said Eleanor Yuen, a Hong Kong native who now heads the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia .
    "Most of the people who come here don't come with a strong ideology that they want to fight and die for."
    Yuen said accommodation and integration in Canada differs from Western Europe, where her research shows immigrants, including those from China , tend to stay in "a ghetto of their own, in secluded areas, and speak little English."
    Nationally, Canada has one of the world's highest immigration levels compared to its population. A federal report this week showed the mother tongue of fully one in five Canadians is no longer English or French, especially in major cities like Vancouver , Toronto and Montreal .
    Overall, nearly 18 million Canadians still cite English as their first language, and nearly seven million call French their mother tongue, Statistics Canada reported.
    But newcomers from Asia have made Chinese the third most common language now, with about one million speakers (324,000 in Vancouver), and up 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2006, compared to an increase of just 3.1 percent for English speakers and 1.7 percent for Francophones.
    Punjabi speakers increased by 35.5 per cent in the same period, and immigrants from India now number about 350,000 nationwide (117,000 in Vancouver ).
    The rise of ethnic media especially is a sign of how rapidly the West Coast culture is changing, said Catherine Murray, a professor at Simon Fraser University here. Murray and a team of researchers recently released a report on local news media outlets in 22 languages.
    One potential problem, said both Chan and Murray, is the gap between new media outlets, which focus mostly on overseas and cultural news, and mainstream media that reports on local and national issues.
    "The big stories in English media are not followed in Asian media," said Murray , citing a dearth of ethnic media reports about Canada 's military in Afghanistan .
    "Overlooking Canada 's war effort in Afghanistan is setting up an important dynamic in the next election," she said.
    Chinese newspapers "have to do a much better job in providing coverage for local issues," said Chan. "Most reporters are from China or Hong Kong , and many of them do not have the necessary understanding of the nuances of Canadian issues. That, to me, is an area that could be improved."



12/7/07 Los Angeles Daily Breeze: "The truth behind the flying mud,"
By Gene Maddaus
    EDITOR'S NOTE: A slew of negative attacks have landed in mailboxes in the 55th Assembly District over the past week. Below, political writer Gene Maddaus gives a rundown of the charges and an assessment of their relative truthfulness.
    CHARGE: Warren Furutani kept two chauffeurs while on the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
    FACTS: This charge has a kernel of truth to it, but only a kernel. Board members were occasionally driven to events by two sergeants-at-arms.
    The claim, contained in a mailer by Furutani's opponent, Carson City Councilman Mike Gipson, appears to suggest that each was paid $100,000, when in fact that figure was divided between the two employees, and included overtime. Their base salaries were $36,000 a year, and they had other responsibilities, including attending board meetings and delivering agendas.
    Furthermore, the implication that board members were living luxurious lifestyles at taxpayer expense is off-base. Board members were paid about $2,000 per month for their service.
    CHARGE: Gipson is "the candidate of the tobacco industry."
    FACTS: Gipson is the beneficiary of at least $150,000 in independent expenditures paid for by the Alliance for California's Tomorrow, a group of corporate interests with business before the state. Among the donors to the group in 2006 were cigarette makers Philip Morris and U.S. Tobacco.
    Several other corporate interests have contributed larger sums, but Furutani's campaign chose to single out the tobacco companies because of their unpopularity with voters.
    Gipson has not directly received any money from tobacco companies, and says he has had no contact with the independent expenditure group.
    CHARGE: "Smokey" Furutani is taking money from interests that don't want tougher penalties for selling tobacco to minors.
    FACTS: The mailer claims that Furutani received $2,500 from "CIGCS PAC," leaving the impression that the group represents tobacco companies. CIGCS stands for California Independent Grocers and Convenience Stores.
    In 2004, the organization lobbied against SB 433, which would have toughened penalties against retailers that sell tobacco to minors. The California Grocers Association, which has given Gipson $1,000, also opposed the bill.
    Furutani has not taken money from tobacco companies.
    CHARGE: Furutani fired 800 teachers while on the LAUSD board.
    FACTS: The board voted to eliminate 889 nontenured teaching positions in August 1991. The district was also forced to cut salaries and increase class sizes to fill a $274 million budget gap, due to a recession and drastic cuts in state funding. The board also slashed administrative costs.
    CHARGE: Oil company polluters are backing Gipson.
    FACTS: Gipson has received $3,600 from Sempra Energy, $1,000 from Chevron and $1,000 from ConocoPhillips.
    The mailer also accuses Gipson of taking thousands of dollars from construction and insurance companies. Gipson received $2,500 from the California Building Industry Association, $1,000 from Coast to Coast Construction in Hacienda Heights, $1,500 from the Insurance Brokers and Agents PAC, $2,000 from Farmers Group, $3,600 from the Farmers Employees and Agents PAC and $500 from Allstate.
    CHARGE: Gipson was "like a madman" during a City Council meeting.
    FACTS: Gipson did stand up during a council meeting to confront Rick Pulido, an audience member. To say that he "tried to attack" Pulido, as Pulido claims in the mailer, is an exaggeration.
    Though the mailer suggests a pattern of immaturity on Gipson's part, Gipson is usually among the council's more polite and restrained members.
    CHARGE: Gipson makes dissension in Carson politics "much worse."
    FACTS: Carson politics are fractious, for which both sides deserve some blame. But to assert that Gipson makes the situation "much worse" is a distortion.
    The mailer charges that Gipson engaged in battles over Unity Day and an event to honor Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald. In both cases, Mayor Jim Dear probably bears greater responsibility by claiming the exclusive right to appoint committee members to organize the events, thereby introducing factional feuding to the matter.
    The mailer is on firmer ground when it accuses Gipson of delaying city business by holding up scores of appointments to city committees. But again, Dear holds some blame for reserving the exclusive right to appoint committee members.
    CHARGE: Furutani should be held accountable for the Belmont Learning Center fiasco.
    FACTS : Furutani did vote to acquire the land for the Belmont Learning Center in 1993, but the key decisions that inflated the cost of the project to $400 million were made after Furutani left the board, in 1995. Furutani was not in office when the board approved the project's flawed environmental report and its development agreement. District staffers, including the then-superintendent and the project manager, as well as the district's contract attorney, have generally taken the brunt of the blame - although a thorough review by the District Attorney's Office found no criminal wrongdoing.
    In a booklet mailed to voters, Gipson asserts that union representatives warned the board early on that the project was "not a good idea." But the union activists were initially motivated by opposition to the project developer - which owned a hotel that resisted organizing efforts - and not by environmental concerns. Environmental issues did not become paramount until the project was under construction in the late 1990s.
    Charge: Furutani spent $665 for a trip to Torrance.
    Facts: Furutani paid $665 for a meeting room and a hospitality suite at the Filipino Educators Conference in Torrance in 1990. The cost was reimbursed by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
    The mailer also cites a travel expense figure of $400,000, but does not explain that the sum was the total spent by the entire district - including administrators and lobbyists traveling to Sacramento - and not just the board.
    Charge: Furutani defended spending $400,000 in taxpayer money on a public relations firm.
    Facts: True. The Los Angeles Community College District paid Fleishman-Hillard $400,000 per year from 1999 to 2003 for marketing efforts, including arranging groundbreakings.

12/6/07 Sacramento Bee: Senate backs adding federal judgeship,
By David Whitney
    WASHINGTON The Senate approved legislation this week that would restore a temporary judgeship for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the Sacramento-based court whose per-judge workload is the heaviest in the country.
    The action came Tuesday with the unanimous approval of legislation sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. California 's two Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, were co-sponsors.
    Temporary judgeships are lifetime positions filled by the normal process of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation. But unless the temporary judgeship is extended, after 10 years the next vacancy that occurs on the court goes unfilled. 
    That's what happened in Sacramento . A temporary judgeship was created in 1992 and filled by Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. But the position was not extended, and when Judge William Shubb went on senior status in November 2004, his spot went unfilled. Then a vacancy was created in June when Judge David Levi resigned to become dean of the Duke Law School in Durham , N.C.
    Sacramento Superior Court Judge John Mendez was nominated in September by President Bush but has not been confirmed yet by the Senate. The result is that the Sacramento court has dropped from seven full-time judges in 2004, when it had the second-highest per-judge caseload, to five.
    "It is clear that the Eastern District of California needs our help to ensure that cases continue to be handled with the care, attention and promptness that are essential to the fair administration of justice," Feinstein, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a prepared statement.
    Feinstein said the workload in the Sacramento court had increased by 18 percent since 2004, while the average per-judge caseload nationally had declined. Last year the case filings in Sacramento hit 928 per judge, which Feinstein said is twice the national average.
    The legislation must go through the House, where Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Gold River , sits on the Judiciary Committee and Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, serves on the House Rules Committee.
    "I will work with the House Judiciary Committee and leadership to make sure that the judicial system can meet the needs of the people of Sacramento ," said Matsui.

12/3/07 Asian Week: "Jimmy Lee Running For Congress In Illinois 11th District,"
By: Reiny Cualoping
    Chicago, Ill. Former White House official Jimmy Lee, 30, recently left his job as managing director of the Washington-based U.S. Asian Business Council to run for Congress in Illinois 11th District, a seat being vacated by Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL), who is retiring.
    Lee previously served as executive director of the White House Initiative for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Announcing his candidacy, Lee said his experience in community development, business and public policy would be essential in retaining the 11th District for Republicans.
    Lee believes in holding the line on federal spending, a strong national defense and pro-family issues. He is an active youth group leader for his church, and while living in D.C., Lee routinely flew to Chicago on Friday evenings to serve as a mentor and church youth counselor at the Chinese Christian Union Church. He recently took up residence in North Utica (LaSalle County, Illinois).
    As a conservative Christian, he said he identifies closely with many people in the 11th District, which encompasses small towns such as Joliet, Kankakee and others as far south as Bloomington-Normal. My positions on the issues are based on a foundation of strong family values and faith, Lee said in a Nov. 10 statement.
    The son of immigrants, Lee grew up in Chicago. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lee previously served as executive director of the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce and director of outreach for Jim Ryans Illinois gubernatorial campaign.
    Lee faces two opponents in the February Republican primary.

12/2/07 San Francisco Chronicle: Asian Americans flex political muscle in wider Bay Area,
by Vanessa Hua and Matthew B. Stannard
    The elderly Chinese American men in dark suits passed through ornate doors guarded by stone lions, then ambled into a soaring hall lined with flowers and history.
    Holding court inside was Harrison Lim, the outgoing president of the Chinese Six Companies, the San Francisco fraternal organization whose fetes regularly draw such political luminaries as Mayor Gavin Newsom and Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors. 
    As Lim did the meet-and-greet with a sea of representatives from Chinese family associations and service organizations, the white faces of Newsom and Peskin stood out, as did one glaring fact:
    In a city that is one-third Asian, the majority Chinese Americans, there are few prominent politicians of Chinese descent.
    Next year, the Chinese American population of San Francisco will mark the 160th anniversary of its presence in the city. Gone are the exclusionary laws that held the populace in check, the policies that curtailed Chinese immigration and citizenship. Gone is the official discrimination that kept many in the ghetto.
    Yet such progress has not translated into political power. No Chinese American has held the top office of mayor, and except for a few years in the late 1990s, they have never been proportionately represented in the city's top political body, the Board of Supervisors.
    "I was dying to be working on the election of a Chinese American mayor," said Rose Pak, the Chinatown wheeler-dealer who has spent decades grooming and supporting candidates for office. "But now I ... wonder if I'll see it."
    The longtime political frustration of Chinese Americans in San Francisco has been placed in sharp relief in recent months with the scandal-plagued first year of Chinese American Supervisor Ed Jew. Yet the political fate of Chinese Americans in San Francisco will not hinge on the Jew saga.
    Instead, the future could rest on what happens in the South Bay , where the Chinese American community's dramatic strides could make San Francisco a virtual backwater on the Chinese American political landscape: 
    Kris Wang, an immigrant from Taiwan , is mayor of Cupertino . Otto Lee, a Hong Kong native with a degree in chemical and nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley and a law degree from UC Hastings, holds the top elected office in Sunnyvale . San Jose 's Kansen Chu, who hails from Taiwan , is the city's first Chinese American councilman. Evan Low is the first Chinese American elected to the Campbell City Council.
    "The South Bay - in particular Santa Clara County and the Silicon Valley area - is really kind of leading the charge for Asian American political incorporation in the continental United States," said James Lai, associate professor of political science and ethnic studies at Santa Clara University.
    A new generation of Chinese Americans in San Francisco hopes to grasp the gold ring, but it won't be easy. In San Francisco , Lai says, Asian Americans are "one of many in line, and not necessarily first in line."
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    In 1973, Mayor Joseph Alioto appointed George Chinn as the first Chinese American on San Francisco 's Board of Supervisors. In 1977, Gordon Lau was appointed and eventually elected.
    "Non-Chinese perpetuate the myth that Chinese can and should take care of their own problems, that nothing is wrong in Chinatown ," Lau told The Chronicle in 1969. "And I want to dispel that myth, which results in lack of responsiveness from government agencies and officials. I want to start people talking, not only about what is wrong, but about what can be done."
    Tom Hsieh Sr. - San Francisco 's third Chinese American supervisor - was appointed in 1986 and was re-elected twice. A successful architect, Hsieh realized he needed to get involved in politics or neither he, his family nor his community would advance further. It seemed then that Hsieh would be followed by politicians like him: professional, educated, politically aware Chinese Americans.
    It didn't happen.
    In 1991, the fiscally conservative Hsieh ran for mayor and got about 10 percent of the vote - the most any Chinese American candidate has received before or since. But Hsieh ran into the Chinatown conundrums that perplex Chinese American politicians to this day, such as the far greater willingness among Chinese Americans to donate money than to vote.
    The result: Chinese Americans lacked the ballot-box power to push their own into office or even attract the interest of mainstream politicians outside of fund raising.
    The consequences of lacking political power were clear after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the Embarcadero Freeway. City leaders proposed replacing it with a sunken expressway. Hundreds of Chinatown merchants went on strike and closed shops for three hours to attend a Board of Supervisors hearing on the proposed demolition, saying that business would be hurt without the important transportation link. But the city moved ahead with its plans.
    In the late 1990s, some observers heralded a new era of Chinese American power in San Francisco when Chinese American property and business owners successfully demanded a rebuilding of the Central Freeway. About the same time, three Asian Americans - Mabel Teng, Leland Yee and Michael Yaki - joined the Board of Supervisors, the first time the populace was proportionately represented on the board.
    It lasted less than five years.
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    At the dawn of the 21st century, as Chinese Americans' brief experience with proportionate representation was coming to an end in San Francisco , a new generation to the south was finding success - on a startling scale.
    In 1980, Kris Wang borrowed $1,000 from a friend and spent $700 on a plane ticket from Taiwan to San Francisco . But where previous generations of immigrants might have arrived with few connections and gravitated to Chinatown with the help of the Six Companies, Wang arrived with family on the East Coast and friends in Campbell who let her stay and stretch her remaining $300 long enough to get a job at a San Jose firm.
    Where a previous generation's story might have ended with finding a job, Wang's was just beginning. In the years that followed, she earned her MBA, got married, had kids, moved to Cupertino for its good schools - and discovered an opportunity in a city in which Apple Computer was within sight of many Chinese shops.
    While volunteering at Cupertino 's schools, Wang came to the attention of then-Mayor Michael Chang - the city's first Asian American mayor, elected in 1999 - who suggested she attend Leadership Community, a city program that introduces people to volunteer and public service opportunities. 
    Suddenly, Wang was parks and recreation commissioner, a position she held until 2003, when Chang left office.
    "A lot of people came to me and said, 'Are you ready? We want you to serve, want you to run,'" Wang recalled. At first, Wang was uncertain. It was a comment from her youngest son, she said, that made up her mind.
    "He said, 'Mom, I want to ask you a question,' " she recalled. " 'Tell me, if you get elected, do you think because you're a Chinese American, you'll be an advocate for Chinese Americans? Or are you serving the whole community?'
    "I said, 'Of course, the whole community.' "
    "He said, 'Go, mom. Then you go.' "
    Wang ran for re-election last month and won.
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    Ask why Chinese Americans in San Francisco have not seen their numbers translate into political power as in the South Bay , and you will get dozens of responses. Chinese American leaders, academics and observers are far from agreement on the reason - or even on whether it's a problem. 
    Some say the differences between the two regions come down to simple demographics: The immigrants moving to San Francisco for much of the past century were limited to working-class jobs, with limited education, limited English and little interest in politics. 
    Those arriving in the 1980s - many of whom, like Wang, immediately headed south - often came to advance their educations and arrived with degrees and experience in politics and opening markets. They were joined by American-born Chinese who had left San Francisco after benefiting from the social reforms of the 1960s, which helped them gain better housing, better jobs, better incomes and educations.
    Chinatown remained a jumping-off point for newcomers, offering cheap housing and a multitude of Chinese groceries, shops and social services within walking distance. But cities such as Cupertino , Sunnyvale and Foster City had their own large Asian American populations. 
    These populations were different from San Francisco 's: better educated, less likely to be linguistically isolated, and wealthier - and more likely to vote or run for office. San Francisco 's Chinese Americans, in turn, became poorer, older and less educated - and still disinclined to vote.
    Some say demographic differences don't tell the whole story. At the heart of it, they contend, is the lingering connection that many Chinese Americans, particularly in San Francisco 's Chinatown , feel to their homelands.
    "We have several factions," said Hsieh, the former San Francisco supervisor. "One is for mainland China . One is for Taiwan . One is for Hong Kong . And they don't really have that much in common."
    The walls of Chinese Six Companies at 843 Stockton St. still bear framed calligraphy by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. When new leaders are installed at the Six Companies, everyone sings along to a tinny recording of the national anthems of the United States and of Taiwan , in accordance with the group's long allegiance to that government. 
    Today, governments of Taiwan and China still court local Chinese leaders, showering titles and preferential treatment to win them over. A stroll down Stockton Street , the main drag of Chinatown in San Francisco , reveals competing loyalties: the red flag and yellow stars of China and the white sun in a blue square against a red flag of Taiwan .
    "There's still albatrosses around our necks that we haven't even moved in the last 50 years after the Cold War. Chinese politics! China politics!" roared Pak. "It still comes down to pro-China, anti-China. Still."
    But in Cupertino , Wang sees the China-Taiwan split as largely irrelevant: "I think we're all the same citizens, whether you're from China , from Taiwan , from Hong Kong , or if you're African American. I always disagreed with the saying that you have a number percentage of Asian Americans, the representation should also match the number percentage. It should all come natural."
    Some San Francisco leaders bemoan the lack of an infrastructure that could groom and support up-and-comers, such as the traditional role churches play in many African American communities.
    In theory, it is a role that could be played by Six Companies. But a number of observers, including some within the organization, say it doesn't deliver in those terms and instead eschews much mainstream political debate.
    "The immigration bill. How come they never discuss anything about that?" said Thomas Ng, a Six Companies board member.
    On top of that is the structure of the Six Companies, in which a complex formula designed to balance power among the main family groups requires a new presiding president every two months.
    "How can you represent a community still using the Qing dynasty mentality on the bylaws? They may not like me saying it, but that's the reality," said Bok Pon, the commander of the Chinatown post of the American Legion. "Those associations have become social clubs. It's not actually doing anything for the community."
    On the surface, the association seems important. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma recently dropped by the Six Companies board meeting to tout her legislative agenda, and the turnover of the president attracts local politicos every two months.
    But skeptics say the real reason the politicos come is for coverage in the Chinese-language press.
    "Maybe 20 years ago, the Chinese Six Companies was very powerful," said Lim, a longtime member. "If the Chinese Six Companies said yes, everybody would support. But now, no. Still has influence, but not as strong."
    By contrast, Lai said, several South Bay communities have organized efforts to nurture future Asian American leaders, such as DeAnza College 's Asian Pacific American Leadership Institute.
    "Take a look at the Web sites for all these cities and look at the commissions," Lai said. "You'll see Asian Americans serving in key positions."
    That doesn't mean there are no political contenders in San Francisco today - Eric Mar, a San Francisco school board member and Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State , recently filed to run for supervisor, and Claudine Cheng, president of the Treasure Island Development Authority, also is considering a bid.
    But Chinese American candidates face a fundamental challenge: They must try to appeal both to their conservative communities and to the city's progressive majority.
    That presents a hurdle to leftists like Mar, who some analysts say might attract Chinese American votes on the basis of his ethnicity, but may not be able to be re-elected, because of his politics.
    "If you stay as conservative as I was, you know you're wasting your time," Hsieh said. "You have to be 40 percent on the conservative side, say, and 60 percent on the progressive side. You have to understand that you are not running for office to serve one community. You really want to serve the city as a whole, and with an emphasis and reminder that you are from that community and you want to give them very special attention."
    South Bay Chinese Americans have learned that lesson, Lai argued, and with it has come power.
    "They're really giving back to the community, and their interests are just like everybody else's," he said. "That's why you see people like Kris Wang being able to cross over, and that has always been the key to success for Asian American candidates."
    To some observers, the obstacles for San Francisco 's Chinese American candidates seem insurmountable. Some suggest that the city's Chinese Americans should focus on issues important to them instead of tilting at windmills with their candidates.
    But others see hope in a new generation of immigrants with its own unique experience that may change the political face of San Francisco yet again.
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    When they called his name, the man stood and made his way to the front of the packed, stuffy auditorium of San Francisco 's Gordon J. Lau Elementary School. He was short and slight, his face youthful beneath the brim of a small, olive-gray cap. "My name is Zheng Zhao Xin," he said. "I'm also a new immigrant. I'm a student at City College in Chinatown ."
    Seated before Zheng were the members of the college's Board of Trustees, which was hearing comments on plans to rebuild its rundown Chinatown campus with a $122 million, 16-story building, one of several proposals.
    Most of the hundreds in the boisterous audience were Chinese Americans in favor of the plan. The handful of mostly white opponents worried about parking and called for a shorter building.
    Zheng spoke in Cantonese, but his words were quiet and firm, and he waited patiently as a translator interpreted his comments. "Immigrants such as myself, Asian born, who want to get into the mainstream society of the United States , we need to receive a quality education, not only in English but also to receive job skills and other skills," he said. "So I urge the board as the decision maker ... you should listen to the voices and the opinions of the community."
    Zheng sat down to applause. It was the second public meeting he had ever attended. He had been in the United States for six months. 
    Zheng came of age as China developed rapidly - and with wealth came more mobility, a wider perspective and greater openness. He was learning English at City College when he heard about opposition to the proposed new campus. If he didn't get involved and participate, the building might never be built, he thought. He was nervous about speaking in public and questioned whether marching or demonstrating was illegal or might cause him to be deported. 
    This fall, Zheng helped mobilize students at City College in support of the campus - perhaps the first step in a budding political career. The night he spoke at the hearing, Chinatown elder Harrison Lim also was in attendance. The Six Companies leader has strived to make this an issue for the organization to rally around. The men represent the past and future Chinese America.
    In China , "what they think is, well, we are just ordinary people. Even if you do something, it may not change anything at all. So why bother to do it?" Zheng said. "In the society I live in now, I think if you think this is right, and you try to do something, there is a chance you may get things done."
    Zheng's diligence paid off: The City College trustees approved the new campus on Oct. 18. And Zheng was elected to the student council.

11/22/07 Dallas Morning News: Key Asian-Americans deserve thanks,
by Esther Wu
    Today is the traditional day to give thanks for the bounty after the harvest season. 
    This Thanksgiving, I have much to be thankful for a loving family, a network of supportive friends, my faith and my health. 
    But while visiting with John Tateshi in Dallas recently, I was reminded that I might not be here today had it not been for the contributions and personal sacrifices of some very special Asian-Americans. 
    So this year I am also giving thanks to these folks who have helped further the cause of Asian-American civil rights. They are helping to preserve the fundamental foundation upon which this nation was built. 
    Among them: 
    John Tateishi, former executive director of the national Japanese American Citizens League based in San Francisco and author of And Justice for All. 
    After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor , President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which called for the internment of people of Japanese descent. More than 120,000 men, women, children and seniors were relocated to desolate camps surrounded by barbed-wire fences and armed guards. 
    After the war, the internees were told to go home, but they had been stripped of their property, money and, for many, their self-esteem. In 1978, Mr. Tateishi spearheaded a national campaign to seek redress for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. In 1988, each surviving victim of the internment camps received reparation in the amount of $20,000 and letters of apology from Congress and the president. 
    Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873. His parents were Chinese immigrants who eventually returned to China , leaving their son behind. However, in 1890, after Mr. Wong traveled to China to visit his parents, he was denied re-entry to the U.S. The court argued that Mr. Wong was born to immigrant parents and therefore a subject of the emperor of China . However, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling, citing the Fourteenth Amendment which states "all persons born or naturalized in the United States , and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States ." This landmark case set an important legal precedent about what determines American citizenship. 
    Dalip Singh Saund, the first South Asian and Sikh to serve as a member of Congress, who represented the 29th district of California from 1957 to 1963. Born in Punjab , India , Mr. Saund immigrated to the U.S. to study. Though he earned a doctorate in mathematics, Mr. Saund could not get a job in his field, so he turned to farming. He worked to stem the prevailing anti-Asian sentiments by petitioning the government to allow South Asians to become naturalized citizens. 
    After the Luce-Celler Act was passed in 1946, Mr. Saund finally became a U.S. citizen. In 1950, he was elected justice of the peace in Westmoreland Township in California but was blocked from office because he had been a citizen for less than a year. Undaunted, Mr. Saund later ran for and won the same post. In 1957, he became a member of the U.S. House, a post he was re-elected to twice. 
    Fred Korematsu and Dale Minami two men who shared the same passion for justice. Mr. Korematsu, a law-abiding citizen in his 20s, refused to report to the internment camps during World War II. He simply saw this as a violation of his constitutional rights and refused go. 
    He was arrested, convicted of violating a federal order and sentenced to five years' probation. He was incarcerated at Topaz, an internment camp in Utah . Mr. Korematsu lost an appeal in 1944. But in 1980, an attorney named Peter Irons who was researching a book about the internment stumbled across information proving that the government had suppressed evidence in the Korematsu case. 
    In 1982 a team of lawyers headed by Mr. Minami took on the case pro bono. Two years later, a federal district court overturned Mr. Korematsu's conviction ending his 40-year battle for justice. Mr. Korematsu died in 2005, but not before President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. 
    This landmark case was just the beginning for Mr. Minami, who has gained a reputation for championing civil rights not only for Asian-Pacific Americans but all Americans. Among his more famous cases: United Filipinos for Affirmative Action vs. California Blue Shield, the first employment class-action lawsuit brought by Asian-Pacific Americans on behalf of Asian-Pacific Americans; Spokane JACL vs. Washington State University, a class-action to establish an Asian-American studies program at that school; Nakanishi vs. UCLA, which involved a claim for unfair denial of tenure that resulted in the granting of tenure after several hearings and widespread publicity over discrimination in academia. 
    Helen Zia and Vincent Chin, two people who pushed the issue of Asian-American civil rights before the public. In 1982, while celebrating his upcoming marriage in a Detroit bar, Mr. Chin was mistaken for Japanese by two men who blamed Japan for the failing auto industry. 
    A shouting match ensued and Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler plant superintendent and his stepson, Michael Nitz, followed Mr. Chin outside and chased him into a parking lot where they beat him to death with baseball bat. The men were sentenced to three years' probation and fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. 
    Helen Zia, a Princeton graduate who had quit medical school in 1974 and moved to Detroit to work as a laborer and later as a journalist, covered the case. She was so moved by the case, she began working with Asian-Americans to organize protest rallies and town hall meetings. 
    Vincent Chin's death was one of the few times Asian-Americans were united for a common cause. Ms. Zia is a Fulbright scholar, studying in China . A former executive editor of Ms. magazine, she is the author of The Emergence of an American People and co-wrote My Country Versus Me with Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for the People's Republic of China .

11/21/07 Philippine News: Rising Harassment of Asian American Students,
     San Francisco -- Civil rights advocates representing broad sectors of communities gathered at the downtown offices of the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) recently to call attention to the rising incidence of bias-related harassment of Asian Pacific American youth in California s public schools.
    Race, ethnicity, religion, disability, and sexual orientation were cited as the most common factors that instigate harassment, ridicule, and threat of violence in the schools.
    Angela Chan, ALC staff attorney, said she continues to receive a steady stream of complaints from APA students regarding harassment and violence perpetrated against them by other students or even employees. 
    Other minority groups are not spared either.
    Senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Tamara Lange, reported that in the last six weeks alone prior to the San Francisco press conference, her group reached a settlement with an elementary school system in Bishop, where Native American children were being harassed and assaulted by a school resource officer.
    Chan said the alarming trend continues despite state laws to protect students that went into effect seven years ago. 
    In 2000, the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act, AB 537, was implemented to prohibit discriminatory harassment and violence in schools.
    More recently, California Assembly member Lloyd Levine authored the Safe Place to Learn Act (AB 394) requiring the states education department to play an active role in ensuring full and proper implementation of existing anti-discrimination laws that apply to schools.
    This problem of school harassment will not go away without leadership by the Department of Education, Lange insisted. We look forward to the implementation of AB 394 and urge the Department to do more than the bare minimum required by this new law to ensure that all of our children know that they are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect. 
    Chan told Philippine News during the open forum While California may seem ahead of other states in the institution of anti-harassment laws and policies, it lags behind in implementation and compliance.
    Nevertheless, she added, the findings from a recent study ALC conducted have shown that many school districts do not even have anti-harassment policies in place. 
    The survey, conducted just last spring, found that 31 percent of the 75 California school districts surveyed did not have any anti-harassment and anti-violence policies in place. 
    Another recent study done by the California Safe Schools Coalition indicated many students and parents are unaware of nondiscrimination policies, with 23 percent of students and 29 percent of parents not being informed of the policies.
    Civil rights organizations, therefore, are advocating the prompt and effective implementation of local and state initiatives, more so in the light of recent incidents of harassment in schools.
    Lance Chih, a recent graduate of Folsom High School, recounted his experience as the victim of hate crimes at his school. Three years ago, I experienced a series of hate crimes for being gay, starting with a death threat, moving on to a physical attack, and ending with sexual harassment in front of a teacher by two male students, he narrated.
    Reports of Muslim American students being harassed by both students and school employees are also becoming more frequent, according to Mahrukh Hasan, civil rights coordinator for the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). 
    In one recent case handled by CAIR and the ALC, a school employee in Monterey repeatedly demanded that a 13-year-old girl remove her hijab, a headscarf she wore for religious reasons, in front of a cafeteria full of students, Hasan recalled.
    At the local level, Jen Gasang, coordinator for the Asian Pacific Islander Youth Advocacy Network announced the launch of a new system for reporting incidents anonymously in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). 
    Gasang said, The Safe School Line aims to make our school community safer by providing three ways for students and parents to anonymously report to the District incidents of harassment, violence, and intimidation via e-mail at safeschool@sfusd.edu, telephone at (415) 241-2141, and online at www.sfusd.edu.
    Christina Wong, director of community initiatives at the Chinese for Affirmative Action, also discussed a project called the Culturally Responsive Initiative that will obtain funding and develop training for teachers in SFUSD to prevent bias-related harassment. 

11/20/07 Los Angeles Times: English-only workplace rules spur debate The House and Senate disagree on a law that bars employers from firing people who don't speak English on the job.
    Washington -- A government lawsuit against the Salvation Army has the House and Senate at loggerheads over whether to nullify a law that prohibits employers from firing people who don't speak English on the job.

11/20/07 New York Post editorial: End the Race Games, 
    Parents of three Asian middle-school students yesterday filed suit in fed eral court, charging that their children had been unconstitutionally barred on the basis of race from a city-run program designed to prepare students for the entrance exams of New York 's elite public high schools. 
    We wish them well. 
    The program, the Specialized High School Institute, was created in 1995 to help talented but underprivileged students compete for coveted spots in schools like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant. 
    Nothing wrong with that, of course: Back in the day, such exams - which the program's students still had to pass - were the last bastion of challenging standards in the system, and the quality education they unlocked was the fastest ticket out of poverty. 
    The problem was in how you qualified for the test-prep program. 
    The Department of Education says that all students eligible for a free or reduced-price school lunch got priority spots. But so, too, did students from the right "underrepresented" minority groups - mainly, blacks and Hispanics - irrespective of economic circumstances. 
    Inexcusable racial discrimination, says lead plaintiff Stanley Ng. 
    Adding to the injustice, the plaintiffs' counsel has unearthed a 2007 district memo instructing principals to give program applications only to students of designated ethnicities - in other words, not to give them to poor whites or Asians. 
    The DOE insists that the memo doesn't reflect city policy, but that - thanks to a recent anti-quota Supreme Court ruling - it is reviewing the program's acceptance guidelines before next year's cohort starts applying. 
    It would do well to scrap the racial qualifications entirely. 
    The entire spirit of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's laudable reforms, after all, is that improving education for the worst-off students requires standards and accountability across the board. 
    Nothing could be more inimical - or damaging - to that spirit than treating students differently entirely on the basis of race. 
    The preferences need to go.

11/19/07 New York Post: In 'Wrong' Minority
by Chuck Bennett 
    Three Chinese parents in Brooklyn are expected to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a popular city-run tutoring program on the grounds it discriminates against Asians, The Post has learned. 
    The Specialized High School Institute preps gifted but "underrepresented" minorities to ace the competitive exam to get into top city high schools like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech. 
    But the parents say it is unfair - and illegal - for the Department of Education to limit eligibility to blacks and Latinos. 
    "The program only selects certain kinds of minorities and unfortunately my daughter didn't fall into that category," said Peggy Foo-Ching, 47, a mom from Bensonhurst who said her 12-year-old daughter's application last year was ignored. 
    The Specialized High School Institute was created to expand the population of black and Latino students at the elite high schools, but the Department of Education has always insisted anyone who qualifies for a free lunch could apply. 
    Foo-Ching's eldest daughter qualified for the institute in 2003 and is now a student at Brooklyn Tech, but the mother believes guidelines were changed barring her younger daughter from participating last March. 
    A Department of Education internal memo obtained by lawyers trying the case indicated that eligibility criteria excludes whites and Asians. 
    "What this memo reveals is blatant and categorical discrimination by race. If you are white or Asian, you're not supposed to get an application," said Christopher Hajec, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative advocacy group. 
    "It's not the business of the government of New York City to be counting up the Asians or whites in, say, Stuyvesant High School and concluding there are too many of them." 
    Andrew Jacob, a Department of Education spokesman, said the racial criteria has been under review since summer, when a US Supreme Court ruling said ethnicity could not be a factor in deciding which public schools students attend. 
    He could not comment on the suit, but said no policy will be changed before March, when the next group of sixth-graders will be invited to apply to the program. 
    The father who initiated the suit, Stanley Ng, said he understood how controversial his challenge may be viewed. 
    "It's not something that I take lightly," he said. "There are many Asian and white kids in this district who can't pay for tutoring. What is their recourse?"

11/19/07 News release: Center for Individual Rights sues to stop NYC schools race discrimination: Test prep program excludes Asian, white students
Contact: Terry Pell or Chris Hajec 202-833-8400, x113/109
pell at cir-usa dot org or hajec at cir-usa dot org
    Washington , D.C. : -- The Center for Individual Rights filed a class action lawsuit today against the New York City Department of Education challenging the Departments policy of excluding Asian American and white students from a test preparation course because of their race. CIR is representing three Chinese American parents in Districts 20 and 21 (Brooklyn) whose children were denied admission to the Citys Specialized High School Institute, a fifteen-month course designed to prepare students to take the admissions exam for such elite New York schools as Manhattans Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Technical High School, and the Bronx High School of Science.
    The lawsuit seeks to open the course to students regardless of race and seeks monetary damages for hundreds of white and Asian students who were forced to pay as much as $2,000 for a private test preparation course as a result of the Citys illegal racial exclusion.
    CIR is a public interest law firm that has challenged other unconstitutional racial preferences in schools and colleges. Most recently it successfully challenged a minorities-only summer journalism workshop jointly sponsored by the Dow Jones News Foundation and Virginia Commonwealth University . As in the Dow Jones program, the Department has a policy of restricting its test preparation program to students of certain races.
    White and Asian students are prevented from even applying to the program. One parent, Stanley Ng (pron. Ing) was denied an application by his daughters junior high school guidance counselor. When Ng contacted the Office of Teaching and Learning in November 2006, an official told him the program was not open to white or Asian applicants.
    Together with Ng, CIR is representing two other Chinese American parents, Margaret Ching and Dennis Chen, both of whom have children who were prevented from participating in the examination prep course because of their race. In addition, CIR is representing a parents organization called Parents Against Discrimination, which Mr. Ng formed, consisting of parents of white or Asian children who hope to participate in the preparatory course once it is opened to students regardless of race.
    CIR President Terry Pell said, The day is past when school officials can automatically exclude students from desirable programs solely because of the color of their skin. The Supreme Court has made it clear that school officials may never mechanically exclude students from any program because of one feature and one feature only, namely their race.
    http://www.cir-usa.org/releases/95.html

 

10/26/07 Wall Street Journal: Bayou Bobby,
by Rod Dreher
Mr. Dreher is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News.
    Alas for me, I didn't get to cast a vote for Bobby Jindal, the winner of last weekend's Louisiana governor's race. It's been 15 years since I left the Bayou.
    The last time I voted in a gubernatorial contest there, it felt less like a civic duty than an occasion of sin. I pulled the lever for Democrat Edwin W. Edwards -- instead of my fellow Republican, David Duke -- following the instruction of the bumper sticker on my car: "Vote for the Crook. It's Important."
    That evening, I went to a party in Baton Rouge , attached myself to a keg of Budweiser and talked long into the night about how, four years after electing the supposedly reform-minded governor Buddy Roemer, it had come to this. I was only two years out of LSU and, like just about everybody I knew then, wanted to move away. What future did any of us have in a state where the choice was either a blow-dried Ku Klucker or an oleaginous Cajun kleptocrat? (As the joke had it, the Wizard or the Lizard?)
    I soon left for Washington , D.C. , a new job and a new life. Many years later, in an online discussion about the fate of the state, I read that a well-known New Orleans journalist, having lost hope in his family's future there, stood in the middle of his newsroom to announce his resignation. He said that he loved the city dearly but couldn't raise his children in a town that cherished parades more than libraries. Framed that way, you can understand why so many Louisianians choose to expatriate, but never quite get over leaving.
    Louisiana has been at or near the bottom of "quality of life" lists for so long that you start to believe that there's something genetically wrong with its residents. For 15 out of the past 17 years, Louisiana has been either America 's Least Livable State or runner-up in the annual Morgan Quitno research firm's comprehensive rankings, which combine educational, economic, health, environmental and crime statistics. No wonder Louisiana has for at least two decades experienced a steady out-migration of young professionals.
    You notice something, though, when Louisianians meet in exile. Everybody misses home and will take any opportunity to talk about it. Our friends -- Yankees, mostly -- get the biggest kick out of our honest-to-God tales of Bayou State life (political and otherwise). My wife, a native Texan, confessed that when we first started dating, she thought my stories about my homeland revealed me to be a pathological liar -- until I took her there to see for herself. She visited my Uncle Murphy's grave and saw the headstone he'd won playing bourr (a Cajun card game) with an undertaker. He had it inscribed with the epitaph: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."
    Louisiana makes a lot more sense if you read the beloved picaresque "A Confederacy of Dunces" as an exercise in literary naturalism. There's simply no place like Louisiana . You will not find more generous and life-loving people anywhere, and Lord knows, you won't eat or drink better. It's hard to get over that. But you do, mostly. Last Sunday, I ran into a couple I know at a Krispy Kreme shop here in Dallas . We got to talking about the Jindal victory, and the wife, a non-native who had fallen in love with Louisiana as a Tulane student, said warmly that she'd love to move back. The husband gave her a look that telegraphed, "Yes, we all would, dear, but come on."
    Despite all the sentimental longing for LSU Tigers tailgating and the scent of Zatarain's crawfish boil on your fingers, moving home rarely crosses the minds of us expatriates. Louisiana is a great place to be from, but the sense of fatalism that pervades life there casts doubt on whether it will some day be great place to be. In Louisiana , to be educated is to love the state and hate the state -- and, for many, to leave it.
    Here's the thing about Bobby Jindal: He didn't leave for good. He came home. With his Ivy League and Oxbridge education and his startling smarts, he could have gone anywhere and nobody back home would have blamed him. In fact, he is the epitome of the kind of Louisianian who emigrates to Dallas , Atlanta and points beyond -- driving around with an LSU sticker on his bumper.
    But he didn't. The guy actually seemed to think he could make a difference in Louisiana . He got involved in government at age 24 and stuck with it. He ran for governor in 2003 and lost to Democrat Kathleen Blanco. When the Katrina hurricane aftermath destroyed Ms. Blanco's career, Mr. Jindal's loss came to look like a blessing in disguise. Anyway, after what Katrina revealed about the chronic dysfunction of the state, how crazy would a politician have to be to think he could straighten out a place like that?
    Well, now we know. This unlikeliest of all Deep South politicians, a squeaky-clean Gen-X son of Indian immigrants, a policy wonk and Catholic convert who, as a child, adopted a nickname from a "Brady Bunch" character, just got himself elected. In his victory speech, Mr. Jindal exhorted a jubilant crowd of supporters: "I'm asking you to once again believe in Louisiana ." That's asking a lot.
    As it happened, the night Mr. Jindal won I was having dinner in Henry County, Ky., with the farmer and agrarian poet Wendell Berry and a group of his conservative admirers. Earlier in the day, we'd heard Mr. Berry talk about how we Americans educate our children today for outgoing, not homecoming, and what a shame that is. We'd been talking about what kind of country we'd have if folks decided to stay home and learn to love their little place.
    That night, my father woke me up phoning from St. Francisville , La. . "Jindal won tonight!" he said, tickled to death. So did the Tigers, but I don't think he even mentioned football.
    I haven't lived in Louisiana in a long time, but this election makes me proud and hopeful -- two emotions unfamiliar to exiled Bayou Staters. And the promise of Mr. Jindal's leadership makes me wonder, for the first time since I packed up the U-Haul and drove off, if maybe I -- and now, my children -- have a future in Louisiana .
    Yes, I know, reform-minded governors (and their supporters) always come to grief in our wizardy, lizardy banana republic. Yes, I'm fully aware that Louisiana is bound to break your heart. And yes, I live happily in Texas . But you know what? My governor is a Hindu Catholic Republican, and I think he's going to write the next great Louisiana story. Maybe just this once, it's not going to be a farce.

10/24/07 Washington Post: EEOC Turns Attention to Asian American Workers,
Federal Diary by Stephen Barr
    Concerned that federal agencies are not paying adequate attention to their Asian American employees, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has set up a working group to study how they are treated and promoted across the government. 
    The group will try to pull together a report by next year that examines allegations of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who work in the federal government, how they are treated when it comes to promotions and whether they are reluctant to file discrimination complaints. 
    "Our work will begin with testing perceptions and gathering the realities Asian Pacific Americans face in the federal workplace," Naomi C. Earp, chairman of the EEOC, said. 
    Of the 2.6 million employees in the federal sector, 5.9 percent are Asian Americans, according to data collected by the EEOC. The Office of Personnel Management has described the overall representation of Asian Americans in the federal workplace as generally satisfactory when measured against the broader national workforce. 
    But relatively few Asian Americans make it into the highest ranks of the government -- 146 out of 6,349 career members of the Senior Executive Service, according to a congressional audit released in May. 
    That raises the question of whether Asian Americans face a " 'bamboo ceiling,' " said Gazal Modhera, who will head the working group. 
    Modhera met yesterday with federal executives to roll out a survey to collect information from agencies on how they staff, finance and organize programs for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, compared with other minority groups. 
    She said the working group will use the survey to help gauge anecdotal accounts from Asian Americans. Some say they are being denied time off to attend conferences or to take advantage of training opportunities, Modhera said. Others have noted that their agencies do not sponsor activities or programs for them to the extent that they do for other groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics and gays. 
    The EEOC's survey will ask agencies to provide information on who manages diversity programs, which committees oversee diversity initiatives, what activities are sponsored and whether they have identified issues and problems that lead to an under-representation of Asian Americans in the government. 
    In addition to looking at possible workplace barriers encountered by Asian Americans, the EEOC also is interested in why this group appears reticent to file discrimination complaints against their agencies. 
    A survey by the Gallup Organization in 2005 found that 31 percent of Asian Americans thought they had been discriminated against, but EEOC records show that only 2 percent of Asian Americans file discrimination complaints, regardless of whether they work in the federal or the private sector. 
    Most of the federal Asian American complaints cited race or national origin as the basis for harassment or for the denial of promotions, EEOC records show.
     Members of the working group include Suzan Aramaki of the Commerce Department, Linda Bradford-Washington of the Housing and Urban Development Department, Sherrie Davis of the National Institutes of Health, Robert Jew of the National Archives and Records Administration, Farook Sait of the Agriculture Department, James Su of the Federal Asian Pacific American Council, and Sharon Wong of the Asian American Government Executives Network. All are leaders in civil rights, diversity management or equal employment opportunity at their agencies or groups. 
    "We want to break through and get to what are the issues," Modhera said.

10/24/07 Los Angeles Times: Ethnicity is no bar to Jindal's dream; Indian immigrants' son was readily elected Louisiana 's governor based on tireless work in what amounted to a four-year nonstop campaign,
by Miguel Bustillo
    Monroe , LA. -- When Bobby Jindal lost his first Louisiana governor's race four years ago, some experts told him that white people here were not ready to elect a dark-skinned son of Indian immigrants.
    On Tuesday, as he dashed across the state in a victory caravan after his historic Saturday landslide win, Louisiana 's Republican governor-elect had a message for his rural supporters: Thank you for proving the conventional political wisdom wrong.
    Jindal, 36 -- who will become the first Indian American governor of any state, the youngest current governor in the country, and the first nonwhite to lead Louisiana since Reconstruction -- refused to believe that his ethnicity was an obstacle to his political dreams.
    He essentially never stopped campaigning after his 2003 defeat to Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, an election in which he failed to win over many of the white rural voters who could have been expected to love his conservative positions.
    Jindal was convinced that if voters got to know him, they would see him as a fellow native son from Baton Rouge , not an exotic foreigner with an Ivy League degree.
    So he made more than 70 trips to northern Louisiana cities such as Shreveport , and the devout Catholic seemingly attended Sunday Mass at every small church in the state, even after he was elected to represent suburban New Orleans in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004.
    "In these small Louisiana towns, retail politics is very important," Jindal said in an interview from his tour bus as he rode to the town of Natchitoches . He always believed Blanco beat him simply because she was better known. "I don't think there's any substitute for staring someone in the eye and listening," he said.
    Jindal's tireless tours, especially in the conservative northern parishes considered key to his earlier defeat, impressed seasoned political observers, who said that by the time his rivals entered this year's race, Jindal's hard-earned backing in the rural strongholdwas insurmountable.
    "I have never seen anyone work so hard," said Bernie Pinsonat, a Louisiana pollster and political consultant. "I had a local legislator tell me that he had to go to church more often, because Jindal had been to his church more times than he had."
    Jindal wound up winning all but four of Louisiana 's 64 parishes -- nearly the entire state except New Orleans . It was an embarrassing defeat for Democrats, who were unable even to force Jindal into a runoff.
    Under Louisiana 's open primary rules, a candidate who can secure more than half the total vote wins outright. Jindal got 54% despite competing against 11 other candidates.
    Blanco opted not to seek reelection this year after her response to Hurricane Katrina drew widespread criticism, and no prominent Democrat stepped in to challenge Jindal. The Democrats' strongest candidate Saturday, State Sen. Walter J. Boasso, was a former Republican who switched parties just before the race.
    Though Democrats hold a 2-1 edge in voter registration in Louisiana , recent statewide elections -- such as GOP Sen. David Vitter's commanding 2004 victory, also during an open primary -- have demonstrated a clear tilt to the right.
    Piyush "Bobby" Jindal's meteoric rise through the Republican Party ranks is already legend in Louisiana , as is his personal version of the American dream.
    His parents moved to Baton Rouge from India shortly before he was born so that his mother could study nuclear physics at Louisiana State University . His father is a civil engineer.
    At age 4, Jindal asked his teacher to refer to him henceforth as Bobby, after a character from "The Brady Bunch." His parents worried that he was going through a phase. But they also obliged, and Jindal has been known as Bobby since. When he converted from Hinduism to Catholicism at age 18, he used Robert as his baptismal name.
    At 24, the Brown University- and Oxford -educated wunderkind was named head of the Louisiana Department of Heath and Hospitals by then-Gov. Mike Foster, placing him in charge of a $4-billion budget and 13,000 employees -- and on the political fast track.
    Yet he learned in 2003 that his sterling resume was not enough to get him elected governor in Louisiana -- and could even serve as a hindrance. Democrats ran ads criticizing the steep cuts Jindal had made as health chief, and questioning whether the Ivy Leaguer was in touch with common folk. The ads seemingly worked.
    After that defeat, Jindal launched a statewide charm offensive. Richard Hartley, a former school superintendent from near Monroe who said he helped connect Jindal with local church groups, said he saw the difference Jindal made by repeatedly showing up.
    "A lot of people didn't trust him" in 2003, said Hartley, 50. "I think it was a way for people to learn that, yes, he was an Indian American, but also as Louisianan as the day is long. It was never a question after that."
    Jindal will never be mistaken for Huey Long on the stump. Nor did his wooden campaign speeches in Alexandria , Shreveport and Monroe on Tuesday bring to mind the oratory of such charismatic characters as former Gov. Edwin Edwards.
    But when Jindal, wearing cowboy boots and a dark blazer, spoke about his desire to clean up Louisiana's corrupt image and bring competence to state government, the crowd cheered the policy wonk's every word.
    "I think people have finally gotten past that," Jerry Roshto, a 43-year-old machinist, said of Jindal's ethnicity. "I'm not looking at the past, and I don't think he is either. He has a chance to do something special."

10/22/07 Chung Seto Responds to L.A. Times
Dear Editor:
    I am, Chung Seto, the woman and key figure that Tom Hamburger referred to in his article about fundraising in New Yorks Chinatown (October 19, 2007).
    I am dismayed by his derogatory portrayal of my community and the unflattering characterizations that the motives of Chinatown residents to support a particular presidential candidate should be suspect.
    I am an Asian-American. I immigrated to America with my parents and grew up in the Chinatown community where I live today. I am the beneficiary of years of successful community activism by others who worked to assimilate new arrivals with translation services that enhanced the academic success of our children.
    Some of those activists were my mentors and their legacy is represented in a thousand successful stories about Chinatown sons and daughters, grandsons and grand daughters who have earned college degrees, work as professionals and contribute to society.
    This is the same legacy that over the years has integrated Chinatown into New York political life; a milestone whose significance is something that Mr. Hamburger certainly fails to grasp when he writes that my community is an unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton or any other political candidate.
    Our nations chinatowns have a history unknown to most Americans but they became enclaves for hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants during the nineteenth century. Poverty and the marginalization imposed by cultural and language differences are well known, which is why I spent more than an hour speaking with the reporter prior to the articles publication, describing at length my own community activism in Chinatown and my experience in Democratic politics. During the conversation, I questioned the reporters assertion that Asian American donors in Chinatown are unlikely suspects and unpromising targets because many of them work as dishwashers, cooks and waiters.
    His view would make us feel ashamed. My view is just the opposite.
    Maybe our apartment buildings arent as luxurious as the homes in zip code 90210, but my hard working neighbors contributed a record $6 billion in deposits in Chinatown s banks. (See NY Sun, 12 October, 2007).
    The conclusion in his story portrays a lack of understanding about my neighbors. Honest mistakes in fundraising happen for every candidate, but to attribute the political will of Asian-Americans to arm-twisting of unwitting donors is galling. The implication that my Chinatown neighbors are too poor and too ill-informed to make a choice on their own is demeaning. Mr. Hamburgers thesis reminds me, once again, that Asian-American immigrants remain an exotic curiosity in our adopted country. Because had he explored this subject honestly, he would have discovered that we are no more exotic than the Italians, Irish and others who filled the same tenement apartments a century ago.
    Rather than jump to conclusions, he would have found a community of competent not impotent residents. Had he taken the time to understand us, he would have learned how the sacrifices of dishwashers, waiters and cooks who pay tuitions resulting in Ivy League educations for their children can also contribute to the most important Presidential election in my lifetime.
Chung Seto

10/22/07 Asian Week: Is Hollywood Giving Asian Men More Love?
by Philip W. Chung
Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble
    I caught the second episode of NBCs revamped The Bionic Woman on Wednesday night, and Korean American actor Will Yun Lee plays Jae Kim, one bad ass mofo. He gets to kick ass, has an interesting back-story, is clearly an American character so no accent or other FOB characteristics and, rarest of all, gets to play a fully realized sexual being. 
    Kim pines for his ex-wife, played by blond Battlestar Galactica hottie Katee Sackhoff, who also happens to be the original evil bionic woman whom Kim had to kill. In the episode I saw, the two even got their own love scene.
    Just a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a character like this on prime-time network TV. But along with characters played by Daniel Dae Kim of Lost (to be joined this season by The Sopranos Ken Leung); B.D. Wong of Law & Order: SVU; Kal Penn of House; Masi Oka, Sendhil Ramamurthy and James Kyson Lee of Heroes, and even Rex Lee of HBOs Entourage, not only are there more Asian male faces, but also three-dimensional characters who are more than token window dressing. 
    Mainstream film may be slower in showing love to the brothers, but there are small signs of progress Kal Penn and John Cho will return next year in the Harold and Kumar sequel, and director Justin Lin seems determined to single-handedly change Hollywoods perception of Asian men with films like Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and his latest, Finishing the Game.
    But is there a genuine shift taking place, or is this just a blip that will soon be forgotten? 
    Two decades ago, a young Vietnamese American actor named Dustin Nguyen burst onto the scene playing an undercover detective on the TV series 21 Jump Street . Nguyens character was just one of the guys and got to catch the baddies alongside his fellow heartthrobs, including a young Johnny Depp. 
    That experience has made Nguyen sensitive to how Hollywood has portrayed APA males over the years. 
    Have things changed? Well, you cant ignore shows like Lost or Heroes that have a very intelligent treatment of Asian males, says Nguyen, who also stars in Finishing the Game. But I wonder how much improvement in terms of quality there has been for Asian American males. 
    Lets not forget that in the 1960s Hollywood gave a shot to men like James Shigeta, who played the romantic lead in films like The Crimson Kimono and Flower Drum Song, and George Takei on Star Trek. However, those turned out to be just temporary blips on the road to business-as-usual. 
    But there are reasons why we might look at our current situation with guarded optimism. 
    If a genuine shift for the positive does occur, I think future historians will look at both Lost and Heroes as watershed moments. Not only were both shows major hits and pop culture phenomena, but their Asian male characters have become memorable, break-out presences who have made an impact on all viewers. I doubt NBC would have allowed The Bionic Womans producers to make Lees character an Asian American male had they not seen the success of similar characters on those previous shows. If these characters and shows continue to succeed, you can bet that the powers that be will be more open to do the same. 
    On the film front, I know of at least a dozen Hollywood projects in development featuring prominent Asian or APA male characters in non-stereotypical roles.
    Whether these films ever get made and have an impact remains to be seen. But I think the best bets are our own Justin Lins. Just as Spike Lee almost single-handedly spawned a new wave of African American filmmakers and actors, all we need is that one guy to lead the way.

10/22/07 Los Angeles Times: "APIs Chat With Controversial LA Times Reporters re: Clinton campaign fundraising, "
    Times staff writers Peter Nicholas and Tom Hamburger and Johanna Neuman and National Editor Scott Kraft answered readers' questions on Hillary Clinton's fundraising machine and its hiccups along the way 
    Scott Kraft: Tom and Peter: You've been covering the fundraising of presidential campaigns for some months now. Tell us about the latest story you uncovered on Hillary Clinton's efforts in Chinatown in New York.
    Peter Nicholas: Our story looked at a slice of donors to Sen. Clinton's campaign who are participating in the American political process in ways we haven't seen before. Many of these donors are immigrants from Fujian Province in China and are not eligible to vote, yet are significant donors to her presidential campaign.
    Johanna Neuman: So how did you two discover this story?
    Tom Hamburger: I was one of the reporters covering the story of alleged swindler Norman Hsu and his role in the Clinton campaign. In the course of researching that story we came across this historic fundraising from the Chinese American population in New York
    Johanna Neuman: Peter and Tom, What I'm wondering is what these donors expect or hope that Hillary Clinton will do for them if she is elected.
    Peter Nicholas: Many of these donors mentioned immigration as an important reason for their support. They hope that if she is elected president she will help reunite families and smooth the path to citizenship. Others mentioned that they valued the chance to meet and be photographed with Sen. Clinton. She is a popular figure in this community and draws even more enthusiastic attention in some respects than her husband.
    Administrator2: Is it clear why these donors chose Senator Clinton among all possible candidates? Is that directly related to Hsu?
    Scott Kraft: is there anything illegal about doing that?
    Tom Hamburger: Hillary Clinton remember is their senator and she has cultivated this community. In addition, as Peter just mentioned, she is quite popular and they look to her for help with immigration concerns
    Tom Hamburger: It is legal for people with green cards who have permanent residence status to donate to politifcians, even though they may not be citizens. People in this category cannot vote, however.
    jiminit: Your story mentions that many felt pressure to donate. Where did that pressure come from?
    Tom Hamburger: We believe that most of the donations that emanated from New York's Chinatown community were not related to Norman Hsu. There was some overlap, but most donors we interviewed told us they did not know Hsu
    Peter Nicholas: Some donors we spoke to said they felt encouraged to donate by their neighborhood associations. They said they gave more out of a sense of obligation to the broader Chinese community, in some cases, than out of a devotion to her presidential campaign.
    Administrator2: Do any of the other presidential candidates have such a strong backing from a particular immigrant population? How unusual is that?
    Tom Hamburger: New and prosperous immigrant groups are increasingly being cultivated by campaigns. What made this particular group stand out is that so many donors lived in relatively modest neighborhoods and some held jobs that seemed to make $1,000 donations unlikely. In addition, we found it difficult to locate donors listed at the addresses provided by the Federal Election Commission.
    Pabitra: What was the basis for your writer's choice to portray Chung Seto as an "outsider" "immigrant" giving money rather than an American acitivist who has been working on political campaigns in the US and has served as the Communications Director for a former Labor Secretary?
    Tom Hamburger: Chung Seto was also the executive director of the state Democratic Party and has been active in New York and national politics for years.
    ylee: Earlier comment whether some donors were related to Norman Hsu pointed to the problem with this article. By focusing on Chinese american donors, the public gets the perception this is a Chinese phenomenon. If these Chinese American donors felt obligated or pressured to give, why not draw the parallals between union workers feeling pressured to donate or precinct walk for candidates. Or employees at Fortune 500 firms whose CEOs asked them to get involved for the interest of protecting their firm or business interest?
    Tom Hamburger: Ylee's is an excellent comment. It speaks to something that we are sensitive to. We understand that there are other groups that have been pressured to donate, and we have reported on those instances and believe there is more reporting to be done in this area.
    Scott Kraft: Actually, that's a good point. We have written frequently about other groups where pressure to donate is a factor -- unions, as you say, but also universities and businesses.
    Christine Chen: Many Asian immigrant families save a long time, even when they have limited means. They have been able to send their kids to college, and now as an emerging community they are now learning to get civically involved. It is unfair to assume that they cannot afford to give.
    Peter Nicholas: One thing that struck us in reporting the story was that contributions from this community have not occurred before to this degree. When John Kerry ran for president in 2004, he collected a fraction of the donations that Sen. Clinton has taken in to date.
    vshu: While many Asian Americans lead very modest lives, they will give signicant amounts of money to causes they support, including churches, community organizations and schools. It is not unusual to see the children of garment factory restaurant workers attending Ivy League and other major, private universities.
    Tom Hamburger: As both Christine and Vshu have said thse are communities known for hard work and saving. Yet some of the donors we spoke to said that donating $500 to $1,000 stretched their budgets.
    Johanna Neuman: Do you think the Clinton campaign should do more to vet their contributors?
    Tom Hamburger: The Clinton campaign has had to refund some donations deemed inappropriate. But this is a problem facing all major campaigns because of the unprecedented pressure to raise funds. The Clinton campaign has vetting procedures in place that go beyond the minimum standards used by most campaigns.
    Christine Chen: Many of us in the Asian American community always believed that it would take over a decade to get over the negative impact of the 1996 campaign finance controversy. For the longest time Asians were rarely outreached to as voters. They were not encouraged to participate in the elections. I would correlate it to the earlier years when the political parties and candidates rarely addressed the concerns of the younger generation. But we have seen increases in their participation because they are not being courted and resources in educating them about the process has been provided. This year we have seen not only Clinton, but also Guiliani, Edwards and Obama make efforts to outreach to the Asian community. Also, through the last decade more Asians have run for local office. This has helped increase and encourage more Asians to participate as donors and as voters.
    Christine Chen: Correction: The younger generation is now being courted
    Scott Kraft: To Vshu and Christine's questions, it's true that immigrants of modest means do spend large amounts of money for private school tuition and the like. But spending large amounts on political campaigns suggests that the donors believe they're going to get something from it that it's unlikely they'll get.
    ylee: it is also unfair to assume hard working low wage workers wouldn't have the legit means to write political checks. A quick review of San Francisco Bay area's booming housing market will show most $800,000 plus homes are bought by the dish washers, hotel workers who work hard and pull their resources together. Immigration, specifically family reunification has been a top concern for many in the community. If they must pay thousands of dollars to the government on naturalization petitions, it is perfectly understandable that they want to invest in individuals or causes that will give them hope there is a fair family reunification policy in place for them .
    Peter Nicholas: Sen. Clinton's campaign has talked about its fund-raising prowess. It's a newspaper's responsibility to look deeper into the source of these funds. It's not our intent to hurt or offend any constituency.
    TL: Scott, your earlier comment to Christine talks about spending large amounts of money on political campaigns suggests donors believe they are going to get something in return. What other reason would someone donate?
    Pabitra: It's not about hurting of offending as much as it is about jumping on a bandwagon without looking at responsible reporting. How do you think your article along with the line of articles from major papers about Asian American donors will influence public perception of Asian American involvement in our political process? How do you think it will affect the work that has been done to bring Asian American's into the political process? Do you think that the negative press on campaign contributions rather than any mainstream articles about positive participate in the American political process will takes away from seeing Asian American's as Americans who can contribute to campaigns, who can run for office, who can vote?
    vshu: First - the issue of stretching their budgets to donate -- The nature of immigrants is such that they will stretch and pull and do whatever is needed to ensure the security of their families. Second -- to Scott Kraft's assumption they will "get something from it that it's unlikely they'll get" -- many people who donate to campaigns will not get what they want. What new donors to get immediately, however, is a sense of political empowerment and a sense of pride of being able to take part in the political process. The same immigrants who are scrutinized are probably some of the most patriotic Americans out there.
    Tom Hamburger: People donate to campaigns for a variety of reasons. In some cases, including some of the donors we spoke with, they give because someone asked them to. Others give because they are looking for something specific from a candidate. Some because they want to support a candidate for the most idealistic of reasons.
    vshu: quick edit on my recent post -- when I wrote "most people who donate," I meant people in general and not just Asian Americans.
    Chester: When are you going to report the achievements of Asian Pacific Americans?
    TL: The issue of increasing political involvement and campaign contributions is something the API community is working hard to improve. Your 10/19 article keeps the Norman Hsu issue alive, potentially impacting our community's ability to be heard. In the spirit of balanced reporting, where are the community leaders in your article?
    Tom Hamburger: We are interested in covering the developments of ethnic communities. If you have specific ideas, please let us know.
    maelisa: I'm sorry that I got here late...thanks for having this forum...my question/comment..what is the candidate's responsibility in these situations when she (in this case it is Hillary Clinton) who knows this constituency, knows the unrealistic dreams and expectations they have of her and what their donations will do for them yet give her these big checks, what if any responsibility does she have?
    maelisa: As an immigrant family in the 60s, I can relate, I would have wanted Hillary to say, no thanks, $25 is very helpful...\
    Tom Hamburger: We did talk with community leaders and Asian American academics and commentator and quoted some of them in the story
    Pabitra: Who do we contact about ideas? Do you have a direct number? How do we know you'll respond to our ideas?
    Chester: if you can help schedule a live meeting with your senior editorial team with asian pacific american leaders, that would be great
    Tom Hamburger: Please feel free to email us. Peter is at peter.nicholas@latimes.com and I am reachable at tom.hamburger@latimes.com.
    Peter Nicholas: Thanks, Chester. We'll pass along your suggestion to our editors. Again, you're welcome to email me if you'd like to follow up. I am at peter.nicholas@latimes.com.
    TL: are you and peter in a new york bureau of the LA Times?
    vshu: As the elections continue to move forward, it is my hope that the media reports on Asian American political activities in a positive light. As a result of your story, there are at least two more stories in newspapers in NYC, both of whom, in wishing to jump onto this bandwagon, got their facts wrong.
    Tom Hamburger: We want to thank all of you for participating today and for your thoughtful comments.

10/21/07 Associated Press: Indian immigrants' son new La. Governor, 
by Melinda Deslatte 
    Baton Rouge, La. - U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream. 
    Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation's youngest governor. He had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday's election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.
    "My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana ," he said to cheers and applause at his victory party.
    His nearest competitors: Democrat Walter Boasso with 208,690 votes or 18 percent; Independent John Georges had 167,477 votes or 14 percent; Democrat Foster Campbell had 151,101 or 13 percent. Eight candidates divided the rest.
    "I'm asking all of our supporters to get behind our new governor," Georges said in a concession speech.
    The Oxford-educated Jindal had lost the governor's race four years ago to Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He won a congressional seat in conservative suburban New Orleans a year later but was widely believed to have his eye on the governor's mansion.
    Blanco opted not to run for re-election after she was widely blamed for the state's slow response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
    "My administration has begun readying for this change and we look forward to helping with a smooth transition," she said in a prepared statement. "I want to thank the people of Louisiana for the past four years, though there is still much work to do in my last few months as your governor."
    Jindal, who takes office in January, pledged to fight corruption and rid the state of those "feeding at the public trough," revisiting a campaign theme.
    "They can either go quietly or they can go loudly, but either way, they will go," he said, adding that he would call the Legislature into special session to address ethics reform.
    Political analysts said Jindal built up support as a sort of "buyer's remorse" from people who voted for Blanco last time and had second thoughts about that decision. Blanco was widely criticized for the state's response to Hurricane Katrina and she announced months ago that she would not seek re-election.
    "I think the Jindal camp, almost explicitly, (wanted) to cast it this way: If you were able to revote, who would you vote for?" said Pearson Cross, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette political scientist.
    Jindal has held a strong lead in the polls since the field of candidates became settled nearly two months ago.
    But the two multimillionaires in the race Boasso, a state senator from St. Bernard Parish, and Georges, a New Orleans-area businessman poured millions of their own dollars into their campaigns to try to prevent Jindal's victory.
    Campbell, a public service commissioner from Bossier Parish, had less money but ran on a singular plan: scrapping the state income tax on businesses and individuals and levying a new tax on oil and gas processed in Louisiana .
    The race was one of the highest-spending in Louisiana history. Jindal alone raised $11 million, and Georges poured about $10 million of his personal wealth into his campaign war chest while Boasso plugged in nearly $5 million of his own cash.
    In India , Jindal's family members were proud, and were going to celebrate with the traditional Punjabi folk dance called bhangra.
    "We're very proud that he has reached such a high position in the United States ," said Subhash Jindal, a cousin who runs a pharmacy in the Jindal family's hometown in Maler Kotla in northern Punjab state.

10/19/07 press release: Honda Statement on L.A. Time Campaign Donor Story,
     Washington , DC Today, Congressman Mike Honda issued the following statement in response to the L.A. Times story (October 19, 2007), An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton :
    I am appalled by the irresponsible and biased portrayal of the Asian American immigrant community, published by the L.A. Times today.  The reporting unfairly attributes selected individual cases to an entire ethnic community in a major metropolitan area.  Such an unfair, sweeping, and negative portrayal has a significant chilling effect on the civic participation by all Asian Americans, who merely want their fair chance to participate in the American political process. 
    This story has already spawned a barrage of racist reactions in the blogosphere and the airwaves and is sending chilling shockwaves through immigrant communities that are making commendable efforts to integrate into American life. There is no shortage of bigots chomping at the bit to trample over those who do not look, sound or act like them and it is a shame when a respectable publication such as the L.A. Times provides them with the fodder to do so.
    While I sincerely hope the reporting is airtight, the story lacked responsible sensitivity and, at times, even strained to turn the commonplace into the mysterious. For example, the story describes a woman named Chung Seto, who came to this country as a child from Canton province... Anyone who has ever spoken with Ms. Seto, who Ive known for many years, knows that shes as New York as one can get. The story, however, paints her as a mysterious foreign figure, when in fact she has been a longtime established leader within the New York Democratic Party and is well respected in Democratic circles nationally.
    Drawing a connection between the emerging political involvement of Asian Americans and individual cases of possibly suspect donations sends a strong message that the political participation of minority communities is undesired.  Minority communities in America have been shut out of the political process through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics throughout our countrys history.  As leaders, we should be encouraging, not chilling, the legitimate involvement of underrepresented communities in our democracy.
    Many times it is not so much what a story says, but what it insinuates, such as a link between Asian Americans and organized crime. The aftertaste of this story is that campaign financing is an Asian problem. If this was about fundraising, I failed to see anything about Mitt Romneys campaign co-chair Alan Fabian, or other non-Asian American incidents.  Why are Asian Americans being singled out?  Unquestionably, there is room for improvement in campaign finance and the vetting process in this country and we should address this issue. However, this is a bi-partisan, American problem, not an Asian American problem.  To characterize it as such does injustice to our democracy.
    Where I grew up, some people would call allegations without proof slander.  And if such allegations are made solely because the community is Asian American, it begins to feel a lot like racism.

10/19/07 Los Angeles Times: "Vietnamese refugee family in limbo: Relatives of woman who testified on immigration are to be deported but have nowhere to go. The case raises questions of intimidation."
by Teresa Watanabe
    Government actions in a deportation case involving a Vietnamese refugee family in Santa Ana drew fire Thursday as political and community leaders accused immigration agents of intimidation. 
    Agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency last week arrested the parents and brother of Tam Tran, a 24-year-old UCLA graduate who testified before Congress about the plight of undocumented immigrant students in May. The family, detained overnight and then released under electronic monitoring, had received final deportation orders in 2001 after losing an appeal to win political asylum. 
    Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), who heads the House immigration subcommittee that called Tran as a witness, said she was concerned that the arrest would intimidate other activists into silence.
    "What message does that give future witnesses -- that if you give testimony to Congress, your family is arrested?" Lofgren said in an interview Thursday. "I'm very concerned. This is intimidation."
    Lofgren said she planned to call a public hearing this year to scrutinize the immigration agency's actions in this and other cases. 
    The Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles also criticized the arrest.
    "Many in our community are scared to come out and lend their voices to the immigration debate because of actions like these," said Daniel Huang, the center's policy advocate. "The suspicion is that the administration is trying to silence the powerful advocacy going on on behalf of undocumented immigrants."
    Virginia Kice, the immigration agency's spokeswoman, said agents did not know about Tran's congressional testimony when they arrested her family members in an early morning raid Oct. 11. Kice said the arrest was part of the agency's stepped-up efforts to find and deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with final orders of deportation -- efforts that have snared 61,000 people in four years.
    "This had nothing to do with any congressional testimony," Kice said. "The bottom line is that at present these family members all have final orders of deportation, and our responsibility is to endeavor to carry out those orders."
    At the moment, however, no country is willing to take the Tran family back -- placing it in a legal netherworld.
    Like so many other boat people, Tam Tran's parents left Vietnam in 1980, fleeing war and political persecution triggered by the family's anti-Communist activities, Tam Tran said. They were picked up by a German ship and taken to Germany, where they tried to apply for resettlement in the United States but could not locate a sponsoring relative, she said.
    The family stayed for six years in Germany, where Tran and her brother, Thien, were born. In 1989, they came to the United States and applied for political asylum.
    As their case worked its way through the system, the Tran family was able to obtain legal work permits and painstakingly built a life in the U.S. Tran's mother, Loc Pham, baby-sat by day and worked at a garment factory by night, eventually earning her manicurist license. Her father, Tuan Tran, worked as a security guard and now struggles as a writer. 
    Tran graduated cum laude in American literature from UCLA and is working at a Los Angeles nonprofit organization to earn money to pursue a doctoral degree. Her brother works as an auto mechanic.
    The family bought a mobile home, pays taxes and has no criminal record, Tran said. They report every year to U.S. immigration officials to renew their work permits. 
    But the Trans' dreams were crushed in 2001 when the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected their asylum claim. The board found that Tuan Tran faced political persecution in Vietnam and could not be returned there
-- among other things, his father was an anti-Communist journalist who was imprisoned and eventually died in captivity in Vietnam. But the board ruled that the family should be deported to Germany, where they had safe haven until they voluntarily decided to leave.
    Germany, however, has refused to accept the family.
    Because the Trans left Germany without official permission and have been gone for more than six months, their residency permit has expired and will not be reissued, according to Lars Leymann, spokesman for the German Consulate in Los Angeles.
    "They therefore have no legal claim to go back to Germany," Leymann said. "It's the law. We see no reason to change our position on that."
    Kice, of the immigration agency, said U.S. officials would continue to seek travel documents from Germany to send the Tran family back. Another option, she said, was to see whether the political climate had changed enough in Vietnam to allow the family to return there without fear of persecution. 
    Sending them back, however, could be difficult because the U.S. government still does not have a repatriation agreement with Vietnam.
    Another alternative would be to find a third party to accept the family, Kice said.
    Lofgren said that if Germany declines to change its position and accept the family, the Trans' asylum case could be reopened to seek permanent residency in the U.S.
    "These people have been found to be refugees," said the Tran family attorney, Dan Brown of the Los Angeles-based Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP law firm. "They're no danger to anyone."
    Tam Tran, meanwhile, said she just wants to get past the uncertainty and angst and be able to make the United States her permanent home. 
    "At the end of the process, we have nowhere to go," she said. "We're in a black hole."

10/18/07 Chronicle of Higher Education: " The proportion of Asian-American college students has almost doubled each decade since the 1970s to 8.8 percent of the total enrollment in 2005 but those students do not enjoy the universal success that stereotypes suggest, according to a new report by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.
    Three in 10 Asian-American students come from families with annual household incomes of less than $40,000, and one in five needs special tutoring or remedial work in English, says the report, Beyond Myths: The Growth and Diversity of Asian-American College Freshmen, 1971-2005, which can be ordered online.
    Drawing on data from the research institutes well-known freshman survey with responses from more than 360,000 Asian and Asian-American first-time, full-time students at four-year institutions from 1971 to 2005 it bills itself as the largest compilation and analysis of data on Asian-American college students ever undertaken.
    Asian-American students tend not to take full advantage of financial-aid opportunities, instead relying on parents, relatives, and employment to pay for college, one of the reports authors said in a written statement. The study found a significant increase in students who planned to work full time during college to cover costs.
    The report also says that Asian-American students are more than twice as likely as their peers to apply to six or more colleges. But fewer Asian-Americans 51.8 percent in 2005, compared with 69.8 percent nationally were attending their first-choice institution.

10/17/07 The Daily Bruin (UCLA): Report analyzes Asian American students,
By Rotem Ben-Shachar
    Asian American college students are facing more obstacles in higher education than in previous years, according to a UCLA report.
    The report, Beyond Myths: The Growth and Diversity of Asian American College Freshmen, 1971-2005, states that Asian Americans do not enjoy universal academic success in higher education, contrary to popular belief. Fewer students are attending their first-choice schools, and more face problems in financing their education, according to the report.
    The data analyzed were compiled from 361,271 Asian American incoming freshmen students who took the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshman Survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA from 1971 to 2005.
    There is no comparable survey about incoming freshmen, John Pryor, the programs director, said.
    This report provides the largest and most comprehensive analysis of data on Asian American college students. It was a project that we (at the program) were fully behind.
    Oiyan Poon, one of five co-authors of the report and a graduate student at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, said the report debunks popular beliefs about Asian Americans.
    But she stressed that the data are skewed because they include information about incoming freshmen students only from four-year colleges, not community colleges.
    The largest segment of Asians are actually at community colleges and are not included in this study, Poon said. But we think these students reflect the trends in this report. There is a myth that Asian Americans do not benefit from affirmative action, but we have found this is not true.
    The number of Asian Americans attending their first-choice colleges has declined and is lower than the national average.
    If students were not benefiting from affirmative action, then there would not have been a large decrease in students attending their first-choice colleges after the University of California ended affirmative action with Proposition 209 in the mid-1990s, Poon said. But there has been a larger decrease than many other ethnic groups.
    In 2005, 51.8 percent of Asian American freshmen reported they were attending their first-choice institutions, compared to 68 percent in 1974, according to the report. The national average in 2005 was 69.8 percent.
    But the aspirations of Asian Americans are higher than average, said Don Nakanishi, a co-author of the report and director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
    The percentage of Asian American freshmen who have applied to six or more colleges has increased from 10.7 percent in 1980 to 35.9 percent in 2005, more than twice that of the national population. In 2005, only 17.4 percent of freshmen nationally applied to six or more colleges, according to the report.
    Furthermore, incoming Asian American freshmen aspire to more advanced graduate degrees and intensive careers than average students, Nakanishi said.
    Asian Americans aspire to be doctors, engineers or business executives very, very high positions. These careers also reflect a search for financial security and a desire for a clear display of merit, a right versus wrong answer, he said.
    These aspirations reflect their backgrounds, Nakanishi said, since many come from low-income families.
    The report identifies discrepancies in income of Asian American student households compared to the national average. In 2005, 30.9 percent of Asian American students came from families with a household income of less than $40,000, while the national percentage was 22.7 percent.
    Asian American students depend more heavily on parents and relatives and employment instead of loans to finance their education, according to the report.
    Parents do not want their children to be burdened by loans, Nakanishi said.
    Therefore, financial aid has become a more important factor in determining where a student goes to college, and an increasing number of students work while going to school.
    The report also states that Asian Americans self-confidence is increasing. Entering Asian American college students are more likely to rate themselves above average in areas of social self-confidence, public speaking and leadership abilities, according to the report.
    But the report stresses not to take these gains for granted.
    It is important to recognize the discrepancies among Asian American ethnic subgroups in their educational attainment and to address the challenges that especially low-income or first-generation Asian American students face in higher education, the report reads.  

10/17/07 The Daily Bruin (UCLA): By The Numbers: Asian American college students,
    A new UCLA report that illustrates trends of Asian American first-year college students from 1971 to 2005 shows that these students have high aspirations, but they face financial obstacles. 
    30.9%: Portion of Asian American college freshmen with a household income of less than $40,000 in 2005 
    22.7%: Portion of the national population of freshmen with a household income of less than $40,000 in 2005 
    10.7%: Portion of Asian American students who applied for admission to six or more colleges in 1980 
    35.9%: Portion of Asian American students who applied for admission to six or more colleges in 2005
    68%: Portion of Asian American students attending their first-choice school in 1970
    51.8%: Portion of Asian American students attending their first-choice school in 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SOURCE: Beyond Myths: The Growth and Diversity of Asian American College Freshmen, 1971-2005

10/11/07 press release from U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
Contact:   David Grinberg, Mark Wong                                                                 (202) 663-4191, TTY: (202) 663-4494       
EEOC FORMS FEDERAL ASIAN AMERICAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER WORK GROUP
    WASHINGTON Naomi C. Earp, Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), today announced the formation of an Asian American and Pacific Islander Work Group that will examine this communitys concerns about federal sector employment, special emphasis programs and the complaints process. 
    The work group will be tackling these urgent and vexing problems which the Commission plans to address at a meeting to be held in 2008, Chair Earp said. Our work will begin with testing perceptions and gathering the realities Asian Pacific Americans face in the federal workplace.
    The composition of the work group will be diverse in race, ethnicity and gender, and will be comprised of persons from various agencies, grade levels, occupational categories, levels of management, and professions, Chair Earp added. 
    The members of the new work group represent a cross section of agencies, departments and external stakeholders and include the following: 
    Suzan Aramaki, Director, Office of Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Commerce; 
    Linda Bradford-Washington, Director, Office of Departmental Equal Employment Opportunity, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; 
    Sherrie Davis, Acting Division Director, Program Policy and Evaluation, Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity Management, National Institutes of Health;
    Robert Jew, Director of EEO and Diversity Programs, The National Archives and Records Administration; 
    Farook Sait, Special Counsel to the Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Agriculture; 
    James Su, Senior Vice President for Operations, Federal Asian Pacific American Council; and, 
    Sharon Wong, President, Asian American Government Executives Network.
    This work is extremely important, said Gazal Modhera, a special assistant to Chair Earp and the newly appointed chair of the work group. I cant wait to get moving on this important initiative, and I am so pleased to have the opportunity to guide this extraordinary group. 
    The EEOC monitors federal agency compliance with equal employment opportunity laws and procedures. Further information about the EEOC is available on its web site at www.eeoc.gov.

10/4/07 Dallas Morning News: Gifts surprise suicide jumper crash victim: Nearly $28,000 donated to manicurist hurt when man attempted suicide, 
by Sherry Jacobson
    University Park The checks and cash were piled in her lap, but Lan Nguyen seemed too dazed to add up the money. 
    Generous strangers gave $27,850 to Ms. Nguyen, who was hurt when a man jumped from an overpass and struck her moving car. Her injuries included a fractured arm.
    "It's too much," she said, smiling and shaking her head at the generosity of strangers. 
    So her co-workers at the Maile Nail Salon in University Park went to work sorting, counting and jotting down numbers on the back of an envelope. 
    "It's $27,850," said Kelly Ha, a fellow manicurist.
    "You can pay your medical bills now." 
    The two biggest contributors may not be familiar to Ms. Nguyen, but they're hardly unknown. Most of the money came from Harold Simmons, one of Dallas ' most generous philanthropists, and Tom Hicks, owner of the Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers. 
    Ms. Nguyen, a 39-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, was injured Aug. 2 when her car was struck by a Lancaster man who was trying to commit suicide by jumping from an overpass onto Central Expressway. 
    The man, Norman M. Thompson III, survived and was hospitalized for weeks. He declined to talk about what made him jump into rush-hour traffic that day. 
    A story in The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 23 detailed how the suicide attempt totaled Ms. Nguyen's two-year-old car and caused injuries including a compound fracture of her right arm that kept her from returning to her manicurist job. Her medical bills are only partially covered by insurance. 
    "This isn't fair," she said last month. "I didn't cause this accident. Why do I have to pay?" 
    Dozens of readers responded to her plight by sending checks or dropping off cash at the nail salon on Lovers Lane . 
    Mr. Simmons sent a check for $10,000. His assistant, Lisa Woolverton, said he brought a copy of The News' story to his office and asked her to look into it and then send Ms. Nguyen a check. 
    "His heart just goes out to people who have nowhere to turn," she said. "He's done this countless times." 
    The Thomas O. and Cinda Hicks Foundation also sent a $10,000 check. Neither Mr. Hicks nor his wife could be reached for comment. 
    A third donor sent a $5,000 check anonymously. And several dozen others made up the $2,850 difference. 
    Ms. Nguyen seemed almost bewildered at her windfall.
    Nodding and smiling, she tucked the bundle of money into her purse, en route to depositing it in the bank.
    "I will pay the bill at the hospital first, and the rest will go to fix my face," said the Richardson woman, whose face was lacerated by glass from her car's shattered windshield. 
    It was the second time in nearly two months that Ms. Nguyen said she felt the cloud lifting from her life.
    In late August, she was presented with $1,014 in cash that had been donated by customers of the nail salon. 
    The toughest part of receiving such generosity will be thanking the people who helped her, she said. 
    Although Ms. Nguyen has lived in Dallas for a decade, her English skills are minimal. She came to the U.S. as an adult in the mid-1990s, which meant she did not receive an American education, as some of her co-workers did. 
    "I wish I could speak English so that I could understand all this," said Ms. Nguyen, who admits being confused about her auto insurance coverage and her interactions with doctors and other caregivers. 
    Working in a nail salon with seven other Vietnamese women has made it possible to avoid learning English, she said. 
    And her home life revolves around her two sons, who speak Vietnamese, although the older boy, now 14, also speaks English and sometimes serves as his mother's translator. 
    But Ms. Nguyen vowed to do her best to thank all the people who have helped her in English. 
    "I will write the notes," she said. "Somehow, I will do it."

 

10/4/07 AFP: 'Desperate' apology over Philippines slur,
    Manila (AFP) - Makers of hit US television series "Desperate Housewives" have apologised for a slur against Filipino medical workers that caused an uproar in the Southeast Asian country.
    The apology was sent to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN's bureau in the United States and aired in the Philippines on Thursday following protests by the Manila government.
    "The producers of 'Desperate Housewives' and ABC Studios offer our sincere apologies for any offense caused by the brief reference in the season premiere,"
cable news channel ANC quoted the statement as saying.
    "There was no intent to disparage the integrity of any aspect of the medical community in the Philippines ," it said.
    The episode showed actress Teri Hatcher, who plays Susan Mayer, asking during a medical consultation to check "those diplomas because I want to make sure that they're not from some med school in the Philippines ."
    The apology was made a day after chief aide to Philippine President Gloria Arroyo said the line of dialogue appeared to be a "racial slur."
    Philippine Senators said the apology was not enough, and urged their Foreign Affairs Department to lodge a formal protest with the US government.
    "I am mortally offended by the statement because it betrayed the racial prejudice and denigrates the excellent performance of world-class Filipino doctors in the US ," said Senator Miriam Santiago, whose sister is a doctor working in Los Angeles .

10/1/07 Asian Week: Brag About Your Accomplishments: How to break the bamboo ceiling
by Angela Pang
    Why arent there more Asian Americans in top corporate level positions in America ? was the question posed by John Y. Chiang, chief financial officer of Pacific National Bank, to an Asian Business League of San Francisco leadership panel.
    Approximately 100 professionals gathered at the PG&E Building in San Francisco on Sept. 20 to hear PG&E Vice President of Energy Procurement Fong Wan, Reed Smith attorney Catharina Yoosun Min and Witt/Kieffer consultant Steven Yamada tackle this topic.
    Yamada cited a disconnect between traditional Asian values and those of corporate America .
    Asians are taught to be humble, not assertive, Yamada said. We also face discrimination and stereotypes. We may be technically competent, but were told and viewed only as team players, not leaders.
    We also lack the networks needed to move up the corporate world, Min added. Circles of supporters and friends can help nurture and carry you throughout your career.
    Are Asian Americans facing a bamboo ceiling? The term made popular by author Jane Hyun, a former human resources executive at J.P. Morgan, is a play on glass ceiling, which refers to the barriers that often confront Asian Americans trying to reach the high ranks of corporate America . Though Jerry Yang of Yahoo! and Steve Chen of YouTube are a few of the more well-known exceptions, statistics indicate that a glass ceiling is at work.
    A 2004 study conducted by Harvard Business Schools Gordon C.C. Liao and Philip Tseng reports that though Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing groups in the United States labor force, they remain one of the least represented groups in senior management ranks at Fortune 500 companies.
    Asians currently hold 1.5 percent of corporate board seats among Fortune 500 companies, a slight increase from 1.2 percent in 2005, according to a Committee of 100 corporate report card.
    The panel offered advice on how to break through the bamboo ceiling.
    The first thing you need to do is believe in yourself, because if you dont, no one else will, said Wan. Also, dont be afraid to take risks or change jobs. If you feel like youre stuck and unable to move up, try moving laterally.
    Very few people will read your full reports its all about your oral presentation skills and what you say. That is the most important skill to develop, he added.
    Min also suggested networking and seeking leadership roles whenever possible, even if that means gaining leadership experience by volunteering at local organizations or churches.
    This way when youre called upon in a leadership role at work, you will be able to do it, said Min.
    Yamada said one does not need to give up their Asian values to move up the corporate ladder they just need to be willing to learn new skills.
    Dont be afraid to sell yourself or brag about your accomplishments, said Min. If you dont promote yourself, no one will.
    Visit www.ablsf.org.



10/1/07 New Orleans Times-Picayune: Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee dies,
By Bill Walsh and Stephanie Grace 
    Harry Lee, Jefferson Parish's irrepressible sheriff since 1980 and one of the most famous politicians in Louisiana history, died Monday at Ochsner Medical Center after a five-month battle with leukemia. He was 75. 
    "Today, at 10:44 a.m., Harry Lee, sheriff of the Parish of Jefferson, left us," said Chief Deputy Newell Normand, fighting back tears during a news conference outside Ochsner's main hospital in Old Jefferson. Some 2-1/2 hours later, Normand was sworn into office as sheriff by Mr. Lee's former law partner, Judge Marion Edwards of the state's 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. 
    Mr. Lee had returned five days earlier from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and seemed to be faring well until Sunday, when he was rushed to the Jefferson Highway hospital with labored breathing. Within 24 hours, the state's most populous parish lost the only sheriff it had known for a generation. 
    Mr. Lee was the second longest-serving sheriff in Jefferson Parish history, after Frank Clancy, whose 1928-56 tenure he would have surpassed in April. His death comes three weeks before he hoped to win an eighth term in office. 
    'I tell it like it is' 
    Despite his ill health, Mr. Lee had been the heavy favorite to win re-election this year. Indeed, during the past 27 years he was re-elected regularly by huge margins even as he managed to become embroiled in controversy. 
    Defying every notion of political good sense, he unabashedly -- and often indelicately -- took stands considered taboo by most politicians. His shoot-from-the-hip style often made his closest advisers cringe even as it endeared him to many voters. 
    "I think people like me because I do a good job and because I tell it like it is," he once said. "If you ask me something, I'll give you an answer, straight up. People may not like it, but I'm not going to sugarcoat it." 
    One of Mr. Lee's most famous assaults on political sensibilities came in 1986 when, amid a suburban crime spree, he ordered his deputies to stop black men for no reason other than driving "rinky-dink cars" in predominantly white neighborhoods. The order, later rescinded, prompted calls for his immediate resignation and landed him in the national news. 
    "The sky was falling in," said Mr. Lee, admittedly shaken by the criticism. "I almost resigned." Years later, he said he really didn't understand what all the fuss was about and blamed the news media for blowing his order -- which he called "good police practice" -- out of proportion. 
    His political start 
    The son of Chinese immigrants, Mr. Lee was born in the back room of his family's laundry on Carondelet Street in New Orleans in 1932. When they were old enough, he and his siblings, eventually numbering eight, were given jobs in the laundry and later in the family's restaurants, including the House of Lee in Metairie . 
    He got a firsthand taste of politics early, at age 12, when he was elected president of the newly formed student body government at Shaw Elementary School . Each year after that, he was elected to class office. During his senior year at Francis T. Nicholls High School , now Frederick Douglass Senior High School , he was president of both his senior class and the student body, a school first. 
    Mr. Lee received a bachelor's degree in geology from Louisiana State University , did a short stint in the Air Force in Texas and married Lai Lee, then returned to Louisiana in 1959. That was the year that the family began construction on the House of Lee, where Mr. Lee would meet the man who became his political mentor, U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs, D-La. 
    He learned the art of politics from Boggs and Boggs' widow, Lindy, who succeeded her husband in Congress. For six years he worked as Hale Boggs' driver and confidant when the congressman was home in Louisiana . 
    Soon, Mr. Lee decided that public service was the career for him and saw law school as an entree. He took classes at Loyola University School of Law while working 12-hour days at the family's restaurant. 
    After law school, Mr. Lee set up a small practice with classmate Marion Edwards, now an appellate judge. With Boggs' help, Mr. Lee was appointed the first magistrate for the U.S. District Court in New Orleans , and in 1976 he became chief attorney for Jefferson Parish. 
    Four years later, with Sheriff Al Cronvich embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal, Mr. Lee saw a chance to plunge into electoral politics. Assailing the corruption and inefficiency of the Sheriff's Office, he ran as a reform candidate, led the five-candidate primary and took 57 percent of the runoff vote to defeat Cronvich. 
    'I don't give a damn' 
    He immediately gave deputies raises and poured money into the Sheriff's Office, computerizing it for the first time. He also began to build a political machine that would become one of the largest in southern Louisiana , although his record of helping others get elected was spotty. 
    By the late 1980s, as fear of crime became the No. 1 concern of Jefferson Parish residents, Mr. Lee sensed his continued political fortunes would have less to do with reforming the Sheriff's Office than with making his suburban constituents feel safe from the big city ills. As recently as last month, he touted the safety of predominantly white Jefferson Parish -- and the work of his office -- by contrasting it with headline-grabbing violence in majority-black New Orleans . 
    Once Mr. Lee was blamed for trying to separate the races by ordering that a barricade be erected on a street at the parish line dividing majority-black New Orleans and majority-white East Jefferson . Mr. Lee turned the story -- though false -- into political capital. "Depending on who I'm talking to," he said, "I either take credit for the barricade or I don't." 
    On another occasion, he defended his decision to yank deputies out of an all-black neighborhood in Avondale after residents complained about police brutality. And when an 8-year-old girl Harvey girl who was raped in March 1998 initially described two black men as her attackers, Mr. Lee was criticized for declaring every black man in the subdivision a suspect. 
    He apologized for any offense but insisted the practice was not racist. In fact, friends said the sheriff was so shaken by the vicious attack on the girl, who was black, that he pulled out all the stops to solve the case. "I'm going to catch that bastard, and when I catch him, he is going to be black," he said. "I just don't give a damn what people think of me anymore. If that was their daughter and we weren't doing that, they would be on our ass." 
    Several days later, Mr. Lee personally arrested the girl's stepfather in the rape. In 2003, a jury sentenced the stepfather to death. 
    While he enjoyed the political return that his loaded comments generated, Mr. Lee was unhappy with the image that they created. He viewed himself as a progressive Democrat, simply more honest than the "empty-headed" liberals in his party. 
    To combat his image as a racist, he once drew up a lengthy list of charitable contributions he made to black people, including a family burned out of their home and a girl with leukemia. "You're not hurting me when you print those things," he once told a reporter. "You're making me a hero. But I don't want to be that kind of a hero." 
    'King of the mountain' 
    Despite what would be considered missteps for other politicians, Mr. Lee's popularity grew from the time he took office, particularly among white people. In 1994, a survey for The Times-Picayune showed that an extraordinary 84 percent of Jefferson Parish residents had a favorable impression of the sheriff, including 91 percent of white people. 
    The same poll showed that, while almost nine out of 10 people thought he "tells it like it is," six of 10 thought he should sometimes keep his mouth shut. Numbers such as that, along with his dual role as top law enforcement officer and chief tax collector, made Mr. Lee stand out even in a state known for its political kingfishes, said Ed Renwick of Loyola University 's Institute of Politics . 
    "There are very few people that are as powerful as he was within his domain," Renwick said. "He seemed to be sort of king of the mountain." 
    His widespread popularity gave Mr. Lee some wiggle room in the face of criticism about his management of the Sheriff's Office. A 1993 study by one government watchdog group lambasted his handling of the Sheriff's Office then-$60 million budget but stirred nary a ripple of public criticism. The same group gave him higher marks in a follow-up study a few years later. 
    Mr. Lee understood what was important to Jefferson voters. Until Hurricane Katrina depleted the Sheriff's Office ranks, he made sure a deputy showed up at a resident's house within five minutes of an emergency call, and he gave deputies take-home cruisers ensuring that marked cars were always visible around the parish. 
    Indeed, the most serious political scare of his career had everything to do with crime and nothing to do with race, his fiscal management or his penchant for controversial remarks. It came in 1985, when voters learned that a convicted rapist named Brian Busby was allowed to wander Jefferson Parish unsupervised during the day, instead of being locked up in state prison. 
    Mr. Lee had granted Busby special privileges as a favor to a Parish Council member. Ten days after the disclosure, Busby was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola . Mr. Lee's approval rating plunged. 
    A year later, however, after a series of Metairie robberies in which white shoppers were followed to their homes and held up at gunpoint in their driveways by African-American men, Mr. Lee made the statement that either almost ended or saved his career, depending on who judges it. "If there are some young blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white neighborhood, they will be stopped. ... There's a pretty good chance they're up to no good. It's obvious two young blacks driving a rinky-dink car in a predominantly white neighborhood -- I'm not talking about on the main thoroughfare, but if they're on one of the side streets and they're cruising around -- they'll be stopped." 
    Outrage was immediate, and Mr. Lee quickly canceled the order and apologized as the NAACP called for his resignation. But there are those who think the statement reversed Mr. Lee's slide in popularity in what at the time was an overwhelmingly white parish. When he ran for his third term the next year, Mr. Lee failed to win the primary, but he defeated Art Lentini in the runoff with 54 percent of the vote. Never again would he be forced into a runoff. 
    Walk the walk 
    Early on in his administration, the sheriff realized that Jefferson voters wanted a lawman who didn't just talk tough, but looked tough, also. At times he appeared in public in full dress uniform with gold stars on the shoulders or wore his Sheriff's Office bomber jacket while riding with his deputies on early morning drug raids. At public events, he often sported a Stetson and custom-made cowboy boots with the Sheriff's Office emblem sewn into the front. 
    During his tenure, Mr. Lee spent heavily on computer services and modernized the Sheriff's Office. Flush with money to pay deputies overtime, his office usually boasted an impressive homicide solve rate of more than 90 percent, and he oversaw an aggressive strategy of tracking down and prosecuting career criminals. 
    He used his ample resources to push the boundaries of his job description. In late 1996, for example, he temporarily dispatched his own deputies into New Orleans after several particularly brutal, high-profile murders set the city on edge. While he took some heat for the move, Mr. Lee defended it as both good for neighboring Jefferson Parish and simply the right thing to do. 
    He also stepped in and took over when other agencies investigating a string of serial killings, most not even within his jurisdiction, dropped out of a regional task force, and he stayed with it when one of his own investigators was accused of destroying evidence. Rather than fold, Mr. Lee put his chief of detectives on the task force. He eventually fired two investigators on the case, one for destroying evidence and another for not promptly reporting the destruction. The murder suspect, Russell Ellwood, once implicated in as many as 15 homicides, was convicted of one. 
    Hunting nutria 
    Mr. Lee also put his deputies to work in some unconventional ways. One of the strangest started out as what many considered a joke. 
    The Parish Council was in the midst of a long-running and rancorous debate in 1995 over how to stem the rapidly growing nutria population, which threatened to undermine the parish's all-important drainage network, when Mr. Lee sauntered to the microphone at a council meeting and appeared to grab an idea out of thin air. 
    "I could do it for $50," he told the council. "I could buy a lot of .22 (bullets) for $50, and my SWAT team could shoot them." 
    But Mr. Lee was dead serious, and lo and behold, the sharpshooters' late-night rides alongside drainage canals put a dent in the infestation, and drew national and international press in the process. 
    An avid hunter whose offices were well-stocked with trophies, Mr. Lee himself sometimes rendezvoused with deputies at a Metairie donut shop and got in a little target practice on the nutria. He also poked fun at his trigger-happy image by appearing in a New Orleans Zephyrs television commercial pretending to go gunning for Boudreaux, the team's nutria mascot. 
    Mr. Lee was equally aggressive about pursuing his political agenda, and he was willing to take advantage of every sliver of authority the state Constitution bestowed on him. 
    In 1993, anticipating a low turnout for his sales tax referendum, Mr. Lee and his inner circle hatched an elaborate strategy to get out the vote by requiring each of his 1,300 deputies to deliver 20 sympathetic voters to the polls. The deliveries could be made in police cars, Mr. Lee decided. The tax passed easily. 
    Deeply loyal to his own political friends, Mr. Lee demanded loyalty from his employees. He deftly tip-toed around election laws while persuading deputies to campaign for him. The tactics were subtle, but the message was clear. 
    "Any guy that doesn't help out shouldn't expect advancement in the department," he said. "The Sheriff's Office is very unique. They serve at my pleasure, and pleasure means pleasing me." 
    Mr. Lee once boasted that a poll showed he was the most popular politician in metropolitan New Orleans , and candidates routinely sought his endorsement. In 1995, after Edwin Edwards, a close friend and hunting buddy, announced he would not seek another term as governor, Mr. Lee himself briefly ran for the state's top post. But in the end, he was reluctant to give up a job that gave him enormous latitude in raising and spending money and hiring and firing deputies. He boasted that he could legally spend public funds to buy his personal secretary a Mercedes. "Why would I want to be governor when I can be king?" Mr. Lee asked. 
    Although never elected in any district larger than a single parish, his reputation was broad enough that in 2001 he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame. Such was his popularity with the public that he could occasionally keep company with convicted felons yet never suffer politically. Among his questionable associates were organized crime figures Carlos Marcello and Frank Caracci; Al Payne Sr., a former warden whom Mr. Lee rehired despite a conviction for protecting a bookmaking operation; and Robert Guidry, who pleaded guilty to an extortion conspiracy and testified that he paid off former Gov. Edwin Edwards for the license to open the Treasure Chest casino. 
    Within the Sheriff's Office itself, five of Mr. Lee's deputies admitted to crimes exposed in the federal government's Wrinkled Robe investigation of Jefferson Parish Courthouse corruption. Despite internal investigations, Mr. Lee's staff had failed to uncover the systematic bribery that the FBI found. 
    Mr. Lee himself was convicted of a misdemeanor in 1998 for unknowingly hunting mourning doves over a baited field in Pike County , Miss. "I am a victim of circumstances," Mr. Lee said afterwards. "I find no irony. I feel no remorse. This is just another day in the life of Harry Lee." 
    Couldn't transfer popularity 
    Mr. Lee's political success was driven by an impressive vote-getting and money-generating machine. His annual fais do do fundraiser drew more than 5,000 guests each paying $100 for a seat -- even in non-election years. He also invested in votes. He routinely dipped into his campaign coffers to give money to local charities and social organizations -- and he expected a return. 
    Yet for all his personal popularity, Mr. Lee's efforts to transfer support to hand-picked candidates and causes proved less successful. The candidates routinely fell flat at the polls, and Mr. Lee failed three times in the 1990s to persuade voters to raise taxes to expand the parish jail. Only after other parish officials put together a campaign to keep video poker legal in Jefferson , by pledging the gambling tax revenue to the jail expansion, did voters agree. 
    Renwick said Mr. Lee's endorsement record is just another example of how he defied conventional wisdom. Most politicians put their reputation on the line only if they think their cause is a winner, Renwick said, while Mr. Lee backed anyone and anything he felt like backing. 
    A nice guy 
    Despite his rough-hewn political style, most people -- even his political enemies -- thought of Mr. Lee as a genuinely nice guy. Just before he entered the hospital for chemotherapy treatment for leukemia in May, a group of his most persistent critics, seven black ministers affiliated with local churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, paid Mr. Lee a visit in his office to pray for his healing. 
    "When we were done," said Rev. Norwood Thompson, "there were tears in his eyes." 
    Long before that moment, Mr. Lee had attained the local celebrity status usually accorded to music and movie personalities. When he stepped foot into a schoolyard, children clamored around him screaming, "Harry Lee. That's Harry Lee!" 
    He was a fixture in Carnival parades, tossing plastic Sheriff's Office badges and cups from a float bearing his own larger-than-life image, a giant paper mache head that also briefly graced his campaign headquarters in the 1995 governor's race. 
    Mr. Lee, a voracious eater, even turned his weight in to an asset, although it was a painful handicap to him. He often joked about his considerable girth and once joined his fattest deputies in a (short-lived) weight-loss program. When a cartoon was published depicting him as a rotund lawman with Ultra-Slim Fast in his belt, Mr. Lee made copies and sponsored a "Color Fat Harry" contest for school children. 
    Simultaneously summing up Mr. Lee's appeal and his waistline, former University of New Orleans Chancellor Gregory O'Brien once considered naming the five most influential people in the New Orleans area and remarked, "Harry Lee would be three of them, and I'd be hard pressed to name the other two." 
    Mr. Lee weighed closer to 200 pounds when he took office in 1980. But he soon grew corpulent and, despite trying everything from Weight Watchers to hypnotism, never could slim down permanently. Finally in 2003, weighing about 375 pounds, he opted for gastric bypass surgery to reduce the size of his stomach. Within 10 months, he lost 90 pounds. 
    By this time he had already replaced both knees and both hips, all casualties of arthritis. Type 2 diabetes and hearing loss were other ailments, and his cancerous prostate gland was removed in January. He was diagnosed with leukemia in April and, as with almost all his medical maladies, used the occasion to try to educate the public on health, medical testing and early intervention. His health, he said, was the public's business. 
    The line between stage performers and Louisiana politicians has always been perilously thin, and not too far below the surface in Mr. Lee was a lounge singer crying to get out. On more than one occasion, he sang at a popular West Bank honky-tonk, Mud Bugs, and at the 1994 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans , he took the stage for a duet with his friend, Willie Nelson. "I'd like to do what he does," Mr. Lee said once, referring to his famous friend. "I'd like to travel around and make people happy." 
    For one of his famous fais do dos, Mr. Lee handed out to all his guests a complimentary cassette tape featuring his own silky voice singing such tunes as "Wind Beneath My Wings" and his personal favorite, which one associate called the sheriff's theme song: "Welcome to My World." 
    Funeral arrangements were incomplete Tuesday.

9/28/07 Houston Chronicle: Reaching a flourishing Asian-American market;
3 newspapers, other journals offer features geared toward the Indian community in Houston ,
by Purva Patel
    K.L. Sindwani started a one-man, eight-page monthly tabloid in 1982 to keep Houston 's then-nascent Indian community in touch.
    Those eight pages since have grown to 44, given birth to two more papers and caught the eye of mainstream advertisers including Citibank, MetLife, Nationwide and H-E-B.
    "It's a recognition of the importance of that community in terms of consumer buying power," said Jackie Kacen, a marketing professor at the University of Houston . "Census data supports that the Indian-American ethnic population has a wealthier household than other ethnic groups."
    Today, Sindwani's newspaper, Indo-American News, prints 5,000 copies a week and leaves them at about 50 locations around Southwest Houston , including ethnic grocers, coffeehouses, restaurants and other retailers.
    "Now look at us," said Sindwani, 80, who came to the United States from New Delhi in 1958 as a student and worked as a sociology professor at Texas Southern University from 1975 until he retired five years ago. "We're a business."
    Nationwide, there are more than two dozen publications catering to the Indian-American market at large, as well as various lifestyle magazines, business journals, and niche publications targeting the market. Most are in English, though some small publications are in Hindi, Gujarati and other languages.
    Besides its three Indian-oriented newspapers, all of which declined to disclose their revenues, Houston has various smaller niche magazines carrying news about politics back home, local events and Bollywood gossip.
    History and division
    The growth in the Houston area's Indian-American population and its businesses have helped support the three papers. 
    The area is home to about 74,000 Asians of Indian descent, according to the latest Census figures, though some community leaders put the figure at more than 100,000.
    By 1986, Sindwani had taken on three partners, hired a managing editor and turned his monthly paper into a weekly. The paper also published a 150-page directory of local and Texas-based South Asian businesses.
    Partner Koshy Thomas, originally from Kerala , India , left the paper shortly after to start his own because, he said, he thought he deserved a bigger share of the profits.
    Today, Thomas' paper, Voice of Asia, prints 15,000 to 20,000 copies a week, he said.
    And last year, Thomas, 73, launched the Asian Business Journal to cover the entire Asian business community in Houston , including Chinese, Vietnamese and other east or southeast Asian businesses.
    Nine years after Thomas left, Rajeev Gadgil left his post as managing editor of Indo-American News and joined a friend to publish the India Herald.
    "We thought we could do on our own what we were doing for others," said Gadgil, 56, who is originally from Hyderabad , India . "Ten or 15 years ago, it seemed like there would be no future for a newspaper, but with this influx in immigration, the market remains pretty strong for the desi media."
    Desi, derived from the Hindi word for "from our land," is a colloquial name for those who trace their ancestry to South Asia, especially India , Bangladesh or Pakistan .
    The market is so strong, the papers now try to cater to all South Asians, especially with new competition from the Pakistan Chronicle, Urdu Times and other local publications.
    The India Herald distributes about 2,000 copies a week.
    The three papers focus on locally produced community news and carry wire service stories about news in South Asia .
    Growing market
    All three Houston-area papers make most of their advertising revenue from South Asian businesses, but mainstream advertisers are starting to take notice. 
    Indian-Americans in the Houston area have a median household income of $66,789, compared with the overall area's median of $50,250, according to the most recent Census figures.
    That's an attraction for advertisers, as is the fact that India itself is of growing importance to global companies that want to do business there.
    "Forging ties with that community is a smart business move," Kacen said.
    H-E-B has been advertising in Indo-American News for at least four years, said James Harris, director of supplier diversity for the grocer. It's a way to reach shoppers who wouldn't necessarily notice that the stores carry items like India Gate Basmati Rice and channa dal, or split chick peas.
    "It's really driving awareness that we have the traditional items and we appreciate their business," Harris said. "With Houston being so diverse, you really have to cater your message to each community."
    With lower advertising rates than general circulation publications, ethnic media are usually a good value, Harris added.
    'Soft-pedal' content
    For South Asian small businesses, the papers provide an affordable alternative to advertising in mainstream papers. 
    Recent issues published ads from South Asian jewelers, sari shops, and travel agencies touting cheap fares to India , Bangladesh and Pakistan .
    The publishers of all three newspapers acknowledge that their reliance on advertising by South Asian businesses keeps the papers from venturing much into contentious editorial content.
    "People here have become more defensive," said Jawahar Malhotra, a partner at Indo-American News who told the Chronicle in 1985 that the paper planned to be controversial. "In my opinion, we're very conservative. Nobody wants to hear the bad stuff, so we soft-pedal it."
    Perhaps if they had stuck together, they could have built one powerhouse paper, Sindwani said.
    Two years ago the three papers talked about merging but couldn't agree on the terms.
    "We could have grown and been even better," he said. "We divided ourselves. But that's the way it worked out."
    Last year, Sindwani sold his shares in the paper to become publisher emeritus and plans to leave within a month or two to focus on other community projects.
    "I'm finished," he said. "I've done what I came to do. Now we'll just take it easy."
    Houston-area Indian-Americans:
    Population: 74,068 
    Median household income: $66,789 
    Bachelor's degree or higher: 67.1%
    Source: 2006 U.S. Census American Community Survey

9/26/07 Asian Week: Hmong Labeled Terrorists, Denied Green Cards,
by: Sandy Cha
    Fresno , Calif. Its an endless process of waiting, of not knowing why or how, but thats often the way it is, applying for U.S. citizenship. Many can relate, but in particular, the situation has become tenuous for the 4,000 Hmong with backlogged applications.
    During the Vietnam War, the United States recruited more than 40,000 Hmong men in Laos to fight communism on behalf of the American government in a covert operation known as the Secret War.
    They rescued American pilots who had been shot down, guarded the Ho Chi Minh trail, gathered intelligence, provided information about the landscape and suffered enormous casualties, dying at a ratio of 10 to one in comparison to their American allies.
    Hundreds of thousands of Hmong immigrated to the United States in the decades following the Vietnam War, but it was not until December 2003 that the State Department made the decision to resettle 15,000 Hmong refugees my grandparents among them from Wat Tham Krabok, one of the last Hmong refugee camps in Thailand, to the United States.
    But decades after assisting the United States under the principles of democracy and freedom, many Hmong may be stranded without the opportunity to obtain full citizenship.
    The broad provisions of the Real ID Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2005 as an attachment to the Patriot Act, affirm that groups of two or more individuals who have taken up arms against a government will be deemed a terrorist organization, and are therefore prevented from gaining full citizenship or refugee status even while facing possible deportation.
    Anyone who provided material support, meaning food, shelter, money or any related assistance to a terrorist group, faces equal risk as well.
    The Hmong who fought alongside the Americans in Laos are considered terrorists under this definiton and are therefore ineligible for asylum or green cards.
    My grandparents recently resettled in the United States from Thailand , but my grandfather does not have full citizenship.
    It has been over a year since he applied for a green card. He currently works part-time in an entry-level position for an electrical company and is learning English as fast as he can.
    He is trying to assimilate into this new culture, taking ESL classes, working and paying taxes.
    Yet, he has not received an answer as to why his green card application has been backlogged while everyone else in the family has received theirs.
    Many Hmong would like to think that the U.S. government did not intend to apply the Real ID provisions to the Hmong community, especially since Hmong soldiers took up arms on behalf of this country; since thousands of Hmong soldiers died to save American lives; and since the United States deserted the war in 1975, leaving thousands to fend for themselves against increasing communist attacks. 
    Young Hmong Americans have a civic responsibility to speak up for the Hmong community. A group of 11 from Fresno recently carried this history and these stories to Washington in meetings with the offices of legislators.
    In these meetings, the stories and struggles of parents, elders and recent refugees, all back home thousands of miles away, resonated heavily, and some participants could not hold back their emotion.
    Our government is responsible for ensuring democracy for everyone, especially for these Hmong who now struggle to become active citizens. Relief may be near if the Foreign Operations Bill passes this fall with its provision that would exempt the Hmong from the Real ID Act.
    American citizens, young Hmong Americans and other communities, should challenge themselves to be critical of how legislation affects the history of immigrants in this country and especially of how this history is coming back to impact many families today.
    Article by Sandy Cha, as told to Mai Der Vang, a youth media coordinator in Fresno .
    FYI: MATERIAL SUPPORT UPDATE provided by The Hmong National Developments News Flash for the week of October 01, 2007 .
    What is Material Support? Due to provisions containing broad definitions of terrorist activity and terrorism in the Patriot Act of 2001 and the REAL ID Act of 2005, the activities of Hmong and Montagnards who fought alongside the U.S. during the Secret War in Laos and the Vietnam War unintentionally fell under these broad definitions. The material support bar impacts individuals who have provided material support, such as food, water, shelter, money, and etc. to individuals who are classified as terrorists. Material support is an issue that affects not only the Hmong and Montagnards, but thousands of refugees and asylum seekers from all around the world. 
    Current Legislation and Next Steps: Language addressing the material support issue for the Hmong and Montagnards (and other refugee groups) was recently passed in the Senate as an amendment to the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill. What next? Within the next few weeks, the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill will go to conference, where a number of selected Senators and Representatives will convene to work out the differences in the House and Senate versions of this bill. Once the bill is finalized and agreed on, it may be sent to the president to be signed into law. The President has threatened to veto the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill due to issues unrelated to material support. 
    Misperceptions about Material Support: While we are excited about the passage of material support language, it does NOT mean that there isnt more to be done! The language still has to go through conference, during which it could possibly be changed and there is still a threat of the President vetoing the bill. Many in the community perceive that if and when the material support issue is resolved, this will automatically allow thousands of Hmong refugees from Laos and Thailand to resettle in the U.S. While resolving material support issues for the Hmong would take care of a huge barrier, the refugee issues of the Hmong in Laos and Thailand are very complex and its resolution WILL NOT open the floodgates for Hmong to resettle in the U.S. This update was adapted from the Material Support Community Update Call hosted by Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) and Hmong National Development (HND) on Friday, September 14, 2007. 
    For more information, please contact Srida Moua, Policy Advocate, at (202) 463-2118 or smoua@hndinc.org. You may also contact Helly Lee, Advocacy Initiative Director, at (202) 667-4690 or helly@searac.org. To receive further updates, please subscribe to hndflash@hndinc.org.
Vivanxai Moua on Oct 01, 2007

9/8/07 Wall Street Journal: Bobby Jindal: In Katrina's Wake,
By James Taranto
Mr. Taranto, editor of OpinionJournal.com, is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
    Buras , La. -- A church is more than a building, and Faith Temple Ministries illustrates the point. This non-denominational congregation holds services in a large white tent behind the frame of its new structure, which is under construction. Two years ago Hurricane Katrina destroyed the old one.
    Buras, a community of about 3,500, is in lower Plaquemines Parish, the southeastern corner of Louisiana . This is where Katrina first hit, and the hurricane's effects are very much in evidence on the 90-minute drive from New Orleans along the Mississippi River's west bank. Partly completed new buildings stand alongside wrecked ones. Trailers sit on the footprints of houses blown away two years ago.
    Faith Temple Ministries is where Bobby Jindal, the second-term Republican congressman seeking to become Louisiana 's governor, has decided to spend the evening of Aug. 29, the anniversary of Katrina's landfall. "We're here with a faith-based community that's done an amazing job, not only in rescue efforts but in rebuilding efforts," he tells me as we prepare to climb off the campaign bus.
    Mr. Jindal, 36, is an affable policy wonk with a quick mind and a fascination with the details of governance. Before our interview, an aide emailed me a series of press releases announcing his 28-point anticrime agenda, his 31-point anticorruption agenda and his 25-point agenda to curb spending. As we chat on the campaign bus rolling through Plaquemines Parish, he is full of ideas.
    He faults the state's bureaucratic culture for the slow pace of rebuilding since Katrina. Congress has allocated tens of billions of dollars, he says, but "a very small percentage" has reached struggling citizens and businesses. "The federal government's got its own complicated set of paperwork. But then after you finally navigate that, for the first time ever, the state created its own additional bureaucracy on top of that -- they created it after Katrina -- and so a lot of these projects, their funding's been approved . . . and that money's getting caught up in Baton Rouge." He vows to reduce this red tape and speed the rebuilding of hospitals, schools and other infrastructure. "I don't think there's been enough urgency. . . . There's not been a realization that the longer you wait, the less likely people are to come back."
    Post-Katrina New Orleans has the nation's highest per capita murder rate. Although dealing with crime is mostly the responsibility of local officials, Mr. Jindal says "there are tools you can give them. . . . For example, crime labs aren't up and running in full force. . . . They were releasing prisoners because of paperwork issues, backlog issues. We need to give the prosecutors that need [it] additional time to make their charges. . . . We need to make sure there's more protection for witnesses. There was a huge problem with witnesses not coming forward. We've got a sentencing guideline that's a maximum five-year sentence for people who intimidate witnesses."
    Mr. Jindal's air of earnest proficiency makes for a sharp contrast with flamboyant past governors like Huey and Earl Long and Edwin Edwards. Yet while Louisiana has never had a reputation for good government, neither has it always been known as a failed state. Decades ago, Mr. Jindal says, " Louisiana was ahead of the South. . . . If you go back to the early '60s -- if you'd gone back then and said Atlanta 's going to be the capital of the New South, they would have laughed at you. . . . New Orleans was bigger than Miami . It wasn't that long ago that we were the gateway to Latin and Central America ."
    What went wrong, Mr. Jindal says, is that Louisiana got caught up in a boom-and-bust cycle. "The state had all these surpluses, had all this oil and gas revenues, so there wasn't the fiscal constraint, there wasn't the fiscal discipline. . . . We've used these dollars and created cycles for instant gratification." So the state was already distressed when the hurricane struck. "Even before Katrina, as a state, we were 50th in health outcomes," Mr. Jindal says. "We were 50th in Forbes as a place to do business -- now we're 49th. We were the only state in the South with . . . people moving out faster than they were moving in."
    The influx of federal money after Katrina, coupled with recent increases in energy prices, has produced a new boom, and Mr. Jindal hopes to seize the opportunity to avert the next bust: "The real danger is, you've got a false economy for a few years, where everybody's building, and you've got sales-tax revenues increasing; you've got temporary workers here. But what that could mask is if you're not rebuilding a solid economic foundation. And where I think the government's best role is there, is setting the conditions for success, then getting out of the way."
    That means changing the conditions that make Louisiana an unattractive place to do business. "Within New Orleans to be specific, we can go in there and say . . . now is the time to get rid of the taxes on debt, new equipment and utilities. Our neighboring states don't have these taxes. Why in the world are we discouraging companies from job creation?"
    Piyush Jindal was born in Baton Rouge just after his parents arrived from India in 1971. At age 4 he took the nickname "Bobby" from "The Brady Bunch," and it stuck. His parents appreciated America as only immigrants can. "Every day when I was a kid, my dad would tell me, 'We live in the greatest country in the world. We are so lucky to be Americans,'" he says.
    This sensibility resonated with the upbeat patriotism of Ronald Reagan, who was elected when Bobby was 9. "Reagan was the optimist, the optimistic conservative, [who] believed in the premise of America, at a time when . . . there was a 'malaise,' people were doubting the American ideals, the American dream. I grew up saying, 'What are you, crazy? This is an incredible place.'" At Brown University and later at Oxford , where he was a Rhodes Scholar, Mr. Jindal's political views put him decidedly in the minority, an experience he found exhilarating: "It was great to be exposed to some very smart, very articulate people that challenged my core beliefs every step of the way."
    In high school, Bobby aspired to be a doctor. But he sought out a well-rounded education, and this eventually led to a change in plans. As an undergraduate, he served an internship in the office of Rep. Jim McCrery, a Shreveport Republican. He earned a master's in political theory, then went to work as a health-care consultant at McKinsey & Co. While there, he read an article in the Washington Post about Louisiana 's troubled health-care system. "It seemed to me that they were going to make a bad problem worse. They were going to have more government-run health care, more spending. So I wrote up an analysis of what I thought they should do."
    It was 1995, and Republican Mike Foster had just been elected governor. Rep. McCrery and then-Sen. John Breaux were impressed with Mr. Jindal's report and recommended him to Mr. Foster's transition team. Eventually he met the governor-elect, who proclaimed Mr. Jindal a "genius" and offered him the top job in the state's Health and Hospitals Department. He was 24. "I realized: 'Well, I guess I'm not going to medical school anymore.'"
    Instead, he spent the next eight years amassing the rsum of a technocratic wunderkind. He eliminated his department's $400 million budget deficit by reducing the payroll and aggressively pursuing private hospitals that had overcharged for Medicaid services. Later he served as executive director of a bipartisan Medicare advisory commission (Sen. Breaux was a co-chairman), president of the University of Louisiana system, and an assistant secretary of health and human services in the Bush administration.
    Four years ago, at age 32, he made his first foray into electoral politics, running to succeed the term-limited Gov. Foster. He finished first in Louisiana 's open primary but narrowly lost the runoff to Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat. In 2004 Mr. Jindal sought and won an open House seat. After her lackluster post-Katrina performance, Gov. Blanco announced that she would not seek re-election, and Mr. Jindal jumped into the race to replace her.
    One reason Mr. Jindal believes he can accomplish his ambitious goals is that this year's election will also bring big changes in the state Legislature, thanks to a 1995 measure limiting members to 12 years in office. His detailed proposals are part of a political strategy designed to hold the new legislators accountable. "Political experts would say, 'You're ahead in the polls. Why do you give them ammunition to attack you with?' I want people to know exactly what we're going to do.
    "I've already said my first special session as governor will be devoted exclusively to ethics. It'll be an up-or-down vote on my 31 points." In the last session, he says, the Legislature approved new disclosure requirements, but "they killed it in conference committee. So they all go home and say, 'I voted for it. Don't get mad at me. Those other guys killed it.' Well, I'm not going to give them anywhere to hide."
    Mr. Jindal says Louisianians understand the gravity of the situation: "I tell people it's our second chance, and they tell [me], 'No, it's our last chance.' There's a nervous optimism in this state. There's an optimism that, yeah, we can change, but there's an anxiety that if we blow this, in our adult lifetimes this will be the last chance."
    He is the prohibitive favorite in the Oct. 20 primary. A poll last month gave him 63% of the vote, to just 14% for his nearest rival, Democratic state Sen. Walter Boasso. If Mr. Jindal gets more than 50% in the primary, he wins outright.
    The Louisiana Democratic Party, in a desperate attempt to halt the Jindal juggernaut, last month made an ugly appeal to religious prejudice. Mr. Jindal, raised in his parents' Hindu faith, is a convert to Catholicism. Although southern Louisiana , with its French and Spanish heritage, is heavily Catholic, Protestants outnumber Catholics statewide.
    The Democratic attack ad claims that Mr. Jindal "has referred to Protestant religions [sic] as scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical" and that he "doubts the morals and questions the beliefs of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Pentecostals and other Protestant religions." In fact, these are wild mischaracterizations of articles Mr. Jindal wrote for a Catholic publication, including one in which he praised aspects of various Protestant denominations' worship and suggested that the Catholic Church could learn from their example. The campaign asked television stations to stop airing the ad on the ground that it is defamatory.
    It was soon off the air anyway, for it had the opposite of its intended effect. "Every phone call, every email, every letter we've gotten has been angry at their ad and supporting us," Mr. Jindal says. "We've literally had hundreds of Democratic elected officials, pastors and others publicly and privately saying they condemn the ad and calling on the party to stop this. . . . Usually with an attack ad, somebody will come up to you and say, 'Hey, is this really true?' . . . I have not had one person question me."
    If the ad was helping him, I ask, why did he ask to have it pulled? My cynical question draws a high-minded answer: "It coarsens what I think should be a very important election. . . . It's beneath our state; it's beneath our voters. I think it's insulting to our voters."
    If there is sectarian strife in Louisiana , it is not evident in Buras. This is a Protestant crowd -- Mr. Jindal is preceded on the altar by nearly a dozen pastors from Baptist, Methodist and unaffiliated congregations around the state. When it is Mr. Jindal's turn to speak, he delivers a half-hour oration that is as much sermon as campaign speech. The parishioners respond warmly to his story of becoming a Christian, a seven-year spiritual quest that began in high school, when his best friend gave him a Bible as a gift.
    "There are people who lost loved ones in this room," Mr. Jindal tells the worshippers. "There are people who lost their life savings in this room. And I can't imagine having to walk in the footsteps of so many of our fellow residents of this state as they had to live their faith through the toughest times. But they were comforted by a God that says: You keep an eternal perspective." It is a perspective that may serve Mr. Jindal well come Oct. 20.

9/6/07 Reuters: "Sayonara" actress, first Asian to win Oscar, dies,
    Tokyo (Hollywood Reporter) - Actress Miyoshi Umeki, the first Asian to win an Oscar, has died in a Missouri nursing home. She was 78.
    The Japanese native, who won the Academy Award for her supporting role opposite Red Buttons in "Sayonara," died Wednesday in the small town of Licking .
    "Sayonara," the 1957 screen version of the James Michener novel, revolved around a U.S. soldier who falls in love amid the chaos at the end of World War II. Fated to be parted when he is ordered to return to the U.S. , the pair commits suicide.
    Umeki went on to a successful career in television, cinema and on the stage. She retired from the screen in the 1970s and moved to Missouri with her husband and son.
    Born in the northern city of Otaru in 1929, Umeki began her performing career by singing jazz numbers at military camps during the occupation. After spells on radio and TV in Japan , she moved to the U.S. in 1955, when she quickly caught the attention of "Sayonara" director Joshua Logan.
    In 1958, she played the lead as the Chinese mail-order bride in Rodgers and Hammerstein's stage production of "Flower Drum Song," which earned her a Tony nomination. She repeated the role in the movie version three years later.
    Her other big-screen credits included "A Girl Named Tamiko" and "The Horizontal Lieutenant." She also played housekeeper Mrs. Livingston throughout the three-year run of the ABC series "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."

 
9/5/07 Wall Street Journal: Watch Out for the China Bashers,
by Zachary Karabell
    The recent outcry over poisonous pet food and the recall of lead-tainted toys sourced by Mattel in China proves one thing: We have a China problem. It is not, however, a China problem in the way most people think. It is not a problem with safety standards that threaten our children and our pets. It is a problem with the very fact of China as an emerging force on the global economic stage, and it underscores a profound and worrying trend in American political and economic life. For half a century we fought for the creation of a global capitalist system. Now that we have one, we seem to have forgotten one little thing: Capitalism means competition, and we are acting like we can't handle it.
    To understand that the uproar over the toys isn't really about product safety, we need to look back at the past few years and see that the current hullabaloo is just the latest incarnation of our simmering China problem.
    The rumblings began during the election of 2004, with accusations that U.S. companies that outsourced work to China were traitorous and being led by "Benedict Arnold CEOs." Never mind that most of the jobs outsourced to China had already been outsourced to Mexico a decade ago. The chorus grew two years ago, when one of China 's state-owned energy companies attempted to buy Unocal. That led to a strenuous and yes, bipartisan, position in Congress that allowing the deal to go forward would jeopardize national security and unfairly benefit China . Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden declared: "I don't think being a free-trader is synonymous with being a sucker and patsy." The Republicans were no better. The deal was scuttled.
    Then last year, the sharply rising trade deficit and current account deficit with China generated pressure in Congress to force China to allow its currency (the yuan) to appreciate more rapidly against the U.S. dollar. The first proposal was sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Charles Schumer and would slap China with a 27.5% tariff unless it allows for an immediate and sharp revaluation. The second is working through the Senate this summer and is sponsored by Sens. Charles Grassley and Max Baucus. It would force the Treasury Department to label China a currency manipulator based on the fact that China doesn't allow the yuan to float freely. That in turn would lead to series of procedural moves with escalating penalties.
    Never mind the fact that even a substantial rise in the currency wouldn't change the dynamics of U.S.-China trade. China is appealing not just because of costs but because of a reliable infrastructure and a proven ability to produce. Never mind that sourcing in China has direct benefits for hundreds of millions of Americans in the form of less expensive goods, from appliances to entertainment. Never mind that China partly subsidizes U.S. spending and consumption by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of U.S. Treasuries. And never mind that China has become an integral market for U.S. goods and companies, as the purchasing power of Chinese consumers rises rapidly. Macau is already a larger market for U.S. gaming companies than Las Vegas , and multinationals such as Proctor & Gamble and GE are seeing some of their fastest, most substantial growth from selling to China , not from sourcing in China .
    While the rhetoric in Congress and on the campaign trail isn't likely to derail these trends, the unwillingness to acknowledge the benefits of China 's rise is part of a pattern of China bashing that raises questions about the ability of the U.S. to compete in the global economy that it did so much to create.
    The issue of safety needs to be seen in this context. There is no question that standards in China are less rigorous than they should be. But consumer concerns over product safety long predate the current scare, and only a severe case of amnesia can turn this into a China issue. Remember Ralph Nader in his 1960s heyday? How about the global recall of Perrier water (made in France ) in 1990 because of fears of benzene contamination? Or the rollover problem of the Ford Explorer in the same period? What about the recall of halogen torchier lamps in 1997 because of an unfortunate tendency for the bulbs to explode?
    Read the annual report of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1990, which pointed to the recall of infant "bean bag" cushions made in the U.S. that caused 30 deaths. Moreover, given the recent outcry over dangerous tires made in China , we should remember that this pales in comparison to the 88 deaths attributed to defective Firestone Tires in the late 1990s that led to the recall of 6.5 million in 2000.
    This is only a small sample of product recalls in the past 20 years that had nothing to do with China . While this year China is a major source of product defects, the actual number of faulty products is, regrettably, normal -- proportionate to how much it produces and comparable to the safety issues that have bedeviled manufacturers of all nationalities in past decades. Companies, not countries, bear ultimate responsibility for what they sell under the label, and it says something about current attitudes that so many have collectively forgotten the recent history of product safety concerns and turned it into a China problem.
    Chinese officials recognize that reason and rationality aren't at work here. Zhao Baoqing, a Chinese trade official in Washington , recently attacked the quality of U.S. goods sold in China , and pointed to cranes and to generators made by General Electric as posing serious safety hazards. Most Americans will, in this climate, probably dismiss his claims as so much empty rhetoric, but the record of safety issues with U.S.-made products should give anyone pause before doing so.
    As we plunge into this long election season, China is a convenient bogeyman for all sorts of ills and fears. Without question, China presents an unparalleled challenge. At various points in the 20th century, the U.S. faced military and ideological threats. But since the dawn of the American republic, we have never faced the kind of economic challenge that China presents. It is playing the game of global capitalism almost as adeptly as we are, and our response for now seems to be a mixture of fear and disbelief.
    Rather than seeing China as adding to an expanding global economic pie, we treat its ascendance as a zero-sum proposition for our workers, our companies, our currency and now even our health. While the evolution of China and the U.S. is anything but certain, and while each face internal issues that could derail the steady move forward, one thing should be fairly clear: Our China problem is going to harm us more than it will derail China .
    It is perfectly legitimate for us to demand that Chinese companies and authorities attend to product safety and to a level playing field in terms of trade. That, after all, is the guiding spirit of the World Trade Organization. It is perfectly legitimate, as both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said, to treat China as a competitor and press the Chinese for greater access, more transparency, and assorted reforms. But much of the rhetoric and cultural undercurrent these days casts China as the on-deck enemy should al Qaeda not prove up to the task of long-term adversary.
    Like it or not, China is going to be a force to contend with, just as the U.S. was a century ago. Already, we are more linked to China than most of us realize or than many would like. If China-bashing becomes the prism through which China is viewed, the recent turmoil in the markets caused by the subprime mortgage mess will seem placid by comparison.
    Mr. Karabell is executive vice president and chief economist of Fred Alger Management.

8/23/07 Dallas Morning News: "Asian Film Festival explores definitions of beauty,"
by Esther Wu
    As a child, one of my favorite programs was the Miss America pageant. I used one of my mother's old lace curtains for my cape and a bowling trophy for my scepter. But even at age 5, there was already a part of me that knew that my Asian features did not exactly fit in what is considered an "American beauty." 
    "A lot of Asian women have poor self-images," said Chiho Mori, who is of Japanese descent. "We have this image of what it is to be beautiful: We must be tall, blond and have big blue eyes. Asian women generally are short, with dark hair and almond-shaped, dark eyes." 
    An estimated 11 million plastic surgeries were performed in the U.S. in 2006. The number of Asian-Americans who underwent plastic and cosmetic surgery more than doubled between 2004 and 2006.
    According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a growing number of Asians are undergoing nose reconstruction, eyelid surgery and breast augmentation. 
    Among the most controversial of these procedures is blepharoplasty or eyelid surgery. This surgery creates a "double eyelid" that is absent in about half of eastern Asians. 
    The first Asian eyelid surgery was performed in Japan in 1896, and the issue has been the subject of debate since. I can remember discussing it in high school with several of my Asian friends. We argued about the implications of the surgery. We were raised as Americans, so doesn't it stand to reason that we would want to look more Western? Would altering our eyes dishonor our cultural heritage? Whose ideal of beauty do we follow? As teenagers, I think we were driven by the desire to fit in with the majority of our classmates. 
    The discussion will continue Wednesday after the Dallas premiere of Never Perfect, a documentary by Regina Park that follows the journey of a young Vietnamese woman who struggles with the decision to undergo blepharoplasty. 
    The screening, part of the sixth annual Asian Film Festival, starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Magnolia Theatre, 3699 McKinney Ave in Dallas . Tickets are $8. 
    Immediately after the screening, Sylvia Komatsu, senior vice president of content for KERA-TV (Channel 13); Carrie Liu Currier , director of Asian studies at Texas Christian University ; and Adrian Tan, sociology instructor at Southern Methodist University, will hold a panel discussion on beauty and the Asian woman. 
    "There is a question why more and more women subject themselves to time-consuming, expensive and sometimes painful processes in their quest for physical perfection," Ms. Park said on her Web site. "Yet this constant striving to reach a beauty ideal to accompany their other academic, career, material and personal achievements is steeped in a profoundly fundamental question of identity and is not simply a matter of an individual's personal aesthetic choice." 
    She also writes that Never Perfect unfolds the dramatic emotional and psychological complexities of what it means to be an ever-evolving, multifaceted woman living in today's global society. 
    In the film, Mai-Anh recalls how her mother told her as a child that she could not be beautiful without bigger eyes. But she is conflicted by the different ideals of beauty. She is proud of her Vietnamese heritage, but she grew up in the U.S. She grew up with the American image of beauty. 
    Ms. Mori, executive director of the Dallas Asian Film Festival, said one of the reasons she chose to screen this film is because the subject of self-image and beauty are not openly discussed in the Asian culture. 
    "I wanted to provide a platform for people to discuss these issues," she said. 
    Years ago, I used to be tormented by playground bullies who would pull up the corners of their eyes and shout racial slurs. Being Asian was simply not acceptable, and for a brief time it caused me to resent my heritage. 
    But things are changing. I doubt that Ming-Na from television's ER, Sandra Oh from Grey's Anatomy, or movie actress Lucy Liu would be teased for their looks. Kelly Hu won the title of Miss Teen USA in 1985, and Angela Perez Baraquio was crowned Miss America 2001. 
    I may be too old to play Miss America anymore, but it's nice to know that this dream can come true for those of us who aren't blond and blue-eyed.

7/30/07 The Daily Breeze ( Torrance , CA ): Lieu Leads California Fight for Asian American Judges,
by Gene Maddaus
    Assemblyman Ted Lieu is taking an increasingly prominent role on issues affecting Asian-Americans as he prepares to assume the chairmanship of the Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus. 
    Lieu, D-Torrance, has taken the lead in pressuring the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to appoint more Asian-American judges. 
    The issue has pushed Lieu, typically a moderate consensus-builder, into pointed conflict with the Republican administration. He has allied with the Legislature's Latino and black caucuses in threatening to cut off funding for judges if Schwarzenegger's appointments do not become more diverse. 
    "One person in California gets to shape the entire judicial branch," Lieu said in a recent interview. "He has wielded this tremendous power in a way that is insensitive to the rich diversity of California ."
    Lieu has given numerous interviews on the subject and authored an op-ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle. He argues that while Asian-Americans make up 12.6 percent of the population, they represent only 4.6 percent of the governor's 260 judicial nominees. 
    Black and Latino judges are similarly underrepresented in comparison to the general population, though the governor's supporters say his appointments look more diverse when compared with the state bar membership, which is 85 percent white. 
    Nevertheless, Lieu has argued that the governor is overlooking qualified minority candidates in favor of political allies. Last week, he cited the appointment of Elia Perrozi, a Republican activist who was rated "not qualified" for the bench by the state bar. 
    "At least now we know what our applicants did wrong," Lieu said. "They were qualified attorneys instead of Republican insiders." 
    Aside from that issue, Lieu has also been prominent in pushing for more detailed ethnic data collection for Asian Pacific Islanders. Lieu authored a bill, AB 295, that would expand the number of Asian-American subgroups from 11 to 21, adding groups such as Bangladeshis, Fijians, Malaysians and Hmongs. 
    Lieu said better data would lead to better targeting of state services. The Hmong community, for example, tends to have a higher dropout rate than other Asian groups, while Tongans have a higher rate of cervical cancer. Under current law, those groups are classified as "other Asians." 
    "When you lump in the Tongans and the Hmong, it messes up the numbers," Lieu said. "This disaggregates the data, and will ultimately help save money." 
    The bill has the backing of Asian-American students at UCLA, who have launched a campaign called "Count Me In!" The campaign is expected to spread to other University of California campuses and rally support for Lieu's bill.
     Additionally, Lieu has been involved in responding to slurs against Asian-Americans in the media. Last year, he wrote to the chairman of CBS Radio to request an apology for remarks made by comedian Adam Carolla about the Asian Excellence Awards. 
    "He went on the air and for almost a minute, said `ching chong, ching chong,"' Lieu said. "Can you imagine if someone made fun of the NAACP Image Awards?" 
    Several other groups protested as well, and Carolla was compelled to apologize. 
    Lieu can be expected to take on a higher profile on such issues beginning in the Legislature's next session, when he will become chairman of the Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus. 
    "Obviously my first priority is my district," Lieu said. "But to the extent that I can help out on issues statewide affecting Asian Pacific Americans, I'm going to try and do that."

7/30/07 Pittsburgh Tribune Review: "Fox Chapel students created anti-Asian Web site,"
by Charlie Ban
    An Asian-American hate-crime watch group has accused a group of Fox Chapel Area High School students of racism for posting an anti-Asian Web site.
    A student affiliated with the site said it was a joke that got out of hand. 
    "Anti-Asians Anonymous" surfaced on the social networking site Facebook several months ago and included the names of 16 Fox Chapel Area students who had joined. Asian-American Fallout Central, which operates a Web site designed to "mobilize Asian-Americans against the racism and prejudices facing us in the United States and beyond," posted pages from the Facebook group in June and urged critics to complain to school officials. 
    The Facebook group, which the Fox Chapel students have removed, contained postings about Asian stereotypes. It had ungrammatical and misspelled references to Pearl Harbor, chopsticks and anime. Included was a photo of an Asian man with a cartoon-style caption: "I ate your dog and I'm not sorry." 
    Nine of those listed as members of Anti-Asians Anonymous will be juniors in 2007-08. Six will be sophomores and one graduated in 2007. A posting in April indicated the group had existed for about a year. The Tribune-Review is not disclosing the names of members who are minors. 
    The Web log's editor -- a Fox Chapel junior -- did not respond to a request for comment. 
    Fox Chapel Superintendent Anne Stephens said the district's computer system blocks access to Facebook, so the group must have been formed and maintained off school property. As a result, the district could not discipline the students, but high school Principal Ken Williams wrote letters to the students and their parents and spoke to all the participants. 
    Asian students account for about 5.4 percent of Fox Chapel's high school students and about 6.25 percent of the district's student body. Allegheny County is 1.9 percent Asian, and the state is 1.8 percent is Asian, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. 
    Stephens said there were no racial incidents involving Fox Chapel's Asian students in the last school year. 
    "Schools across the nation have not been successful in reacting to or punishing students for what they create outside of school," Stephens wrote in an e-mail to Fallout Central. "We can control what students do in school, but the law is not on our side when the actions they take are beyond the school day." 
    Facebook users post personal information and photographs and link to other users' profiles by adding them as "friends." Users can establish common interest groups and invite other users to join. 
    Brandon Elkins, 18, who graduated this spring, said he did not give a second thought to joining. 
    "There are a bunch of Facebook groups," he said. "People send out invitations and you just click on them. 
    "I just thought it was a joke. Everyone did. It just went a little too far. I don't think anyone in that group hates any group of people," he said. "I wasn't really involved with it. I never heard anything about it until I got a letter at home. Nobody ever talked about it at school." 
    In his letter to Fallout Central, Williams said the students involved are not known as troublemakers. 
    "Surprisingly (and disappointing to learn) some of those students have been seen as exceptional students while here," he wrote. "I guess this shows that even some of the 'best' kids can be insensitive and use poor judgment." 
    Wen-Ching Yang, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said representatives of his group and similar ones throughout the area will meet with district officials in hopes of adding to Fox Chapel's diversity program. 
    "Perhaps they could add Asian history to the curriculum. We know they can't discipline the students, but it does reflect on the school district," Yang said. 
    "We would like to see if we could discover the sources of these sentiments. Is it dissatisfaction, like Toyota being more successful than General Motors? When you have these sentiments, they may evolve into hate crimes, so we want to nip these things in the bud." 
    Stephens said the schools would respond by encouraging tolerance and diversity. 
    "We're so limited in what we can do; we're better off to be proactive in the future. You can counsel students, but they still have freedom of expression." 
    Stephens said the district received no complaints from Asian-American students about the incidents. Several families of Asian-American Fox Chapel students contacted by phone said they had not heard of the Facebook group. 
    "There is healing that has to take place at school because this is where we gather," Stephens said. "It falls on the shoulders of the high school. We'll take that role on, but it has to happen 24/7, outside of school, as well." 

7/24/07 Associated Press: Reform Groups Hold Fundraiser for Dry Cleaners in Pants Lawsuit,
by Lubna Takruri
    Washington (AP) -- Legal reform groups and supporters from across the country attended a cocktail fundraiser Tuesday evening at which the star attraction was a pair of famous pants.
    The $54 million pants, as they've come to be known, were the subject of a lawsuit that originally gained international attention and ridicule toward the American legal system. Now, they have their own security guard.
    The dry cleaner owners who successfully defended themselves from the suit, which originally demanded $67 million, now owe about $100,000 in legal costs.
    The American Tort Reform Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform -- groups that advocate tighter guidelines for filing lawsuits -- joined forces to put on Tuesday's fundraiser in hopes of defraying the legal costs for Jin Nam Chung and Soo Chung, the owners of Custom Cleaners.
    The fundraiser netted more than $64,000, with more pledges still coming in, organizers said.
    "Without your support, the Chungs could very well have gone bankrupt," defense attorney Chris Manning told the crowd of about 150.
    The organizers said they also wanted to raise visibility for tort reform in the face of lawsuits that unfairly target small businesses.
    "Our motto is the spirit of free enterprise," said Lisa Rickard, president of the Institute for Legal Reform. "The Chungs epitomize that in our perspective.
    They've really been living the American dream, and that all came to a halt with the filing of this lawsuit.
    "It's our hope to help them do a course correction and get back on track," Rickard said.
    The guests had appetizers and cocktails, and under the stern gaze of the security guard, some posed for photos with the pants that started it all. The Chungs say they are the pants that Roy Pearson brought in, were misplaced, and later found -- and over which Pearson shed tears in court as he insisted they weren't his.
    They also heard speeches by the leaders of the two organizations, and in a rare happening, the Chungs themselves, who took turns modestly thanking their guests.
    If the court grants the Chungs' motion for Pearson to pay their legal fees, Manning said that proceeds from the fundraiser that exceed the family's costs would be donated to a neighborhood charity.
    Pearson did not respond to an e-mail from The Associated Press requesting comment.

7/24/07 Associated Press: Tennessee : Couple Win Back Daughter, 
    A Chinese couple regained legal custody of their 8-year-old daughter after a seven-year fight to win her back from what was supposed to be temporary foster care. Judge Curtis S. Person of Juvenile Court of Memphis signed an order returning custody of the girl, Anna Mae He, to her parents, Shaoqiang and Qin Luo He, Chinese citizens who came to the United States so Mr. He could attend college. In 1999, the Hes put the girl in what they thought was temporary foster care because of financial and legal difficulties. Judge Persons order revoked the temporary guardianship held by Jerry and Louise Baker, former foster parents who had tried to adopt the girl over her parents objections. The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled in January that Anna Mae was to be reunited with her parents, and she began meeting with them in March.

7/22/07 Los Angeles Times: More specific listing of ethnicity at UC urged Pacific Islanders and Asians at UCLA say some student groups' numbers are not recognized,
By Anna Gorman
    Frustrated by the assumption that all Asian American youths are well represented at UC schools, a coalition of Pacific Islander and Asian students at UCLA is pushing for the university to expand its demographic categories to highlight low numbers in some of those communities in hopes of boosting enrollment and outreach programs. 
    Advocates are collecting signatures to petition legislators and the Board of Regents this fall to change how the university system collects admissions data. They believe more information about students from smaller ethnic groups such as Hmong and Thai would focus increased attention on the educational barriers facing certain Asian populations.
    "Pacific Islanders are just pushed under this umbrella of Asian and are never really seen," said Nefara Riesch, a Samoan American junior at UCLA. "Our small numbers are never recognized." 
    Asians and Pacific Islanders have several choices when marking their ethnicity on UC applications, but many of the smaller groups are not represented. And in most official reports, the students are all grouped together. 
    The students spearheading the "Count Me In" campaign want the UC system to create a specific Pacific Islander category within admissions data and to collect information on students from 10 subgroups, including Bangladeshi, Malaysian and Laotian. 
    UC officials acknowledged that some Asian communities are underrepresented and said the university system would be open to presenting more specific data. 
    "We're a university, so we always think more information is better," said Nina Robinson, director of policy and external affairs in UC student affairs.
    "The question is the cost."
    In addition, she said any change to the way the system collects data would make it harder to track trends over time. But even without more demographic information, Robinson said, the university still can expand its outreach to underrepresented populations.
    While growing up in East Palo Alto , Riesch said, she saw other Samoan American teenagers join gangs, sell drugs and get arrested. But her mother made it clear that she wanted a different life for Riesch and her three siblings. 
    Riesch earned a scholarship to attend a private high school and then got accepted to UCLA, becoming the first in her family to attend college. She plans to become a teacher.
    "That was big for me to defy that stereotype that I was going to be just another Pacific Islander that wasn't doing anything with her life," she said. 
    At UCLA, she sought out other Pacific Islander students but realized there weren't very many. Last fall, there were 72 Pacific Islanders at UCLA and 654 systemwide. Riesch said that by collecting more data on those students, the university would realize the need for more tutoring and peer counseling at high schools serving those populations and would devote more resources to such programs. Riesch volunteers at Carson High School , tutoring and counseling Samoan American students.
    "As someone who has the privilege to go to college," she said, "it is my responsibility to take care of my family, and that family is all Pacific Islanders." 
    Carson High School teacher Tammy Bird, who advises the Pacific Islander club, said very few of her Samoan, Tongan and Guamanian students go to four-year colleges. Many are born into gangs, she said, and others simply don't have an interest in school.
    "There is not a stress on education in the population," she said. Cindy Vang, a member of the Assn. of Hmong Students at UCLA, said Hmong youths are at a disadvantage because many grow up in low-income neighborhoods as children of refugees who speak limited English. 
    Vang said it was difficult coming to a campus where there were so few students who shared her background. 
    "It would be good to know the numbers," she said.
    "That could be a justification for why we need more funding to reach out to our communities."
    The students' effort coincides with a state bill crafted by Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) to ensure that state-collected data would be separated into additional Asian and Pacific Islander groups, including Hmong, Taiwanese and Tongan. California collects information for 11 such groups, and the bill would expand that number to 21.
    The data would parallel how the federal government gathers demographic information and would enable the state to better allocate limited resources, Lieu said.
    Among the departments that would be required to separate the data are Employment Development and Social Services.
    "We are one of the most diverse Asian-Pacific Islander states in the nation," Lieu said. "If any state should follow the federal guidelines, it should be California ." 
    Andy Ah Po, chairman of an advocacy group for native Hawaiians in California , said some Pacific Islanders have fared better than others and that programs "live or die based on whether or not there is data on the particular group." 
    U.S. census figures paint a grim portrait of the educational levels of some Asian and Pacific Islander communities in California . For example, 66% of Hmong, 58% of Laotians and 56% of Cambodians have not completed high school, according to a recent report compiled by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center based on census data and estimates. But 30% of Asian Indians and 22% of Pakistanis have advanced degrees.
    "People assume it's this model minority community that is highly educated," said Karin Wang, vice president of programs for the center. "That is true for some of the community but not all pockets of our community." 
    Asians and Pacific Islanders are not interchangeable, Wang added. "The reality is that our needs, our histories, are extraordinarily different."
    Kevin Peanh, whose parents came from Cambodia in the 1980s, is part of the United Khmer Students organization at UCLA. His parents were supportive but didn't know much about American education, Peanh said, so he and his older sisters had to navigate the system on their own. "We should be recording the progress of these new communities and how we are coming along in America ," said Peanh, 20.
 


7/20/0/07 AsianWeek.com: Chinese Ams Lead Young GOP,
by Rodney Leong
    More than 400 activists convened in South Florida for the biannual Young Republican National Convention over Independence Day weekend, to meet, network and elect a new board that will lead the organization through the next two years. 
    Glenn Murphy was unanimously elected chairman, and Vince Fong was elected western regional vice chair. 
    Murphy and Fong were raised on opposite ends of the country, but share common threads of entering the political arena during college and credit their parents for raising them with values of hard work and merit, values that ultimately determined their political calling. 
    Murphy, whose mother emigrated from Hong Kong, was raised in southern Indiana and was the first Republican in a Democrat family. At Indiana University , he majored in journalism and joined the College Democrats. But he soon realized that the Republican Partys values were more in line with his own and promptly joined the College Republicans. "Parties and their names change, but your values will always remain the same," he said. "You have to remain true to your values." 
    After college, Murphy started a public relations firm, in addition to establishing the Indiana Federation of Young Republicans, which grew in two years to more than 200 members. At age 27, he became county chair of the Clark County ( Indiana ) GOP, a post that he still holds. 
    Vince Fong, a Bakersfield , Calif. , native, was raised with a self-described "conservative upbringing" by his parents who emigrated from Hong Kong and mainland China . While earning a BA in political science from UCLA and a masters degree from Princeton , Fong realized that the values of campus Democrats ran counter to his own values. "The choice was either apathy or to get involved," Fong said. 
    He began volunteering on campaigns for President Bush, the Davis recall, and for local and statewide races. 
    Fong was brought on board Congressman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) staff as a district representative, a position he continues to hold for Thomas successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. He is also currently chair of the Kern County Young Republicans. 
    Both Fong and Murphy believe that the Republican Partys core values of empowerment, hard work and merit, are the same values their parents instilled in them. "Your vote should share your values," said Fong. 
    Rodney Leong is communications director for the San Francisco Young Republicans.

7/20/07 AsianWeek.com: Banking on Racism: Asian American banks are under attack -- where's the Asian American response?
by Garry South
    For centuries, virulent anti-Semites have groused about "the Jews owning all the banks." But, in recent years, equally unfair allegations have been leveled against banks originally established to serve the Asian American community.
    My first experience with this was in 1993, when I served as campaign communications director for Michael Woo, the first Asian American to run for mayor of Los Angeles . Woo was also the first and so far the only Asian American member of the Los Angeles City Council, serving from 1985-93.
    Woos grandfather and father were instrumental in founding Cathay Bank, based in L.A. s Chinatown , in 1962. The first Chinese American bank in California , it was established to help recent immigrants who were underserved or denied credit altogether by mainstream banks. In 1985, Cathay opened a representative office in Hong Kong, and in 1987, it established an office in Taiwan .
    Our opponents seized on his familys connection with this institution to wage a negative, racially tinged campaign against Woo, a native-born, U.S.-educated American who didnt even speak enough Chinese to order at a Chinese restaurant. In the runoff election, Richard Riordans campaign pumped out ads and mail pieces falsely insinuating that Hong Kong banks were illegally financing the Woo campaign. They included a gratuitous color photo of the Hong Kong skyline, and they outrageously accused Cathay of being racist because it made most of its home loans to Chinese-surnamed customers. 
    Then in early June, just days before the runoff, I debated former L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates on his KFI-AM radio show. Woo had been the first elected official to call for Gates to resign after the infamous 1992 Rodney King beating, and Gates, a Riordan friend and supporter, was on a jihad against Woo.
    At one point, heres how that conversation went: 
    Gates: As you know, early in [Woos] campaign there was a lot of cash coming from people in Chinatown into his campaign, and then being laundered in his dads bank.
    Me: No, thats not true, either.
    Gates: Did any of that money come from the tongs [Chinese gangs] in Chinatown ?
    Me: That is an absolutely despicable accusation, and I cant believe you would make it on the air.
    Gates: You can say you dont know. Hey, Ive been dealing with Chinatown for years. Do you know there are tongs? Has Michael Woo not gone all over the nation going to the Chinese and asking for money?
    Me: Well, so what? He happens to be Chinese. Thats illegal?
    Gates: Do you know that tongs exist?
    Me: What are you trying to say? Are you trying to link Mike Woo in some fashion to organized crime?
    Gates: Ive simply said cash came into his campaign, and Ive simply asked if any of that money came from tongs.
    Me: Of course it did not. What are you trying to suggest?
    Gates: Im not suggesting I asked the question because I know tongs, and I know tongs give cash money and that comes from years of experience. I just asked you the question. 
    No harm in asking. Think things are better today? This past April, East West Bank announced it was acquiring Desert Community Bank, a nine-branch institution in the High Desert area near Los Angeles . A Chinese American bank founded in 1973 to serve Chinese Americans, East West has become a multi-ethnic institution that is currently the second largest independent community bank headquartered in L.A. , with 58 branch locations across California . It has been widely praised for its innovative and responsible lending policies and outreach to other minorities.
    When the takeover was made public, East West Bank and its long-time chairman, Dominic Ng, were attacked on air by talk show host Barbara Stanton on KIXW-AM, a Clear Channel station in Victorville.
    "Look," Stanton told her listeners, "there is a Chinese-looking guy a foreigner, let me say that, with the last name of Ing, Ng, I dont know how to pronounce it. Id better get used to it, I guess.
    "We are going to see more Chinese faces in the bank than ever before," she continued. "Theyre going to bring their own staff. Oh yeah, its going to be a big time for all, except for us, the true Americans." She then urged her listeners to withdraw their deposits from Desert Community Bank a possible violation of state banking laws.
    As it happens, the true American here is actually Ng, a U.S. citizen, as are his wife and kids. East West has one of the most diverse board of directors and senior management of any bank of any size in California . It has never been a foreign bank, and its only overseas presence is a branch in Hong Kong and a representative office in Beijing . Clear Channel quickly did the right thing and axed Stanton . But this Don Imus-like racist rant gave me an awful sense of deja vu: Cathay Bank all over again, 14 years later.
    Banks even figured in a racial stereotyping remark made by Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon in 2002. Being squired around Oakland s Chinatown , his host pointed out the number of banks and observed that the Chinese were big on saving. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Simon quipped, "Not just gambling?" Then, he laughed. 
    Hard as it is to believe, 125 years after the racist Chinese Exclusion Act was passed and 60 years after innocent Japanese Americans were forced from their homes and interned in desert camps, some people still think they can make sport of Asians with racist remarks or insults, and do so with impunity. Too many times, they can. 
    Part of the frustration in dealing with incidents such as these has been the lack of immediate, outraged reaction from the Asian Pacific American community. The unpleasant reality is that the APA community simply does not yet have the same sort of well-developed, long-standing defense and response mechanisms that other minority groups do. 
    The Jewish community has the Anti-Defamation League, Latinos the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, African Americans have the NAACP. There are fine organizations out there, many of them tax-exempt, designed to protect the interests and defend the reputation of the APA community. But too often, in this era of instant news and 24-hour news cycles, their reaction is too little, too late and too muted.
    Although Im white, I feel part of the APA community through adoption and absorption. My wife is a Mandarin-speaking native of Taiwan and our son, James Ru-Shiao, is half-Chinese. My in-laws are both Chinese and Japanese. So I humbly submit that I have standing to offer some advice.
    Asian Pacific Americans now represent the second largest and fastest-growing minority in California, making up nearly 13 percent of the population by far the highest percentage of any state. This state sent the very first Asian to Congress in 1956. We sent the first Asian American from the 49 continental states to the Senate in 1976. We now have the highest-ranking APA officeholder outside of Hawaii, state Controller John Chiang. There are now Asian Americans for the first time in the leadership of both the state Senate and Assembly.
    But in my view, the APA community simply will not reach its full maturity or potential until it develops more effective and aggressive rapid-response strategies, not only to react immediately to anti-Asian slurs and attacks, but to discourage them from happening in the first place. 
    And you can bank on it.   
    Garry South is a long-time Democratic strategist who ran Gov. Gray Davis 1998 and 2002 campaigns, and was senior advisor in the 2006 Democratic primary to Steve Westly, the first major-party candidate for governor with an Asian-born spouse.

7/19/07 Asian Fortune: More Asian American Voters Up for Grabs; 'Independent' Growing as Political Affiliation, 
By Winyan Soo 
    Editor's note: Domestic issues lead the concerns of Asian voters in the presidential race of 2008. Their presence was keenly felt in Virginia with the election of Democratic Sen. James Webb over incumbent George Allen.
    A recent survey found that a significant number of Asian Americans voted for the first time in 2006. The survey also pointed out that a growing number of Asians, particularly Chinese Americans call themselves independent voters, and do not affiliate themselves with any party. The most important issues to be addressed by 2008 presidential candidates include economy, jobs and health care. 
    These and other findings come from a multilingual exit poll of hundreds of Asian Americans in the Maryland and Virginia area. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), a New York-based non-partisan group, also profiled more than 4,700 voters in 23 cities on Election Day in New York , New Jersey , Michigan , Illinois , Massachusetts , Pennsylvania and Washington . 
    Asian Americans tend to be overlooked when polling other minority groups, said Glenn Magpantay, AALDEFs staff attorney. We try to add to the political discourse with our random sampling from particular jurisdictions in the local area.
    The AALDEF focused its Maryland survey in Rockville , Silver Spring and the Kensington areas, reaching a number of Chinese, Vietnamese and South Asians volunteers. Their survey, however thorough, could not include significant information from Korean American voters because of low volunteer turnout. 
    According to the AALDEF, 6 percent of all Asian Americans voters said that they voted for the first time in the November 2006 midterm elections. Magpantay said that a higher voter turnout could have been attributed to the macaca effect, where Asian Americans responded to former Virginia Senator George Allens comment about a South Asian in one of his audiences during a campaign speech.
    Magpantay and other Asian American leaders discussed these findings at a meeting at the Montgomery County Council Office in May. The survey release came in conjunction with the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. State Delegate Susan Lee (District 16) spoke at the event to emphasize the governments need to focus on the Asian vote. 
    Asians have one of the fastest rates of growth in Maryland and in the nation, Lee said. We have a lot of talent and we have a lot to contribute. We also pay a great amount of taxes. 
    Lee suggested that Asian Americans should help provide substantive input in government laws before bills are drafted. She also pointed out that the attendees of the AALDEF meeting were the same familiar faces she sees at every community meeting. Lee said she hopes that more community members can be encouraged to come out to these meetings to encourage civil participation. 
    We need to be more proactive; voting is one of the most important tools, Lee said. We have to vote for candidates Asian or non-Asian who will be strong advocates of our community, so that we can be active members instead of spectators.
    Other panel speakers included Hoan Dang of the Maryland Vietnamese Mutual Association, Lily Qi of the Organization of Chinese Americans, Kamala Edwards from the Indian American Leadership Council, Chung Pak of the Korean American Association and Raj Kudchadkar from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education.

7/19/07 India Abroad: 13 Indians among top Asian businessmen in US,
    "Honesty and hard work are the ingredients for success. Not in my dreams could I have achieved one-hundredth of what this land has given to me," said Darshan Singh Bagga, one of 13 Indian Americans to win the 'Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business' award from the Asian American Business Development Center . 
    Elaine Chao, US Secretary of Labor, presented the awards at a ceremony attended by 800 people at The Waldorf Astoria in New York , recently. 
    The 13 Indian Americans to win the 'Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business' award include Darshan Singh Bagga, Ram Tirumala, Ravilochan Pola, Gunjan Sinha, C N Madhusudan, Umesh Vaidyamath, Sandeep Gupta, Sanjeev Narula, Ashish Kalra, Virendra Patel, Al Li maye, Vivek Shah, and Sanjay Bose. 
    Hailed as the Asian American business community's most distinguished award programme, the Outstanding 50 is the largest, all-encompassing Asian American business award program in the nation. 
    It honours individuals with outstanding leadership, vision and accomplishment who have built a successful business or who have distinguished themselves within their community. 
    In addition to the Outstanding 50 award, the Pinnacle Award recognises an individual who has reached the top of his professional field. 
    The 2007 Pinnacle Award recipient is Nusrat Durrani, senior vice president and general manager, MTV World, a division of MTV created to launch new MTV-branded channels that serve emerging audiences in the United States . 
    A real estate tycoon in Long Island , New York , Bagga noted: "This land is the land of immigrants. With hard work, imagination and honesty you can go up."
    He came to the United States 37 years ago as a nuclear safety engineer. He was a class one officer in India , when he found a few disturbing truths. 
    As an officer, he could become a lakhpati (a man with Rs 100,000) when he retires. "I thought, Why should I wait for that till I retire? I could make more than that in five, six years in America ." 
    When he arrived in the US , he had $70 on him. He worked as an engineer for a few years before he started Darshan Singh Bagga, LLC, a real-estate investment and development company, in 1981. 
    He has taken on several development projects, including Bagga Tower , in which he built a nine-story apartment complex above an existing one-story shopping center while it was still in operation. 
    He is the pioneer sponsor of the NYC law for tax abatements (1997) for an extension above an existing building and he was the first person to receive such a tax abatement. 
    In May 2002, he took on another challenging project, the 100,000 square foot Bagga Plaza . The property had been abandoned for three years and is now one of the most lively shopping centers in Nassau County . 
    He is also the chair of a committee responsible for planning and developing the Long Island 9/11 Memorial at the State University of Farmingdale. The project, estimated to cost $7 million, will depend on money raised from the public. 
    He has received awards like the Hind Ratan (from the then Indian prime minister H D Deve Gowda), the Punjab Ratan, and others. 
    He credits his wife Lovlin Kaur for his success. They have two sons, Dr Simran Singh and Harpreet Singh, and a daughter, Heer Kaur, who is married to Amit Singh. 
    Another award winner, Sandeep Gupta, works at Deloitte & Touche in New York , and has over 14 years of experience serving the financial services industry. 
    He serves domestic and global clients and specialises in performing reviews of risk management, trading, and regulatory and operations areas. 
    Prior to his move to New York , he worked at Deloitte's offices in Toronto , Canada , and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and at an accounting firm in Mumbai. 
    He serves as the president of the Metro New York chapter of the National Asian American Society of Accountants, a chapter with nearly 500 members. Gupta is a CPA and a management accountant in the United Kingdom and a chartered accountant in India . 

7/18/07 Los Angeles Times: Cambodia Town is now on the map: A stretch of Anaheim Street in Long Beach has the new designation, and its immigrant merchants are happy for the historic recognition,.
by Anna Gorman
    Sithea San fled the killing fields in Cambodia as a teenager and found refuge in Long Beach , where she attended college, got married and bought a house.
    Now, more than a quarter-century later, San finally has a place that she and thousands of other native Cambodians say they can call home.
    A strip of Anaheim Street was officially named the nation's first "Cambodia Town" earlier this month the most recent cultural designation in a county that is home to Little India, Little Tokyo and Historic Filipinotown.
    City and community leaders say the designation not only will recognize the contributions of Cambodians, but also will help revitalize the neighborhood by attracting more businesses, visitors and tourists to the area. San and others are making plans to put up Cambodia Town signs and set up a business improvement district and are considering building a community center and a memorial to those who died under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
    "Now we have the name," said San, chairwoman of Cambodia Town Inc. "Now we have to make it happen. We have the responsibility to make the place nice."
    Long Beach , known as the Cambodian capital of the United States , is believed to have the largest concentration of Cambodians outside of the home country. Some of the first Cambodians in the United States were students who attended Cal State Long Beach in the 1960s as part of an exchange program. Waves of refugees followed in the 1970s as they escaped the Khmer Rouge regime, which took the lives of more than 1 million people. According to 2000 census figures, about 20,000 Cambodians live in Long Beach , but community leaders estimate a larger population.
    Cambodia Town runs along the Anaheim corridor, from Junipero Avenue to Atlantic Avenue . There are already scores of Cambodian-run businesses on the street, including jewelry stores, restaurants, travel agencies and fabric shops. Not all of the businesses on Anaheim Street are Cambodian. Manny Caldera, manager of La Bodega Market, said the name wasn't important to him.

7/18/07 Associated Press: California psychologist wins World Series of Poker,
   Las Vegas - Jerry Yang, a 39-year-old psychologist who uses his professional training in his card-playing arsenal, won the top prize Wednesday of $8.25 million at the World Series of Poker.
    Yang vaulted quickly from eighth to the chip lead soon after play began Tuesday afternoon.
    He knocked out seven of the eight other players at the final table, reminiscent of last year when Jamie Gold ran over his opponents. The main difference, Yang did it from the back of the pack.
    "The only way I would win this tournament is to be aggressive from the very beginning and that's exactly what I did," he said.
    An ethnic Hmong person who grew up poor in Laos , Yang said before the final table began that he would donate 10 percent of his winnings to charity, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Feed the Children, the Ronald McDonald House and his alma mater, Loma Linda University .
    He won his way into the main event from a $225 satellite tournament at the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula and only began playing poker two years ago.
    Yang began heads up play with a giant chip lead against Tuan Lam, a 40-year-old professional online poker player from Mississauga , Ontario . Yang had 104.5 million in chips to Lam's 23.0 million.
    On the last hand, with a huge mound of cash deposited on the felt, Lam moved all-in with an ace and queen of diamonds and Yang called with pocket eights.
    When a queen, five and nine came on the flop, it looked like Lam, waving a Canadian flag, would be on the verge of a miracle comeback, making a pair of queens for the lead.
    But a seven on the turn and a six on the river gave Yang a straight, sealing a win in which he dominated the final table from the moment the nine finalists sat down.
    "I've seen the miracles of God with my own eyes," Yang said. "I did a lot of bluffing also."
    Lam earned $4,840,981 for his second place finish.
    Play at the final table began at noon in Las Vegas and didn't finish till nearly 4 a.m.
    The finalists ranged in age from 22 to 62, and hailed from five nations: the U.S. , Canada , Russia , England and South Africa . By birthplace, players also were from Laos , Vietnam and Denmark .
    Each had their section of fans in the audience, and the arena took on the air of the Olympics as supporters broke out into national songs every time their player won a big hand.
    "The final table says a lot about the globality of poker and the globality of our fans," said Jeffrey Pollack, World Series of Poker commissioner for event owner Harrah's Entertainment Inc.
    The nine players who began the day were all that remained from a field of 6,358 players that began to play down in stages July 6. Everyone paid or won $10,000 to enter the main event, the biggest poker tournament of the year.
    Final table finishers
    A look at where the final table participants finished in the $10,000 buy-in main event at the World Series of Poker, along with their payouts.
    1st: Jerry Yang, 39, Temecula , Calif. -- $8,250,000
    2nd: Tuan Lam, 40, Mississauga , Ontario -- $4,840,981
    3rd: Raymond Rahme, 62, Johannesburg , South Africa -- $3,048,025
    4th: Alex Kravchenko, 36, Moscow , Russia -- $1,852,721
    5th: Jon Kalmar, 34, Chorley , England -- $1,255,069
    6th: Hevad Khan, 22, Poughkeepsie , N.Y. -- $956,243
    7th: Lee Childs, 35, Reston , Va. -- $705,229
    8th: Lee Watkinson, 40, Cheney , Wash. -- $585,699
    9th: Philip Hilm, 31, Cambridge , England -- $525,934

7/15/07 New York Times: "Schools Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some," 
By Jonathan D. Glater and Alan Finder
    San Francisco When San Francisco started trying to promote socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial diversity would result as well. 
    It has not worked out that way. 
    Abraham Lincoln High School , for example, with its stellar reputation and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese descent. 
    If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasnt been as integrated, Lincoln s principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. If you dont look at race, the school has become much more diverse. 
    San Francisco began considering factors like family income, instead of race, in school assignments when it modified a court-ordered desegregation plan in response to a lawsuit. But school officials have found that the 55,000-student city school district, with Chinese the dominant ethnic group followed by Hispanics, blacks and whites, is resegregrating. 
    The number of schools where students of a single racial or ethnic group make up 60 percent or more of the population in at least one grade is increasing sharply. In 2005-06, about 50 schools were segregated using that standard as measured by a court-appointed monitor. That was up from 30 schools in the 2001-02 school year, the year before the change, according to court filings.
    The San Francisco experience is telling because after the recent United States Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race-based school assignment plans, many districts are expected to switch to economic integration plans like San Franciscos as a legal way to seek diversity. As many as 40 districts around the country are already experimenting with such plans, according to an analysis by Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group. 
    Many of these experiments are modest, involve small districts or have been in place only a few years. But the experiences of these districts show how difficult it can be to balance socioeconomic diversity, racial integration and academic success.
    Only a few plans appear to have achieved all three goals. Others promote income diversity but not racial integration while still other plans are limited and their results inconclusive. Those who have studied them say a key to that outcome is how aggressively a plan shifts students around and whether there are many schools that can lure middle-class students from their neighborhoods into poor ones. 
    Systemwide programs are more effective than piecemeal programs, said Mr. Kahlenberg, who has studied plans like these.
    The purpose of such programs is twofold. Since income levels often correlate with race they can be an alternate and legal way to produce racial integration. They also promote achievement gains by putting poorer students in schools that are more likely to have experienced teachers and students with high aspirations, as well as a parent body that can afford to be more involved. 
    There is a large body of evidence going back several years, Mr. Kahlenberg said, that probably the most important thing you can do to raise the achievement of low-income students is to provide them with middle-class schools.
    Economic integration initiatives differ from each other, and from many traditional integration efforts that relied on mandatory transfer of students among schools. Some of the new initiatives involve busing but some do not; some rely on student choice, while some also use a lottery. And so it is difficult to measure how far students travel or how many students switch schools. 
    The most ambitious effort and the example most often cited as a success is in the city of Raleigh , N.C., and its suburbs.
    For seven years the district has sought to cap the proportion of low-income students in each of the countys 143 schools at 40 percent. 
    To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children, the district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are attracted to magnet schools in the city; children from the inner city are sometimes bused to middle-class schools at the outer edges of Raleigh and in the suburbs. 
    The achievement gains have been sharp, and school officials said economic integration was largely responsible. Only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight in Wake County , where Raleigh is located, scored at grade level on state reading tests in 1995. By the spring of 2006, 82 percent did. 
    The plan works well, said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. Its based on sound assumptions about the environment in which children learn.
    The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, North Carolina s largest, has also tried an economic integration plan, but with less success. 
    Students were once assigned to schools in Charlotte and its suburbs based in part on achieving racial balance, but that system was struck down in federal appeals court in 2001. 
    The school board then created an assignment plan based on income and choice; a low-income student could transfer to a middle-class school if he came from a high-poverty, low-performing school. But such transfers could occur only if there was room, and there seldom was. There are not a whole lot of seats available and so there is not a lot of choice available, said Scott McCully, the districts executive director of planning and student placement.
    Within several years, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte , the schools became markedly more segregated. 
    In the smaller school system in Cambridge , Mass. , children apply to the citys 12 elementary schools and socioeconomic status is an important factor in ultimate assignments. The system has been phased in gradually since the fall of 2002.
    Last year, 75.8 percent of Cambridge s low-income third graders were judged to be progressing toward reading proficiency. That was higher than the statewide average for low-income students, 71.3 percent, and better than the rate in more than a dozen other cities in the state. 
    Other districts have not seen such results. One district in San Jose, Calif., switched to using family and neighborhood income instead of race for assignments two years ago, giving a preference to students in low-income areas who try to transfer to schools in higher income areas, and vice versa. 
    But in the first year, the number of students switching schools declined significantly and has only begun to recover in the last year. 
    San Francisco had been under a court order to desegregate for more than 20 years, with no school allowed to have a majority of students from one racial or ethnic group. But after Chinese-American parents whose children were kept out of certain elite schools sued, the district switched in 2002-03 to a plan that sought socioeconomic diversity.
    Students apply to the schools they want to attend, and the district uses a diversity index for assignments when a school is oversubscribed. The index considers the language spoken at home, whether a child qualifies for free lunch or is in public housing, a childs academic performance and the quality of a childs prior schools. But it has not resulted in racial integration.
    We were hopeful that the diversity index would work, said Stuart Biegel, a law professor at the University of California , Los Angeles , who was the districts court-appointed monitor. No one was rooting against it. But it didnt work.
    Officials say one problem is that many students apply to neighborhood schools, which do not recruit enough students from outside their area. Another problem is demographics. Mr. Biegel said public school students in San Francisco were relatively low income over all, whatever their race or ethnicity, so the diversity index produced less mixing than hoped. 
    The wide ethnic diversity in San Francisco s schools, which are about one-third Chinese, also introduces calculations among parents that make it easier to get income diversity without racial or ethnic diversity. 
    At Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy, a fourth- through sixth-grade school in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bayview, 75 percent of the students are black. Most are poor. 
    Tareyton D. Russ, the principal, said students from other neighborhoods did not seek to go there so the diversity index did not even apply. Poor Chinese kids dont want to go to school with poor black kids, Mr. Russ said flatly. 
    Conversely, one white parent interviewed as she dropped her child off at summer school said some white parents avoided schools with a heavy Chinese concentration, like Lincoln , believing they would be too high-pressure for their children. She declined to be quoted by name.
    David Campos, the general counsel to the school district, said the resegregation was so disappointing that the school board might try to test whether Justice Anthony M. Kennedys opinion in the recent Supreme Court case left open the possibility of using race if other methods of integration fail. 
    We stopped using race at some point, Mr. Campos said. And then for a number of years we have tried to use a number of race-neutral factors to achieve racial diversity, which methods havent worked. Should the board decide to use race, and they may or may not, we are a very good test case.

7/10/07 New York Times: Two Men Who Are Faces of a New Force That Has Broken the Old Stereotypes,
By Andy Newman
    The men in the stolen BMW didnt know it, but the two officers who pulled them over in Brooklyn early yesterday were practically a poster for the changing face of the New York Police Department. Approaching the car on the passengers side was a Soviet immigrant and star economics student who had dropped out of college to chase bad guys. Along the drivers side came the son of a seamstress from Hong Kong .
    A man in the BMW fired out the passengers side, then shots came out the drivers side, the police said, and the two partners on the graveyard shift, Russel Timoshenko, 23, and Herman Yan, 26, joined a more exclusive and unfortunate fraternity: officers shot in the line of duty.
    As doctors at Kings County Hospital Center labored furiously to keep Officer Timoshenko alive and Officer Yan lay nearby recovering from bullet wounds to the chest and arm, their friends, families and colleagues hoped for their recovery.
    Im just praying for a miracle, said Victoria Gentile, a neighbor of Officer Timoshenkos on Staten Island whose son grew up with him and now serves on the police force, too. Hes just starting out his young life.
    Both mens lives on the force were off to a good start. Officer Timoshenko, who joined the force in January 2006, has made 15 arrests, three of them for felonies, the police said. Officer Yan, who has worked nights in the 71st Precinct since graduating from the police academy in 2004, has made 36 arrests. 
    Like all police officers, Officer Timoshenko was aware of the risks that went with the uniform. But he told one friend, Alexandra Kuznetsova, You know, this is my job. This is what I really want to do. Ms. Kuznetsova, 24, said her friend took his vows seriously. He was always there for people, she said. 
    Officer Timoshenko, who was born in Belarus and came to the United States in the early 1990s, led a seemingly charmed life. Tall, blond, handsome and athletic, he was on the lacrosse team at City College of New York. Very charismatic, said a college classmate, Guy Marcelus, who visited him at the hospital yesterday. 
    You never saw him walking alone, said Leonard Trugman, one of Mr. Timoshenkos professors.
    Sonya Mechkor, a friend who has known the officer for five years, said it hardly mattered the occasion dancing, hookah bars, Indian restaurants Officer Timoshenko loved to have a good time. 
    Hed be laughing and dancing and all over the place, kind of a social butterfly, she said.
    At the same time, he was a serious and gifted student.
    He was very entrepreneurial, Professor Trugman said. He was an A student he could have gone onto whatever he wanted to do. He could have had an M.B.A. a very bright young man, very analytical.
    Mr. Marcelus said that he was surprised when his friend told him he wanted to join the police force. I figured Russel was going to be a businessman, Mr. Marcelus said. The N.Y.P.D. never came up while we were in the classroom. 
    But once he made up his mind, Mr. Marcelus said, Officer Timoshenko spoke of little else. Another friend, Dmitri Levin, said he tried to talk Mr. Timoshenko out of joining the police force, to no avail. I tried to convince him to pursue other careers, more lucrative, said Mr. Levin, 23. But he was dead set on being an N.Y.P.D. officer.
    At the police academy, Cadets Timoshenko and Yan took their places among the young men and women who are making the old stereotype of the New York City police officer Irish or Italian, staunchly Roman Catholic, descended from a long line of cops a thing of the past. 
    In 2005, the police academy graduated its first class that was less than half white, with Asian-Americans, who made up 8 percent of the class, the fastest-growing ethnic group on the force. Last December, the graduating cadets hailed from 58 nations, including half a dozen former Soviet republics.
    On a force where many members chose to live in the suburbs, both officers stayed in the city where they grew up. 
    Officer Timoshenko lives with his parents in a neatly landscaped ranch house in Bay Terrace on Staten Island . 
    Officer Yan, who was born in Manhattan, lives with a brother and his mother in a brick townhouse on a quiet side street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, off Sheepshead Bay Road, a bustling strip where a smattering of Chinese shops are surrounded by signs in Russian.
    A neighbor, Gary Chu, summed up the sentiment on the street.
    I was shocked this morning, he said. It was very sad. Hes a nice guy.
    One neighbor said her heart went out to Officer Yans family. I come from a family of cops, she said. All my brothers are retired officers, and I cant imagine the heartache.
    She thought a moment. Unfortunately, she added, thats the chance you take when a police officer is your son.
    Reporting was contributed by Kai Ma, Colin Moynihan, Maureen Seaberg and Michael Wilson.

7/7/07 Asian Fortune: Rhee Breaks Tradition: First Asian D.C. Schools Chancellor,
By Rita M. Gerona-Adkins
    Editor's note: Rhee's confirmation is on track. Though the process of her nomination has moved swiftly, her appointment is likely to be one of the most watched and evaluated of the new Fenty administration in Washington . 
    Washington , D.C. -- Promptly at 5 p.m. June 15, as arranged, Michelle A. Rhee, Mayor Adrian M. Fentys newly designated schools chancellor for the District of Columbia , called from her home in Denver , Colorado for an exclusive interview for Asian Fortune.
    She sounded casually friendly but most of all, confident, flawlessly articulate and convincingly ready to take on the daunting job of streamlining one of the countrys worst-performing urban school systems. 
    For the next 40 minutes, she answered questions expansively enough to clarify her policy vision for what she calls a path to change. But she was also thoughtfully precise with specific examples drawn from her hands-on experience in upgrading urban students performances that earned her the reputation of being an expert in urban education.
    I was impressed on every level with Michelle: her intellect, sense of urgency and management acumen, Mayor Fenty (D) was quoted by the Washington Post to have said of the 37-year old when he announced his decision to hire her during a news conference held June 12, replacing D.C. School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey. 
    She is the first Asian Pacific American, youngest and first non-black top honcho to fill the chancellors post in 40 years, making her a historic appointment for the nations capital. 
    All these firsts were all the more dramatized by the Posts top story on her appointment with a blown-up photo of her face, followed by several days more of publicity relating to her work experience and the innovative strategies she and her program coworkers had introduced with great success in largely underperforming urban schools throughout the country.
    It is said that her appointment is not only the first major move that the new mayor made but also the one challenge that could define his legacy for a city that, despite many capable school chiefs before her, can never seem to go far in having its school infrastructure fixed and its 55,000-student populations performance raised to grade level. 
    The system needs radical change, it really needs a shakeup, Fenty said, perhaps anticipating the shock and doubts that were to follow about Rhees zero experience in actually running a school system in a dominantly black population.
    She lost no time in making clear whom she would be working for. Asking a group of students to join her as she made her acceptance remarks on June 13 from the steps of the John A. Wilson Building, she said, You are the folks I am ultimately accountable to ... Get ready to work hard but get stronger, to be pushed but also to excel....My job will be to ensure nothing stands in your way.
    At this writing, she is waiting for her appointment to be approved by the D.C. City Council.
    Background, work experience
    So who is this unknown turned instant celebrity who would liberate the Districts schoolchildren from the doldrums and send them on a high to an educational wonder world? 
    And how would she specifically impact the over 5,000 youths of Asian American and Pacific Islander origin living and going to school in the District?
    Rhee was born in Ann Arbor , Michigan , of South Korean immigrant parents who came to the United States in 1966. She is a mother of two girls, eight and five years old; who she said would be going to school in the District. Separated from a husband, she lives in Colorado , but is looking for a house first, and then a school later in D.C.
    She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Government (1992) from Cornell University , and a Master in Public Policy (1997) from Harvard University .
    Her work experiences at the cutting edge of creative educational policy innovation that revolutionized teacher hiring and turned upwards underperforming kids in a number of inner cities are what apparently led Mayor Fenty, after much consultation with education gurus, to pick her for the Districts challenging job.
    I am not a career superintendent, I only took this job because I believe I can do it over the long haul, she said, as if to reassure those who may have been used to school chiefs leaving or being dismissed before substantive results happen.
    A brief overview of those work experiences are as follows:
    * Working for three years with Teach for America [a program designed to find good teachers during a period of teacher scarcity], she was assigned to teach in one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in Baltimore, and in the last two-year period, moved students reading level from scores averaging at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90% of them scoring at the 90th percentile or higher. Her work was featured on ABCs Good Morning America program, 
    * In 1997, she founded the non-profit New Teacher Project, with a seven-person leadership team, partnering with over 200 school districts nationwide (including D.C.), launching more than 40 programs in 23 states, and recruiting, preparing or certifying over 23,000 highly qualified teachers. 
    Under her leadership as Chief Executive Officer and President, the New Teachers Project, with 120 employees, provides between 10-30 % of all incoming new teachers to many of such cities as New York City , Philadelphia , Chicago , Miami , Baltimore , Oakland , and D.C. 
    Because of her organizations success, she was invited to sit with first lady Laura Bush during the presidents 2004 State of the Union address. 
    In Her Own Words
    Excerpts from her telephone interview for Asian Fortune are reproduced below in a Q & A fashion: 
    Q -- What do you see as the most effective strategies in improving school performance of Asian Pacific Islander American children, considering what might be unique cultural impediments to their learning performance? 
    A -- My goal is to see that all students in D.C. achieve a high quality education. What I know of populations that are new immigrants we have to figure out how to immerse them in the English language in the shortest term so they could gain skills that would get them to grade level as soon as possible. To do this, significant services have to be in place. How to prioritize English language acquisition over, say, math skills is the main problem, as well as the challenge.
    Q -- In your work in Baltimore , what insights did you have that could also apply to an APIA school population?
    A -- I worked 100% with black Americans. But what I learned from that experience is that all kids, no matter what level they are at, if you give them a high quality of instructions in the classroom and good teachers, they can very quickly come up to high levels. I was with kids who were performing more or less at a low level. Over a period of time, they were able to come up not only to the operating grade level, but many of them got to far above [grade] level. 
    As for kids with limited English proficiency, despite the fact that they come in with that limitation, they can very quickly get to the grade level if the quality of instruction in the classroom is good.
    Q -- What about the community, the immigrant families of the schoolchildren, what role do they play, if any, in your approach?
    A -- What my experience in Baltimore taught me is that it is crucial to engage parents and the community in what we were doing. The way I operated in the classroom was very, very different from what the people in the community were used to. For instance, I had kids who came before school, kids who came after school, and others on Saturdays. I gave them two hours of homework each night, and that was what the community had to get used to. So, they had a clear understanding of what I was doing and why. It was incredibly important for their parents to support what I was doing in any way they could. I had to be aligned with them and consistent [in our message] to the students that that was an expectation. So, community engagement and community involvement are crucial.
    Q -- There were some criticisms about the secretive way that Mayor Fenty did in making your appointment. Is there any discomfort on your part about this?
    A -- I was on one side of that ... so you have to ask the mayor about that. But I will tell you though ... after the mayors announcement, I have been with parents and other groups in the city, because I feel it is crucial that in communicating with various constituent groups, we understand what their concerns and issues are, what they need in order to be successful in regaining confidence in the school district. I would say that so far, in my conversations with them, theres a lot of alignment between teachers, parents and students about what they want to be done in the district. So, I am confident. [Also] people need to be focused not so much on the process, but on my ability to do this job.
    Q -- There is a concern about behavioral problems, such as drug abuse, that some kids may have that could prevent them from learning as much as expected. What ideas of intervention do you have in addressing this concern?
    A -- One reason that some children may have behavioral problems is because we dont have specific changes in instructions in the classroom. Teaching kids, holding them to a high standard and creating an excellent learning environment are [helpful] ways to minimize behavioral problems significantly. 
    It is crucial that we dont let those kids take away from the learning environment of other kids. Oftentimes, teachers put in a disproportionate amount of their time disciplining, and it does take a lot of time from the learning environment of their peers.
    We have to provide these kids a level of services that suit their needsMaybe being in a traditional classroom with 30 kids would not be the environment where they could thrive in. So we have to collaborate with the citys other services relating to say, drugs, impediments to their ability to respond to a learning environment.
    One of our priorities [should be] to make sure that all agencies that are working on issues related to our [learning] issues are aligned, communicating and heading in one direction. So, sending the message to the students as well as to the other agencies is very important.
    Q -- Lastly, what message do you have for the Asian American and Pacific Islander students and their community?
    A -- I think that in working broadly, we can affect broader changes that, in the end, are going to be better for everyone. So I would encourage everyone to think and work outside of the confines of their normal population, people that they relate to, and to think about things that they can do to affect change more broadly in the community.

7/1/2007 San Jose Mercury News: Reality-TV stars smash Asian-American stereotypes,
By Susan Young 
    In the blazing Fiji sun, "Survivor" contestant Yau-Man Chan stood spread-eagle on pegs attached to boards. As the time passed, the pegs became tinier and tinier.
    Gripping with their fingertips and toes, Chan and the other contestants struggled to stay on to avoid elimination. And at the end, the 54-year-old Martinez man triumphed over his younger -- and seemingly stronger --competitors.
    Chan says he received e-mails wondering if he was using some sort of kung fu strength, Eastern mysticism or meditation to get him through. 
    "No, I was just thinking about the pain," says Chan, 54, with a laugh. "I was just an older guy wondering how I was going to hang on long enough to win."
    Reality spotlight
    In the past nine months, four Bay Area Asian-American men have jumped to prominence because of their roles on reality shows. Although none thought in the beginning about smashing stereotypes, that's exactly what ended up happening.
    Yul Kwon, 32, a San Mateo resident and Concord native, became the first Asian-American in "Survivor's" 14 cycles to win the popular series last fall -- and afterward was named one of People magazine's Sexiest Men for 2006. Brothers Erwin Cho, 32, of Berkeley, and Godwin Cho, 29, of San Francisco spent last fall on "The Amazing Race 10," coming in fifth out of 12 teams. And Chan placed fourth of 19 contestants on the latest installment of "Survivor."
    Two, Chan and Kwon, were recruited by "Survivor" in an attempt to bring more diversity to the show, while the Chos applied to be on "Amazing Race."
    Godwin Cho says he has had friends who have submitted applications to be on reality shows like "The Amazing Race," but they have not been chosen. 
    "In large part, (producers) are looking for specific types and often times, Asian-Americans don't fit into the casting prerequisites," he says. "They are looking for people who are outspoken and outrageous and I think culturally, and I'm not speaking for the total community, but generally it is desirous (for Asians) to be somewhat humble and to present oneself very inconspicuously."
    That's something, Cho says, that reality shows don't want. 
    "You could see with Yul and Yau-Man that they had interesting personalities," Cho says. "Yau-Man had a likability and Yul exemplified a character that plays well on 'Survivor': very articulate and very fit. He provided the narration for that season."
    Table-tennis cred
    Producers learned about Chan, a Chinese-American who spent the first 17 years of his life living in Borneo , because of his prowess in table tennis. When he went in for the psych review, he says "Survivor" creator and producer Mark Burnett commented on the fact that he scored very high in shyness.
    "He said, 'We don't get very many Asian applicants and you don't look like the type to apply,'" Chan says. "I told him that I didn't apply, I was recruited."
    The slightly built Chan has an impish grin and speaks honestly about why he decided to go on the show.
    "I did it to win a million bucks," he says. "Being on TV, well, in China the acting profession is frowned upon. (Actors) make a living with their body, which has the social status of a prostitute. It's just not done. Now you see a slight shift, but that stigma is still around. If you don't make a living with your brains, you are nobody."
    Kwon, whose parents immigrated from South Korea , says he knows exactly what Chan means. After graduating from Yale Law School , Kwon told his parents that he wanted to go into politics.
    "The only thing worse in Korea than politics is acting," Kwon says. "Politicians are very lazy and corrupt in many Asian countries, so you don't want your children going into that. Then, when I decided to go on 'Survivor,' I think they thought 'You went to Stanford. You went to Yale law. Why would you do this to us?' I didn't just do one, I did both politics and TV."
    Kwon says he hopes that Asian-Americans become more broad-minded when it comes to alternative careers.
    "I think it's true in a lot of immigrant families that you are pressured into going into professions like being a doctor or lawyer and there's nothing wrong with that," Kwon says. "But we need more people in politics and the media to speak on behalf of the community and change what we see in media today."
    Chan says he feels it's time for members of the Asian-American community to become more active.
    'Reach out'
    "My feeling is the problem with the Asian community is that we are so introverted in comparison to the rest of the country. We don't reach out and because we don't reach out, we don't correct misunderstandings,"
    Chan says. "All you have to do is read the Letters to the Editor page in the newspaper and you won't see Asian names in there. You can't sit around and complain; you have to participate. If you don't participate, then you don't have a right to complain about how you are represented. We need to encourage our children to run for office, to go into journalism and other fields that we haven't traditionally supported."
    Kwon had no idea at the beginning that his cycle of "Survivor" would become marked by controversy. After committing to the show, he learned it would be built around dividing the tribes by ethnic groups: one black, one white, one Asian and one Latino. Kwon then feared the worse would be brought out, and racial stereotypes would be re-enforced.
    "I thought this could go wrong in so many ways, but the great thing about reality shows is that they can be contrived, but they are not scripted. I'm sure I was cast as the overachieving Asian nerd, but just because I was cast that way doesn't mean I have to be that," Kwon says. "You can work out like Janet Jackson weeks before the show is taped (as Kwon did) and get ripped."
    Critics have generally agreed that Kwon was one of the best players ever on "Survivor." He used his considerable physical abilities, mental capabilities and social skills to take home the million-dollar prize. In the process, he become a role model not only for Asian-Americans, but for the mainstream as well.
    It's that kind of crossover that helps change perspectives, the men all say.
    Chan became a textbook case for integrity on the show.
    He will go down in "Survivor" history as the contestant who gave away a truck and only got betrayal in return. Chan won the truck in a challenge, a truck that his fellow team member Dreamz wanted badly. So Chan made a spontaneous offer to exchange the truck for a promise from Dreamz that if he won immunity in the finals, he would give that immunity to Chan.
    Chan gave Dreamz the truck. Dreamz ultimately backed out on his promise. Yet Chan kept his word, gave away the truck and didn't hold a grudge.
    It earned Chan worldwide respect.
    "When I told people I was going to be on the show, the older members of the Asian community were quite worried and wanted to make sure I didn't do anything to embarrass the Asian community," Chan says. "They were so conscious of how Asians are portrayed, and they didn't want the stereotypes of portraying Asians as sly, cunning, inscrutable and shrewd being reinforced."
    No assumptions
    Kwon says he also heard from people in the Asian community, and family members who feared how Asians would be portrayed.
    "The stereotypes when I was growing up were the kung-fu master who could kick butt but couldn't speak English or the nerdy geek who was good at figuring out equations, but couldn't figure out how to get a date,"
    Kwon says. "Stereotypes always have a kernel of truth, but if you only see those same stereotypes, then you think everyone is like that. You know, you can be an Asian-American who is athletic, articulate, a leader who speaks English and who doesn't go to jail."
    Even Kwon admits he was a little nervous when he saw that Chan -- who is director of information systems for the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, speaks with an accent and appeared to be athletically challenged -- had been chosen for "Survivor."
    "I thought they were going for the nerdy geek again, but Yau has such a warm personality and he was tough on challenges," Kwon says. "When people look at him, they learned not to jump to conclusions but say, 'Hey, he's an amazing guy.'"
    Chan's daughter Penelope, 19, says she was proud of her father. Her non-Asian friends, she says, were amazed at how well her father did in the physical challenges.
    "I always knew he was a cool guy, but even I didn't know how capable he was," Penelope Chan says. "A few of my non-Asian friends said, "That little Asian guy can really play.' What I didn't say, but some of my Asian friends said, was 'Yeah, Chinese players can really kick.'"
    Chan formed his alliance with an African-American named Earl. The two of them bonded almost immediately, says Chan.
    "Everyone thought I would be in this Asian alliance with the other Asian-Americans in the group, but I didn't have anything in common with them," Chan says.
    Earl and I were much more alike. Yet no one else seemed to see that we had formed this strong bond of friendship." 
    Kwon says that although he and Becky, who is Korean-American too, bonded, it wasn't because of their common ethnic background.
    "We bonded because we had similar values and had grown up the same way," Kwon says. "On the other hand, I didn't get along with Cao Boi at all because we were so different in terms that were not superficial. It was not surprising to me that Yau-Man bonded with Earl rather than other Asian-Americans on the show, because once you got beyond the superficial skin color, in a lot of ways they were similar people."
    Being on a reality show, Godwin Cho says, is not like being on a sitcom or drama series. "(In a scripted show) you know someone wrote it to make a point and you know how the story will develop," Godwin Cho says.
    "There may be some manipulation on a reality show, but there is no script."
    The Cho brothers earned a reputation during their stint on "The Amazing Race" for helping out two less-skilled teams, including the Kentucky couple Mary and David. The couple had never been far from their Kentucky roots and seemed ill-equipped to handle an international race that required navigating through several continents.
    "There was something very real about David and Mary.  My brother and I came from humble beginnings, so it was easy for us to see things from their perspective.  We felt close to this hard-working blue-collar couple, but people look at us now as (college-educated professionals), but it wasn't that far of a stretch, given where we both came from," Godwin Cho says. "The bonding came not from race, but common life experiences."
    The reality-show experience allows viewers to see how people from different ethnic groups interact with each other in a nonscripted manner, Cho says.
    "I think what people should take away is that Asian-Americans aren't that different from any other Americans with or without hyphened names," Cho says.
    "While Hollywood may try and pigeonhole different ethnic groups, no matter what our skin type, we're all Americans who are much more similar than dissimilar from each other. You connect with people not just because they share a cultural heritage, but because of life experiences that gives you a commonality."