MixedAsian

2003-10-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

Update on Fukuoka City School Abuse Case
(Original post)

After a little checking, it seems this case apparently goes back a while. Here's a Yahoo! Japan article from the end of August reporting on Hayashida's suspension. It claims that the abuse began occurring before he knew that the boy had an American great-grandfather, during a period between April and June; it was only during a home visit on May 12th that the teacher learned of the student's ancestry, at which point, he told the boy that his blood was dirty, and pointed him out during subsequent gym classes as "the American." So it's not really clear he's an actual racist, as opposed to merely a generalized asshole who will attack any weakness in a target.

Anyway, if a teacher came into my home and insulted my family, I'd throw him out in the street, hopefully to get run over by a truck, and get my kid out of his school; I'm guessing the parents of this young boy had a similar desire, except that they were blocked from doing so (at least the bit about transferring schools) by the same public school bureaucracy which saw six months' suspension as appropriate punishment for this incident. Proving that government education monopolies everywhere, not just in the US, are completely unresponsive to consumer demand, leaving students not merely uneducated but in actual physical danger.

2003-10-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

Fixed the archives

Well, mostly. Random numbers still seem to be appearing in the middle of older archives, and I haven't caught them all. But links are fixed, and the post archives by topic category are now up-to-date.

2003-10-11T01:49:00.000-07:00

Upcoming posts

For Monday: Phonetic loanwords and scientific education (just one more spinoff from the whole pinyin-bashing thread), and what the push for "Taiwanese language" in Taiwan really means for non-Hokkiens. Posts in initial stages: The Ghettopoly Controversy and Asian-Black Relations.

2003-10-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

Confusing "cultural competence" and "diversity"

Check out this opinion piece from the SF Chron which claims that the defeat of Proposition 54 allows us to continue collecting the racial data on our citizens which is so crucial to ... international trade????

The defeat of Proposition 54 is likely to lead to positive changes at the state level ... The California business community will benefit enormously from enhanced international trade opportunities with Asia, South America and Africa, enabled by promotion and emphasis on the state's diversity as shown in the race-concious [sic] data collection.

America continues to promote a shallow diversity --- one supported by racial data collection and the elevation of underqualified minorities to positions of power, one whose content consists solely of Americans of different colors but the same oppositionalist attitude towards the only culture in which they can function as adults. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of cultural sensitivity needed to promote trade with foreign nations and reduce the enormous American trade deficit with Asia. Language skills, an understanding of how to relate to foreign customers, and an unwavering commitment to high quality service are.

But don't count on American society to provide that soon. Just look at Tufts University's latest plan to further water down their foreign language requirement, this time with a plan to let students take Asian-American or Latino Studies courses in place of the final three semesters of the six-semester Language and Culture requirement. Courses in Native American and African American studies were already permitted; see a description of the requirement and the complete list of permitted courses. (Thanks to Lok for the links and explanation.)

Yep, once those Japanese and Koreans know how well-versed our citizens are in Ethnic Studies, they'll take their trade barriers right down and line up to buy our diversity-sensitized American cars.

2003-10-11T01:42:00.000-07:00

Newsflash --- government monopoly abuses customers
Public shocked by unexpected downturn in quality of service

Conrad points out the case of Japanese middle-school teacher Hayashida Shinji, given 6 months' suspension after a continued pattern of verbally abusing and beating his students which included a suggestion to a boy with an American great-grandfather that his blood was tainted and that he should kill himself. The student is now suing the teacher and the city for 13 million yen. In general, Japanese teachers, protected by a strong union, receive very light punishment for most forms of misconduct. It's possible, though rather unlikely, that Koizumi's new challenge to the LDP's power (and their traditional constituencies, which include civil service unions) may change this situation sometime in the future.

2003-10-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

The difference between observation and attack

Proving that your audience is always much wider than you think when you write on the Internet, even if you haven't updated for 8 weeks, my previous entry on Asian Americans and Christianity drew a rather angry response from a passer-by. After rereading what I wrote, I wasn't sure what to think, and felt a bit guilty, especially after seeing DJ Chuang asking:

What is it with people who have such strong opinions + feelings about politics and religion? Hung out with a new friend last weekend, and found it fascinating that both of us were not dogmatic about politics or theology -- he noticed it first.. I thought it was just me all along.. it's not that we don't understand the issues, both of us are quite knowledgeable in theology, and with politics in varying degrees.. can "see" more than one side of an issue, and the complexity of things.. and for me, I don't want to run over people with my opinions or convictions (this isn't to say that I don't have any; maybe I don't have as many as some others; and this isn't to say that I haven't had my moments once a while).. so it felt good to not feel so alone + marginalized for once..

In face-to-face discussion, strongly-held opinions and feelings could cause things to get out of control. But in response to this problem, most people, even myself, don't actually try to be open-minded or control their feelings; instead, they tone down their statements, putting in meaningless and obvious hedges like "Of course, this doesn't describe everyone accurately" (as if any general statement ever did!) and "I'm sure there are exceptions" (when are there ever not). But when you're on the internet, writing a blog, such things are implicit. Most people wouldn't be joining the blogosphere if they weren't at least somewhat open to discussion and correction of their ideas. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I always feel more comfortable discussing linguistics rather than politics: it's hard to get very emotional about your position, so no one is going to insult you for it.

Personally, as you can see from the length of this page, I already have a big enough problem with loquacity, I'm not gonna put in more verbal hedging in addition. I'm perfectly aware that my statements don't apply to all AA Protestants or all churches. But they do represent a disturbing trend in the churches I have seen.

2003-10-08T18:59:00.001-07:00

I think I figured out my problem ...

Three or four times I've done it now. I start up the blog again, go for at it for a month or two, then give up again. But it isn't because of laziness. Not quite. Usually, my blogging cycle goes something like this:

I read an article that catches my attention and about which I have lots to say that I just have to get out to the world, even if I haven't updated my blog in months and suspect no one will read about it.
I dash off an incredibly long essay.
I advertise my latest work by linking to it from comments on other people's blogs, e-mailing people I think might be interested in the topic, etc.
I get some response. People are reading. I start giving them more to read. It starts taking up more and more of my time.
I get to the point where I'm updating multiple articles every day. I keep my social life going, but barely have any time for sleep, studying, looking for jobs, or other stuff I need to get done.
So I quit for a few months, and then end up right back at #1 a bit later.

So I suppose the solution is to restrict my major updates. Of course, fewer updates will mean less traffic, but then, I guess once every so often is better than every day for a month and then nothing for three months. So I guess my principle will be, major updates on Mondays and not more often, and possible minor rebuttals/additions, acknowledgements, or links & meta-blogging throughout the week. Let's see how long I can keep to this kind of a schedule.

2003-10-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

Point of usage

There is no such thing as a "second-generation immigrant." Well, okay, there is. But it's not the kid of an immigrant, unless that kid himself thereupon goes and emigrates from the country of his birth, either to the country of his parents' origin, or yet a third country.

And in any case, I highly doubt there's such a thing as a "fourth-generation immigrant," as I saw recently used to refer to a yonsei Japanese-American.

2003-10-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

More on pinyin

After thinking about it for a while, one obvious argument I came up with against my own position on the impossibility of eliminating the use of characters in Chinese, which I haven't seen covered elsewhere, is that Chinese Braille is based solely on sounds, with no reference to characters, and blind Chinese people apparently understand it just fine. (Even more interestingly, for the first several decades of its existence it included no tone marks at all, though that apparently impeded widespread acceptance of the system):

Chinese braille is based on a phonetic representation of the sounds of the language. There are no braille signs for individual Chinese inkprint characters, only for sounds ... In inkprint the characters follow one another without any space between them. Thus the word boundaries aren't immediately apparent. In braille, however, a space is left between words. This is necessary: whereas the inkprint characters provide information about the meaning of a syllable, the braille signs only represent the sounds. In the context of the other sounds of a word, the meaning is almost always instantly clear - provided, of course, that the reader masters the spoken language.

However, I don't know how well Chinese Braille has been received by actual users. Also, there's the problem that Chinese Braille, as a result of its' phonetic nature, is different for every dialect. Virtually all Chinese Braille publications are printed in the national language. Despite the ease of learning and reading the letters of Chinese Braille (especially compared to other systems of reading for the blind, such as very large characters printed in raised type), the fact that all publications are in Mandarin is a significant problem for the rural blind.

As the rural blind are more likely to be poor and not to have advanced very far in their education, many aren't so fluent in Mandarin. Even those who live in primarily Mandarin-speaking areas may have trouble recognizing the pronunciations of Beijing Mandarin. The cost of translating publications into the local dialect and reprinting them, with the publisher fully expecting not to sell many copies, might force them to raise prices to the extent that they'd be out of the reach of many of the poor. Converting from characters to Roman alphabet on a wide scale might make it easier for educational materials to be read, but then at the same time might restrict their availability and raise their cost. It's not obvious that this makes poor illiterates any better off.

Nor does the success of Chinese Braille resolve the question of whether Chinese characters or some form of alphabetization would be faster to read. Further, though it may seem like a minor concern, we have to remember that switching to the Roman alphabet would likely make books and publications longer, thus increasing their cost. (Though length of words doesn't necessarily make them slower to be processed, if we believe that research from an anonymous English university which asserts that readers look at only the initial, penultimate, and ultimate letters of a word in order to understand it.)

Finally, various responses to my previous long rambling. Jim of Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey liked it but didn't buy it. Adam Morris agrees more, but also points out a hole in my argument about tone marks:

I disagree with him, however, that tones in Chinese should be represented with additional roman characters added into the already complicated mix, and I disgree with him strongly on that. Tones are no stranger to a reader than are accents in French. Most importantly though, tones are bulit-in to the vowel sound of each phoneme pretty completely (consonants from what I can tell are absent of tones, only the vowels get any of the dips or rises) and so are best represented as accent marks above (or below?) vowels rather than as some seperate distinguishing marks on their own.

I guess if your native script which you read every day included accent marks, you might pay more attention to them. American students tend not to, at least in my experience. When reading pinyin aloud, some of them don't seem to read the tone marks at all, except when they come to a word they don't know at all. Instead, they read the letters of a word, then try to match it to a word in their vocabulary just based on the spelling, and then recite the word from memory, complete with their memory of how the tone sounds. (Of course, other students pay close attention to the tone marks while reading because they can't remember at all how the tone of a word sounds).

Worse yet, when they're required to write pinyin including the tone marks, they often get the pinyin perfect and the tone wrong, which is why tonal spelling (such as in gwoyeu romatzyh) might be helpful for them --- you might be apt to forget a little mark, but forgetting a whole letter would be harder. (I wonder if French students pay more attention to tone marks in Chinese than American students).

As for me, out of both the Roman-based languages I read regularly (English and Malay), neither has any additional diacritics, so maybe I'm overgeneralizing my experiences learning pinyin (which I didn't know at all until about a year after I started studying Mandarin) to the rest of the world. Believe it or not, the first few years of my education in Spanish included absolutely no mention of accent marks, so I seem to be stuck with a habit of underestimating their importance and not looking at them unless I force myself to. (My first high school Spanish teacher couldn't believe it. He was completely dumbfounded. For a while he thought I was just completely inept, until he conferred with his colleague and noticed the other girl from my middle school having the same problem.)

2003-10-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

The (information-theoretic) Argument against writing Chinese in Roman alphabet

Just when I thought I had nothing more to blog about, I stumble onto the wonderful world of ... linguistics enthusiast blogs (up until now the only one I'd known of was Professor Miyake). After a year of on-and-off griping about Asian American politics, this should provide a welcome break and a new source of inspiration. I'll update my blogroll as I continue to explore.

Anyway, Language Hat puts up a post which sparked a lively discussion about a hot-button topic among foreign students of Chinese: why can't everyone just start using pinyin or something?

The main trouble is, pinyin is not a writing system, it's a transcription system. It goes for that oft-worshipped goal of "one phoneme, one letter," which certainly makes things easier for foreigners who have to read it and learn pronunciations of words from it. But it proves to be absolutely impractical among people who have to write down their own native thoughts in it. The obvious proof that of impracticality is found in everyday life: if pinyin were practical as a writing system for real Chinese people, young Chinese kids who were taught in school how to use pinyin (which, as I understand, they all are) would be using it with each other or at least inserting it in place of difficult characters in their informal communications with each other, and maybe even rebelling against the need to learn those old-fashioned characters. You'd see parents yelling at their kids "write in real Chinese!" and the kids complaining about it. Maybe we'd even have seen widely-supported Romanization mass movements in Taiwan with huge participation from college kids and high levels of interest from natives as an issue of huge relevance to their daily lives as opposed to just being something which politicians wrangle over to get media exposure.

Of course, we never see this happening, which should tell you something. In fact, you almost never see two native Chinese using pinyin to communicate with each other except when restricted from using characters by technical limitations, as in, when including Chinese terms in an academic journal or popular magazine whose printer can't handle Chinese characters. Chinese people who absolutely need to write an email to another Chinese person but find themselves at a public computer without Chinese input capabilities will either write in English no matter how bad, figure out a way around the access restrictions on the public computer so they can isntall a trial copy of NJStar, or wait until they're back at their own computer. Pinyin never even crosses their minds. Native Chinese don't even like using pinyin that much for typing; last I checked wu bi zi xing, four corners, or other shape-based systems were more popular. I personally use cang jie despite the wide availability of phonetic input systems both in Mandarin, which I'm not good at, and in Cantonese and Hakka, which I speak rather more proficiently.

The Vietnamese have already found out that one phoneme, one letter is a pain in the ass to read. People complain about it a lot and at great length. (Of course, the Chinese-derived habit of putting a space between every syllable rather than using spaces to divide lexical units doesn't really help either).

So what's the another option besides spelling all similar-sounding words exactly the same regardless of their meaning? Well, one option is to try to encode more lexical information in the spelling, by introducing redundancy: offering many different ways of spelling the same sound. This is precisely what English does in spelling individual words like "through" and "threw" differently, or, more relevant to syllable-poor Chinese, disparate word roots like the "cum" sound (no snickering from the peanut gallery, please) of "income" or "outcome" and the same sound of the unrelated "succumb" (I think I'm stealing this example from Pinker's The Language Instinct, but I'm not sure).

But unlike a romanization system such as pinyin, the creation of this kind of alphabetization which combines meaning and spelling isn't usually done ex nihilo. Asking a committee of linguists to come up with such a system means asking them to jump over the millenia of using the Roman alphabet in the West and the hundreds of years of evolution it took English vernacular writing to organically evolve mechanisms for distinguishing homophones, developing different ways of indicating sounds, creating different spelling rules for distinguishing similar-sounding word roots and combining them together in all sorts of different situations. And the number of homophones in Chinese dwarfs that in English, making it a truly massive engineering problem.

(Just to make things even more difficult, as a point of practical usage it's probably a good idea not to include tone marks in any prospective Roman spelling of Chinese, but come up with some other way of encoding the tonal information in the spelling. Why?

First, tone marks are small and hard to distinguish. This may not seem relevant to us in the computer-filled developed world with Kinko's-quality professional printing accessible on every street corner, but in poor countries, mass-market book publishers skimp greatly on ink and paper quality, resulting in many smudged characters, especially after the book or magazine was left sitting on a shelf in a humid room for a few months. This isn't too much of a problem in written Chinese, because surrounding characters and subject matter combined with the general shape of a smudged character provide so much contextual information that you'd probably be able to guess, especially if you're a native speaker. But if you're relying on tone marks to distinguish words which are otherwise spelled the same, you're going to end up squinting until you're blind trying to read blurry diacritics

And second, at least in present systems, tone marks, being written above rather than next to letters, disrupt from the one-dimensional visual flow of writing. If your eyes glide over a word just looking at the letters, because the tone marks are too difficult to distinguish, but then you can't catch the meaning of the word just from the letters, you have to disrupt your smooth progress to glance back at the tone marks. This slows down reading speed, quite significantly if you have to do it a lot. I seem to recall that some African languages whose Roman-language orthographies initially included tone marks eventually ended up dropping them entirely after a while.)

In principle, the problem of assigning different, easily-recognizable spellings to every single Chinese word, in a way which tries as often as possible to make the spelling of a given character the same and spell different characters out in different ways, could be solved by computer. In fact, that would be an interesting homework assignment. But the trouble is, once you've created the system which is easy to read, you also have to teach people to write it (since your whole purpose in switching over to a Roman alphabet was to allow illiterate peasants and foreigners to record their thoughts without wracking their brains to have to come up with an obscure character for a common spoken word). And it's going to be a pain to write, making English spelling look like Hawaiian, because of all the multiple cases with crazy exceptions and once-only irregular spellings that were needed to distinguish two homophones whose root characters were otherwise easily distinguishable when spelled, in every context except that single one.

And worse yet, from an information-theoretic perspective, you're in deep trouble at this point, because people make spelling mistakes all the time, and your system doesn't handle noise well, unlike Chinese characters. Consider this: when writing in characters, if you miswrite one, you're either going to come up with

a non-existent character;
a character which exists but is nonsense when taken with the characters next to it as a lexical unit;
a character which exists and forms a word when taken with the characters next to it, but that word doesn't really make sense in the current context; or
a character which has the same sound as the intended character, and with surrounding characters forms a word which makes sense in the current context.
a character which has a different sound from the intended character, and with surrounding characters forms a word which makes sense in the current context.

In cases (1) and (2), the reader can tell that there's been a mistake, and so starts wracking his brain for the correct possibility. Based on the sound or the general shape of the incorrectly inserted character, he usually can guess what the writer meant. The reader who is paying attention can usually resolve the ambiguity in case (3) as well. When case (4) happens, the altered word is often so close in meaning to the intended word that it doesn't affect the document, so you're only really in trouble if you're writing something that's going to be picked over with a fine-toothed comb in a court of law. And in my personal experience, case (5) is exceedingly rare among native speakers. On the whole, meaningful characters in a given context are usually visually distant from each other, and characters which look very close in appearance have very different meanings.

Alphabetic systems in general lack this level of redundancy. In English we can deal with incorrectly spelled words and the occasional letter or word deletion analogous to cases (1) and (2) above, but we rely on the fact that there are almost no two homonyms which both sound the same and would both make sense in the same context, and that altering a letter in most words turns them into non-words or grammatically out-of-place words rather than other words which would make sense in the present context, in order to avoid having to deal with cases (3), (4), and (5). But a Chinese spelling system as described above wouldn't have this kind of advantage, especially without tone marks present: you'd likely be using up every possible way of spelling every given syllable that exists in Chinese, meaning that letter deletions, insertions, or alterations would almost always turn one intended word into another real word rather than easily-detected nonsense.

A poster Mr. Kerim Friedman makes an interesting suggestion, a sort of happy-medium between abolishing the characters and sticking with the present system:

There is one person who came up with an ingenious idea for reforming Chinese writing which I actually like. It would entail the use of radicals and romanization together. This seems like an ideal system - the radicals would give you a sense of the meaning (fire/water/beast/etc.) and the phonetics would give you a sense of the pronounciation....

His system would also seem to have the advantage of higher redundancy. But combining radicals with roman letters, at least to my eyes, looks rather ugly (though of course, aesthetics should be a secondary concern, in reality, people pay a lot of attention to them, and as a result the world is a better place, or at least a place easier on the eyes). Maybe the solution is to create a new alphabet which could be written in place of the phonetic component of existing characters and still create a visually-appealing gestalt (and rework existing characters which aren't of the radical-phonetic type so that they are written this way). Though of course it will still mean memorizing a rather larger number of symbols than a pure alphabetic system, especially if you want to avoid the use of tone marks.

2003-10-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

Asian-Americans and Christianity

Hi. Sorry, this blog is still pretty much dead, (or maybe it'll revive again for a few weeks if I can think of new stuff to say; but for now I'm pretty much bored with documenting the hypocrisy of Azn-American aktivism over and over again). I'm just posting here so as not to overrun GNXP's comments section with my usual multi-paragraph off-topic rambling full of interesting but irrelevant anecdotes and speculations.

Anyway, this topic has been bouncing around in my head for a long while, possibly longer than anything else on this blog, but I was finally inspired to take on the gargantuan task of trying to write coherently about it by Razib's entry about the candidacy of Bobby Jindal for governor of Louisiana, and, specifically, his conversion to the dominant Catholicism of that state:

[Jindal's] possible victory points to a mode of assimilation for new non-white minorities, especially ones who are economically successful ... I am all for assimilation, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that Christian conversion as a path to acceptance kind leaves me a bit unenthusiastic ...

Jindal is not my vision of the brown future. First, he's married to a brown chick, which doesn't foster the emergence of a Jeurasian class. Second, as a secular humanist, I'm a bit suspicious of religious traditionalists and their cosmic vision, though as a conservative & Republican I acknowledge their place of primacy on the American Right. Just as secularized Jewish intellectuals lost their Jewishness without becoming Christian, I envision the absorption of Western values & outlook by non-white non-Christian immigrants without necessarily becoming Christian.

Godless sees Jindal's candidacy as wholly beneficial, but I'm not so sure, simply because, whether Mr. Jindal wanted it or not (and I suspect he did), he is now a role model for young South Asians who want to break the "Model Minority" image and gain a voice in politics. His moves will be watched and imitated. If he represents the forefront of any kind of trend towards conversion to Christianity among US-born South Asians, then I'm not particularly sanguine about what that means for assimilation or for evangelism. Why? Because I've already seen what evangelical Protestantism has done to the US-born East Asian community: it actually decreased identification with either the ancestral culture or the mainstream, thus fostering the precise kind of oppositionalism and feeling of being "trapped in between" which hinders both their ability to contribute to and relate smoothly with the rest of the country (which includes the ability to spread the Gospel), or their chance to gain a middleman advantage from their ancestry.

For reference, I suggest you read in its entirety Carrie Chang's excellent article "Amen. Pass the Kimchee." To quote some relevant sections:

For Asian American students who are inundated by stacks of literature from a host ofracial and cultural organizations the minute they walk onto campus, the appeal of evangelical groups is clear: unlike purely ethnic clubs, which promise only schmoozing and skin-deep connections, religious groups take racial politics to the higher plane of salvation. They promise to bridge the gap between students of Chinese, Japanese and Korean backgrounds with a message of universal love. Where the two-dimensional slogans of racial politics fizz in secular organizations, campus church groups have been able to give a distinctly spiritual twist to the amorphous term, "Asian American."

With their universalist aim, Asian-American churches have brought together not only East Asians (and the occasional Southeast Asian) of different ethnic backgrounds but of different levels of Americanization: FOBs, FOB-wannabes, adoptees, and more --- kids who are all over the chart on various axes of assimilation. And it assimilates them not into mainstream American culture, as so many Americans think of their church doing for pagans, but rather, it assimilates them into church culture, and often, a culture specific to the given group of believers. What are the contents of this culture? Keep reading:

Distrust of authority, whether that means anyone over 30 or a majority white culture, often breeds a subculture of discontent. For Asian Americans turned off by the superficiality of racial politics on campus, the discontent translates itself into a spiritual forum that retains an ethnic character and yet removes itself completely from the dialogue of race and protest. Ironically, a religion borne to Asia by Western imperialism now manifests itself in a resistance to cultural assimilation in America.

Many of the more outlandish quirks of the Asian-American subculture which has sprouted up in recent decades, such as the popularity of listening to music whose lyrics you can't understand, going on study-abroad programs only to speak English all the time and associate exclusively with other exchange students, the wearing of very narrowly-defined styles, colors, and brands of clothing, the massive cliquing together at college and the fear among some of hanging out in a white clique and being accused as a sellout, and the calls for the development of a separate dialect, can be seen as an attempt to easily distinguish one's self with as little effort as possible from a mainstream which one distrusts as a result of some past experience. Actually turning into FOBs and would be going too far for most: they need an identity and they need it fast (usually, so it'll be ready by college orientation week).

But many of the above require money and at least a certain base of knowledge and connections which wouldn't be available to certain people. The Asian-American church fills the gap for them which would otherwise be left unfilled by either a mainstream church filled with white people or a clique filled with coethnics. How? It provides an easily asserted and free ethnic identity completely divorced from the actual constraints of knowing about your ancestral culture: just keep the name of Jesus Christ on your lips, and go only to church-sponsored social events. The members of the church have their own culture, and will be quite eager to teach you its norms and habits so that you can wear them on your sleeve and advertise your membership to others. As long as you don't party too much or start quoting the Quran, you won't be ostracized from their culture, as you might from other Asian or Asian-American cliques.

And what does that culture promote? Most notably, the mentality that Christians, specifically one's own congregation, are under attack from all sides, both by the allegedly heathen and sinful customs and values of Asian cultures such as saving face or burning incense for your ancestors, and by the cesspit of mainstream entertainment and society, which young Asian-Americans often like to identify as "white entertainment" and "white society," because they see themselves represented in it so little and dislike or deliberately ignore the role models, even of their own co-ethnics, which it provides for them. Thus, Christianity provides the perfect excuse for those pre-existing Asian-American tendencies of disassociating from non-co-ethnics as well as for not making any effort to learn about your ancestral culture: both could lead you to temptation to turn away from the church. Assimilation, especially in terms of entertainment choices and friendships, becomes equated with sin. But for those who are already assimilated in the larger ways of language, personal habits, and cultural custom, and who might see adopting more of those as sinful, they're left with the option of emphasizing their non-assimilation in other areas in order to distinguish themselves from the mainstream.

In the case of Asian-American evangelicals, the extent of that non-assimilation usually amounts to belief in Jesus Christ and their ethnic appearance which they see as closely tied to that belief, because almost all the other members of their congregation are of that same ethnicity. Often, the ethnicity, even more than the belief, becomes the strongest marker of membership in the culture. Outwardly Christian behavior could be easily imitated, but race couldn't be; it's the real proof that you're not a member of that corrupt mainstream AKA white society. But it's the intersection of ethnicity (with the attendant common experiences and pains that may result from being assumed to be a foreigner) and shared belief that provides a stronger sense of community than simple shared ethnicity or simple shared belief could.

(<papist self-aggrandizement and gloating> I tend to wonder how much of this disidentification with the mainstream is the result of a congregationalist mentality which emphasizes close personal ties and the creation of a sense of community among a specific group of believers who meet and see each other often. when that group of believers is all of one race, due to their pre-existing proclivity to avoid mainstream institutions, the two tendencies feed off of and amplify each other to produce an "us vs. them" mentality. In otherwords, maybe it's only a Protestant problem, which won't arise among converts to Catholicism. It would be rather ironic if it were the case; the Catholic Church, which is often accused of having an anti-assimilationist agenda at a national political level, may be doing far more at a personal and neighborhood level than the traditional bedrock American religion at promoting personal relationships and a sense of unity between Americans of different races, precisely because of its emphasis on standardization of worship and membership in a worldwide body rather than in a specific group of worshippers. Except, Protestant churches seem to be doing a better job than Catholic churches at integrating Latinos ... but then that's way outside the scope of this entry. </papist self-aggrandizement and gloating>)

John Kim, a lanky junior in a Tommy Hilfiger shirt, is also a seeker, although what he'sseeking may not be quite what the group's leaders have in mind. "It's really hard to meet an Asian woman who isn't a Christian these days," he offers as his reason for coming, though he's quick to add guiltily, "I do pray sometimes."

The cliquishness and distrust of outsiders which the Asian-American church promotes without actually expressing revolutionary sentiment against that society, manifests itself in personal relationships. More and more young Asian-Americans, especially males, may turn to a church to meet potential co-ethnic mates, because it provides an environment in which they don't have to worry about Evil Whitey stealing Yellow Bedfellows. Their kid grows up in the Asian-American church, and the cycle begins to repeat itself again ... unless someone knows how to break it.

2003-10-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

What is assimilation?

This is an aside to a post I'm working on right now about Asian-Americans and Christianity: what exactly does it mean to be assimilated? People often like to speak of "assimilation" or "Americanization" as a simple binary variable, or maybe a position on a single axis, but in fact, there's many different ways in which one can be assimilated --- it's a vector in n-space. And notably, East Asian-Americans on the whole tend to be assimilated in some ways which traditionally indicated or were used as a proxy for guessing at social integration into the mainstream among white ethnics 80 years ago (such as in language, living situation/home ownership, income, and religion), more of a fusion in other areas (personal habits, entertainment and food consumption), and highly distinguished from the mainstream in the rest (politics, identification, and racial composition of friendships).

Maybe some areas of assimilation are not as crucial to holding together a polity as we thought they were way back in 1920, when all the immigrants were poor, there was still a distinction between "corner boys" who hung out with their co-ethnics and "college boys" who flew with the WASPs and achieved the American Dream, and there were not yet such things as satellite TV, 10-10-345, or study-abroad programs for their kids. And conversely, maybe some areas of assimilation that were ignored back then because they seemed to come naturally, need to be looked at more closely today, to prevent the rise of the kind of oppositionalism, separatism, and distrust of the mainstream we're so familiar with in other communities.

Language: Your Chinese/Korean/Japanese ancestral language? English only? One better than the other? Taking classes to try to recover it? "This is America, why should I bother?" Can't speak either one well but know the language of a third country like Costa Rica or Malaysia where your ancestors were hanging around for a few generations before coming to the US? And not just the language itself, but the style in which you speak it: gangster-wannabe? valley girl? prepster?
Identification and attitude towards assimilation: 1.5 generation? 2nd generation? "I'm born here but I don't consider myself an American?" Fresh off the boat? Pretending to be fresh off the boat? "What the fuck do you mean where am I 'really from,' I'm American?" Chinese-American, American-Born Chinese, Overseas Chinese? Gyopo? Yonsei? Nikkei?
Living situation: Three generations of your family stuck in one house in your ethnic ghetto? Or in some other ethnicity's ghetto? Apartment in the city? House, 2.3 kids, and 1.2 pets in a cul-de-sac?
Politics: Not your positions on issues, but rather, how race affects your positions, your arguments, and your view of those who disagree with you. Would you vote for a candidate just because he's the same ethnic group as you? The same race? Would it influence you at all? "Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada?" Would you call him a sellout because of his stance on immigration? On affirmative action? On bilingual education? On racial profiling? On tax increases?
Entertainment/food consumption: Hong Kong TVB series, subtitled anime, or Friends? Sing along to Jay Chou, hum along to Hikki but don't know what the lyrics mean, Linkin Park, or Jars of Clay? Pearl milktea or Starbucks? Hot water or cold water? Dimsum, Dimsum but pass on the chicken feet and the congealed pig's blood in favor of pork buns, or McDonalds? Karaoke or the movies?
Personal values: Gotta save face? Care about passing on your ancestral language to the kids? In favor of interracial dating? Opposed? In favor? In favor when it's you but opposed when it's a girl you want?
Personal habits: What kind of gesture do you make to tell someone to "come here"? How do you move your fingers when you count? What arm motions do you make when you talk about swinging back and forth?
Racial composition of friendships: All white with a few tokens like the suburb you grew up in? "My friends look like the United Nations?" All FOBs from your own country? All 2nd-generation AAs? All black people?
Religion: Vaguely Taoist? Catholic? Muslim? Episcopalian convert? Jewish convert?

Hardly an exhaustive list, but I should have put it up long ago ...

2003-08-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

English Language and Globalization

Godless Capitalist points to this Asia Times article promoting another interesting theory which on closer inspection turns out to be completely unworkable. In this one, Asia Times reporter Mr. Rahul Goswami would like to fault Hollywood and English for language extinctions throughout the Asian continent:

"In Southeast Asia, the response to globalization is to acquire language skills, not in many languages, but in one, the English language, which is seen as the key to success in the globalized age," said Dr Rujaya Abhakorn, lecturer in Southeast Asian history at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

It is indeed English, which served the colonial British Empire and now drives the knowledge economy and the Internet, that is all too often seen as a Tyrannosaurus rex that voraciously gobbles up cultures and traditions.

It's rather disingenuous to lay the blame for indigeneous language loss in multilingual and multiethnic states at the feet of the English language and American "cultural imperialism" without at least considering the effects of national language policies. Those deliberately marginalized linguistic minorities by using the school system to force the ruling group's language and culture on the entire country. Next to that, English, spread not by government diktat but instead by people's natural desire to trade with a rich country, is positively beneficent.

To take an example close to home, if the Malays had followed the example of India in promoting English as the national language, instead of insisting on giving special status to BM and deriding as unpatriotic anyone who didn't learn it, then Orang Asli, as well as Chinese and Indians, wouldn't find themselves obligated to be trilingual in their mother tongue, Malay, and English. Instead, they could simply have continued to use the mother tongue among themselves and English in school and with members of other communities. But as things stand, they learn English because it is economically beneficial, and Malay because they need it for STPMs. This forces many of the youth to leave their mother tongue lying in the dust for lack of time and energy to develop their abilities in it beyond aconversational level.

Even Mr. Goswani himself is forced to admit that in India, because of the widespread adoption of English, people of different mother tongues have become more united, though he tries to cast it as disunity between Hindi-speakers and regional language speakers:

Even where languages are not endangered, there are confrontations between them and English ... The official language of communication of India is Hindi. But, Singh explained, "There is always a hidden tussle as well as open confrontation between supporters of Hindi who mostly oppose the use of English, and supporters of the regional languages who look to English as an alternative link between the Indian states."

Imagine how much worse that clash would be if supporters of Hindi had forced their mother tongue on the rest of the nation in all contexts.

Even so, there are parallel globalizations, Professor Chua Beng Huat of the National University of Singapore observed.

"In entertainment, one is looking at a very conscious effort of an industry globalizing itself," he said. "In East Asia, where Singapore is culturally placed because of its Chinese-dominant population, the idea that we are being Westernized/Americanized is being disrupted."

Chua said that fans of products such as pop music from Japan or television soaps from Korea claim it is easier than watching Hollywood ... "Are these programs in fact reactions to globalization, and nationalistic?"

In otherwords, whereas a Hollywood cultural invasion and English linguistic encroachment puts indigeneous cultures in danger due to racist oppression, a Japanese cultural invasion is to be celebrated, as it promotes solidarity between the brothers and sisters of the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere? Tojo would have been proud.

2003-08-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

South Korean Film and American Trade Policy

Not back until Wednesday, but I thought I'd post this article and a few other articles to give you something to read while I work on other stuff. Anyway, Hollywood continues to complain about South Korea's continued protectionism in the movie industry, which requires cinema owners to show domestically produced films for at least 146 days per year. CNN reports:

It's an increasingly familiar sight in South Korea these days -- the making of movies. South Korean films are packing a punch, both at home and overseas, and are more popular than ever. Box office sales are strong and critical acclaim is growing on the international circuit.

But the success of the Korean film industry is not all about quality. This is a protected industry and the United States, led by Hollywood, wants to change that.

As an advocate of free trade, I believe that one purpose of American trade policy should be to benefit American producers by knocking down those tariff barriers in foreign countries which are directly contributing our ridiculously wide trade deficit, especially with Asia. Would forcing the elimination Korea's screen quota system contribute to this goal on any more than a superficial level?

At the moment Korean films are actually being shown more than the quota level because of high demand. They're also taking almost 50 percent of box office sales.

The South Korean public overwhelmingly prefers their local product, because it's better adapted to their tastes than any foreign-made movie ever could be, as Charles Paul Freund predicted in Reason magazine several months ago. Technical prowess in camera work, computer-generated special effects, and big explosions, at which Hollywood continues to possess a minor comparative advantange, can only go so far in bridging the cultural gap.

So eliminating the screen quota system probably wouldn't do much towards reducing our trade deficit with S. Korea (which rose to $13 billion dollars in 2002) --- Hollywood wouldn't be able to gain much ground, unless they started employing local directors and actors to create movies which would appeal to the Korean public. This would likely mean they have to produce locally, in Korea; wages would be paid to South Korean workers, not to American workers. It's hard to see how that would benefit anyone besides Hollywood itself. At the same time, however, that kind of symbolic inroad would come at a high price: it would be seen by the already anti-American public of South Korea as a major economic and cultural concession by the government, regardless of its actual effect.

This would invitably lead to accusations of "cultural imperialism," which would put the damper on any government official proposing further cooperation with America. That just makes it even harder to push through tariff reduction in areas which are less glamourous and less visible (and thus less likely to provoke fears that "America is taking over the economy), but more important to the average American, areas such as agriculture, automotive parts, or photographic film, or visa agreements which would make it easier for American professionals to work in Korea. Such agreements could benefit a wide range of middle-class and blue-collar Americans, as well as mitigate the threat our continued export of debt poses to the value of the US dollar. In contrast, eliminating the screen quota system enriches only a bunch of overpaid, self-centered celebrities, at the expense of the American public image and quite likely the rest of American trade.

Ironically, the overall goal of free trade might be best advanced by permitting continued protectionism in this one psychologically weighty but economically insignificant sector.

2003-07-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

Capitalism: The best way of finding out what people are willing to pay money for

In the past 12 hours, there's been an unusual increase in the number of people either finding me buried in search results for Steve Sailer (I'm currently number 72, way down from a while ago), or directly searching through my site to see how many times I mention him. Following the links, I was also rather interested to see this:

I feel uncomfortably like I'm being sized up as a target for yet another volley in some pro-Sailer vs. anti-Sailer war of words. To which I'll say, no one besides angry ranting partisans take angry partisan ranting seriously. Though I haven't always succeeded in disguising my scorn, disgust, irritation, and contempt for some ideas and people, especially on the AzNPrYd3 Aktivist Left, I've tried to calm down some in the past year since I started this blog. It's an important part of being taken even vaguely seriously.

Anyway, I'm off to the airport. Laptop's coming with me, so I'll be able to continue some work on an upcoming post on intermarriage, foreign vs. US born Asians, and pan-ethnic sentiment among AAs. (It's a little harder crunching the numbers than I thought it would be --- since I'd had no reason to use my copy of SAS since graduation, I didn't realize it doesn't work off campus.) More when I get back, or maybe while I'm still on the road, depending on how boring my trip is. =)

2003-07-18T03:12:00.000-07:00

Statistical grunt work: Sports in Malaysia

(This somehow disappeared from when I posted it two hours ago, so I'm reposting it.)

So I got bored, and with the recent controversy surrounding Dusty Baker's comments on blacks and sports, I decided to go off on a tangent and crunch some sport statistics from the websites of the Malaysian Cricket Association and the 2003 Malaysian Football Premier League Standings. Some interesting but not entirely unexpected findings follow.

Malaysia's always made a fair regional showing in cricket (such as beating the Australians). Why? Maybe it's because we have more Indians than the competition (well, aside from India, of course). Indians are overwhelmingly dominant at all levels of Malaysian cricket. In the 50 Over League (for all you non-cricketers, "overs" are analogous to baseball's "at bats" --- 6 balls are bowled per over. It doesn't refer to the age of the players being 50 and over), of 195 members of registered Division I teams, by eyeballing the names, I counted 101 Indians (that's 52%, whereas Indians make up only 8% of Malaysia's population!).

In contrast, I counted only 65 Malays or Orang Asli (33%, compared to 59% of the population), and, most disappointingly, 14 Chinese (7.2%, vs. 28% of the population), mostly playing for East Malaysian teams. The balance of 15 inviduals included 4 Western-named with foreign passports, 3 Muslim-named individuals with foreign passports, and 8 individuals with Malaysian passports whom I was not sure how to classify based on their names. However, there's some error in this method; most importantly, I may have miscounted some Chinese or Indians with Muslim names as Malays.

However, when we look at football (soccer), the situation changes. Among 261 members of Premier League Division I teams in 2003 (My 20-minute Java hackjob "data-mining bot" I had trouble automatically extracting the data for Division II from the website, so I haven't included them here), there are only 23 Indians (or 8.8%, roughly at parity with their representation in the population). Worse yet, only 14 Chinese, or 5.3%. This compares to 185 Malays or Orang Asli (71%), as well as 9 Africans (from Ghana, Liberia, Zambia, and Sierra Leone), 10 whites (mostly Australians), 5 Brazilians, and 12 individuals whom I was not sure how to classify based on their names.

What's unusual is that Chinese, despite being concentrated in defense and midfield positions, on average during the just-completed 2003 season scored more goals than their Malay or Indian teammates, who were about equally distributed among all positions aside from a dearth of Indian goalkeepers. (As for the foreigners, the expense and wounded pride of having to bring one in only find themselves compensated if that foreigner is very good indeed. So, as expected, virtually all the Africans and a good portion of the whites played as strikers and racked up many goals for their teams, far more on average than native players).

I wish I had other statistics so I could analyze them further, but goals per player was the only one I've been able to find for now. Stats on Malaysian footballers are, as you might imagine, not in such high demand, and so hard to find.

So why are Indians so good at cricket, while Malays dominate in soccer, and Chinese barely make a showing in either, but when they do, seem to be slightly more skilled than their fellows? More in an upcoming post ...

2003-07-18T03:07:00.000-07:00

Marriage Gap more than compensated for by excess Asian Female immigration, but what about similar gap among unmarried cohabiting couples?

Among Asians, the shortfall in the number of married Asian men as compared to women (305,004 individuals) is not only very similar in magnitude to the shortfall in outmarried men (305,768 individuals), but it is smaller than the surfeit of monoracial Asian women overall in the 18-to-65 population ("marriage age population") as compared to monoracial Asian men (400,810, which I obtained from here; oddly enough, the other immigrant-heavy ethnic group, Hispanics, have huge surfeits of men; in that same 18-65 age range, there's an extra 970,186 of them).

Seeing that natural birth should produce almost equal amounts of Asian women and Asian men (sex-selective abortion or infanticide is presumably almost non-existent in the US), one can conclude the imbalance must be either from excess immigration of Asian females (such as for the purpose of marrying white men as mail order brides, which would support Bill Lee's hypothesis), or less likely theories for which there is no evidence, such as excess emigration of Asian men married to non-Asian women.

However, the ratio of unmarried HAFs living with non-Asian males to unmarried HAMs living with non-Asian females is 1.37:1, while the similar ratio for non-Hispanic Asians is 2.07:1. The total excess of interracial cohabitation among Asian females as compared to Asian males is 27,625 indiduals. These seem less likely to be explained by excess immigration of Asian females.

Since it is rather difficult for an not-yet-married mail order bride to enter the country and remain, the imbalance would require that 27,625 prospective mail-order brides were in the country on temporary visas at the time of the 2000 census (greater than the total number of mail order brides who enter in a year!), were all cohabiting with their prospective partners (rather than staying in hotels), and all chose to respond to the Census as householders despite their non-resident status. Furthermore, in the age range from which you would expect most Asian unmarried cohabiting individuals to be drawn (18 to 29), there is only an excess of 14,411 females over males.

So, there must be other effects which explain why so many Asian girls cohabit with non-Asian boyfriends as compared to Asian men cohabiting with non-Asian girlfriends. The imbalance is even more curious given the intense social disapproval which such girls must face, which one would expect to make them more reluctant (Asian men cohabiting with their white girlfriends would likely be applauded as "scoring one for the race," whereas Asian women in the same situation would be derided as "sellout sluts hot for white cock.")

2003-07-18T03:05:00.000-07:00

Hispanic Asians

Based on the calculations I performed in the last post, there are 5,915 Hispanic Asian males married to non-Asian females (out of a total 14,818 married HAMs) and 8,805 Hispanic Asian females married to non-Asian males (out of a total 18,090). Like the gap among non-Hispanic Asians, the shortfall in the number of married men compared to married women (3,272) is of a very similar magnitude to the shortfall between the number of outmarried males and outmarried females (2,890). Interestingly enough, the outmarriage imbalance is smaller than among non-Hispanic Asians (only 1.49 to 1, as opposed to 2.77 to 1), but it is still there.

Unfortunately, the government does not public what the population of Hispanic Asians in the United States actually is, let alone its gender balance. It seems plausible that the roughly 3,000 extra outmarried Hispanic Asian females could be the result of mail order brides from Latin America entering the US (not too many war brides are likely to come from down there, though).

2003-07-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

Even more statistical grunt work: Marriage in the USA

Godless Capitalist points to Bill Lee who purports to refute Steve Sailer (and plenty of whiny AA males who want to use their inability to find a date as an excuse to impose censorship on the media and commit violence against hapas and whites they find putting their dirty untinted paws on Proud Yellow Women) on the topic of interracial marriage among Asians.

Specifically, Mr. Lee disagrees with the conclusion from this number that AA men are having trouble finding mates due to AA female outmarriage; if you subtract war brides and mail-order brides from the equation, there is no outmarriage imbalance, or it is of a far smaller magnitude than anyone has said in the past. Seems plausible, more on that in another post after I've had time to crunch the relevent numbers myself. Hopefully between his crazy vitriolic ranting and my crazy vitriolic ranting, we'll be able to come to a conclusion.

However, Steve Sailer's assertion that the gap has widened since 1990 isn't the result of any trickery (even though I'm not sure how he got 3.08:1). I and probably any number of other people calculated our numbers independently following the Census Bureau's publication of the report on Families and Living Arrangements, and also found a widening gap. Not all of the numbers were the same to two significant figures, reflecting different methodologies, but they did represent a higher outmarriage imbalance since 1990.

My calculations indicated a ratio of 2.77:1,[1] which actually represents an increase in the imbalance of 2.54:1 found in the 1990 census. Mr. Lee, however, examining a different government report, found a ratio of 2.35:1. To compare our figures:

Married Asian males:
Mr. Lee: 2,118,000
Me: 1,880,518
Married Asian females:
Mr. Lee: 2,393,000
Me: 2,185,904
Total number of married Asian couples:
Mr. Lee: 1,914,000
Me: 1,702,735

Why the discrepancy? Mr. Lee is using Current Population Survey numbers, while myself and Mr. Sailer used numbers from two Census Enumerations of all households, from 1990 and 2000. These numbers are (for the most part) directly comparable, as they were collected using the same method, except that the 1990 Census did not allow respondents to check multiple boxes for race. As a result, some married mixed race Asians from the 1990 Census may not have been counted in the Asian category in the 2000 Census, as they've been transferred (for the most part, against their will) to a separate "Two or More Races" category.

The CPS, on the other hand, does not count or even attempt to count every member of the population, as does the Census. (It also seems to count all married couples rather than just "householders"; I'm not too clear on this, however). To quote the press release which accompanied the report of which Mr. Lee makes use:

The Census Bureau cautions the public not to confuse these estimates, based on survey data collected in March 2000, with Census 2000 data, which are being released on a flow basis. Findings from these two sources may not agree because of different data collection procedures ...

The statistics were collected in the March 2000 Current Population Survey, which uses the 1990 census as the base for its sample. Statistics from sample surveys are subject to sampling and nonsampling error.

I've been trying to find earlier CPS data on interracial marriage to compare to Mr. Lee's calculated figure of 2:35 to 1, but the government appears not to have bothered to compile it. So all we have to go on is the Census, which shows a widening imbalance.

Conclusions? Well, Mr. Lee's assertion that most of the imbalance is due to warbrides and mail-order brides appears correct. So the outmarriage imbalance is far smaller than traditionally reported. On the other hand, there's no denying that in 1990, a decade in which one would expect the inflow of war-brides from Asia to be quite small, that imbalance also widened. Other sources (such as the survey of unmarried couple households, which also shows far more Asian females than Asian males living with their unmarried partners) also suggest that the interracial dating and marriage imbalance may not be entirely mythical. Further analysis is obviously required.

Calculating the outmarriage imbalance from the 2000 Census:
Consider the following method:

Open the Excel version of PHC-T-19 Table 1 (Hispanic Origin and Race of Wife and Husband in Married-Couple Households for the United States: 2000).
Find the value B27-F27-M27, which is the total number of married NH (non-Hispanic) AMs (Asian males) who are not married to NHAFs nor HAFs. This should be 171868.
Find the value M14-M27, which is the total number of married NHAFs who are not married to NHAMs nor HAMs. This figure should be 474364.
Find the value B19-F19-M19, which is the total number of married HAMs who are not married to NHAFs nor HAFs. This figure should be 5915.
Find the value F14-F19-F27, which is the total number of married HAFs who are not married to NHAMs nor HAMs. This figure should be 8805.
Add together your values from steps 2 and 4. This gives the total number of married AMs, both Hispanic and non, who are not married to AFs. This figure should be 176,143.
Add together your values from steps 3 and 5. This gives the total number of married AFs, both Hispanic and non, who are not married to AFs. This figure should be 483,440.
Finding the ratio of the two values from steps 6 and 7, we should get a 2.7746.

2003-07-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

Blacks and Asian grocery stores

It's a fairly common observation that in Asian grocery stores and open air markets in the US, aside from Asians, the second-largest group of customers are blacks. Several theories are usually advanced to explain this, such as "WASPs are culinarily unadventurous," "poor blacks are attracted to the cheaper prices," "black cooking makes use of cuts of meat which are harder to find at white butchers," etc.

Well, I've got another one: superior Black resistance to food-borne diseases (of which you'd expect there to be more in hot and humid climates, like Africa, than cold ones like Northern Europe). The markets in Chinatown don't exactly pass the muster of government regulations, to say the least, and so it's safe to speculate that the less sanitary conditions there give rise to more bacteria. Enough whites who buy raw meat and vegetables at Asian food markets have got sick that they've told all their friends not to go, regardless of how much money they might save. Whereas fewer blacks have the same problem, so they can continue to take advantage of the low prices.

This theory might also explain why there are fewer Latino customers in Asian groceries. Despite the fact that, especially on the East Coast, Asian groceries are usually located in heavily Latino neighborhoods, and Latinos, with a similar socioeconomic profile to blacks, would also be attracted to cheaper prices and non-traditional cuts of meat, Latinos just don't have the same level of disease resistance. Then again, they are the people famous for queso fresco ...

(As a corollary, this would also imply that blacks are getting ripped off when their tax dollars go to funding the FDA, since they would have less use for)

2003-07-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

The US moves to catch up with ... Malaysia

Ward Connerly will propose a drastic step at the July 16th meeting of the Regents of the University of California: the elimination of funding for race and ethnic-targetted events on all UC campuses. (Banning ethnic clubs is a common practice in Malaysian varsities, and Malaysia's head of state, unlike ours, has spoken decisively against affirmative action for underperforming ethnic groups).

San Francisco Chronicle reports, but leaves many questions unanswered:

University of California Regent Ward Connerly will ask fellow regents next week to cut funding and sponsorship of nonacademic events held for groups of a specific race, ethnicity or sexual orientation -- the same proposal he unsuccessfully advanced five years ago.

Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, which in 1996 banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, said events such as black student orientations and Latino graduation ceremonies held at all nine campuses of the university system are divisive and exclude the public.

"Brown vs. Board of Education said that separate was morally wrong, and if we want to bring people together we should not start them off as separate," Connerly said. "(These events) have a symbolic effect of dividing people and they clearly are not supported by the public."

However, it remains unclear how far Mr. Connerly's proposal extends. Obviously he targets separate orientation and graduation ceremonies, but would ethnic-specific student associations continue to exist on campus? What about cultural and language associations? The Daily Cal seems to imply that if Connerly's proposal were passed, ethnically-targetted student groups (such as Chinese Students Associations) would be required to disband:

Currently, university funds can support racially or ethnically related groups so long as they are neither favored nor discriminated against based on their mission. Funds are distributed based on general standards unrelated to race or ethnicity, and while certain groups may have a target community, they are still open to all students within the university.

As a supporter of Connerly's proposal, I nevertheless remain worried by some obvious implementation problems, to the extent that I think such a ban would give rise to such worse racial tensions on campus that we're better off without it. Malaysian varsities, of course, have such a ban in place without any trouble. However, they did it from the beginning; they're not trying to dismantle pre-existing social networks which are likely to put up a great deal of resistance.

Some observations:

Most groups will continue in thin disguise: If you just remove the explicitly ethnic-specific associations, the black club will rename itself the Martin Luther King Historical Society, while the Korean club turns into a Korean Language and Culture Club, and maybe even some pan-ethnic Asian-American clubs will survive by reforming themselves into Committees for the Celebration of the Lunar New Year or whatnot. (And if you try to stop those, someone will also demand you ban Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and Thanksgiving.)
Mostly monoethnic groups will remain so, regardless of their name: A group which avoids a ban by removing ethnicity-specific language from its title and charter likely won't see much change in its ethnic composition, due to simple inertia in people's conceptions of the group: members will continue to invite friends they think would fit well with other members, mostly co-ethnics. Even requiring such clubs to disband and hold new elections to ensure more ethnic diversity on the board when the entering freshmen arrive will hardly solve the problem, since 3/4 of the membership will likely remain the same.
Scope creep becomes a real problem: So if you start denying funding to a wider range of student groups to avoid Problem #2, where does it start? Do you look at the ethnic composition target clubs with too many of one ethnicity? That won't even get off the ground; at least in this case, everyone will line up behind Connerly to demand race-blindness.

And once you've started banning, where do you stop? What about foreign students orientations and clubs, which, especially among Asians, naturally attract American-born co-ethnics looking for cute FOBs or a chance to practice their heritage language? And if you cut off the money to the Puerto Ricans and maybe the Hawaiians, do you do the same to students from all the other states and territories too? What about gospel music societies? Foreign-language karaoke competitions? Language practice groups? Religious groups attached to ethnic churches?
The social disappears while the political remains: Student groups faced with exile from campus and possible extinction won't sit idly by, but instead will begin to look for other funding sources. However, socially-oriented groups will find themselves at a severe disadvantage to politically-oriented groups in this regard. The latter have a membership much more willing to donate their time for fundraising, and are also more likely to find sympathetic "community organizations" ready to spread about their own government grants. The former, saddled with the image of lazy partygoers, aren't likely to find community members who want to subsidize their teenage drinking and sex.

Furthermore, Connerly's proposal bans only ethnically-targetted "non-academic" activities. The giant loophole? Department undergraduate groups in African-American, Chicano, and Asian-American studies, which get their funding from the department, rather than from disbursements of student activities fees anyway. Such groups will be unlikely to throw parties or hold ice-skating trips, on which at least a few students of other ethnicities, even Evil Whiteys, might feel welcome and come socialize. However, they'll be certain to take up the burden from politically-oriented clubs of objecting to everything they see in the media, demonizing whites, and promoting the ugliest form of Asian, Black, or Chicano solidarity --- one based not on socializing with friends, but on attacking others.
Frats and sororities will take up the slack: With the loss of socially-oriented ethnic clubs, minorities looking to socialize mostly within their own ethnicities are likely to turn to self-selected residential groups, which will be far less vulnerable to elimination by the administration. It's difficult to pin down such groups as being ethnic-specific, even if they choose mostly members of their own ethnicity: the same thing happens in mostly-white "mainstream" frats. Cutting their school funding would just create even more pressure to drive frats at large off campus, where their antics would cause even more danger to themselves and their neighbors. In the mean time, they'll continue to throw parties less open to students of other ethnicities as those held by non-residential ethnic clubs.

As a former board member of a Chinese Students Association, I can point out one benefit ethnic clubs bring to the student body at large: our parties always attracted at least some members of other races. Plenty of Asian-Americans, who otherwise wouldn't date non-Asians, came to our parties and found themselves dancing and hooking up with one of our Deeply Colored Allies or even Almighty Oppressor Whiteys. And no one gave them a second look. Frat parties tend towards the less friendly; the high-testosterone environment produces plenty of fighting spirit and racial solidarity of the crudest kind, which may well express itself in violence against whites and white-looking hapas flirting with Asian girls (though so far, they've only killed each other). And the residential environment means rumors spread far more quickly.
Religious groups will too: Asian-Americans who want to socialize primarily within their own ethnic group, but don't find drinking and partying attractive, will likely turn to church-sponsored social events instead. The role of evangelical churches in the Asian-American community is rather difficult to explain, and deserves a whole essay in itself; but for now, I'll point out that this development wouldn't be likely to produce any increase in interracial socialization, and would lead to other tensions of its own.
And what about the Jews? Though "Jewish" is ostensibly a religious tag, many Jewish student groups, unlike their Muslim, Christian, or Hindu counterparts, have little to do with the study of holy books or observance of religious festivals. They instead focus on socialization among Ashkenazi ethnics, and admit even atheists and Buddhists as board members. However, it's not very practical either to ban them (which will bring complaints and cries of discrimination from them and probably an expensive ACLU suit) or not to ban them (which will bring complaints and cries of unequal treatment from everyone else, and likely further inflame anti-Jewish sentiment).

2003-06-30T02:35:00.000-07:00

Mandarin uses both sides of your brain; English only one

The BBC reports that a British foundation has new evidence that listening to Mandarin exercises more of the brain than listening to English. Thanks to Craig of Yellowworld for the link:

Dr Sophie Scott and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust carried out brain scans on a group of Mandarin and English speakers. They found that the left temporal lobe, which is located by the left temple, becomes active when English speakers hear English. The researchers believe that this area of the brain links speech sounds together to form individual words.

They expected similar findings when they carried out scans on Mandarin speakers. However, they found that both their left and right temporal lobes become active when they hear Mandarin ...

Mandarin is a notoriously difficult language to learn. Unlike English, speakers use intonation to distinguish between completely different meanings of particular words. For instance, the word "ma" can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp depending on how it is said. The researchers believe that this need to interpret intonation is why Mandarin speakers need to use both sides of their brain. The right temporal lobe is normally associated with being able to process music or tones.

"We think that Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken words," said Dr Scott.

These findings raise at least four obvious questions (from my hobbyist-linguist standpoint, anyway). First, does this have anything to do with the well-known East Asian affinity for European classical music? (Disclaimer: my training is in linguistics and computers, not neuroscience; take my hypotheses with a large grain of salt).

It's long been suggested, but also usually rejected, that speaking a tonal language gives Chinese people some natural advantage in music. Why specifically classical music? No one's really sure, and up until now, everyone believed that Chinese, like all other languages, was processed only in the left brain, and so there was no reason to take seriously the idea of a link between speaking a certain language, and music.

Chronological correction: Chinese appears to have originally been a non-tonal language as recently as the Han dynasty, developing tonality sometime before or during the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) as a consequence of losing final consonant clusters. Presumably, living among an ethnic group who speak a tonal language would exert some selective pressure against people whose right temporal lobes functioned poorly. However, with only a millenia and a half in which to work, it's not clear whether evolution had enough time to have so significant an effect on the structure and/or function of their brains, and specifically on their pitch discrimination and retention abilities, as to explain the Chinese prevalence in the performance of classical music. If it had, it might give them an edge in the musical world, where one must jump about a complex (compared to pop music) progression of pitches with exact timing, while literally buried in a huge mass of people playing other pitches.

Even if speakers of tonal languages are found to have differences in their right brains, don't jump to any conclusions yet: first, the link between the right temporal lobe and classical music isn't fully understood. Though some studies have shown that it is stimulated when listening to such music, no one seems to know in what way or how intensely it is involved in the performance of such music, beyond its role in pitch perception and musical memory (such as recalling the continuation of a melody when given the first few notes). The right frontal cortex seems to be more important in dealing with processing all the frequency information which allows us to perceive all these sounds as music anyway.

It's also been known for a while that East Asians have a higher incidence of perfect pitch, though Zatorre puts this down to differences in the right frontal cortex rather than the right temporal lobe. He also curtly dismisses the idea that musical ability could be related to speaking a tonal language --- by pointing out that Asian-Americans speak English, ignoring the fact that their many of their ancestors spoke tonal languages, which over thousands of years could have had some effect on their brain (though, reasonably enough at the time, he didn't believe that portions of the brain affecting speech would have any particular link to music). Standing on more solid ground, he also notes that Koreans and Japanese have a high incidence of perfect pitch, despite that both their languages are non-tonal --- but it's certainly possible, though not yet tested, that Japanese may make use of the right temporal lobe to understand their language, which is pitch-accented; see question four; I'm not sure of the extent of pitch-accent in Korean, though (and apparently, neither is anyone else).

However, Europeans and white Americans themselves, all native speakers of non-tonal languages, are also quite well represented among concert violinists, while Vietnamese, Thais, Laotians, and Hmong, speakers of tonal languages, are rather more rare.

For that matter, where are the American blacks? Despite their virtually single-handed invention of jazz with it's own complex tonal structure (and paucity of East Asians), blacks are conspiciously absent from the classical music world (though socioeconomic and cultural factors may play a role here and in the comparable absence of SE Asians). However, many of them trace their ancestry back to West Africa, which is full of tonal languages (off the top of my head, I can think of Yoruba and Twi; I think Hausa also developed tonality under the influence of neighboring languages, which suggests that most of those were tonal as well).

All these signs point to there being a rather more complex explanation than improved right temporal lobe function leading directly to talent in classical music; there's something else at work here. It's a start, though.

If you want the other three questions, they're in the post directly below. Blogger is inexplicably refusing to allow me to put them into this post.

2003-06-30T02:33:00.000-07:00

Additional questions on Mandarin Chinese and the right temporal lobe

What happens in the brain of native English-speaking students of Chinese when they hear Chinese?
From what I've seen, beginning students of Mandarin don't seem to bother with distinguishing tones they hear at all, except for the first week of class in which the teacher is giving them tone drills. Usually this is because they don't see any reason to, and at least given the material they learn, they're right not to --- beginning and even intermediate Mandarin textbooks seem to avoid teaching words which could easily be confused for other words if they were pronounced in the wrong tone.

Since the teacher speaks using vocabulary restricted to that which the students have already learned, the students can match the teachers' words to the vocabulary in their lexicon without relying on tonal information at all. (The most obvious evidence for this point is that teachers of Mandarin often give quizzes which require the student to put tone marks on a sentence written out in pinyin romanization, but provide neither the Chinese characters nor the English translation of the sentence --- thus students are expected to understand the words appearing in a toneless sentence!) Thus their right brains can likely stay disengaged.

In the long term, this would seem a very poor idea: one of the biggest challenges in language teaching is to get students to start processing phonetic information which they're used to ignoring entirely when they speak their native. This process includes waking up parts of the students' brains which they are used to leaving asleep.

Interestingly, a while ago I remember a language exchange partner of mine --- he taught me Spanish, I taught him Cantonese (yep, even as a college frosh, I was already proving myself to be a Sellout Half-Breed by pandering to Evil Whitey's secret desire to Appropriate Eastern Culture, Steal Asian Women, And Oppress Asian Men) --- using a set of cassette tapes called "The Musical Approach: Introducing a new concept to learn Cantonese," which, inexplicably to me at the time, kept playing classical music in the background of the dialogues. Though real language teachers apparently hate it because it doesn't follow the traditional tone order handed down from ancient Chinese linguists, I now wonder if the authors of the tapes weren't onto something --- a way of stimulating the student to use his right brain while listening to a conversation, so he might begin to notice tonal differences in speech which he otherwise wouldn't.
Does Mandarin make heavier use of the right temporal lobe than other dialects?
The real question here is whether more tones or more tone sandhi (the change in the tone of a word depending on the tone of the words which surround it --- don't ask me why English speakers use a Sanskrit word to describe a Chinese linguistic phenomenon) put a heavier load on the brain, or whether it doesn't make a difference, or indeed whether tone sandhi involves a different part of the brain than basic tone differentiation. One could presumably resolve this question by comparing activity in the right temporal lobe between Cantonese-speakers (who have nine tones, but with tone sandhi almost entirely absent) and Mandarin speakers (who allegedly have only four tones, but various complex rules for shifting them around, as well as the infamous "neutral tone" which plagues Beijing Mandarin and follows no rules at all).
Do Japanese speakers make use of the right temporal lobe in understanding their language as well? What about Koreans?
Although most Japanese textbooks won't tell you, Japanese is a pitch-accent language. Though the tone doesn't carry nearly as much informational content as in Chinese, Thai, or other tonal languages, Japanese people will still consider you to have a funny accent if your voice rises or falls at the wrong time. Some homophone, both loanwords from Chinese and native Yamato words, are distinguished only by the relative pitch of the two syllables. Furthermore, there are some sentences, such as kirei zya nai (kirei meaning "pretty," zya nai meaning "not") which can mean either "it is pretty" or "it isn't pretty" depending on the pitch of zya nai relative to kirei (this isn't related to pitch rising at the end of a question; in either case, it's a declarative sentence). However, researchers disagree whether and to what extent the pitch accent exists and conveys semantic information in Korean.

NB: This is far worse than Chinese, in which a tone error, though it may lead listeners to interpret an utterance as nonsensical or even offensive (Cantonese, infamously, has various vulgarities which differ only in tone, not in pronunciation, from common words such as "at" or "nine"), almost never causes you to say the exact opposite of what you intended.

Though it seems as though the answer to this question should be an obvious "Yes," there's one thing to consider: if it were true, we would expect Japanese people to have found out about it already. Japanese academia's notorious nihonjinron supporters are always looking for further evidence to prove the biological and cultural uniqueness of the Japanese people. Considering how much mileage they got out of an average of a few extra inches in their intestinal length (which were once used to justify the continuation of agricultural protectionism in the 1980s, by claiming that foreign beef would be difficult for Japanese to digest), I'd be surprised not to hear about an actual neuro-cerebral justification for "why foreigners all speak bad Japanese: they don't know how to use their whole brain like wareware nihonjin."

2003-06-30T02:16:00.000-07:00

Abercrombie and Fitch ... again

The New York Times reported (long enough ago that it's already disappeared into their pay archives at the time I'm posting) that A&F may have discriminated on the basis of race in their personnel policies, and as a result has been sued:

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco, charges that Abercrombie discriminates against Hispanics, Asians and blacks in its hiring as it seeks to project what the company calls the "classic American" look. Abercrombie, whose upscale casual clothes have made it one of the hottest companies for teenagers and college students, is accused of favoring whites by concentrating its hiring on certain colleges, fraternities and sororities.

Several Hispanic and Asian plaintiffs said in interviews that when they applied for jobs, store managers steered them to stockroom jobs and away from the sales floor because they did not project what the company called the "A & F look." That look, these plaintiffs said, is overwhelmingly white, judging from the low percentage of minority members who work on the sales floor and from the company's posters and quarterly magazine, which overwhelmingly featured white models.

My (late) take on this: so Abercrombie seeks to sell to overwhelmingly white upper class frat boys and those who would emulate them (such as, most of my high school ... apologies to Robert Locke, but prep schools haven't stopped promoting upper-class white culture, upper-class white culture just lost all its standards), and does so by hiring such people. Maybe blacks and Latinos could do just as well; A&F don't want to be the ones to take the chance.

Juancarlos Gomez-Montejano, who worked in sales at an Abercrombie in Santa Monica, said that after a corporate official visited his store, he and four other minority sales workers were terminated, told that the staff was too large. A few weeks later, he said, the store hired five white fraternity members from U.C.L.A.

"It disgusted me because my family name has been on this continent for centuries, and they have the audacity to say I'm not American enough," Mr. Gomez-Montejano said.

If Mr. Gomez is that convinced that A&F corporate are a bunch of racists, why is he suing their company to gain the privilege of working for them and helping them make even more money while earning a comparative pittance himself? Looks like everyone would rather rely on the government to fight their battles for them these days. Can't exactly blame them, the government is big and most of us are rather smaller.

He should just go work for Banana like this Mr. Gonzalez and do his capitalistic best to drive the competition out of business:

Eduardo Gonzalez, a junior at Stanford University, said that when he applied last August to the Abercrombie store in Santa Clara, Calif., a manager said he should apply for the stock room or an overnight position.

"It was like, wow, they're pushing me to the only nonvisible jobs, they don't want me to be seen in public," Mr. Gonzalez said. "And it was weird: all the store's posters were white, blond-haired, blue-eyed."

Soon after, a nearby Banana Republic hired him.

"If you look at a store like Banana Republic," Mr. Gonzalez said, "there's a huge difference. Banana Republic has almost all minorities working there."

It's hardly surprising Banana hires lots of minorities, either. A huge portion of their customer base are Asian-Americans whose main image concern is proving they're really not members of the evil white oppressor class no matter how much they act and speak like them. At the same time, the nice fabrics and designs of their $40 shirts and $110 trousers flaunts their money to their fellow Asian-Americans, proving to potential mates that, while they may play the role of an oppressed minority at the protest march, they're hardly as poor as them.

Surrounding such AA consumers with lots of non-white sales reps helps them to minimize the cognitive dissonance they must feel when they spend ridiculous sums of money (earned by distant parents working at professional jobs with huge numbers of white coworkers), to prove to their Asian-American and other classmates, and to themselves (who achieved the opportunity to flaunt their clothes in those famous universities by attending schools in majority-white suburbs, always communicating amongst themselves and each other in English) that they really aren't similar to Evil Whitey.

One has to wonder Asian-Americans go to such damaging lengths to distance themselves from white people. Could it be the continued demonization of whites by their humanities and social science professors and the larger university culture which three-quarters of them pass through?

2003-05-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

Pain Thresholds

Anyone know if Punjabi Sikhs are known for having a particularly high tolerance for pain or heat? I'm just curious cuz we have one staying at our place (a friend of mine, senior student who graduated last year), I was washing dishes and he reached in to wash his hands in the pure hot water supply, which in our building is set somewhere around 120 F/50C. He didn't even flinch. My roommates (a Tibetan, one Kenyan Indian who isn't sure exactly where he's from but speaks Hindi, and one Tamil) can't touch the stuff, and even I wouldn't be found calmly washing my hands in it, no matter how much is said about the high pain threshold of East Asians. So I'm wondering whether my friend is merely a freak of nature or an average representative of his group.

2003-05-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

Public Bilingualism Watch: Providing Services to Aliens ... hehe

This pretty much speaks for itself. Which is a good thing, since I'm in the middle of finals and don't have time to speak for it. Someone's tax dollars at work:

Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon.

The language created for the "Star Trek" TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County.

"We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak," said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients ...

"There are some cases where we've had mental health patients where this was all they would speak," said the county's purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway.

Opportunity cost? Well, some guy who might have done something vaguely, remotely useful with his time is instead going to study a fictional language with no economic value whatsoever, and for which the only demand is, as we can see here, government-created. Also, the article fails to mention how many of the alleged Klingon speakers are actually speaking Klingon, and how many are just insane Trekkies blabbering on in gibberish and claiming that it is Klingon, since no one could tell the difference anyway.

2003-04-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

Viral Russian Roulette, anyone?

In what is either a publicity stunt or a move by Toronto business organizations to pump up a tourist economy lagging due to fear of SARS, JetsGo is offering free roundtrip tickets to Toronto, coming from Montreal, Ottawa, and New York.

¡§All the media attention on SARS and the World Health Organization¡¦s Toronto travel advisory has had a direct negative economic impact on the city,¡¨ said Michel Leblanc, president of Jetsgo. ¡§It¡¦s important that the tourism industry pulls together to rebuild traffic to Toronto as quickly as possible. These ¡§Let¡¦s Go to Toronto¡¨ weekends will deliver 3,000 tourists to the city over the next three weeks. We¡¦ll review the initiative with our partners at that time.¡¨

Brilliant, more disease vectors. In unrelated news, a professor at my university who has recently returned from a conference in Toronto has been placed into isolation for ten days after she began coughing and showing other symptoms of SARS. This isolation, unfortunately, came only after she had already been back for a week and giving many lectures.

2003-04-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

Outsourcing Work to Foreign Countries

Asia Times publishes an unintentionally amusing article about the growth of call centers in the Philippines.

Tuan Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, manages the Manila office of I-TouchPoint, an Indian call-center firm. Nguyen's office fields a share of directory-assistance calls coming from New York. One consideration in the selection of his operators is their ability to speak a neutral-sounding American English. Indeed, for I-TouchPoint and other call-center firms, a key consideration in the choice of the Philippines as a base of operations is the ability of Filipinos to project "Americanness".

Imagine how long a company would survive inside the US if their HR manager admitted in an interview with the Times that "ability to speak a neutral sounding American English" served as a primary criterion of employment. A wide variety of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American legal foundations would rapidly encourage the EEOC to jump down said company's throat, due to the "disparate impact" this kind of accent criterion has on immigrants and blacks.

More amusingly, if the manager in charge of such practices were found to be a "person of color," as is Mr. Nguyen, he would quickly be derided as a sellout and a Wicked Whitey Wannabe.

As the article fails to note, the cost of complying with "anti-discrimination" regulations is no small reason why so many businesses are moving their operations overseas in the first place, though of course, the wage differential is a larger one.

Idea for a test case: find a US-born kid who speaks a foreign language, possibly his ancestral one, with a noticeable American accent, have him apply for a job in the US, such as in sales, which requires fluency in that language, and unleash your lawyers when he gets rejected. Promising career opportunity for ABCs!

2003-04-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Palden Gyatso

The Tibetan former political prisoner, was just sitting in my living room watching CNN on our little 13-inch TV. He's giving a talk at our school tonight and my roommate will be assisting with translation. He can't speak English, and I felt bad to speak Mandarin to him. So when my roommate left the room, he just kinda sat there watching the pictures on the TV.

Suddenly I'm inspired to say my piece on the issue of Tibet and China, which I'll start working on after I'm back from dinner and the talk, and try to get up tonight.

2003-04-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

Jailbait

Back from Montreal, land of the cold weather and overwhelming Hong Kong domination, where I made far more use of Cantonese than my one year of French. Canadian bilingualism? Hehehe. I was there mostly just visiting high school friends, but while I was there also got the chance to meet a friend of a friend, some girl who I'd only spoken to online. This of course provoked lots of friends to send me articles about the horrors of online dating. This one from AsianWeek caught my attention in particular. It features mostly the stories of college guys getting the hookup online, but also discusses an older woman:

Jane, a 37-year-old Chinese American Silicon Valley software engineer, says she’s done the casual partying and dating, but now wants a husband and kids.

Keep in mind, Jane was thirty-seven at the time of the writing of this article.

Often, she meets someone and dates him once or twice, but then, they “don’t see each other again,�Eshe says. Two years ago, it was a different story. Through match.com, she met the man she thought she would marry. According to Jane, Dan is white, divorced, has three kids from his previous marriage and is eight years older than she.

In otherwords, Jane began dating Dan when she was thirty-five, at which time he was forty-three. When this article was written, Dan was forty-five.

Jane dated Dan the entire year of 1999 with the assumption that it would lead to marriage. She also says she loaned him $200,000 because he was having financial problems with his company. Then, without warning or explanation and without paying her back, Dan broke up with her in early 2000.

So Jane broke up with Dan when he was 44.

Dan confessed to Jane the reason he broke up with her �Eit shocks her even today: During their relationship, Dan started seeing a Chinese American woman, some 28 years his junior. And they are still seriously involved, believes Jane.

So, at some time between the ages of 43 and 44, Dan was dating an individual 28 years younger than him. Simple math tells us that his partner was not a woman at all, but a 15 or 16 year old --- a high school student. If "seriously involved" includes sex, Dan is guilty of statutory rape. I seriously hope that "28 years his junior" is a typo.

2003-04-08T21:39:00.000-07:00

Suburban Luddites ...

USA Today last week ran a few paragraphs of fretting about how Internet chat programs have caused a decline in English language skills among today's youth. Thanks to Joanne Jacobs and SWK of YellowWorld for the link.

Carl Sharp knew there was a problem when he spotted his 15-year-old son's summer job application: "i want 2 b a counselor because i love 2 work with kids." That night, the father in Phoenix removed the AOL Instant Messenger program from the family computer and informed both his children they were no longer to chat with friends online.

Mr. Sharp, whose son has apparently not found himself blessed with the native intelligence or grammar-school education necessary for code-switching between the formal and the informal in his written communications, would rather blame the Internet than a deficiency of the brain or of the school. But we don't see him forbidding his children from passing notes to each other in class, or for that matter, talking to each other on the playground, even though they use just as many linguistic shortcuts and non-standard grammatical features --- "ya know, like, we gotta!" --- in those contexts.

This kind of code-switching is already a daily necessity in our lives --- most people know when they should use the "sloppy diction" of the street dialect versus the "proper, businesslike conversation" of the boardroom and classroom, even if they're not always fluent in the latter due to lack of exposure, and in some cases find themselves dangerously out of place due to their lack of fluency in the former (consider undercover cops trying to infiltrate a drug ring). We're just not aware of this code switching because the difference isn't as formalized as that between, say, the Cantonese which people speak in Hong Kong and the formal standard Chinese they have to use in writing essays for school. I don't think I can speak English in a style remotely resembling that with which I write my class papers or even this blog, at least without significant preparation --- this is one reason why public speaking is so difficult. And even if I could speak English in this style, people would have to pay twice as much attention to understand me than if I simply spoke in short sentences of mostly monosyllabic words, the same style I use in informal emails, AIM chats, and telephone conversations.

The Internet isn't going to accelerate the decline of the literary English language; it's just proving that outside of literatures and serious journals we have no more use for literary English than a Chinese kid on ICQ has for classical Chinese. As a result, it'll probably accelerate the trend of demoticity: further grammatical and vocabulary divergence between the spoken language and the written one, and even the general acceptance of different spelling conventions for writing down the spoken language in informal communications as opposed to writing the formal language in books and the like (as in late Roman-era Greece). Actually, the situation in the Arabic and the Chinese world is just an extreme example of this phenomenon. Arabs and Chinese could all perfectly well choose to write the way they speak, and in fact do, on occasion (Hong Kong entertainment magazines, for example, are infamous for this, and just as the Internet is faulted for bad English, often find themselves the target of campaigns from angry mothers and schoolteachers who believe them to be at the root of the decline in written Chinese standards), but they keep that usage restricted so as to preserve a wide audience for their writings.

As spoken and written English separate further, and people come to recognize their separateness, it could actually reduce regional variations in the written language by preventing all but the most useful of regionalisms and neologisms from making the jump from sound waves to paper, making written English easier to study for second language learners and more robust as a medium for international communication, and possibly making the spoken English of various regions easier to study as well by promoting the creation of large bodies of informal material whose spelling and writing which accurately reflect modern pronunciation and grammar, their writers no longer being bound by some artificial standard of linguistic propriety to which they feel they should hold lest they be viewed as "uneducated." (As I've pointed out earlier, many non-native speakers of Cantonese in Hong Kong learn new slang expressions and the proper context for already-familiar ones by reading magazines written in Cantonese; non-native speakers of English have no such recourse since it is virtually impossible to find printed matter written in the spoken style; you'd have to resort to the Internet and online chat programs for that).

Online lingo may even have roots in other languages, says communications professor Robert Schrag of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The absence of vowels, for example, is similar to how Hebrew is usually written, he says. And the use of "emoticons" ¡X punctuation sequences such as :-) that create smiley faces and the like to convey emotion ¡X are a form of the pictographic characters used in Asian languages.

Sorry, plain wrong. First, don't confuse convergence with relatedness. Analogously, birds and bees both have wings, but neither one is the ancestor of the other. Generally, linguistic features get adopted from one language to another when the language from which the borrowing occurs belongs to a prestige culture. But kids dropping vowels on AIM aren't thinking, "Hey, those smart, powerful Zionist Conspirators don't use vowels in their language, I wanna be just like them, so I'll drop my vowels too," they're taking advantage of the redundancy inherent in English spelling to compress it a bit so they can type out their thoughts faster. The overwhelming majority of kids on AIM do not speak any Semitic language anyway, and probably couldn't tell you that it doesn't have vowels (though material aimed at kids in fact has vowel insertion points ... I wonder if Israeli and Arabic kids chatting away on ICQ put vowel insertion points into their chats to make it easier to read?)

Further, what people repeatedly fail to realize about Chinese characters is that all of them have a phonetic value, and that their meaning arises from that phonetic value, not the other way around. (It's analogous to the way in which "2" will mean a number which you might think of as "two" or "dos," but if you're an English speaker you'll also use that symbol to represent unrelated morphemes "to" or "two" in online chats). Written Chinese has no symbols which convey an idea which has no syllable associated with it. When Chinese and Japanese (and some Korean) people see a character, they don't think of an idea directly, but they think of a sound, which then causes them to think of the various words in which that sound appears which all share some concept between them. This is in contrast to emoticons, which have no phonetic value, and in some cases no semantic value either. When you see a sentence like "So, you think she's cuter than me :-P", the :-P isn't read aloud, but instead serves to change how you perceive the sentence, shifting it from a possibly angry accusation to a mere joke.

In fact, Chinese has characters used in a fashion similar to emoticons --- the infamous sentence final particles, placed at the end of an utterance, which serve to change the perceived emotional content of that utterance (contrast hao3 meaning plain old "okay" with all the various permutations of meaning you can get by tacking on some particles --- hao3 le "okay already!", hao3 de "great!", hao3 ba "if that's what you want, I'll be okay, but ..."). But in sharp contrast to emoticons, these characters are read aloud and have a standard, accepted phonetic value.

Finally notice that emoticons are often present ICQ conversations in Asian languages and will often be used in conjunction with sentence-final particles anyway --- see here for some emoticons made out of Chinese characters --- note for example the one labelled "ocha douzo," which uses a Chinese character meaning "in addition" and read in Japanese as katsu to serve as a pictograph of a pot of tea on a tray, which has no relation to the actual written usage of the character., just as the "P" of :-P has no phonetic or semantic relation to a man sticking his tongue out.

2003-04-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

First Confirmed SARS Death in Malaysia

The Ministry of Health said on Sunday that a man with the country's first "probable case" of SARS died in hospital on Saturday afternoon. MalaysiaKini reports (subscription required):

According to a Bernama report, Health Director-General Tan Sri Dr Mohamad Taha Arif (left) said post-mortem results revealed that the victim had symptoms of lung inflammation.

He said the man, who hails from Jerantut, Pahang, had reportedly visited China from March 6 to 14 and stayed in Singapore from March 14 to 16. He was admitted to the Hospital Kuala Lumpur on March 29.

Mohamad Taha added that the deceased's family members in Jerantut have been placed under a 10-day quarantine since Sunday as a precautionary measure.

Malaysia presently has 75 "suspected cases" of SARS.

China, Hong Kong and Singapore were among the six countries that have reported many cases of SARS. The others are Taiwan, Canada and Vietnam ... the Education Minsitry has instructed local private schools and colleges to temporarily stop recruiting students from the six countries.

Imagine the outcry if the United States Department of Education tried this ...

2003-04-05T06:22:00.000-08:00

Against Romanizing Dialects

Malaysia's The Star produced an article with the following headline:

SARS prompts many Hong Kongers to avoid going to China for Cheng Beng

Confused, I clicked it just to figure out what it was talking about, two seconds before my brain kicked in and told me it was the Hokkien dialect spelling of "Ching Ming," on which we should return to clean our ancestor's graves. (To be honest, the first thing I thought of was Ah Beng).

A request: when you need to romanize anything except people's names, please use a spelling which refers to the Mandarin pronunciation, so that everyone can understand. Dialect romanizations are non-standard, not likely to be understood except for common terms even by speakers of the dialect in question, usually incomprehensible even for common terms by people who don't speak your dialect (e.g. 95% of all Chinese people in the world, and at least 50% of your local population) and often rely on spelling conventions of the language of the local country, which make them incomprehensible even to speakers of the same dialect from other countries (for example, English speakers spelling Cantonese pronunciation of "to point" as "gee," pronounced with a "j" sound, or Malay speakers spelling the same thing with a "c" at the beginning).

Some have suggested developing standard romanizations as a way of promoting various dialects, most notably, Hokkien as spoken in Taiwan. But, romanization which looks like this will scare off both English speakers and speakers of other Chinese dialects. Without clicking that link, I doubt even any Hokkien speaker tell me what this is talking about:

1951-nii ycieen, Liim Keahioong Kaosiu si eng MLT siar Taioaan bunge-zokphirn ee zokkaf. Y ee zokphirn lorng eng phofthofng ee Engbuun-phahjxiky laai tuozog, mxkuo hiah'ee ee zerngseg irnsoad-zhutparn khiok in'ui tngsii syn-panpox ee Taioaan-Serng-Zernghuo ee hengzexng-bengleng, siutioh zoftoxng; hit'ee bexngleng zoadtuix kirmcie ti Taioaan-kerng-lai zhutparn Taioaan-oe kab Jidpurn-oe ee jixmhoo zokphirn.

Most English speakers will react with either laughter or irritation to something which is spelled like that (don't worry you all, spoken Hokkien doesn't contain any sound even remotely close to "phajxiky" or "mxkuo"). Worse, it's equally disadvantageous to speakers of other Chinese dialects who want to learn Hokkien, since they won't even be able to start to guess at the meaning of something like that until they're already fluent in Hokkien, unlike what would be the case if you just wrote in Chinese characters. Many mainland Chinese students who have studied in Hong Kong pointed out that to me that, when their Cantonese was still not at a conversational level, their man method of their main method of picking up new Cantonese expressions wasn't speaking with Hong Kongers or watching movies, which in both cases were too difficult for them, but rather, to read entertainment magazines, which are usually written in Cantonese dialect, but using Chinese characters. They're able to guess at the meaning of most expressions based on the surrounding text, which is in Chinese. I doubt they'd be able to pull the same thing off if faced with Cantonese written in Romanization.

The Hong Kong government got Cantonese dialect characters added to BIG-5 and Unicode, you can get Hokkien characters added too if you get together a proposal.

2003-04-05T05:54:00.000-08:00

Political Correctness Triumphs Over Disease Prevention

Yesterday I wrote that Asian countries (outside of China, anyway) will probably be more successful at controlling SARS than Western countries. As if by magic, a Toronto lawyer has decided to provide me with an example of why. Canada's CBC News reports:

TORONTO - A Toronto lawyer says some members of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board are discriminating against Chinese refugee claimants by wearing masks to hearings ... Some refugee board members, and Toronto lawyers began wearing masks this week in response to the SARS outbreak in the city, but public health authorities say it is unnecessary and alarmist.

Go believes board officials who wear masks are being discriminatory, unfair and the action may possibly be illegal.

Ontario public health officials chastized people for wearing masks in public saying it promotes fear and hysteria.

So now Mr. Go believes it is discriminatory, unfair, and illegal to take a simple and legal health precaution when dealing with a person who is more likely than the average member of the general population to have been in close contact with someone from regions of the world where SARS is a serious problem. In Japan, people put on masks when sick out of common courtesy. In Canada, people who put on masks are browbeaten by the Defenders of Political Correctness.

2003-04-03T22:01:00.000-08:00

Asians in Sports

AsianSportsNet.com --- profiles, including statistics, of various Asian and Asian-American athletes in the US. I meant to post this link a while ago, but my spring break vacation in California made me blissfully lazy and happy, unable to summon the annoyance with the world necessary to blog. Best wishes and good luck to the moderator, Bill.

2003-04-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

Man on the Street: Eurasian Opposes War

AP --- Marine Corps reservist Stephen Funk, center, walks with his mother, Gloria Pacis, left, and sister Caitlin Funk to turn himself in at his reserve unit in San Jose, Calif.

The notion that as a Marine he would be expected to kill people somehow escaped former Seattleite Stephen Funk when he left his job at a California pet food store and enlisted in the Reserves.

Yesterday, 47 days after he refused to report for active duty in Iraq, Funk declared himself a conscientious objector and surrendered to military authorities in San Jose.

The Marines declared him a deserter ... I refuse to kill," said Funk, who had excelled as a rifleman during boot camp. "I object to war because I believe that it is impossible to achieve peace through violence. I am a conscientious objector because there is no way for me to remain a Marine without sacrificing my entire sense of self-respect."

Funk said he would rather face the military's punishment than act against his beliefs.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Guessing from the name, my first guess is that his mother might be Filipina, with Indonesian Chinese whose family changed their name in the 60s running a distance second. Or she might be an adoptee to a Portuguese or Spanish family, in which case all bets are off.

Funk himself has recently come out as gay, leading The Advocate to become interested in his story. Funk himself states:

Funk acknowledges his sexual orientation in his conscientious objector statement: "My moral development has also been largely effected by the fact that I'm homosexual. I believe that as a gay man, someone who is misunderstood by much of the general population, I have a great deal of experience with hatred and oppression. When someone is thrust into a situation of hate and oppression because of factors they have no control over, I believe they either react with hatred back, because they've experienced it, or they learn not to be that way towards others. I have adopted the latter reaction and stand with the oppressed people of the world who know that hate and oppression do not solve any problems. I was raised to respect, not hate, others who are different than me. I was appalled by the amount of hatred I found in the military. Of course I couldn't 'come out' in boot camp, but everyone pretty much knew that I was gay, and many hated me for it. The military cultivates antigay sentiment among its enlisted, but I also believe it perpetuates feelings of hatred against all that are different either culturally, ethnically, or otherwise. I think that is the way the military dehumanizes the enemy (whomever that may be) so that its members won't be averse to killing them. Coming to that realization about war disgusted me and made me completely opposed to military action."

It's not clear whether his coming out is genuine or is simply a further tactic to speed his discharge. Marc Miyake thinks it's the latter, but I'm not so sure. Not much else to say on this topic personally. Thanks to John Scalzi for the links --- click over there if you want further reading and a good discussion.

2003-04-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Man on the Street: Eurasian POW in Iraq

Here's hoping for the safe return of Spc. Joseph Hudson, a Eurasian of Filipino ancestry from New Mexico, and kudos to the Phillipine government to concerning themselves with a welfare of a Filipino descendent abroad, even a hapa --- something I highly doubt any other Asian government would bother to do. New California Media reports:

This after the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that one of five American soldiers captured by the Iraqis was 23-year-old Army Spc. Joseph Hudson, who is of Filipino descent. "We call on the parties to the conflict to observe the rights of both combatants and non-combatants. Prisoners of war should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention," said Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople. "We are aware there are Americans of Filipino ancestry in the war. While they are no longer Filipino citizens, their ties to our country and our people remain strong."

Ople also called on global humanitarian organizations to attend to the needs of those affected by the war, which has the backing of the Philippine government.

"I call on the international agencies, particularly the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent to attend to the needs of all prisoners of war," Ople said. "I call on the parties to the hostilities to allow the appropriate humanitarian agencies access to all prisoners of war."

The Phillipine government officially supports the US in the war with Iraq.

2003-04-03T19:27:00.000-08:00

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in the US

VDARE puts up an interesting article about abnormal pneumonia (SARS) and immigration policy. The author first convincingly argues that China's infection statistics are complete and utter garbage:

At the outset of serious news coverage of this story about 17 days ago, the Chinese government fessed up to 305 cases with 5 deaths and claimed that the disease was contained. This number rapidly lost its credibility. About a week ago, the Chinese amended that to 800 or so cases and just 34 deaths¡Vwhile admitting new outbreaks in Beijing.

This number still defies belief. Since the first known carrier arrived sick in Hong Kong on February 21 2003, the number of cases in Hong Kong alone have bloomed to 685, including an entire apartment building. I have been following this story since March 13 and have watched the cases mount at about a 20% daily rate. And this is in a modern city with up-to-date health facilities.

My own back of the envelope calculations: a total of only 800 cases after 19 weeks would imply an exponential increase in infections of about 5-6% daily. The observed increase in HK is more like 10-15%, which would imply anywhere from 300,000 people to the entire southeastern seaboard actually being infected, which obviously isn't the case either. Even in cities, it isn't yet at epidemic proportions. Otherwise, regardless of Chinese government control of their media, we'd be hearing about it from every man on the street e-mailing his cousin in America.

The author goes on to make some further good points. Unfortunately, the one with which he leads off his list seems to be his least sound. Those of you who have been around for a while know I'm not exactly in the business of jumping all over people for minor violations of racial sensitivities, but:

Massive, unassimilated enclaves of ethnic Chinese in North America --- Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco-Oakland, Los Angeles, New York --- often crowded, unhygienic --- a veritable human petri dish for the new virus to take hold, after introduction by Chinese travelers.

It seems that if Chinese were assimilated, they'd be living all over the country rather than crowding into those cities with Chinese broadcast television, decent dim sum places, and at least vague semblances of emergency procedures to deal with outbreaks of disease. Immigration results in Americans with relatives living overseas who come to visit and who get visits in return, regardless of whether those immigrant Americans and their kids continue to live a FOB lifestyle in Chinatown or start speaking English at home and buying American cars to show their national pride. Would you rather one Chinese family fill into every little town in the Midwest with absolutely no medical facilities to speak of, so that when their relatives come to visit, cases will be popping up in all those little towns? At least with the present situation of the Chinese population being heavily concentrated in certain areas, we know who's at risk.

The assimilated may even be at more risk than the unassimilated if SARS starts hitting hard over here. Why? We Chinese speakers have already been inundated with information about this thing. The rest of the country, including many ABCs, are weeks behind and they're probably not even gonna bother trying to catch up in their preparations until some deaths in a major city make the front page, by which point you can be sure many have already been infected.

As this Forbes article points out, Chinese language US media are the only ones which regularly report on SARS as a main topic in favor of the war. As a result, many assimilated ABCs don't even know how serious the problem is, because they're stuck with the English-language media which spend 95% of their time mangling the names of southern Iraqi towns we're never gonna hear from again and, when there's an ebb, tack on some coverage about this strange flu way over in Asia. In contrast, Sing Tao has been running front page stories about SARS for weeks.

Me? In the last week I've gotten at least 10 email forwards with extensive descriptions of the symptoms of SARS and detailed discussions of the benefits and drawbacks to various brands of masks. Only one of those emails was in English (posted here for everyone's benefit). When I went back to California last week, the Chinese video rental store I usually go to was selling packages of masks. So was the bookstore. They were the right brand, too. The only business in that plaza likely to get non-Chinese customers, the restaurant, didn't have them.

The package of masks is now sitting on my desk. I may never use it. But if and when I hear on the evening news that five guys died in some hospital in New York or Boston, near where I'm at now, next morning when I go to class I'll bust open that package and put on a mask. Unlike all y'all who don't actually know people with friends or relatives infected by this disease yet, I'm not gonna be sitting around for a day being confused about what to do, get lots of email forwards from my friends, then the next morning conclude that maybe doing something is a good idea and go queue up for half an hour at Walmart during lunch along with everyone else in the city, probably catching the disease while there.

Recent e-mail from a non-Chinese speaking ABC friend:

Yeah, I'm thinking of taking a trip to Hong Kong. It'll be cheap cuz now that there's the war, no one's flying, and no one's staying in hotels cuz of that virus thing.

I really hope this isn't typical, but similarly, white people --- even university students --- with whom I've brought up the subject usually don't know what I'm talking about until I say "the flu over in Asia which killed all those hotel guests."

Political Correctness --- The brutal truth is that SARS is, currently, a predominantly Chinese disease (the media disguises this by talking about, for example, "Canadians" --- ethnicity suppressed).

Or "Asians" --- at least from what I've seen the media haven't been too jumpy to point out SARS as an Asian phenomenon, but are reluctant to state the obvious fact that it's being spread along precisely the routes that southern Chinese people travel to go visit relatives --- Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and Canada --- for fear of offending the sensibilities of Chinese people. As a result, Americans will hear about a flu coming from "Asia," remember only this one bit of information, and start avoiding their local Cambodian donut shop or rethinking their trip to Korea. But they probably wouldn't blink twice at driving to Toronto, despite that they're at much higher risk of being infected there than in Seoul.

I personally doubt SARS will spread evenly throughout Asia. It might hit Japan because of the scale of the illegal immigration problem, but I doubt the Japanese government will show any of the concern with political correctness or sensitivity that the US government will --- they'll be aggressively inspecting every Chinese restaurant in the city, stopping random Chinese people on the street, etc. I'll be very surprised if it becomes a large-scale problem in Korea, given their Japanese-like attitude towards foreigners combined with a lack of any significant Chinese population. Singapore will probably be best at resisting the disease simply because of their population's acceptance of paternalistic violations of civil rights, combined with the government's immunity to charges of racism leading them to unfairly target Chinese people. (That's one reason why I worry about Malaysia. There's always enough angry and frightened people around to turn anything into a race issue).

2003-03-24T01:41:00.000-08:00

Census Discrepancies

I had been planning to finish up a post on intermarriage and immigration, but a basic problem has stopped me dead in my tracks. See the table below. Numbers in thousands. "Total" refers to all persons of the given category, whether married or not. "Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000" does not provide this figure. Note that the counts for foreign born are estimates based on projections which have been reweighted to fit Census 2000 numbers, and are not actually compiled directly from Census 2000 raw data.

Category	Total	Married, Spouse		Data Source	File
		Present	Absent
Foreign-born Asian Men	3,508	2,087	159	Foreign Born Population, Table PPL-160-3.2	Excel
Foreign-born Asian Women	3,927	2,415	117		PDF
					TXT
All Asian Men 15+	4,041	2,118	163	America's Family and Living Arrangements, Table P20-537-A1	Excel
All Asian Women 15+	4,374	2,393	120		PDF
					TXT
All Asian Men	N/A	1,866	N/A	Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000, Table PHC-T-19-1	Excel
All Asian Women	N/A	2,168	N/A		PDF

Basically, the number of married foreign-born Asians with spouses present (which I am fairly sure means present in the same household) is reported to be greater than the number of married Asians in the whole country. This isn't only a problem for Asians --- for Hispanics, the number of married Hispanics shown in PHC-T-19 is exceeded by the number of foreign-born persons from Latin America with spouses present shown in PPL-160-3.1 and is only about half the number of married Hispanics 15+ with spouses present indicated in P20-537-A1.

Also note that Population by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Origin for the United States: 2000 (PHC-T-9), Table 1 indicates a total 4,948,741 Asian men and 5,294,257 Asian women in the US, implying around 1,440,000 US-born Asian men and 1,367,000 US-born Asian women, some of whom are presumably married.

A partial explanation is offered by the explanation in the report for "Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000" on page 2 that:

The numbers in this report do not show a complete count of all married couples and unmarried partners but only of couples and partners where one person was the householder. If the household included more than one couple, the household designation was determined by the status of the householder. For example, if a household was maintained by an unmarried couple but also contained the son of the householder and the son's wife, the household would be tabulated only as an unmarried-partner household in this report.

That would imply that plenty of Asian and Hispanic couples aren't householders, which isn't so surprising when you consider intergenerational households (grandparents and parents all under one roof, meaning as many as three married couples in a household), or multiple families sharing a single unit. I'm also not too clear whether "householder" includes a family renting an apartment; it doesn't sound as though it should, though this would seem to make the Census report on Married-Couple Households a rather unrepresentative sample of married couples overall, since it would automatically exclude married couples of lower socioeconomic status who can't afford to buy a house, an increasing problem in California, especially among immigrants who are more likely to be in poverty.

Furthermore, this still doesn't explain how the number of foreign-born Asian women with spouses present could exceed the total number of Asian women ages 15 and above who are married, unless there are a lot of pedophiles here getting 14-year old Asian mail order brides, no US-born Asian women are getting married, or the Census Bureau's estimates of the foreign-born population are inflated. However, for various reasons, most people seem to agree that the Census Bureau's annual estimates of the foreign population actually undercount it.

The Census Bureau claimed in December 2001 they would have real data about the foreign-born population based on the 2000 enumeration up "in 2002," but fifteen months later we're still waiting. Moving at the speed of monopoly ...

Anyway, this makes things a little difficult if you want to compute the marriage rates for US-born Asians and compare it to foreign-born Asians, which is what I had been planning to do before I got sidetracked.

2003-03-23T05:50:00.000-08:00

Hapa attacked by Asians, Revisited

A reader looking at one of my earliest posts points out that the link to this article was broken. Indeed, the article seems to have disappeared from the present Internet, so I went to the Wayback Machine and dug it out for you all to see:

Hate Crime in Japantown
by Rocky Kiyoshi Mitarai

I was raised in Sonoma, California, which is a small, predominantly Caucasian town. When I was growing up, people made slanted eyes in front of me and called me names. My group of friends in grammar school would brag about being Italian American or having Italian ancestry, and I was treated badly because I was Japanese. I went home and asked my mom if I had any Italian blood in me and it turned out that I am one-eighteenth Italian, which I remember being very excited about. I went to school the next day and told them, but they didn't believe me.

Once when I was in seventh grade, we were told by the music teacher to get into groups and make songs. This other group put up a big piece of butcher paper, and on it was a picture of a man with a rice picker's hat, buckteeth and two slanted lines for eyes. Their song didn't involve much more than these lines: "I come from China. I don't care if you kill me. I eat sushi. And my eyes are so slanted that I can't see."

After they were done, all the kids in the class and even the teacher were laughing. I felt angry, but I didn't know why. I had been hearing racist things throughout my life and I had started to feel as if it were normal. My friends who wrote the song said, "Why is that song racist? It's not even racist." Whenever I did say something in response to their insults and jokes, I was told by my teachers that I was taking their comments too seriously, and I always looked like the bad guy who had an attitude problem.

In the eighth grade, I hung out with a kid who was half African-American and half white and another kid who was Cuban-American. There were hick types-who would scream obscenities at us, like "You f---ing Mexicans," for example. At one time, my friends and I were labeled as a gang by the school administration and were sent to see the school psychologist during lunch period for a few weeks. If you were a person of color and hung around other people of color, it was automatically assumed that you were a gangster.

Things like that hurt me while I was growing up, which is probably why I denied my Caucasian side after grammar school and identified myself as full Japanese.

My father told me many stories about my Japanese ancestry and how important it is. He told me that our family is of the samurai-class warriors who lived by a strict code of honor, and would go as far as death to uphold this code. My jichan, which means "grandfather" in Japanese, would always remind my father that we need to be proud of and show respect to our ancestors. My jichan was a very honorable man. He was raised with Japanese cultural values.

What happened in 1942 changed my jichan's life, along with the lives of all people of Japanese ancestry in America. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, newspapers told how the "sneaky Japs" were evil. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the evacuation of everyone on the west coast who was seen as a threat to the war effort-all the Japanese Americans were interned. My father, at the age of 3, and his family were sent to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. They were given 10 days' notice to sell everything they owned.

The relocation camps were located on very barren, desert-like land. It was terribly cold in the winter, especially in the small crowded wooden shacks that every family had. The bathrooms were just big rooms with toilets, usually without partitions around them.

When my family was released in 1945, there was no house or land to go back to. They had had a successful farming business before the war, which they also lost. My jichan did his best to start over from nothing and support the family. After being interned, my jichan felt that knowing the Japanese language might be dangerous in this country. They had a hard enough time as it was convincing people here that they really were American, so many Japanese-American parents tried to mold their children into "mainstream American" children; this was the main reason why my father and many other Japanese Americans were never taught how to speak Japanese by their parents. At the age of 85, after living a hard life, my jichan passed away.

When I think about things like this, I feel enraged. But at the same time, I have such admiration and pride for my family and my people for standing strong through all of this oppression and allowing me to live the good life that I do now.

I thought it would be great to go to a school where whites were not the majority. I came to the University of San Francisco (USF) so I could be with other Asians because I felt that they were the ones who would support me. But when I finally got to USF, my world seemed to collapse around me. The Asians usually hung out together in big cliques-cliques that I couldn't be a part of. I was not accepted by many as an "Asian" person. I heard things from people like: "Why do you try so hard to be full Japanese?" "Why is your last name Japanese?" "You shouldn't be in the Japan Club-you aren't a real Japanese." "Eating rice today, huh? Are you getting in touch with your Asian side?" "Hey, what's up, Mexican? What's up, Paco? Do you want toeat some refried beans?" "Look at this guy-the Asians don't want him, the Caucasians don't want him. He might as well be Mexican."

All of this rejection affected me in many ways. I used to have my hair combed back on top and shaved on the sides, which was a popular hairstyle for young men at the time. Asians would tell me that I looked "Mexican" because of this haircut. What I didn't understand was that some of them had the same hairstyle but nobody was telling them that they looked "Mexican." I also got the same reaction to my '94 Chevy Camaro. Since it is an American-made car, I have been told that it is a "white car." The popular car for an "Asian" person to have is a car made in Japan, they say. I know many Asians who have American-made cars, but they don't get criticized. When I wear something that is not considered very popular by the Asian-American crowd, I am told that I am dressed like a "whiteboy" or a "Mexican." In response to the criticism, I used to sometimes wear clothes that were considered stylish by many young Asian people that I knew, and I had my hair cut short so that people didn't make comments about it.

One recent experience taught me some very hard lessons about the world. On Friday, May 9, 1997, I was attacked and nearly killed by a group of Asians because I am hapa. That night I went to sing karaoke in San Francisco's Japantown with four of my friends. When we were leaving for the night, there were about 10 Chinese and Vietnamese guys standing outside of the karaoke studio. As a good luck charm, I wear a Chinese character on my necklace that says fuku, meaning "happiness" in Japanese and "good fortune" in Chinese. They were all staring at me angrily and I heard one of them say, "But why is he wearing that necklace? He doesn't even know that it means."

I knew that they had a problem with me because I am not "full" Asian. My friends told them that I was half Japanese, but that didn't seem to matter.

I left the building and started walking to my car. I turned around and saw three of them walking behind me. They all started punching me in the face and stomach. Then one of them began choking me. I fell down, and they started kicking me in the head. At that point, I was covering my head, trying to protect myself and thinking that I might die. One of the guys yelled, "You see Bruce Lee movies and you want to be Asian, huh?" My friends did not help me. I guess they were too scared to act.

I kept telling him that I was half Japanese. Finally, he left with all his friends. My necklace had been ripped off. My friend found it for me but it was bent and broken. I must have been struck in the face and head at least 35 times. I had huge bruises on the side and back of my head, a black eye that I couldn't see out of, and a swollen head for about a week. Things had gotten to the point where I was almost killed by other Asians because I am proud of being Japanese.

After my violent experience in Japantown, it became clear to me that something must be done to stop the oppression that hapa people face every day. I wrote an e-mail describing my assault to Hapa Issues Forum, which is a mixed-race club at the University of California, Berkeley. I got a great deal of support from them. Identifying myself as hapa is very important to me. I do have an identity. I shouldn't just be seen as some confused person who doesn't fit in anywhere. I want people to understand that being multiethnic-half Japanese and half Caucasian, for example-does not mean that you only know half of your culture. If anything, people like us should be considered to have a double cultural background. People can't assume that culturally we are any less Asian or Pacific Islander than anyone else. A person can't be split down the middle.

After that incident occurred, I was scheduled to leave for Japan to study abroad for a few months. I felt that something needed to change-whether it was my attitude toward the whole situation of being rejected and ridiculed because of being hapa, or whether it was those who oppressed me who needed to change. When I finally got to Japan I had some of the greatest times in my life, and I learned so much about my culture, my ancestors and life in general. I met some of my relatives who I never knew I had, and I made some friends that I will keep for life. When I got back to the United States I realized a few things. When I was in Japan, I was able to fit in well with the Japanese natives, just because I had been raised with many of the same cultural values that exist there. Of course, there were many differences that existed in my cultural background, which made it hard at times. But I was able to connect with the country of my ancestors. When I got back from Japan, I seemed to know who I was.

Now, even if people tell me that I look Latino and that I am not a "real" Japanese person, I don't care because I know who I am and their comments are ignorant, anyway. I think that this knowledge has helped me greatly in extinguishing that flame of anger that I carried around inside me before going to Japan. I never thought that things would get better, and the situation felt pretty much hopeless. But looking back on my experiences, the situation did get better.

Many hapa people's experiences today are similar to those of the Japanese Americans about 30 years ago. Many of them had an identity crisis because their knowledge of Japanese language and culture was limited because their parents tried to mold them into "Americans" for their protection. At the same time, people were constantly questioning their knowledge about the United States and their ability to speak English-they were judged by their appearance and nothing else. I know that the oppression I have been subjected to is not at all equal to what my father and Japanese family went through during their terrible internment experience. But the rejection, the need to probe my "Asian-ness" and being hated because of my multiethnic background, are issues that weigh heavily on my mind every day.

People may choose not to accept who I am because I am hapa, but this ignorance cannot change me. Nobody can take my heart and spirit away from me. I am a very proud Japanese American.

Selections of this story were originally published in What's Hapa'ning: The Hapa Issues Forum Newsletter, and in What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People, by Pearl Fuyo Gaskins and published by Henry Holt.

(reprinted under "fair use" doctrine).

2003-03-20T16:55:00.000-08:00

Asian American Unsympathetic to War Protestors

The word from the proverbial man on the street. SF Chron article courtesy of Instapundit:

Outside the Transamerica Pyramid, more than 100 demonstrators shouted anti-war slogans, shutting down the intersection of Clay and Montgomery and angering motorists. "You suck. Why don't you all go to North Korea and do this," yelled Larry Chu, who had driven into the city from San Rafael and had been stuck for several minutes in his car.

So far, I haven't been much inconvenienced by protestors, though a presentation I was supposed to give today was cancelled by virtue of many students being too lazy to come to class today and calling it a walkout in solidarity with Iraqi civilians. How exactly walking out of the class of a professor who supports the anti-war position (she didn't cancel class) is supposed to help the people of Iraq is beyond me, but I got glares from several fellow students for asking the TA for permission to go ahead with my presentation anyway.

The process was going slowly. At Montgomery and Clay streets, about 15 demonstrators linked arms through lengths of 3-foot-long plastic tubing ... requiring four dozen police in riot gear to carefully and gingerly saw them apart.

The tubing, not the protestors.

2003-03-15T17:20:00.000-08:00

Look Out For Another Attack on the English Language

Normally I avoid blogging on general political issues which don't have much to do with the stated theme of this blog (cultural interactions throughout Asia, and immigrant integration and non-integration in the US). It's not that I'm not interested, it's just that the same things can be found elsewhere, stated far more eloquently, by people with more experience and a better perspective on the matters involved. But this is sort of on my wavelength anyway. Remember the scandal over the use of the word "niggardly" from a while back?

A CNN Capital Gang participant (I believe it was Al Hunt, but I'm not sure since I was cooking dinner and only vaguely paying attention to the TV) accused Congresswoman Grace Napolitano (D-CA) of reneging on her "term limit" promise which played a significant role in getting her elected to the House in 1998. She has announced plans to run for the Senate, saying that "six years in Washington are simply not enough.

Now the problem isn't the accusation itself so much as the word used to accuse the Congresswoman of having reneged on her promise --- "reneger," which the reporter pronounced with a short "i," rendering it close to "re-nigger." I'd imagine that quite a few people out there think that "renege" is pronounced with a final "j" sound, and so have no idea what "re-nigger" might mean, besides being a variation on a racial slur. Wonder if someone claiming emotional damages from hearing that on national TV is going to crawl his or her way out of the woodworks soon.

Enough speculation and procrastination, back to coding.

2003-03-14T08:40:00.000-08:00

China Braindraining the First World?

Well, not exactly, but as this Asia Times article points out, many companies in Shanghai hope to hire Japanese workers who can't find jobs at home. Thanks to SWK of YellowWorld for the link:

China's most economically dynamic region, the eastern area including and around Shanghai, is planning to hire laid-off and retired skilled workers from Japan. The booming region is suffering a shortage of high-level technicians, and the large pool of unemployed engineers and technical talent in Japan, due to its sluggish economy, provides a possible solution.

A Sino-Japanese skills exchange fair is to be held in June in Osaka, Japan, aiming to import Japan's advanced technologies as well as technicians who are urgently needed at home, said Liu Weigang, an official with Shanghai's service center for small enterprises. Liu said the unemployment rate in Japan climbed to 5.4 percent last year, leaving 3.59 million people jobless. Many of these people were high-level technicians in the machinery, electrical and metal manufacturing sectors, of whom Chinese enterprises are in large demand. It is expected that 50-100 Japanese workers will be recruited this time, aged from 40-50, Liu said. Because these people are free of dependent children, they require relatively less pay.

In Japan, this just represents a new twist on the old social phenomenon of the father being assigned to a distant or overseas posting while the children remain at home. This will probably serve to increase the popularity of Chinese language study in Japan, though. And it underscores the increasingly bizarre economic relationship between China and Japan: China is both undercutting Japanese manufacturing with cheap labor, using excess capital to buy up their companies, and now, braindraining their skilled technicians, while sending them unskilled laborers in return.

2003-03-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

Note on Asian-American Intermarriage

A brief glance at the Census Bureau's latest statistical compilation shows that as of 2000, for every Asian male married to a white female, there are about three Asian females married to white males. This indicates a widening intermarriage gap --- in 1990, the outmarriage ratio between Asian males and females was only 1 to 2.5. In light of this fact, however, it's a bit unusual that the ratio for unmarried couples living together is only 1 to 2.2 --- more balanced not only than present marriages, but the number of marriages from 10 years ago.

If the present number of unmarried couples is any indicator of future marriages, this might mean the marriage ratio will be a bit more balanced by the 2010 census. But don't count on it. The racial ratios of unmarried couples living together is probably a very poor proxy for the racial ratios of boyfriends and girlfriends in general, and racial ratios of boyfriends and girlfriends in general is probably a far better indicator of future marriages. At least looking around me, it's more common for an Asian girl with an Asian boyfriend to move in with him during college, than it is for an Asian girl to move in with her white boyfriend, because there's a lot less peer disapproval of the former situation. (Unlike in marriage, parental disapproval is not a factor here - most of them simply haven't told their parents, so the only people who know about the situation are their friends and acquaintances). So we'd expect the number of unmarried couples living together to include a disproportionate number of Asian-Asian couples.

2003-03-14T06:55:00.000-08:00

Asian-Americans Living With Their Boyfriends/Girlfriends

The Census Bureau released their report on marriage and unmarried partners living together. (Also see data tables). I've tabulated the data for Asian-Americans in a slightly easier-to-read form. Confused? See explanation (bottom of this post). Lots of other people are also the process of analyzing all this data now; I wouldn't be surprised to see a Steve Sailer article soon.

Asian Unmarried Opposite-Sex Partners

Partner's race	Asian Males		Asian Females		Total
Asian (H/NH)	44,681	50%	44,681	50%	89,362	100.0%
Asian (H/NH)	62.8%		43.6%		51.5%
White (NH)	18,930	32.0%	40,285	68.0%	59,215	100.0%
White (NH)	26.6%		39.3%		34.1%
Black (H/NH)	763	13.0%	5,084	87.0%	5,847	100.0%
Black (H/NH)	1.0%		5.0%		3.4%
Amerind (H/NH)	407	43.0%	538	57.0%	945	100.0%
Amerind (H/NH)	0.6%		0.5%		0.5%
Hispanic (W/O/M)	3,910	41.3%	5,546	58.7%	9,456	100.0%
Hispanic (W/O/M)	5.5%		5.4%		5.4%
Other (NH)	78	3.9%	2,561	96.1%	2,639	100.0%
Other (NH)	0.0%		2.5%		1.5%
Mixed (NH)	2,244	37.5%	3,739	62.5%	5,983	100.0%
Mixed (NH)	3.2%		3.7%		3.4%
Total Non-Asian	26,512	31.5%	57,753	68.5%	84,265	100.0%
Total Non-Asian	37.2%		56.4%		48.5%
Total	71,193	41.0%	102,434	59.0%	173,627	100.0%
Total	100.0%		100.0%		100.0%

For those of you who don't like reading tables, here's the overview: for every Asian male living with his girlfriend, there are a little bit more than 1.4 Asian females living with their boyfriends. For every Asian male living with his non-Asian girlfriend, there are nearly 2.2 Asian females living with their non-Asian boyfriends. (And obviously, for every Asian male living with his Asian girlfriend, there are also precisely 1.0 Asian females living with their Asian boyfriends).

I'm intensely curious as to how many of the "Partner of Two or More Races" were hapas; unfortunately this data is not listed. This is another reason why I wasn't as enthusiastic as many other multiracials about being able to check off two or more races on the 2000 census. Previously, I would have just checked off "Asian" and for demographic purposes been lumped in with Asians - biologically only somewhat inaccurate, and culturally pretty accurate. Now for demographic purposes I'm lumped in with "Two or more races." Both culturally and biologically that's far worse than before - if I ever need a bone-marrow transplant, it's really unlikely that it's going to come from a half-white half black person (who compose the majority of that "Two or more races" category), and furthermore, as a Chinese-speaking guy who grew up both in Malaysia and over here, I'm just not that similar even to other hapas, most of whom are English-monolinguals who grew up only over here.

I'll take a look at married couples later and their trends since the last Census later, but I still have one last midterm project to finish up.

How to read this table:
Under each heading "Asian Males" and "Asian Females" there's a raw number and two percentages. The percentage to the right refers to the percentage of all couples of the mix in the given row in which the Asian partner is of the gender in the given column --- these sum to 100% in the rightmost column. In contrast, the percentage below refers to the percentage of all Asians of the given gender, respectively, who are married to a partner of the race indicated in the given row --- these sum to 100% in the bottom row. So for example, in the row "White (H,NH)" in the "Asian Males" column, the entry is "18,294." The "32.4%" on the right indicates that of all Asian-white couples, 32.4% consist of an Asian male with a white female. The "26.6%" below indicates that of all Asian males living with an unmarried partner, 26.6% of them have a white partner.

"Total # of Asians" refers to the total number of Asians in an unmarried partner relationship with a member of the race in the given row.

An H or NH in parentheses after a racial grouping indicates Hispanic or Non-Hispanic, respectively. My category "Hispanic (W/O/M)" indicates persons who indicated themselves to be of "white," "some other race," or "two or more races" as well as of Hispanic origin. This is the best way I can think of to get a category which corresponds to what the average guy on the street is thinking of when he thinks "Hispanic." Recall that 97% of people checking "Some Other Race" on the census were Hispanics, probably most of them mestizos who felt that checking off "White" would be incorrect.

"Other (NH)" is short for "Non-Hispanic Partner of Some Other Race Alone" while "Mixed (NH)" is short for "Non-Hispanic Partner of Two or More Races."

2003-03-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

A Good, Short Definition of Ethnic Group

Steve Sailer, having managed to create a 5-word scalable definition of "race," now takes on "ethnic group:"

Please help me polish my definition of "ethnic group." As you may know, I've spent a lot time trying to come up with the most parsimonious definition of "racial group" possible. By now, I'm down to five words: "a partly inbred extended family." ...

I'd like to come up with a complementary definition for "ethnic group." My first crack at is: "A population sharing traits that are typically passed down through families, but don't necessarily have to be." In other words, traits like language and religion as well as genetic traits. This would seem to match the Census Bureau's usage, when they carefully explain that Hispanics are an ethnic group, but not a racial group.

My first thought was Possibly unrelated individuals united by shared customs and identity. It's only 8 words, a 53% reduction in length, but misses the key points of the limited but real process of assimilation into an ethnic group by genetically unrelated individuals (e.g. the quarter-Irish Mr. Fox can call himself Hispanic with a straight face, though Mr. Fujimori might have more trouble), and indeed the possibility of the creation of new ethnic identities where none existed before (think "Asian Pacific American" uniting Laotians, Bangladeshis, Koreans, and Chamorros) and which have the possibility to blur the racial separateness among the members of the ethnic group (Mexico's "raza cosmica").

Also there's the problem that in many people's minds, any feeling of racial unity has been supplanted by loyalty to the ethnic group, not to mention that they were never really clear on the difference between ethnicity and race in the first place. (New York Times, March 13, 2001, archived by Mr. Kenyada's Neighborhood). Though perhaps a more succinct definition of what "ethnic group" is would alleviate this problem:

At a news conference today, Census Bureau officials were pelted with questions about the value of the category "some other race." The officials acknowledged that 97% of the 15.4 million people who checked the "some other race box" were Hispanics who ignored requests by federal officials to indicate their Hispanic origin in the ethnic category, not racial category.

The key to improving and shortening the definition is to find an everyday small-scale social structure to which the ethnic group is analogous, as the family is analogous to race. The closest one I can think of now is a high school clique, whose members are united, often against other genetically similar individuals and with some genetically dissimilar individuals, by shared modes of speech, styles of dress, and social activities, and whose members often invent alleged commonalities to further distinguish themselves from other groups and bolster their sense of mutually-recognized shared identity. Unfortunately, I can't think of a shorter word for "high school clique."

Okay, time to stop procrastinating and go back to writing my ethnic studies paper. The two weeks of pain are almost over, just this paper and some networking code.

2003-03-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

Quality of Ethnic Studies Professors

As a student paying significant tuition at a private university, I would hope that my professors have a basic grounding in the subject matter they teach. For example, I expect my History of the American Revolution professor to know who Patrick Henry is, and I do not find myself disappointed. I expect my Parallel Algorithms professor to be able to explain with reasonably fluency the parallel implementation of Sollin's algorithm for the minimum spanning tree, and again my expectations are met.

As for the department of Ethnic Studies, which purports to be the study of minorities in the US and their treatment by the white mainstream? Well, I might expect a tenured professor, in response to a question about whether anti-miscegenation statutes forbade relations between "People of Color," to mention Chinese men married to black women in the South as well as Indian men married to Mexican women in California during the early decades of the 1920s, rather than saying she's not sure. Further, I might expect this tenured professor of Ethnic Studies to have some vague inkling, for example, that language in the anti-miscegenation statutes of Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming forbidding intermarriage between "Malays" or "Malayans" and whites was aimed primarily at preventing Filipino men (linguistically and genetically quite related to Malays and Indonesians, hence the old racial terminology "Malayan") from marrying white women, rather than theorizing about Nevadans' worries of utterly non-existent 19th-century immigration from British Malaya to the United States, especially when in preparing us for today's discussion she handed out and directed us to read an article which directly quoted those anti-miscegenation statutes.

Unfortunately, the above expectations were today disappointed in a 15-minute period. What kind of education is it exactly that professors in this field of Ethnic Studies receive, if by the time of their tenure they have not even mastered the outline of this very basic body of material which was contained in a book earlier assigned for this course I am taking?

2003-03-09T23:53:00.000-08:00

Eyes on the Prize

In a time in which actual racially-motivated beatings and moral crises plague our community, it's good to see our intellectual creme de le creme going into high-protest gear over something that really matters: a lawyer who was detained for a few hours after he tried to pay for some purchases with a $100 bill which a convenience store owner believed to be fake. Because he's Asian, and he got arrested, obviously this is a case of racial profiling! He gives a personal account of the events leading up to his arrest at AsianWeek, and then follows with an emotional outburst designed to rouse our anger:

There is not a doubt in my mind that if the officers had come to Walgreens and saw that it was Supervisor Gavin Newsom with the ¡§counterfeit¡¨ bill, they would have treated him quite differently. At the most, they would have reminded him to be more careful next time about what money he uses to pay for his goods. Not in a million years would they have ever considered putting him in handcuffs.

Why was I arrested? I believe it was because I fit their subconscious racial profile of one who would likely be passing around counterfeit money. In the officer¡¦s subconsciously racist mind, Filipinos and other minorities are prone to commit these kinds of crimes, while respectable white officials would never do this.

I seem to recall a story about a boy who cried wolf --- he cried too many times, and in his hour of true distress, became lunch. But this is just an Ice People's hegemonic "morality" tales into which we proud yellow fellows shouldn't read too much, right? We must heroically smash every instance of racial prejudice, and damn those who would label us as moneygrubbing whiners for inflating a mere notaphilic misunderstanding into a full-blown civil rights lawsuit!

2003-03-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

Midterms Week

Sorry for the "light" (read: non) posting --- I'm halfway through midterms. The worst is over, but there's still a number theory exam, a paper for chinese creative writing, some networking code, and my omnipresent graduation project, with a looming April 1st departmental deadline.

2003-03-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

Malaysian University Admissions: Matrikulasi vs STPM

Only weeks after the announcement of a permanent end to admission quotas in higher education, Democratic Action Party Chairman Lim Kit Siang is already making a run at the last vestige of the old racially-discriminatory system: the Malay-only "matriculation centers" and the easier exam which their graduates take to secure seats in universities. Rather than trying to eliminate the schools themselves, he proposes a reform of the examination system. The Star reports:

The Education Ministry has been urged to introduce a special examination for entry into public universities instead of implementing the new cumulative grade point average system for the Sijil Tinggi Persekolahan Malaysia (STPM) examination. DAP national chairman Lim Kit Siang said the move to introduce a new system which would correspond with that of the matriculation system was not a good idea. The idea of matching STPM results with matriculation results would not reflect the students’ academic achievements fairly, he said yesterday.

Nanyang Siang Pau editorialized on this topic recently; I'll translate and comment on their thoughts when I get back from lab.

2003-03-03T15:08:00.000-08:00

Asians, Smoking, and Nicotine-Free Cigarettes

Triad Business Journal reports on the first month in the market of new reduced-nicotine and nicotine-free (but full-carcinogen) cigarettes by the same company which last year released reduced-carcinogen cigarettes and later withdrew them from market due to lackluster sales:

Advertisements colored sky blue introduce Quest, which come in three versions called Quest 1, Quest 2 and Quest 3. No. 1 has 17 percent less nicotine than typical "light cigarettes" and tastes very similar; No. 2 cuts that nicotine content in half and No. 3 is billed as nicotine-free.

Also see this Wired article from last year about the source of the tobacco. Great photo caption:

An Amish farmer takes a cell phone call as transgenic tobacco dries inside his 250-year-old barn in Holland, Pennsylvania.

(From the photo about two-thirds of the way down the page). Basically, Trone (the advertising agency) is trying very hard to market Quest as an analogue to smoking-cessation products such as Nicorettes (even duplicating the three-levels concept) without actually stating that Quest is designed to help smokers quit.

Surveyed smokers often said they didn't want to feel dependent on nicotine, but at the same time they didn't want to give up smoking: They liked the hand-to-mouth, orally fixated process. It was relaxing and something they enjoyed ... To Trone's creative research team, this was the key revelation. They concluded that Quest could be promoted on the basis of its reduced nicotine and at the same time provide a new reason for continuing to smoke. Smokers could still puff away, secure in the knowledge their decision to smoke was a choice.

If I'd had the option at the time I quit smoking, I still probably would have stuck with gum, mainly because I wanted to stop pumping carcinogens into my lungs as fast as possible. Though there's one situation where they obviously would have been useful: at a club, bar, or party. If I already had something in my mouth, friends wouldn't keep coming up and offering me another cigarette.

I predict the existence of this product might actually raise the teenage and college student smoking rate. Quest's product could tap a market that no other tobacco company would dare touch: kids who want to smoke for the image, but are too afraid of the side-effects that could accumulate over a life-time of smoking. All throughout childhood, kids have been the target of anti-smoking campaigns which point out the greatest danger of cigarettes are their addictive character: start now, and you may spend the rest of your life hooked. This kind of campaign will obviously have about zero effect when there's a non-addictive alternative product on the market.

In general, kids, especially suburbanites and university students, don't start smoking in order to take their mind off of the stress in their lives, but rather in order to look cool, especially at parties when they've already been drinking heavily. This will probably prove to be especially problematic among Asian and Asian-American youth, who, for example, have the highest 30-day smoking prevalence (i.e. had smoked one or more cigarettes within the thirty days previous to a survey) of all races in California.

2003-03-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

Driver's Ed

Since this video will probably be accused of extreme insensitivity and political incorrectness, and the creator labelled as a sellout tool of the Evil White Oppressor who doesn't realize the harm she's doing in spreading racialized stereotypes of Asians, I felt morally compelled to post it here. Aktivists: Lighten Up. The rest of us normal Asians find it hilarious, otherwise I wouldn't have found this link forwarded to me by five separate Asian individuals.

2003-03-03T13:49:00.000-08:00

The New, Hip Chinese Drink: Name-Brand Milk

Journalist Chi-Chu Tschang points to an Asian Wall Street Times article about increasing milk consumption in urban China. Unlike in the US, where Angry Azn Aktivists have linked the inclusion of dairy products in the Food Pyramid to a secret Evil Whitey Government campaign to nutritionally oppress People of Color, Chinese people are slowly waking up to the benefits of milk, which they have long blamed for Western body odor, and looking for ways to take advantage of those benefits for themselves:

To lure new customers, companies are hawking everything from peach-mango milk drinks to aloe-flavored yogurt. Beijing Sanyuan Foods Co. sells a "Gold Brand" version of milk that it touts as being produced by special cows whose milk contains a higher fat and protein content than regular milk. At nine yuan ($1.08) for a small carton, it is three times as expensive as regular milk. Nestle markets milk drinks beefed up with calcium or iron, while others offer malted milk aimed at kids. Dairy companies are hiring newspaper boys to drop off milk cartons with the daily paper or postmen to deliver milk with the mail.

However, as among Asian-Americans in the US, there is a significant barrier: high levels of lactose intolerance. Instead of blaming the Western media for deceiving poor innocent Chinese people into thinking they need to drink milk for their health, Chinese dairy companies have come up with an unusual marketing strategy: infect everyone with Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus.

To build up a taste and tolerance for milk, Chinese companies are selling yogurt-based drinks, which some people find easier to digest. One of the most successful campaigns has been waged by former auto repairman-turned-dairy king Miao Changqing ... when he inherited a small dairy plant as part of a land-purchasing deal to expand his auto-repair shop in 1995, he spotted a niche: a dairy-based drink that could complement banquet food. After doing research, his team came up with "Miaoshi," a slightly sweet yogurt drink, with a thicker consistency than milk, packaged in a fancy white-and-green carton.

It wasn't an easy sell. Mr. Miao plied his friends with the beverage when they ate out together and gave away free cartons to diners at local restaurants. Most were incredulous. "What? Drink milk at the dinner table? No way, no way," he recalls them saying. But a few adventurous diners ventured to taste it, and soon Miaoshi took off -- boosted by the company's claims that it helps offset the effects of alcohol. Today, Mr. Miao's Miaoshi Dairy Corp. is among the country's top producers of yogurt drinks, with revenue totaling about 200 million yuan a year. Competitors have piled in with their versions.

Hopefully this will be effective in countering the growing problem of osteoporosis, as well as promoting more growth among the present generation of youth. Also, note that China isn't the only country where manufacturers are trying to turn milk drinking into a hip phenomenon: Dr. Pepper also plans to bring several milk-based drinks to market, and use a weblog to promote them.

2003-03-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

Yao Ming's Translator

Washington Times interviewed Yao Ming's translator Colin Pine. Interestingly enough, he's a US-born white guy (picture --- he's the shorter one in the black shirt), not an immigrant as I was expecting.

The sudden fame is largely the result of some advice he heeded from the brother of one of his Chinese-American college roommates. Unsure of his plans after graduation, Pine asked about going abroad, specifically to Asia. Soon after that conversation, Pine was on a plane to Taiwan, where he spent three years absorbing the culture and language. "I had a lot of Chinese friends in college," Pine said. "The people and culture [in Taiwan] were great. I fell in love with it."

Interesting. Perhaps the Rockets didn't hire an immigrant, or let Yao supply his own (probably Shanghai Sharks and PRC government-approved) translator, because they wanted someone with fluent English who could interact well with the American media. Not to mention:

Since [Pine's hiring], the two have become fast friends. Pine lives with Yao and his parents at their house west of downtown Houston. He eats dinner with them after each home game and whenever the Rockets are not traveling. He teaches Yao about American culture and coaches him in English, which Pine says Yao strives to speak without help.

Didn't realize that Yao's parents had moved to the US. Pine seems to have a sweet deal going for himself --- and I wouldn't be surprised if Yao's fame and popularity rub off on him. He'll have an interesting life and get to meet lots of women. Pine also sounds like he might have been one of the type who would have been accused by Asian-American guys of having an "Asian fetish," especially during university days. ABCs: well, you could have had his job, if you studied Chinese harder.

2003-03-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

School Integration in Malaysia: Twinning

Finally, a small, workable suggestion on promoting better relations among youth of different races. The Star reports:

Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has called on schools with a predominant racial group of students to embark on "twinning programmes" with schools which have as its student majority a different racial group.

Citing this as one way to build better racial relations between students, the Deputy Prime Minister said such a linkage could be in the form of sporting and camping activities, especially during the long school holidays.

“We can bring together 20 Malay, 20 Chinese and 20 Indian students from different schools and then split them up so that each team will have all the races fighting for the victory of their team,'' he said yesterday at a hotel near here during his keynote address at a public forum on 'Vision 2020 Revisited: Continuing with the Next Lap'.

Sounds like an effective and low-cost first step.

2003-03-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Unique Visitors

Well, the statistics are in, and for the first time in this weblog's on-and-off 8-month history (about 4 months on and 4 months off), we've surpassed both 1100 unique visitors in a single month and 500 unique visitors in a single week. Furthermore, this appears to be only 25% due to blatant attempts to get bigger fish to link to me, or the fact that a single post I wrote seven months ago has propelled me to #3 on Yahoo for "Malay sex massage." Thank you all.

2003-03-01T23:32:00.000-08:00

Asian College Students Arguing for Affirmative Action Reform

I was thinking of calling this one "Asian Americans Argue Against Affirmative Action" but I thought the alliteration was a bit over the top. Anyway, Samuel Kang and David Yau of Stanford University write an opinion piece on affirmative action in the Stanford Daily. Though I agree with many of the points made in the article, it represents one of the more blatant expressions of racial self-interest I've seen lately in a college newspaper: taking away spots from white guys (though apparently not white women) is fine and dandy, but don't mess with Asians.

In our nation's history, blacks, Native Americans and women have suffered particularly extreme cases of oppression ... However, the group that should be held accountable for undoing this legacy is the group that was historically responsible for, and also most benefited by, that oppression. Thus if a university decides preferentially to accept applicants of the above-mentioned groups, then the only people who should have to forfeit admissions spots are white males ... [currently, however] affirmative action at many colleges hurts Asian-American applicants even though they played no role in oppressing the aforementioned groups.

Well, it's something short of a clarion call for justice and equality among the American people, but it's good to see Asian-Americans speaking out against affirmative action anyway.

Finally, aside from issues of social equity, many people justify race considerations as a means of increasing campus diversity. While this reasoning may sound nice, it rests on a flawed assumption. Being in a place of higher learning, we want a diversity of ideas rather than of physical appearances. Most students would probably agree that while race is a decent indicator of physical appearance, it is at best a very loose indicator of a person's ideas. Why, then, do proponents insist that a racially diverse university is an intellectually diverse community?

Suppose a university¡¦s motive is to diversify the ideas of the student body through varied cultural backgrounds. Then the application process should directly assess an applicant's relationship with his or her culture through essays or surveys. Otherwise, admissions personnel are effectively assuming that students of one ethnicity will have a cultural background different from students of other ethnicities. Are we to believe that third- or fourth-generation immigrant children who have lived in the United States since birth, and who have almost no connection to their cultural heritage, somehow add diversity to a school just because they are of a certain race?

I personally agree quite strongly with Steve Sailer when he argued that colleges really concerned with preparing their students for an outside world in which cross-cultural interaction skills are at a premium should simply admit more international students; admitting assimilated minority kids who have basically the same life experience and cultural referents as any other kid from their high school and neighborhood doesn't provide much benefit to the rest of the student body to offset the cost of their having to deal with less-qualified classmates. Ironically, since most colleges tend to admit international applicants at a lower rate than domestic applicants, the international applicants who actually get in are on the whole harder-working and better-prepared than the average domestic applicant, which from the average students' point of view has managed to promote the misconception that pretty much everyone in the rest of the world is smarter than us lazy Americans. (I wonder if this isn't a contributing factor to anti-American attitudes among college students.)

On the other hand, however, I'm living, breathing proof that having more international students around may reverse the cultural assimilation and social integration of minority ethnic-group students. Although, if it leads them to adopt a less confrontational attitude towards the mainstream, it could be worth it.

2003-03-01T23:25:00.000-08:00

Asian-Americans and Military Service

New California Media reports briefly on Asian-Americans in the US military. I'll quote the entire excerpt, because it's short:

Koreans Outnumber Other Asians in U.S. Military Service

Koreans lead other Asian Americans in the U.S. armed forces, according to numbers released by the Pentagon in the Korea Times.

As of last October, Asian American service men and women -- active and reserve -- numbered 16,740. Koreans made up more than one third of this number, with 6,367 serving in the army, the Pentagon statistics showed. Koreans were followed by Japanese Americans with 3,794, Chinese (3,616), and Vietnamese (2,963).

That is to say, on a per-capita basis, Koreans are 1.24 times as likely as Japanese (who are 74% as numerous in the general population), 2.24 times as likely as Vietnamese (who are equally numerous), and 3.25 times as likely as Chinese (who are 2.15 times as numerous) to volunteer for US military service. Those statistics consider the population counts only for those who marked a single ethnicity on the census; if mixed-race individuals are included, only the ratio between Koreans and Japanese shows any significant change; Koreans are 1.66 times as likely as people claiming any Japanese ethnicity to enter military service. It's unclear whether the Pentagon statistics included individuals of mixed race in their counts of Asian-Americans.

The most obvious fact influencing this disparity is that Korea is the only Asian country mentioned with mandatory military service. Immigrants to America from Korea have thus grown up with the expectation that they'd have to go into the military at some point in their lives anyway, so they're more open to the idea of joining up even when they come to the States. They may have also passed this attitude on to their children; it's also unclear how many of the Koreans in the US military are immigrants and how many are US-born.

Compared with other Asians, Koreans have more readily accepted military service as a way of settling their immigrant lives, said Sgt. Kenny Ahn, a Korean-American official at the Hollywood U.S. Army Recruit Station, which covers Los Angeles Koreatown.

"Young immigrants easily accept the idea that Army service is the best opportunity to learn English, get free college education and enjoy overseas life experience," said Ahn, who reported he recruited more than 40 Koreans for active duty during his two-year assignment at the station. Ahn, 31, described himself as a typical example. He joined the army 10 years ago, went to college in Texas and served in Hawaii before being transferred to his present duty.

See also this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article from a few weeks ago about immigrants in the Marines (link courtesy of Chuck Simmins). In general, as Israel has already found, the military can act as a powerful engine for the integration of immigrants, giving them the opportunity to improve their command of English and to gain the social skills necessary for interacting with mainstream Americans. Hopefully the modern craze for multilingualism in government won't extend to this institution.

2003-02-27T23:32:00.000-08:00

Yellow/Brown Conflict and Self-Segregation

Thanks to YW for the link. Daily Princetonian reports:

An organizer of the search engine gank.princeton.edu --- which operates off of the University network --- posted a message Tuesday drawing attention to possible self-segregation among Asian students and questioning the University's diversification efforts. The message included the last names of 21 Asian students from the Spelman room draw list and three rhetorical questions which offended many: "aZn self-segregation? Spelman internment camp? Why do we bother with diversity?"

Many of the individual words in those questions were linked to other articles expanding on diversity and segregation issues. Niraj Bhatt '03, the site's operator and a Butler College Minority Affairs Adviser, would not comment specifically on the message but said he is now working to organize a debate about self-segregation through Whig-Clio. Yesterday, Bhatt posted an apology in place of the list of names.

The Daily Princetonian also published a follow-up article as well as an opinion piece on this topic. gank.princeton.edu appears to be either offline, or merely inaccessible to off-campus users, though I'm a bit curious as to why I can't even find anyone who links to it.

Interestingly enough, we can see that the poster of the message in question was not white, but South Asian. Not just any kind of South Asian either, but apparently an engineering major, who, if he continues in his present career path, will find himself working with many East Asians in the future. Anyway, to those who think that East and South Asians naturally share any community of interests besides having been lumped together in the federal census, we yellow fellows aren't usually referring to our brown brothers when we say "we Asians," and most of the people I know would classify a Bangladeshi guy dating a Korean girl as an interracial relationship (and some of them would describe it in just as vulgar terms as they would a white male-Asian female relationship).

As the token Chinese guy in an apartment of Indians (and a Tibetan who grew up in India and speaks Hindi), I've noticed that South Asians tend to more segregated in the realm of dating and relationships, but less segregated in their daily social life (e.g. white people actually come eat lunch with us and show up to parties at our place). It seems to lead to a reduced level of racial tension with whites, at least judging from my surface impressions. On the whole, South Asians seem better integrated than East Asians.

In any case, I've said it in the past, and (with modifications reflecting the fact that my view has changed somewhat since I started writing this blog) I'll say it again: social integration and cultural assimilation are only vaguely related, especially among American-born Asians. Don't mistake a large proportion of professionals, strong family values, high educational achievement, or even a complete loss of original ancestral culture and language, for the kind of personal assimilation into the mainstream which European immigrants underwent last century. The "model minority" myth, which blamed black failure on lack of assimilation to white values and presumed Asian success came from assimilation to those same white values rather than genes, culture, or plain old parental pressure arising from vestiges of the old culture or a response to past discrimination, completely blindsided mainstream commentators - they never saw Asian-American segregation coming when they started praising the community in the 60s and 70s for impressive work ethic and university advancement rates.

Young Asian-Americans, especially males, are adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture towards the mainstream, and seeking to segregate themselves from it --- with Americanization serving to increase rather than mitigate that antagonism (FOBs also tend to segregate themselves from the mainstream, but 1.5 generation kids don't, at least to the same extent as either the American-born or the later immigrants). Notice that all of the affected individuals interviewed in connection with the article were Chinese-American males (though this article, just posted, interviewed a Korean or Korean-American female also affected). I'm willing to speculate that the full list of 21 names included far more males than females --- anyone have more information?

One last piece of advice: Google sees all. It gets harder and harder to retract your statements these days.

Update: More on the idea that South Asians are simultaneously more socially integrated and less culturally assimilated with Americans than East Asians. First, this student Niraj Bhatt who made the comments complaining about is himself a minority affairs advisor and a member of the Hindu Student Council at his university, has been featured on rediff.com's news section, and had some harsh words about Christian missionary activity in Asia and blasted his university for providing funds to a student group travelling to India to perform charitable work with a Roman Catholic organization. Yet even this guy finds the extent of East Asian-American cliquishness on campus disturbing. (Yes, it may seem like I'm stalking this guy. As I said, Google sees all. You can find out a lot about a person, especially a student --- a few quotes in the school newspaper, membership in student organizations, field of study, etc. Actually, it kinda scares me - what have my internet stalkers, presuming I have any, been able to find out about me?)

Also, Razib reminds me duende (also over at GNXP) pointed to this WaPo article about arranged marriages among US-born Indians. Apparently there's enough of them doing it that specifying in one's personal ad that one is ISO a US-born Indian actually produces responses from other interested families. Unusual contrast to E. Asian Americans, who have almost entirely adopted the American attitude towards dating, but remain within the ethnic group --- we often hear of an all-Asian group of guys getting together and complaining about their dating prospects to each other, but they wouldn't really consider white girls, only Asians, and never in even the most desperate of circumstances would they imagine asking their parents for help.

2003-02-27T23:28:00.000-08:00

Asian Students React Favorably to Affirmative Action Bake Sale

Or, at least that's what it looks like to me:

University of California students, from left, Lee Kwon, Tammy Chang and Judy Li react while reading a bake sale sign that includes prices based on the ethnicity of the buyer, on the university's campus in Berkeley, Calif., Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003. Conservative students at the University of California cooked up an unusual protest Wednesday, holding an 'affirmative action bake sale' --- treats priced according to the buyer's ethnicity, gender and social status. The student protestors were attempting to illustrate the unfairness they see in affirmative action policy. (AP Photo/ Marcio Jose Sanchez)

From Yahoo! News. Thanks to YW for the link.

2003-02-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

Links, Archives, and Other Details

After all these months of assiduous blogging on issues of immigrant integration and interracial interaction throughout the world, I'm seeing my efforts and first-hand knowledge of the subject matter paying off --- my previous all-time most-accessed post, concerning Asian massage parlors in Tennesee, has now been surpassed by my biting commentary on computerized toothbrushes. Thanks to Gizmodo for all the publicity.

In addition, I'd like to take the time to introduce you to some recently added links: Chi-Chu Tschang, a journalist in Beijing, and Simone Koo, a fellow undergraduate blogger and neural networks researcher. Also, does anyone know what happened to Suara Anum? I seem to be the last one to learn of their sudden demise or vacation, and I miss them, even though their presence served as a constant reminder that my reading skills in Bahasa Melayu mysteriously absconded during the decade in which I neglected them.

Finally, I've fixed the problem with the archives, so the menu of past posts sorted either by topic or by date now once again reflect all material posted up until now. Furthermore, a few highlighted posts from the past can be found linked to in the sidebar, at right.

2003-02-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

Irrelevent Addendum to Previous Post

A language question. From the article mentioned in the post below:

Japan's written language includes traditional Chinese characters. The Japanese word for bankruptcy spells out "born again" in Chinese.

As far as I've seen, Japanese usually uses the word hasan to refer to bankruptcy, written in the same way as Chinese po chan - though san could refer to birth, I'm not quite sure where the writer is getting the "again" part from, since ha just means broken. Maybe he's referring to shindai kagiri, or another term I just don't know about?

Or maybe the author just made this part up. It's a nice myth. I wouldn't be surprised if it became an incredibly wide-spread piece of trivia and even began to appear on inspirational posters, only to be fruitlessly debunked by snopes.com. I bet Professor Miyake would know, though I'm not sure if he reads this page. If this is for real, I could probably find mention of it in Mr. Mo's book Japanese (Words) Which Seem Strange to Chinese People.

2003-02-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

Chinese-Japanese and Chinese FDI in Japan

Sorry for the meta-blogging as of late ... my senior project continues to take up much of my time, and friends visiting from Japan took up the rest. About two weeks ago, I read a Washington Times article about the increasing number of Chinese companies who are swooping into the depressed Japanese market to acquire assets and advanced technology at bargain-basement prices in order to further their own ambitions of breaking into high-end markets, archived here:

Yasutaka Kojima, president of the Akiyama Machinery Manufacturing Corp., a fallen champion in once-mighty Japan, began negotiations to hand over his business to a state-owned company from the People's Republic of China. He would seek salvation -- cash, and expertise in the art of capitalism -- from Shanghai Electric Co., a conglomerate still controlled by the Communist government ... In the past two years, at least seven Chinese companies have purchased majority stakes in such diverse Japanese ventures as metal processing and textile operations, according to Recof Corp., a leading Japanese mergers-and-acquisitions research firm

Managers from the officially Communist country have been finding they could teach Japan a few things about the art of commercial management and negotiation. However, their methods are likely to result in a great deal of temporary dislocation of workers, and the precise kind of "creative destruction" which the Japanese government has been unwilling to permit.

"China is more capitalist than Japan in terms of labor issues," said Akira Kan, president of the home-appliance division of the Japanese giant Sanyo Electric Co., which sold its microwave-oven division to Guangdong Midea Holding Co. in October 2001.

It seems likely to me that Mr. Kan is actually of Chinese descent - judging from his Japanese given name, probably second or third generation. He seems to have done quite well for himself in Japanese society, as have other later 2nd generation Chinese and even immigrants such as Mo Bangfu, author of The New Overseas Chinese and many other books on modern Sino-Japanese cultural relations, who immigrated to Japan in 1985 for further studies.

So far, Chinese immigrants, unlike their Korean counterparts, have been well-received. What happens, however, when Chinese companies are swooping in to buy up assets in a depressed economy at the same time as Chinese laborers, many illegal, are flowing into the country? They're causing tension not just because of Japan's infamous ethnocentrism and bias against foreigners, but also because of their own criminal behavior. Even students have been implicated in heinous crimes.[1].

Though seven companies may seem like too small number to have any significant effect on the attitude of the man on the street, recall that Detroit autoworkers murdered a man they believed to be Japanese while pundits wrote books declaring the unassailable superiority of the Japanese business model, in an era during which Japanese FDI in America and Japanese manufactured imports, despite their high profile, were dwarfed by European investment. And there is no shortage of negative media attention for Chinese in Japan.[2]

Right now, Chinese in Japan don't seem to be subject to the same kind of social discrimination as zainichi Koreans --- for example, many Chinese-Japanese retain and publically use Chinese surnames, unlike Korean-Japanese, virtually all of whom use a Japanese pass-name. However, they're likely to be a more unified community - there's no parallel among modern Chinese immigrants to the North-South divisions and hardline Communist affiliations among the Korean community in the post-war era. Furthermore, for the moment, they're poor, and not likely to try to create their own school system (especially given their lack of ideological or religious, rather than merely cultural, motivation to do so) preferring instead to send their children to Japanese public schools, where, as numbers of Chinese increase, incidents of bullying may as well.

Finally, even among the youngest generation of Chinese who have been watching Japanese television shows and listening to Japanese pop stars all their lives, there remains an extreme resentment towards Japan as a whole for the atrocities of WWII, which has absolutely no parallel among Chinese immigrants anywhere else.[3] Such an attitude will likely be passed on by adult immigrants to their children any time they have to explain the reasons behind some incident of discrimination to them.[4] So on the whole, it's likely that the children of these immigrants will grow up with a strong sense of identity as Chinese due to the numbers of their own community and discrimination they face from the mainstream, but at the same time, on a cultural and linguistic level, mostly assimilated to Japanese society and taking influence from no other popular culture besides that of Japan, and having no other culture to fall back on for acceptance or support if they find themselves rejected by Japanese people for whatever reason. Sound like any other overseas Chinese community you know?

Minority resentment against the mainstream leading the minority to adopt a confrontational stance, a large second-generation population insistent on reforming Japanese society to accept them because they have nowhere else to go, and an increasingly unemployed Japanese population watching foreigners buying up Japanese assets and transferring manufacturing to China, doesn't sound like such a favorable combination to me for Chinese people in Japan.[5]

[1] This is something of an embarassment, considering that the popular image among Chinese of our own immigrants to Japan, to the extent that it exists at all, is not really that of the laborer off to strike it rich and give his kids a good life, like the image of immigrants to the West, but remains that of the young scholar nobly pursuing learning and coming back to help the nation, because of Lu Xun, Sun Yat-sen, and Lee Teng-hui, to name a few of the more famous ones.

[2] Granted, some of this attention may be overexaggerated. Ryogo Mabuchi of Nara University has statistically demonstrated the bias of Japanese newspapers against foreigners, by comparing the crime rates for Japanese and foreigners to their appearance in 2,579 articles about crime in the Asahi Shinbun for six months of 1998, and found that the arrest of aa foreigner was almost five times as likely to be mentioned in print as the arrest of a Japanese.

[3] It's difficult to get Chinese people to say they actually "hate" America or Britain, as opposed to simply hating some particular Western government policy or military action, but now I've had three graduates of top universities in China confide to me that they hate Japanese people, upon finding out that I have studied Japanese.

[4] Despite the famed Japanese politeness, incidents of everyday discrimination are hardly absent - Mo Bangfu, in an interview with a mainland magazine, cited an incident in the 1980s which he was thrown out of a shop and told to go back to China for complaining about the condition of an item he had just purchased.

[5] Worse yet, the mainland Chinese government might decide to involve itself in the matter, turning a domestic problem into an international diplomatic crisis, as Gordon Chang (author of The Coming Collapse of China), who penned this pro-illegal-immigrant article supporting the legalization of the estimated 100,000 illegal Chinese laborers in Japan, suggests.

2003-02-26T16:04:00.000-08:00

Japan: Technology and Society

Despited a rather lower adoption rate of computers for business purposes (for example, customers at Japan Railways' ticket offices still have to look up prices in a hundreds-of-pages-long book or ask the clerks to do it for them), Japan has long been famous for creative applications of technology in the sphere of everyday life. Here's one more, for which I can see absolutely no possible present use. (Link in Japanese, but click it if you want photos). English translation mine:

Novel and Strange USB-Connective Product On Sale
This Time It's an Electric Toothbrush

Another novel and different kind of USB device has entered the market. This time, it's nothing other than an electric toothbrush which connects to a PC's USB port. It is being offered for sale at ComSatellite's #3 shop at the price of 1280 yen [about US$10.50] (for details see New Product Find of the Week [translated below].) However, they've only stocked one for now.

That is, because this product was created from an presently-marketed AAA-battery electric toothbrush (on sale for 480 yen [about US$4.00]) according to ComSatellite's own USB specification [???], this time is only a "test sale," as it were. If it receives good reviews, the manufacturer plans to increase production. The battery terminal inside the toothbrush is connected directly to a USB cable, and so the toothbrush can't be used with batteries.

Also, the product comes with a two week original warranty from the shop. Rest assured you'll probably soon be able to purchase an updated version.

Because there's only one in stock, it will be difficult to obtain, but collectors of strange USB devices are going to be waiting for the company to increase production.

New Product Find of the Week

An electric toothbrush which operates on USB power. There are all different kind of USB-powered products being sold, but this is the first toothbrush. A normal, reasonable priced electric toothbrush created at ComSatellite's #3 shop, it's sold with their special warranty (2 weeks). They say it is "convenient for things like cleaning PC parts."

The original electric toothbrush (480 yen) was powered by 2 AAA batteries, but because this toothbrush was created specifically for use with a USB port, it doesn't accept batteries.

As of the present (22nd February, Saturday) it's sold out, but is expected to be restocked on or after the 24th (Monday).

Talk about taking the human-computer interface to a ... well ... different level. Despite the statement of the manufacturer about its uses for cleaning PCs, they're still advertising it as a "toothbrush" rather than a general electrically-powered cleaning device. For now, it only uses the USB port to draw power, but if people get used to the idea of turning on the computer to brush their teeth, or bringing their laptop to the bathroom, with computer-guided brushing and inspection Japan's national dental hygiene could be greatly improved.

2003-02-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

Incomprehensible searches of the week

Can tell me about test IQ thought a Japan? If not, maybe you're interested in buying elderly Asian Americans?

2003-02-24T18:47:00.000-08:00

More metablogging

MSNBC reports on a potential aids vaccine which, despite appearing no more effective than a placebo on average, had some efficacy in protecting blacks and Asians, but not whites nor Hispanics:

An experimental AIDS vaccine does not appear to protect most whites and Hispanics from the disease but may show promise in protecting blacks and Asians, said VaxGen Inc., the company that makes the vaccine. NBC¡¦s Robert Bazell cautioned that the results showing possible protection among some racial groups were highly inconclusive and represented ¡§a very small part of a study that was essentially negative.¡¨ ... The expected infection rate for the 314 black volunteers who received the vaccine was reduced by 78 percent ¡X a result the researchers said was unexpected. The rate was reduced by 67 percent for all non-white volunteers other than Hispanics.

Update: bloggers with rather more experience than I in discussing matters of human biodiversity have picked this one up.

2003-02-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

More Chinese Crime in Japan

[Update 2003 Oct 13: Looking for news about the Fukuoka City teacher accused of abusing his mixed-race student? See my post on this topic, or go to the main page]

Breaking news from four hours ago courtesy of Yahoo! Japan, my partial translation below.

Chinese-Japanese Theft Ring Exposed - 38 Arrested, 390 Million Yen (US$3.3 Million) in Damages

In relation to the widening theft and fraud case of a group of Chinese and Japanese who broke into offices by using special tools to enter through loading areas and then withdrew money on stolen bank passbooks, police from the police headquarters of Fukuoka, Daibu, and Kumamoto prefectures on Feb 19th arrested 38 Chinese suspected of theft. In 11 prefectures including Fukuoka, Daibu, and Kumamoto, among the damages in some 222 cases (totalling 390,000,000 Yen), police report that they have selected for use as evidence 77 cases (estimated at 160,000,00 Yen or US$1.3 million) and have finished their investigation.

Thirty-eight Chinese people, huh? That's quite a few. I guess some of them got worried about giving Chinese people a bad name, since between the first paragraph and the second, eighteen of them apparently decided to naturalize as Japanese and change their names, and the nineteenth switched his allegiance to the Republic of Korea:

Arrested were 19 Chinese people including the leader Mr. Jiang Xuanzhong (40), an unemployed resident of Ijiri in the southern district of Fukuoka City, Mr. He Jianliang (39), unemployed and residence unknown, 18 Japanese people including Mr. Tanaka Naotoshi (54), a heavy machine operator from Minoshima in the Hakata district of Fukuoka City, and one South Korean.

Pretty neat trick, huh? To the Japanese press: come on guys, there's already enough real Chinese criminals in Japan for us Chinese people to be ashamed of without your inventing nineteen more.

2003-02-18T14:47:00.000-08:00

Dr. M's Life Story

Just wanted to point everyone to an interesting special from the Straits Times (Singapore) about the life and times of Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia. (i.e. I'm getting lazy and using meta-blogging with little commentary to provide a continuing stream of content). Among the other facts it pointed out of which I wasn't really aware:

He was born on Dec 20, 1925, in Alor Star, Kedah, to an Indian school teacher father and a Malay mother.

Didn't realize he was mixed race. Furthermore, there's no mention of the Chinese roommate from his college days he often brings up when discussing the deterioration of race relations in Malaysia and cliquishness on college campuses:

One of seven Malays in a cohort of 70 medical students, he hung out with a clique of Malay students and was elected president of the Muslim Society on campus.

Finally, the author discusses at length Dr. M's views on human nature and race relations:

Dr. Mahathir's deep impressions about Singapore had their definitive freeze-frame in the moment he was left standing outside his friend's servant's quarters some 50 years ago. Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote about the incident, which was related to him by Dr Mahathir, in his memoirs, From Third World To First. 'Mahathir was candid about his deep anti-Singapore feelings... It was an insult he did not forget. Singapore Chinese, he said, look down upon the Malays,' he wrote ...

'At another level, he encountered the Chinese in Social Darwinist imagery - a race endowed with superior genes and traits which he admired but also a horde of predatory immigrants whom he resented,' Prof Khoo said.

You can compare and contrast that with this (somewhat critical) discussion of Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew's own Social Darwinist views. (Thanks to Razib of Gene Expression for the link)

2003-02-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

Chinese Exchange Student Arrested for Kyoto Crime Spree

Japan Times reports:

Arrested was 22-year-old exchange student Zhang An, who has reportedly admitted to the allegations. Investigators said Zhang broke into a house in Kyoto's Fushimi-ku at about 1:40 a.m. on Jan. 15 and stabbed 59-year-old Ikuko Kato in the head and stomach, killing her. He then stole about 11,000 yen, police said. Zhang was arrested over a separate break-in on a road in Muko, Kyoto Prefecture, on Feb. 16 after a resident alerted police, saying they had seen a robber.

It's really shameful. Japanese people attribute the recent increases in urban crime to Chinese illegals. Even my best friends in Japan have told me to my face that Chinese are inherently criminal. Now they have one more reason to believe it.

2003-02-18T00:13:00.000-08:00

School Integration in Malaysia

Is it just me, or does this editorial from the New Straits Times, reprinted by Straits Times (Singapore) look like someone from some committee in the Ministry of Education using his media connections to float a test balloon? Anyway, the article points out the reason for the increasing Malay enrollment in private religious institutions:

Thus, the challenge for the committee is to formulate a system that not only liberates the school culture from the conservative Malay-Muslim ethos, which suffocates it and turns off non-Muslims, but also to find an alternative model of Islamic education that would satisfy Malays.

So the committee realize that the curriculum is a complete turn-off for Malays, and is causing them to turn to privately-funded schools which as a matter of necessity get their funding from rather more radical sources than the government, but never consider the fact that the curriculum is just as big an irritant to non-Malays. As a result, they presume that integrating Indians and Chinese into the national school system is as easy as providing mother-tongue education:

To appeal to non-Muslims, the committee will have to consider introducing Mandarin and Tamil in national schools because these are important markers of identity to the respective communities.

Unfortunately, the fact that only 2% of all Chinese pupils and 4% of Indian pupils are enrolled in the national-type schools shows dissatisfaction not just with the language there with the educational standards and curriculum content there (for example, the oft-ridiculed "moral education" classes). After all, even our own fearless MCA leaders have often seen fit to send their children to international schools teaching in English or to boarding schools overseas, in order to provide them with a better education, though often at the expense of their Chinese-language abilities. I guess people just don't trust the government to be able to provide a quality education, in any language (even English). Imagine that. As this recent MalaysiaKini article points out:

The national school system leaves much to be desired, and critics have been pointing this out for years - disparity in quality and facilities between rural and urban schools, very large class size, low morale among teachers such as to leave a largely female workforce, etc.

Anyway, note to the government: weren't you talking about vision schools a few months ago? Why not take small steps which don't require much funding before proposing huge and hugely redundant investments in curriculum development and teacher training for mother tongue education?

2003-02-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

The Resurrected Immortal

Professor of Linguistics Marc Miyake is back after a brief hiatus with a wealth of new content, including a pointer to news about a recent UCLA Affirmative Action Bake Sale:

The sale, held on Bruin Walk on Feb. 3, offered cookies at different prices depending on the customer's race and gender. Black, Latina and American Indian females were charged 25 cents for cookies that cost males of minority descent 50 cents. White females were charged $1, and white males and all Asian Americans were charged $2. Students selling the cookies were assigned name tags portraying them as "Uncle Tom," "The White Oppressor" and "Self-Hating Hispanic Race Traitor." ... [president of the Bruin Republicans Andrew] Jones said many people would look at a black or Latino student taking part in a Bruin Republicans anti-affirmative action sale and either think to themselves or say out loud that the student is a traitor to his race.

It's not only blacks and Latinos who fall victim to this kind of racism from other members of their own race, but East Asians as well. As a guy of indeterminate ethnic appearance who can be mistaken for white, I'm intimately familiar with this phenomenon. Asian-American Aktivists have often dismissed my viewpoints by saying I can't possibly comprehend what it "really means to be Asian in America" because I've never experienced discrimination from white people based on my appearance (which, incidentally, I have --- I just don't take the fact that a white guy in line behind me at a bus station yells "Hey hurry up ching-chong" when I'm talking on a public phone in Cantonese to mean that all Evil Whiteys are out to get me), and hence, my viewpoints are moot.

As a result, I'm taking the cowardly route of keeping my mouth shut in Ethnic Studies class so I can get out intact and get back to the lab to finish my senior project, instead of getting in lots of arguments in a class I'm only taking because it's the only one classified as a "writing course" which still had available spots. The level of dishonesty in the class is staggering. Two weeks ago we did a unit on race relations in Malaysia which made no mention of 5-13 (the May 1969 post-election riots in which hundreds of Chinese were killed), tried to trace all racial tensions in Malaysia back to the British, and asserted that NEP/NDP affirmative action was in fact the panacea for poor relations despite the fact that Tunku Abdul Rahman had already implemented such policies prior to 5-13).

2003-02-13T11:55:00.000-08:00

Imagine That ...

Though I'm not normally one to highly recommend Andrew's website, someone has started a thread on Asperger's syndrome and Asians. I'm especially amused by the two posters who make comments to the effect of "Yeah I just read a webpage about it and can now authoritatively state that despite it possibly arises due to genetic causes, it has nothing to do with race."

2003-02-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

Attacks on Korean Ethnic-School Students in Japan

Japan Times reports that female students dressed in the uniform of Korean ethnic schools managed by Soren (the formerly Pyongyang-affiliated Korean Residents' Association of Japan) have been attacked while onboard trains. (This mirrors a scene in the movie version of Kazuki Kaneshiro's award-winning 2001 novel Go, in which a group of Japanese guys tries to pick up on a girl in a subway station dressed in hanbok, and threaten her with a knife).

Although the school instructs them not to wear chogori for safety, the children think this is unreasonable," said a 53-year-old woman whose daughter is a second-year student at the high school.

In spite of the danger and the legal and informal discrimination they face from society, Korean-Japanese schoolchildren continue to show an admirable pride in their ethnic heritage. However, ethnic pride may need a better outlet when it expresses itself in the form of solidarity aligned behind leaders who refuse to accept any part of the responsibility for conflict between their own community and the mainstream:

"Biased media reports that fuel anti-North Korean feelings are part of the reason" behind the abuse, Gu [Dae Sok, principal of the Tokyo Korean Junior and Senior High Schools] said.

Anti-North Korean feelings were hardly "fueled" by biased media reports. I think test missile firings and kidnappings might have had something to do with it. And as far as I can find, Soren hasn't issued any statement condemning the North Korean leadership for its actions. They only recently stopped hanging portraits of Kim Il Sung in the classrooms.

2003-02-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

Affirmative Action Detrimental to Asian-Americans - Statistics

A common argument among Asian supporters of AA is that university admissions committees seek to admit as many white people as possible, and that only the strong hand of the Federal Government holds them back. Eliminating AA and admitting students based on merit is thus seen as a ploy to increase the proportion of whites at everyone else's expense. However, an New York Times article provides clear evidence of what happens when race is dropped from consideration in admissions policies, even in place of a "Ten-Percent Plan":

After a federal court in 1996 barred the University of Texas from practicing affirmative action, the state began offering admission to all high school students ranked in the top 10 percent of their classes ... the main beneficiaries were Asian-Americans. The percentage of freshmen entering the Austin campus who were Asian-American rose to 18 percent last fall, compared with 14 percent in the fall of 1995 ... As the admission rate of Asian students rose, to 71 percent from 68 percent over that period, the admission rate of whites fell, by one percentage point to 66 percent. So did that of blacks, to 43 percent from 59 percent.

In California, where Asians make up 11 percent of the general population, the gains were also striking after the state ended traditional affirmative action in the late 1990's and adopted a system similar to that of Texas. At Berkeley, the percentage of the freshman class that was Asian-American rose 6 percentage points, to 45 percent, in 2001. Over the same period, the percentage of the class that was black fell by three percentage points, to 4 percent; the percentage that was white dropped by one percentage point, to 29 percent; and the percentage that was Hispanic fell by six percentage points, to 11 percent.

Asian-Americans benefit under race-neutral admissions plans, even under "Ten Percent" plans which work directly against the cultural tendency to sacrifice everything to get your child into as good an elementary school, middle school, and high school as possible.

2003-02-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

Media Stereotypes of Asians

Those evil Ice People are at it again, using movies to spread racialized stereotypes of Japanese exchange students as sex maniacs ready to fall into the arms of any local student. Asian-American brothers unite to fight against the exotification and commodification of our women!

Meanwhile, [an area] college student is having a language exchange with a Japanese girl, Ameko, who has just retired from being a geisha. Unsurprisingly, intimacy leads to romance. Ameko tells the college student of a quaint Kyoto custom -- when a boy wants to show his love for a girl, he asks her to share a raincoat with him.

Oh sorry, must have got caught up in all my anger at Hollywood, because there's one detail I forgot to tell you: this quote comes from a Taipei Times article about a new Taiwanese movie "Love at 7-11" from director Teng Yung-Hsing.

2003-02-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Japanese Language Study Growing in Popularity in India

Glad to see my brown brothers are also entering into the study of this fascinating language, though I have to admit I'm surprised to see any growth at all. Japan's immigration policies are far more strict than those of the US, and with the cost of living so high it's not a popular destination for students from poor countries seeking inexpensive technical training, especially as the Japanese government has begun to cut budgets for scholarships to foreign students from Asian countries. Furthermore, as far as I understand it most Japanese companies who are doing any outsourcing at all prefer China. Thanks to SWK of yellowworld.org for the link. Asia Times reports:

"We have classes to prepare our students for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test conducted by the Japan Foundation, which is part of the Ministry of Education of the government of Japan. This is the benchmark for Japanese language qualification worldwide. As the only recognized center for the test in south India, we had around 1,500 students taking the test last year," says P T Kannan, director, language teaching, at ABK-AOTS Dosokai.

There are an estimated 12 language institutions in South India of various levels, providing teaching and translation services that generate approximately Rs 1 million (US$21,000) a year. Japanese language courses cost in the range of $80, which is a not inconsiderable sum in India.

In addition, 2001 marked the first sitting of the JLPT in Bangladesh, which attracted 60 students, though none attempted the Level (I) examination which foreigners planning to work in Japan often taken, and only four attempted the Level (II) examination required for entrance into Japanese universities. (The levels are numbered in reverse order of difficulty; (I) indicates near-fluency while (IV) is aimed at students who have completed a 150-contact-hour course, usually through a yearlong introductory course at university).

However, unlike in China where two-thirds of students took either Level (I) or (II), obviously indicating a professional purpose, even in India with the largest number of examinees, the vast majority (four-fifths) in India attempted the easier levels, which probably aren't very useful as job-seeking qualifications (except possibly in hospitality), and indicate more of a hobbyist interest in the language, a rather surprising trend for a poor country. Statistics for all South Asian countries in which a sitting of the examination was offered:

Country	TOEFL			All JLPT			JLPT 1/2
Country	2001	2000	% up	2001	2000	% up	2001	2000	% up
Bangladesh	3315	1011	328%	60	n/a	n/a	4	n/a	n/a
India	38073	10288	370%	2118	1560	35.8%	397	316	25.6%
Pakistan	7058	2649	266%	72	52	38.5%	9	7	28.6%
Sri Lanka	1495	1629	-8.22%	13	930	-98.6%	5	121	-95.8%

Sri Lanka's dramatic drop in 2001 was likely due to their ongoing civil war; between 1999 and 2000 their total testtaker pool grew from 826 to 930, a growth rate of 12.6%. As I wrote previously, Japanese study has also been growing in popularity in East and Southeast Asian countries, though also not as fast as the popularity of English study. 2002 statistics are not yet available, though I can tell you I met 3 guys from Pakistan at the sitting of the 2002 Level (I) examination in Hong Kong. For further information, see JLPT Communication Square for 2001 and 2000 JLPT statistics, or ETS for TOEFL statistics for the past decade.

2003-02-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

Template Work in Progress

I'm messing with the template right now instead of coding my graduation project. It should stop looking funny in a few minutes.

Edit: I've saved a few of the most useful features, but essentially the old template is gone, as I found its ugliness to be completely unredeemable. Hopefully this makes things a lot more readable and aesthetically pleasing. Furthermore, past posts are now available archived either by topic or by date. Now, no blogging for me at least for a few days, I have yet another meeting with my advisor on Monday. I'd forgotten how addictive this can be ...

2003-02-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

CIA Seeks Out Chinese-Americans to Spy on China

In an interesting counterpoint to the story of Mr. Yai, recently arrested on charges of acting as an agent of North Korea inside the US without registering with the government, the BBC reports that the CIA is seeking out Chinese-Americans to work as spies and intelligence analysts.

The CIA - along with the FBI and other agencies - has been criticised for not having enough agents who can fit in with Arab or Asian societies.

Unfortunately, there's a rather limited supply of Chinese-Americans who can both pull off the task of effortlessly blending into mainland society and who would consider working for the CIA. The lack of Chinese-language education at an early age would appear to be impeding the normal operation of US intelligence agencies --- there's a distinct lack of native-born Americans who speak good Chinese. The most useful response to this kind of advertisement will probably come from Taiwanese student immigrants, who would require the least investment in additional language training. History has given the United States the unusual coincidence of 22 million people whose security interests in Asia are aligned to a certain degree with ours and who speak the language of our most important strategic and commercial counterpoint (yes, I'm deliberately straining to avoid the word "rival" here).

By and large, history has not given us any such equally valuable coincidence in the Arab world, except among some stateless groups such as the Kurds or Egypt's Coptic minority. This means that most intelligence work in the Middle East relies on post-puberty-trained speakers, with predictable results:

Around six days ago the phone lines of the Iraqi air defense units were “attacked”. When you picked up the phone in some of the command units you didn’t get a dial tone but a male voice speaking in broken Arabic. What it said is close to what the infamous email said, don’t use chemical or biological weapons, don’t offer resistance, and don’t obey commands to attack civilian areas and so on. This went on for a couple of hours.

If there were no Taiwan, US intelligence work in China would be similarly forced to rely on second language speakers of Chinese and a few dissidents who left China and hoped to work against the Communist government from the outside. Just a thought.

2003-02-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

South Korean Immigrant Arrested in LA on Charges Relating to National Security

UPI was the first with the story. Washington Times reports:

John Joungwoong "Joung" Yai, 59, faced an initial court appearance Wednesday afternoon on charges he failed to register as an official agent of the Pyongyang government, which could lead to a 20-year prison sentence for the former merchant and restaurant investor.

His brother's wife chimes in with her own perspective:

Yai's sister-in-law, Young Ro, told reporters Tuesday night that Yai "loved America" and didn't appear to have the English proficiency or computer skills needed to be a successful spy. "I don't believe he would do that at all," she told the Times. "I don't think he's that smart."

Ouch.

2003-02-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

Language Schools

The Washington Post reports on the growth of Chinese and Korean language schools catering to the children of immigrants:

"We have to teach them from the very beginning," said Choon T. Hong, principal of the Korean language school that meets every Friday night at Bethel Korean Presbyterian Church in Ellicott City. About 250 students are enrolled for the spring semester. "The children who are born in the U.S., they don't think they are Korean," Hong said. "But they are Korean, because of their parents, because of the way they look. . . . I'm trying to give them an identity as a Korean-American who can understand both cultures, who can speak both languages."

Pastor Hong, please don't worry about giving them an identity as "Korean-Americans." That'll develop quite well enough on its own once they hit high school. But understanding both cultures and speaking both languages? This is a ridiculously overambitious goal for a program with 3 contact hours a week.

Children may be language sponges, but they also have a surprising tendency to forget what they don't use, and immigrant parents need to rid themselves of the ridiculous idea that sending our kids to church for 3 hours on Friday night is going to result in anything more valuable than a chance for to spend a quiet evening alone or out on the town. There is no way anyone is going to learn anything from a weekly language class. I took Spanish every weekday of the schoolyear for 9 years and I could barely follow the World Cup commentary on Univision (which I was was forced to watch instead of ESPN because my housemates and I were too cheap to get cable).

2003-02-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

Chinese Takeout

Though there are those blame the inauthenticity of Chinese food in the Midwest on the limited palates of Ice People, and see in the menus of Wong's Kitchens and Peking Gardens the horrors of cultural imperialism, Taiwan's Presidential Office Deputy Secretary General Joseph Wu sees a different reason. In an interview with the Taipei Times, He asserts that even in St. Louis, the main driving force behind menu changes at the restaurant he worked at were Chinese immigrant and student customers, not local whites, and that as a result, many chefs were forced to make dishes from outside of their regional specialties:

Having been brought up in a home where the kitchen was the sole preserve of women, Wu had never done any cooking before he went to Missouri in 1979 to start on a masters degree. But in order to ensure he had enough money for his second year of studies, Wu applied for work at the Yen Ching Chinese Restaurant in May 1980.

"Although it was supposedly a northern Chinese restaurant, the owners and most of the chefs were either from Taiwan or Hong Kong," Wu said. "And in order to cater to the tastes of local Chinese, many of whom were immigrants or students from Taiwan, there were plenty of southern seafood dishes on the menu, so what it offered was actually mixed cuisine."

2003-02-03T01:21:00.000-08:00

The End of Discriminatory Admissions in Malaysia?

Don't count on it. Though Steve Sailer (who links to this article) seems more confident, there's a gaping hole in the new system. In Malaysia, there's three ways to qualify for a higher education course. The first is by examination: you study two years for the STPM (Sijil Tinggi Persekolahan Malaysia), the Malaysian Higher School Certificate Examination which has been acknowledged to be even more difficult than the British A-levels. You submit your results to your preferred varsity, sit, wait, and hope. The second option is to take a two-year diploma course at a local private college. However, those born into the right skin color and raised in the right culture can take a far easier route: matriculation centers. Matriculation graduates sit for a mere one year course, after which they take perfunctory examination that is not even as hard as the A-levels, let alone the STPM, and have their grades treated the same - an A on Matrikulasi is worth the same as an A on STPM. But does it represent the same level of preparation? Of course not. As DAP National Chairman Lim Kit Siang stated in a speech at the DAP's educational forum last year:

In May last year, Utusan Malaysia carried an article about a study by Universiti Utara Malaysia (Bidin Yatim, Sharipah Soaad Syed Yahaya and Nor Azilah Ngah, 1997) on the performance of matriculation holders in the first year of university compared to STPM holders. The study found that matriculation students on the whole could not maintain their high CGPA after their first semester.

In otherwords, this is the Malaysian equivalent of saying Blacks and Latinos get 200 extra points tacked on to their SAT scores. Malaysia isn't ahead of the US on the elimination of affirmative action - they're not even keeping pace with us. Granted, however, Dr. M has only had a recent change of heart on the matter, and immediately took a big step in the right direction, while George W. Bush's continually expresses his convictions about the wrongness of affirmative action without doing anything about it.

As long as higher education admissions committees continue to treat matriculation students as equivalent to STPM holders when the evidence shows their academic preparation is nowhere near the same level, the basic injustice of the system continues unimpeded. Opening up 10% of seats at matriculation centers to non-bumiputra, throwing us scraps from the table, as it were, doesn't change this fact. Is this what's necessary to hold the country together? We'll be watching anxiously. (I'll feel seriously embarassed if Chinese students apply in any significant numbers for seats in matriculation centers, but it won't surprise me when they do and when MCA starts defending their right to do so. The Indians are the ones who need them and deserve them after years of discrimination --- under NEP/NDP, university intakes consistently measured as little as 4% Indian.)

The most significant long term effect of Mr. Musa's plans may be to slow the outflow of non-bumiputra students to overseas universities in Singapore and Taiwan. Though the most able will continue to go far afield to the USA or the UK for the best education possible, the middle ranked students, who would previously have been forced by discrimination to go overseas for university, as often to Sinophone countries as to Anglophone ones, may now find they can stay at home and pay far lower costs. Under the old system, many families simply sacrificed all, including the educational opportunities of all their other offspring, in order to pay private tuition at an overseas university for one of their children. With more inexpensive educational places available inside the country, maybe more families will be able to give all their children a shot at the top.

2003-01-28T19:56:00.000-08:00

Asian Americans and Eyelid Surgery

As this article points out, many Asian American Aktivists (spelling copyright Marc Miyake) like to blame Evil Whitey for the fact that among Asians in Asia and Asian-Americans alike, cosmetic surgery to create a double-folded eyelid exploded in popularity during the late 90s and continues to remain very much in style. They assert, without proof, that the standards of beauty in largely non-English speaking East Asia, such as the preference for light skin, a somewhat prominent nose, and double-folded eyelids, were imposed on us helpless FOBs by the White media, while it is the job of the Aktivists, English-monolingual Asians living in America who can't even understand the language of the Asian media, let alone be influenced it to the extent that they would understand what Asian beauty standards are, to save us:

Authors Maxine Hong Kingston and David Mura are uncomfortable with the popularity of the surgery, and believe that altering eyes, features by which Asians are so easily identified, is an attempt to conceal or deny Asian heritage and conform to mainstream American beauty ideals.

"It's evidence of internalized racism," says Mura. "It really indicates something about the way in which Asians in America are indoctrinated by white standards of beauty. They feel less beautiful than those who fit the Caucasian standard of beauty." The main reason for that, Mura says, is the low representation of Asians in the media. "People grow up watching the media, which is where people are beautiful and powerful. You see very few Asian faces. The message is: the way you look is not beautiful, or doesn't count, or doesn't even exist," he says. He believes the American media also account for much of the surgery's popularity in Asia.

"The power of the American media and American culture stretches all over the globe, and can cause people to devalue their own culture," says Mura.

So, two English-monolingual Asian-Americans married to white people are trying to speak for Asians in Asia and interpreting our desire to follow our own culture's beauty standards as blind attempts to imitate white people. (In psychology this phenomenon is known as projection). Cultural imperialism at its worst. Fortunately, some people seem to get it:

"The desire for double eyelids has taken on a strange idea in the U.S. that Asian women want to look like Caucasians and that they desire [moon-shaped] eyes," says Shi Kagy, editor of AsiaMs, an online Asian beauty magazine (www.AsiaMs.net). "In truth, Asian women want double eyelid folds that look like natural Asian type folds, and dislike the Caucasian type," she says.

For ten years, Dr. Jeffrey Ahn, Director of Facial Plastic Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center, has performed about 200 Asian blepharoplasties a year. He dispels the idea that his patients have tried to obscure their racial identity. "I don't get a single patient asking to be 'Westernized,'" he says. "A lot of doctors still call it Westernization of the eyelid, which proves they have little understanding of the Asian patients." He stresses the importance of going to a surgeon who is accustomed to operating on Asian eyelids, because of the fundamental differences in facial anatomy.

The article goes on to point out that in Southern China, as many as 70% of all people already have double-folded eyelids anyway.

2003-01-28T19:01:00.000-08:00

Wai Yoo No Speeka Asian-Ameleekan?

Hello to all the loyal readers of MixedAsian (hello? anyone?). This post unfortunately does not mark my return to regular participation in the blogosphere; it will likely be several months before that. However, I've just seen a piece of writing so wrong-headed and misinformed that I felt compelled to take it on. (Thanks to Shanti for the link). It consists of a long complaint that it is a bad thing that Asian-Americans (AAs) possess no racial language and as a result are forced to use Black Vernacular English or worse, the evil Ice People Standard English, in order to express all our "cultural" thoughts.

Actually, this rant I'm about to commence has a lot to do with one of my favorite pet academic topics, linguistics, but it also relates to issues of integration and cultural identity, so bear with me. Since fellow Asian Anti-Aktivist Marc Miyake seems to be on hiatus, I hope I can take on this task without making too many errors that would be obvious to any linguistics graduate student.

Anyway, Mr. Hoyt Sze first decries the AA tendency to overuse black street language in an effort to distinguish themselves from white people:

This campus's Asian American literary set fails to understand a simple concept: When we Asian Americans appropriate African American language for our own, we sound ridiculous. Using another people's street language is both a joke and a corruption. Sporting a traditionally "black" attitude results in cheap imitation, not expression.

So far, I can agree with him. AAs have a tendency to ape poor urban blacks in an effort to earn respect and fear from white people, as can be seen in the populariza tion of basketball among AAs. They fail to realize the essential absurdity of middle class suburban kids wearing $100 Banana Republic sweaters trying to talk and act like they po' oppress-ed foke up outta dah ghett-toe.

Towards the middle of the article, though, Mr. Sze starts to veer wildly into dogma:

But let's not fool ourselves. Jazz and rap are culturally ours as much as Bach and Brahms.

Though Mr. Sze means this quote in a negative sense, I've chosen to take it the other way. Black Jazz artists of the 1930s hardly intended their musical talent to be a gift solely to black Americans. Americans of all races and even Australians of all races enjoy jazz music today. As an American I'm heir to all the great musicians and poets of Western civilization and of America itself. As a Chinese-speaking overseas Chinese, I'm heir to the civilization which produced the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and all those cool TVB wu xia dramas. Why would I want to be an "Asian-American?" I don't wanna inherit a bunch of crazy political platforms, whiny books, and racial cliquishness.

An Asian American sensibility must be unique. We must find our own tongue with minimal influence from the white mainstream or the African American alternative.

So, all you AAs are trying to find such a tongue? That's great, I know this language called Chinese, heard of it? In its history of thousands of years it has received no taint of loanwords from the heartless colonial tongues of Evil Whitey (though we stole some words about horsemanship from the Mongols). If you're worried about your cultural discourse being overheard by oppressors who by some miracle have learned to speak the national common tongue of China, why not pick a more obscure member of the Chinese family, such as Fukkienese, or my very own beloved Hakka? Oh, excuse my Sinocentricity. Non-Chinese Asians also have the many languages and dialects of their own ancestral countries from which to choose. We're confronted by a wealth of options.

No wait, lemme guess, you all don't want it, it's too hard to learn, and you got embarassed when your parents spoke it to you in public when you were a kid. You want a dialect which is easy for a AA native speaker of English to put on as a flashy badge of his identity, and which all of the Proud Yellow People (or at least the ones you're interested in hooking up with) can speak to each other while none of the Evil Ice People have a hope of understanding (or breaking in on your pick-up attempt), right? Okay, let's see how this might come about ...

A dialect of a language begins to develop when a subcommunity of users of a language need to talk about ideas, objects, or actions in their daily experience, for which the base language (e.g. English) has no words. The subcommunity invents words to fill the gap in their expressive capabilities. We can see this process at work to a small extent in the AA community, with loanwords such as "desi," "gyopo¡M" or "jook sing," or new English phrases such as "parachute kids" or "overseas Chinese." Standard English has been taking loanwords from the AA lexicon for as long as there have been AAs, leading to "chop suey" (Taishan Âø¸H meaning "miscellaneous"), "coolie" (could originate from Tamil "kuli" meaning payment for menial work, or from the Hakka reading "koo liet" of W¤O, Mandarin "ku3 li4," meaning hard labor), "dim sum," (Cantonese ÂI¤ß literally meaning to touch the heart), "wok" (Cantonese ÷i), "kimono," (Japanese µÛª«), and the like. Indeed, the word "Asian-American" itself was invented by AAs.

That's usually called something like jargonization (there's a real word for this; my Linguistics TAs would be marking me down at this point), but it's not a sufficient condition to make a dialect. At this point, it's just English with a few funny words. In general, a full-fledged dialect only develops if the life experiences of the subcommunity are so different from that of mainstream language users that the lexicon becomes filled to bursting with new words, and if the subcommunity in the process of dialect formation is so segregated from mainstream language users that standard grammatical features are not reinforced and new ones develop. The classic example of this kind of segregation is long distance, as occured in the colonization of Latin America by temporally and regionally separated groups of Spanish explorers. Their differing origins and interactions with locals led to various regional dialects of a single Spanish language, most of which, for example, lost the second-person plural informal "vosotros" and associated verb forms.

Unfortunately for Mr. Sze, AAs are not segregated to anywhere near the extent that black Americans were during their 300 years of Anglophone history that led to the development of Black Vernacular English, or to the extent that Australians were from Mother England in the 200 years which led to the unique Aussie accent. We grow up among, work with, and date speakers of standard English, and share their life experiences and cultural referents. And as can be seen from the examples of specific Asian-American words above, most of our invented jargon concerns either peculiarities of life as a child of immigrants, or customs of old-country cultures in which the vast majority of AAs cannot participate without assistance from relatives due to linguistic deficiency and are rapidly leaving behind due to lack of concern. Thus these words will likely fall out of use as AAs pass into adulthood, rather than becoming a stronger component of the spoken language.

Searching for our own identity and language is not any easy process. But once we discover our true collective voice, it will mean the [blank] to our days of silence and self-hatred and the birth of a new Asian American.

Sorry, Mr. Sze, you've got it backwards. A dialect isn't the beginning of a new, separate identity; it's the result of it. If an AA dialect has not already developed by 2003, the centennial of Korean immigration and long past the sesquicentennial of Chinese immigration, maybe that's a sign that even 2nd-generation AAs are already just mainstream kids little different than the white and black suburbanites who surround them.

Is this the fault of white people for forcing AAs to forget their old culture? Well let's see, in San Francisco Bay Area alone, there are 3 broadcast television stations (in addition to I don't know how many cable and satellite channels) which every evening from 6PM until midnight run shows in a total of 3 different Chinese dialects (nightly news, soap operas, music, and talk shows in Cantonese and Mandarin in addition to a weekly cooking show and the occasional movie in Fukkienese or something close to it), in addition to Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Every public university offers Chinese language courses; community colleges and religious associations offer courses in Japanese, Korean, and Thai, among others. Chinese bookshops and Korean video rental stores abound.

And there are tens of thousands of immigrant students who would love to teach AAs their native languages and take them around to all these places and watch TV shows with them; that's how I, a Malaysian-Chinese Hakka speaker who was born in America and has lived here on and off (about 75% on) all my life, learned to speak Hong Kong-accented Cantonese while attending an American high school.

But do AAs take advantage? No, all they have is a lowered Civic with some pearl milktea in the drink holder, as Eminem blasts on the stereo and they drive home to watch The Simpsons. And they're trying to convince us that the shape of their taillights and the flavor of their drinks says more about their cultural identity than the language in their heads and in their entertainment.

2002-10-31T03:49:00.000-08:00

Former Chancellor of UC Berkeley Passes Away

Dr. Chang-Lin Tien, the first Asian-American head of a major US university, has passed away at age 67 after entering hospital due to a stroke. See UC Berkeley's official press release or the Orange County Register article (thanks to YellowWorld.org for the link).

2002-10-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

Foreign Language Study and Immigration

Christian Science Monitor reports on the possible elimination of Georgia public high schools' foreign-language requirement by the Board of Education.

Under pressure to eliminate a dual-track diploma system, the Georgia Board of Education is considering dropping its merit track language requirement and adding a math requirement for vocational students. As testing increases in core academic subjects, languages are an issue on a number of states' agendas. A few months ago, the New Jersey legislature made it easier for high-schoolers to have their foreign-language requirements waived.

Many pundits decry the lack of American interest in studying foreign languages at a time of expanding globalization. I'd like to second their assertion that the study of a foreign language can be a very valuable component of one's personal development, and can form the basis for grassroots cultural exchanges between America and the rest of the world at a time when our country is so greatly misunderstood. However, these same pundits never seem to consider that the very fact of our openness to the world, manifested in mass immigration, far from providing an incentive to study foreign languages to communicate with all our new neighbors, who learn English anyway, instead results in the rational decision by millions of American students to de-emphasize their foreign language studies in favor of areas with a higher return to their time and efforts:

[E]ven devotees like UGA linguist Joe McFall admit it's always been hard for Americans to muster up enthusiasm for the languages of foreign shores. Not only does the whole world seem to speak English, but many consider it part of the American immigrant spirit to want to assimilate into society by suppressing the mother tongue, which is why many second-generation immigrants speak only English.

Sure, blame that "American mainstream" for forcing the children of immigrants to forget their ancestral languages, rather than considering that the lazy children might have chosen the path of forgetfulness themselves. What 2nd-generation American would consider studying his ancestral language a rational economic decision when it would take him years of effort to obtain the same command as an H1B visa holder from his ancestral country, and when he could be using those same years to study accounting, computer programming, or some other skill providing him with a guaranteed future? [1]

In the present environment, there's hardly any advantage to being a multilingual database engineer or sales director from the US when Chinese-speaking database engineers from China and Russian-speaking sales directors from Russia are cheaper and far more plentiful. Whatever costs might be incurred by the fact that such foreign workers are likely to speak less-than-fluent English are more than made up for by the lower paycheck they demand.

As a result, the only decently fluent foreign language speakers America consistently produces, or needs to produce, are European literature majors from universities. Others can be imported, and, local high school principals, knowing it's impossible to cram much language into kids' heads in 4 years of post-puberty education, give up on the idea, while local middle school principals doubt that teaching their students a foreign language would be worth the money. And everyone else is content to muddle by with the amount of Spanglish they need for addressing the clerks at their local grocery store.

[1] Not that I'd consider that any excuse for the pathetically low command of ancestral languages among American-born Asian, especially given the amount of ranting about "Asian pride" and the level of complaints about the racism of mainstream society, but I'll try to stay on topic, seeing as I've written about this extensively in the past.

2002-10-27T12:18:00.000-08:00

Amusing Search of the Week

This blog is #28 on Google for the search list of massage parlors in Japan and also #35 for japanese massage san jose sex. Massage, presumably of the variety involving sex, is one of the top keywords by which internet users find this page, appearing in over 15% of the queries leading here. My apologies to all the johns with Asian fetishes that I can't help you with your needs.

Also, I remain the top search on Yahoo for malaysian rave party..

2002-10-27T08:47:00.000-08:00

Public Bilingualism Watch - Public Transportation

ChronWatch points out a rather bizarre situation on the L train in San Francisco: a black driver making announcements in an unspecified Chinese dialect, but not in his own English mother tongue, by way of repayment for white racism against blacks and Asians:

I realized that the driver was giving duel announcements in English, but only at main arteries, such as 19th Avenue. As for the other avenues, the intercom announcements were given only in Chinese. I ride the train to the end of the line, but I thought about the people who need to get off earlier and who could use the assistance of a driver speaking in English, especially at night.

Such as, for example, black people, or Chinese speaking another dialect, or any of the other number of immigrant groups who don't use English as a mother tongue but certainly don't use and likely don't speak whatever the driver was speaking, either. Refusing to speak English on public transportation in San Francisco isn't a very effective way of getting back at Evil Whitey anyway, since most of the time, he drives in from the suburbs.

Frankly, some of the Chinese-American passengers on the train looked uncomfortable with the announcements, rather than impressed by them. I know from experience that they are not a people who want to be pandered to.

To be perfectly honest, I'm a bit suspicious of non-Chinese people who want to show off their Chinese skills. Especially if their Chinese isn't that great in the first place. I'm not sure how good this driver's Chinese is (the author of this article doesn't speak Chinese), but hopefully someone with more information can enlighten us.

2002-10-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

Public Bilingualism Watch - Voting

The Korean American Voter Allience, a volunteer group composed of Korean-American private citizens, created and distributed an unofficial Korean-language voters guide for the recent elections in Washington's King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties, reports the Seattle Times.

Lee said when KAVA met earlier this year, members talked about a new federal requirement to provide foreign-language ballots and voting materials in counties with high numbers of voters who have difficulties with English. Chinese-speaking voters in King County were the only group in Western Washington that qualified under the federal guidelines for special ballots.

"We're Americans, we can't wait to have the government do this for us," said [Cheryl] Lee, [chairwoman of the volunteer Korean American Voter Alliance], who works at Microsoft. "To participate you have to enable people to do it."

Ms. Lee, who understands that if you want good service, serve yourself, instead of asking the government to do it for you and your fellow taxpayers to foot the bill, deserves commendation for her attitude. To those politicians and activists who have in the past have fretted that eliminating the taxpayer-funded provision of government services in multiple languages is tantamount to stripping limited-English speakers of their citizenship, notice what happened here: ordinary men and women stepped in to fill a community need, and in the process brought that community closer together. This unofficial voter's guide was produced entirely through donations and volunteer labor, placing the costs of bilingualism squarely on the shoulders of the community which actually benefitted from it. There's no reason that this model can't work on a larger scale, if given a chance.

2002-10-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

From the "He said that IN PUBLIC?" Department

The San Francisco Examiner runs an article about West Portal and its sister school Alice Fong Yu, home to one of the Bay Area's Cantonese-English dual immersion programs. Unsurprisingly for a school which is 50% Asian and located in an affluent neighborhood, test scores are quite high, but this hasn't led to a particularly high ranking:

One of the oft-overlooked challenges is the school's relative lack of diversity. In spite of its high API scores, state education authorities classify West Portal as an average school for its demographics, mostly Chinese American and white. It scored only five out of 10 on the Similar Schools Ranking because its black students account for only 3.3 percent of the student body, and Latinos only 5 percent. Whites and Chinese Americans typically score higher, and state authorities say they are less difficult to educate.

Never imagined I'd see that in print. Apparently Steve Sailer's idea that schools should be ranked according to how high their students score relative to their IQ has more popular currency than I thought.

2002-10-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

Gross Lack of Updates

Hi all. Sorry to be dead for so long. Yes, I haven't updated in over a month and a half, and as a result I've lost all my links (though search engines are still providing a nice stream of traffic). Needed to get a senior research project off the ground, apply for jobs, and start preparing for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December. I'm going to try updating once week from now, since, though I'm less busy than I was in September or the first half of this month, it's still a bit crazy for now.

2002-08-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Asian-Americans and Sports

This article on Alternet examines several interesting aspects of the increasing importance of Asians on the world sports scene. Todd Inoue writes:

[The World Cup] was early in the summer, when the Korean soccer team had an amazing run -- finishing fourth after bowing out to Turkey. That was when I first noticed that a lot of my friends -- and most of the Asian American ones -- were suddenly down with soccer, staying up late to watch the games, rooting in supermarkets and driving like idiots ... The fact is, I felt a deeper kinship with the Asian players. They resemble me -- crazy Ahn Jung-Hwan perms notwithstanding. They probably take off their shoes when they enter a home and have rice cookers on their kitchen shelves. They make the same faces I do when I screw up on the field. Am I a bad American because I feel more in common with the Asian players and root for Asian teams?

Though in a fantasy world, national patriotism would trump cultural sentiment, people want to see role models who look like them, role models with whom they can identify culturally, especially in entertainment (and its cousin, professional sports). To the extent people so inclined are respectful in their support of non-Americans (e.g. not throwing garbage on teams from their own country as has happened in Los Angeles to US soccer teams playing against teams from other countries in Los Angeles or otherwise causing danger to US citizens) it is difficult to find fault with this trend.

Also it's interesting to note that while Korea's run of World Cup victories strengthened Asian-American identity, with ABCs and yonsei rooting side-by-side with Korean-Americans for the Red Devils, it had an opposite effect in Asia itself: rumors that the Korean team had bribed officials and engaged in other dishonest methods in pursuit of victory circulated throughout the media and found wide currency in online bulletin boards, especially those for Chinese and overseas Chinese, where many participants engaged in vicious diatribes against Koreans.

I think [Yao Ming] might open up the door for many Asian Americans who have the dream to go to the NBA," says James Ryu, editor at Korean Journal. "There's a perception of many Americans that Asians cannot compete in the NBA. However, I think it will still take another 10 years before you will see many Asian American players, like you see in the professional baseball league."

With the increase in the Asian-American population I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more AAs who have the particular combination of musculature, speed, and talent to succeed in sports such as baseball. Unfortunately the present Asian-American youth culture holds up basketball, not baseball, as the highest athletic aspiration, possibly because another minority which suffered discrimination in the past made such extraordinary inroads there and transformed the game in the process.

People like Mr. Ryu, pandering to the lower elements of this AA youth culture, would like to attribute the lack of AA progress in basketball to the poor perceptions of AA masculinity, no doubt the fault of the media. But Asian-Americans need to understand: we are not black. We're not going to make progress in society through the same methods black people made, whether in sports or in politics, because we have different talents, different strengths and weaknesses, shaped by our widely divergent cultures, life experiences, and historical environments.

Given the disgusting sums of money which the agents of a basketball talent and the team for which he plays can make, even at the allegedly non-commercial college level, does anyone seriously believe that any sane scout would pass up a truly talented AA baller because of some dislike for Asian language, habits, or skin color, or because he believes a significant number of fans in his local area are so racist they would stop buying tickets just because there was one Asian on the team? Even if that, do you seriously believe that every scout of every team in every metropolitan area in America would pass over a truly talented AA baller for those same reasons, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity given up by their competitors and snapping up the guy like hotcakes? No matter what you believe about the level of racism in American society, this is ridiculous to consider.

Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella, on a DVD about the 2001 influx of Japanese baseball players called "Rising Sons," acknowledged the link between the spike of Asian faces in the seats and his star right fielder. "He puts people in the stands, no question," Piniella says about Ichiro. "San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas, we've drawn more Asian people to our baseball games. When you put more people in the ballpark, it's good for baseball and that's exactly what he's done."

Asian-Americans have huge spending power, and owners of sports teams realize that. Don't you they'd kill to find some way to tap into that market more effectively? That's the beauty of capitalism - white, black, or yellow, we all love green.

Because the Asian-American population is not 1.3 billion, we simply have less of a chance of producing many genetic freaks (and mind you, I use this term with the utmost respect) like Yao Ming. It's not impossible, just highly unlikely, that an Asian-American basketball star will emerge in the near future. But if and when it happens, we'll know about it, because scouts will be all over the guy. For now, we have three options:

We can train and make serious progress in the less-respected sports like baseball, tennis, and soccer, and refuse to let our self-confidence be dragged down by the fact that we're not built to be basketball players,
We can genetically engineer the future kid of some willing Asian parents to give him the speed, strength, and height of Shaq, or
We can spend plenty of useless efforts and money protesting the alleged racism of NBA owners, and waste endless time on internet bulletin boards bemoaning the fact that we can't achieve our highest aspiration of getting respect from white people.

I know which one I wouldn't choose.

2002-08-20T00:48:00.000-07:00

Public Multilingualism Watch --- Seattle

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that 3 counties will provide Spanish translations and 1 county will provide Chinese translations of ballots for the upcoming primary elections, less than a month away.

"Any citizen of the United States has the right to vote, and there's nothing in our law that says a citizen has to speak English," said Adams County Auditor Nancy McBroom.

Well, that's technically true, but English ability is required to become a citizen if you weren't one before, with exceptions only for long-term elderly legal residents and the physically or mentally impaired. See INA, Section 312.

Additionally, most of the people needing assistance in Spanish are located in once place -- the Othello area. The county has had interpreters there before, although Hispanic voters who did not speak English well often would bring along an English-speaking family member to assist. "If someone comes in and needs help, they shouldn't have to drag a family member along or depend on a busy poll worker," [McBroom] said.

Just as I've asked before, why should the whole community of state or American taxpayers bear this cost, rather than the members of the community who benefits from it directly?

Ms. McBroom doesn't offer a defense of her idea that the State should be forcing its way in on yet another responsibility, language assistance, which used to be borne by family members or immigrant civic organizations. Before the expansion of official multilingualism, a citizen unsure of his English skills would press one of his relatives into service as an interpreter when interacting with the government. He'd understand the inherent limitations of this method, and probably take everything he heard with a grain of salt (or am I just overgeneralizing from all the times my uncle asked me, "Are you sure that's what he said?" at the DMV?). People don't do the same thing when faced with bilingual election workers wearing official badges and a translated ballot with an imprint of the state seal, even when errors and biases of those have the potential to negatively affect far more voters than one nephew who lies to his uncle about how to fill out a ballot in order to get him to vote a particular way.

2002-08-19T02:36:00.000-07:00

Racial Integration in Malaysia

I'm not really sure what to think of this Star article about Dr. Mahathir's plan to expand "vision schools," in which private mother-tongue schools teaching in Tamil or Chinese and national (public) schools teaching in BM would share a common campus and non-academic facilities such as cafeterias and gymnasiums. It's an interesting idea which might promote more interaction between the races (of which there is rather less than in the US, for example). However, for Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indians it also brings up the specter of increased government control over the private schools, which they fear could be used in the future to force the elimination of mother tongue teaching. So, what does our leader do to reassure nervous parties?

Addressing the convention earlier, Dr Mahathir said PAS and the Chinese educationist movement, Dong Jiao Zong, had conspired to oppose the Government's efforts to enhance the knowledge of the Malays.

Hmm, the normal tactic of conspiracy theorists is to blame any problems on an unholy alliance of communists and Zionist bankers, but Dr. M is too creative for that (or he just felt like he needed some new material, since he used that one on George Soros); he's blaming opposition to his political program on an unholy alliance of Chinese school teachers and Islamist fundies.

He added: "We have to look at other ways of promoting racial harmony among students because non-Malay parents are not interested in sending their children to national schools. They fear that their children would be segregated."

Maybe it's just the late hour, or maybe I've been overseas for too long, but I think this is the last thing on a Chinese mother's mind when she chooses to enroll her kids in a mother-tongue school instead of a national school. At least at a mother-tongue school a student learns his ancestral language and culture. Whereas at a national school you lose your culture and get it replaced by those "Moral Education" classes, which is probably a bad tradeoff.

2002-08-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

Lame Excuses

Sorry for the paucity of updates lately, I've been in summer school exams. So here are three entries on democracy in Japan, banning race-based clubs in universities, and German and Indonesian experiences with assimilating immigrants. More to come, because I have a rather large backlog of stuff that's been accumulating in the past week or so I've been studying instead of blogging.

2002-08-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

The Culture of Democracy

Those who assert that Anglo-Saxons are the only inherently democratic people on earth and that all others are just closet fascists should take a look at this Time Asia article regarding the opposition to the implementation of a national identification card system in Japan:

Last week's launch of a computerized national ID system, which tags every citizen with a unique 11-digit number, triggered vehement protests throughout the country by those who fear Big Government is getting an efficient tool to invade their privacy. Some local prefectures refused to go along: Yokohama, the country's second-largest city, made participation voluntary, while three other municipalities opted out.

Even in a young democracy, people are willing to go against cultural norms and challenge authority when they perceive that authority as violating their liberty. Being non-Anglo-Saxon does not make your culture inimical to liberty and democracy, it just means you have to work at it a little harder to patch it into your cultural framework and help it find roots in pre-existing traditions.

2002-08-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

Banning Race-based University Clubs

An article from The Star points out that Unimas (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, in East Malaysia, AKA Malaysian Borneo) disallows race-based clubs of the type found in most American universities:

Probably the only university in the country to ban the setting up of clubs with such inclinations, Dr Yusuf said Unimas had been practising the policy since 10 years ago. "We have a policy that strictly disallows students to set up clubs that are based on race, religion, language or states because they may be used as a vehicle to polarise them," ... Dr Yusuf said the policy was also implemented in hostels where students of different races, religion and states were "mixed and matched" to be roommates.

Though the university is perfectly within its rights to deny funding to race-based clubs, and is probably making sensible use of its money by doing so (experience in the US suggests that such clubs turn into vehicles for using student activities funds to subsidize either political gatherings or drunkenness and debauchery, providing questionable benefit to the majority of the student body), it's just not likely to have that much effect on society. The clubs are just a symptom of a deep-rooted divide between the races in terms of their identification with each other as fellow citizens. Without the clubs, minority students will go on cliquing together and partying together if they want, they'll just do it in their own dorms rather than rooms at the student center, and entirely at their own expense rather than partly on the university's dime.

Update: Ethnic student clubs in universities provide one service which some might consider useful: throwing large parties open to the public, which attract partygoers of all races (as opposed to members-only parties, a practice which occurs more often than you'd expect, especially with the perverse incentives of the funding structure encouraging clubs to spend as much money as possible and not report profits). Much more mingling between Asians and non-Asians occurs at large "Asian Students Association"-sponsored parties held in a dance club, as opposed to the small, informal, and often illicit parties that spring up in dorms over the weekend and which, due to matters of private choice, tend to be very heavily segregated by race.

Many Asians who wouldn't show up at your average white frat party and who would otherwise spend their weekend drinking in their dorm with 50 of their closest friends will go to an Asian-sponsored party at a dance club. There, the profit motive pushes the doorman to let in pretty much anyone with a valid ID, a ten-dollar bill in his handshake, or pronounced secondary sexual characteristics. Turning away people based on their race would probably result in university sanctions as well as very poor word-of-mouth advertising. Non-Asians who go in will probably find someone to chat up and dance with, because this kind of thing is expected in the setting of a dance club. So members of separate ethnic groups get to know each other better, leading to improved relations.

At a private party in someone's dorm room, however, the "doorman" is the occupant of the room, who aims to get together with his friends and improve his own social standing by making sure everyone has a good time. Charging admission would be gauche, and so he'll pay the costs out of pocket, or "pass-the-hat" (which works a lot better when all the partygoers trust each other). The crowd is smaller and the atmosphere is not as conducive to making self-introductions --- it's better to get an introduction from a mutual friend, which means it's easier if you're Asian. Also, at such a privately-organized Asian party, many partygoers might have the expectation of finding an entirely Asian social space, in which they don't need to follow mainstream social standards. Basically, a whole lot of factors which lead to self-segregation.

2002-08-16T17:37:00.000-07:00

Minority Populations and National Identity Around the World

Many immigration restrictionists would like to blame modern multiculturalism for encouraging children of immigrants to cling to their ancestral cultures and thus destroying the sense of nationhood and unity once held by the people of the United States. But two articles from Germany and Indonesia should give us all pause, because they point out that clinging to your ancestral culture is a natural human tendency, not necessarily a response to real or perceived grievances committed against an ethnic community by the mainstream. If you let immigrants into your country, this tendency will find power to express itself, regardless of whether the immigrants themselves are economically successful or not. The article in the Jakarta Post points out:

Bitterness over the state's oppression of the people and failure of the state to protect the rights of the people may explain why these young people do not see being an Indonesian as part of their identity

Basically, people outside of the mainstream tend to be angry when the state violates their natural rights in the name of national unity, and as a result they disidentify with the mainstream. This suggests that non-libertarian methods of encouraging immigrants to assimilate could create severe grievances, which would be a threat to national unity. How long would those grievances last? They wouldn't be confined to a single generation, as experiences in both countries suggest:

Germany: Less than a fifth of all second-generation immigrants consider themselves German, a recent study carried out by Frankfurt's department of multicultural affairs revealed. "It was drummed into me from an early age that I wasn't German," Jasmin explains. "Not from my family, but from other Germans."

Indonesia: Robert Mulyarahardja, 17, an Indonesian of Chinese descent and chairman of a student body at Pangudi Luhur high school in South Jakarta, said, "I'm an Indonesian. I was born here and had my education here. And my family is rooted here. We no longer practice Chinese culture ... [however] if I had a choice, I would change my citizenship because as an ethnic Chinese, I am often a victim of discrimination."

The Indonesian experience is particularly instructive, since their methods of encouraging assimilation go entirely against the ideas of modern Western multiculturalism: they encouraged Chinese to take Indonesian names, discriminated against people who spoke Indonesian with foreign accents, outlawed public celebration of the Chinese New Year, beat up Chinese in riots, and prohibited everyone but a few newspapers from printing in Chinese language. Though they Indonesianized their immigrants in terms of language and culture, they still didn't succeed in instilling patriotism in them.

In Germany, they are taking some measures to address the problem of immigrant non-integration, but they appear to be aimed completely in the wrong direction:

The highly disputed immigration bill, passed earlier this year, aims to attract highly skilled foreign workers while putting more pressure on newcomers to integrate and tightening rules for asylum seekers. Foreign residents now have to take language and integration courses, presumably providing them with the basic knowledge they need to function in the country. While these courses should go a long way to help newcomers settle in Germany, most second-generation immigrants like Jasmin already appear perfectly integrated. They were born here, speak the language flawlessly and often work for traditional companies like Lufthansa and Siemens. Most hold German passports.

Even when descendents of immigrants can function in no other culture besides that of the nation in which they were born, and the majority culture strongly pushes immigrants to forget their ancestral languages and cultures, they still have trouble reconciling their status as visible minorities with a sense of identification with their country, regardless of whether the political environment is controlled by multiculturalists or assimilationists.

This strongly suggests we Americans are barking up the wrong tree: rather than encouraging immigrants to imitate Anglo-Saxons in all aspects of their lives and blindly assume patriotism will follow, we have to find other ways to encourage immigrants and their children to identify with their adopted homeland and its political traditions, regardless of their culture. National unity requires us to find some solution, because even if you cut off immigration, the immigrants already here aren't going to disappear.

2002-08-16T02:47:00.000-07:00

Public Multilingualism Watch --- The view from the other side of the pond

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal opines on the negative effects of government multilingualism in the UK. However (though I'm not sure whether it was he or his editor who chose the title "How Not To Encourage Assimilation"), he seems to think that it's all the government's (and specifically, the left's) fault that immigrants don't want to give up the chance to teach their children about their ancestral language and culture, rather than the fault of human nature. He discusses a proposal to teach (as foreign languages, not as the language of instruction) immigrant languages such as Punjabi and Swahili in the British public schools. I will get my rant out of the way first and then address his main point.

[School principals] want to turn Britain into New Guinea, where there are hundreds of mutually incomprehensible languages spoken in mutually inaccessible mountain valleys.

Not to mince words, but this is the most idiotic argument I have ever heard from a conservative. Mr. Dalrymple is not arguing against bilingual education which may hinder the less able students' efforts to learn English, he is arguing against 45 minutes a day of language lessons for second-generation children. The overwhelming majority of children of immigrants speak English. They can't help but not, growing up surrounded by English cartoons, English books, English conversations. When will conservatives realize that they have to find another way of ensuring that immigrants and their children integrate into the mainstream and are loyal to their adopted country, besides forcing them to abandon their ancestral languages and cultures? Faced with the false dilemma of giving up all their old ways in order to be considered a full American (or Englishman), or holding on to them and suffering charges that they are balkanizing the nation by speaking their old language even though they speak English quite well, many immigrants and their children will head straight for option #2, and develop a hostile attitude towards the mainstream. This is entirely unnecessary.

It is already possible for immigrant groups to live their lives enclosed in their own languages. Official forms are available in scores of such languages; large translation agencies act as intermediaries between immigrants and officialdom; and it is possible for people to take official tests in Albanian, Kurdish, Punjabi, Mandarin, Arabic, and a host of other languages.

Reductio ad absurdum, one might conclude that a certain group of 19 Arab men deceased in September, who spoke English well enough to take lessons in that language on how to operate a vehicle rather more complicated than a car, were already on their way to becoming upstanding citizens of our nation.

Restricting government operations to a single language has plenty of benefits. However, it's not going to make immigrants who otherwise haven't learned English suddenly see the benefits of learning it, especially as long as the most important parts of their lives --- interaction with private sector businesses, and social life --- don't require English. The government has (or at least it should have) rather less influence over those, as they are the result of private choices. I doubt, for example, that companies would close down their Spanish customer service hotlines even if the EEOC and related bureaucracies disappeared from the face of the planet tomorrow, because it attracts consumers (though some might try to raise the cost of providing services to non-English speaking consumers). Imagine a Hispanic immigrant, faced with the prospect of buying a toaster or a life insurance policy from Company A which requires him to use English with all their sales representatives, and Company B which has Spanish-speaking sales assistants to help him if he has any problems as long as he is using their product. He is going to go with Company B, unless their cost is so much higher than that of Company A that it exceeds the benefit he gets out of efficient communication in Spanish rather than halting communication in English.

Government monolingualism will shift the costs of immigrants not learning English from taxpayers to immigrants. However, the immigrants have a tendency to then take that cost and shift it on to their American-born children --- dragging their oldest child, niece, or nephew along with them to government offices to translate. This does have the beneficial effect of enhancing family cohesion among immigrants, which should then mean better educational results and less gang activity (time spent at the DMV with your uncle is time not spent on the street getting into trouble). However, as Steve Sailer pointed out recently, family cohesion is simply ethnic group cohesion writ small --- enhancing family cohesion will make kids feel a stronger affinity for their ethnic group. Not to mention that translating the legalese on government forms for your uncle who doesn't speak English offers great language practice for teenagers whose grasp on their ancestral language is slipping. This probably isn't the outcome Mr. Dalrymple is hoping for.

2002-08-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

Japanese as a Global Language

The Daily Yomiuri publishes an article about the new president of the Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, a scholar of Japanese who has been teaching since 1956, and the trend his appointment represents towards an increasing awareness among Japanese people of the internationalization of their language.

The report of the Council on the National Language, meanwhile, found the Japanese language to have increased its prominence in the Pacific Rim region. Cited as an example was the fact that a number of works of Chinese and Western literature had been translated into Japanese and that some overseas students in the region now use textbooks written in Japanese to study core subjects.

At some point in the future we may very well see a linguistic turf war between the two largest economies in the region: Japan and China. Will either succeed in promoting its language as a regional lingua franca, or will both lose out completely to English?