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As a child educated in the U.S. through the late 1950s and early 1970s, I learned little about China that was not negative. I knew it to be the “Sick Man of Asia,” and to have fought and lost the Opium Wars to the superior Western powers. It was a country that could not feed, clothe or shelter its own people; I grew up hearing of the “starving children in China.”
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When I read Timothy Yu’s article, “Has Asian American Studies Failed?” in the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies, I was taken aback. After all, I was the one who initiated Asian American Studies at City College of New York in 1970. That was the first time Asian American Studies had ever been offered at an institution of higher learning east of California, and it was only preceded by one year in California.
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Because of their respected role in communities, religious institutions have the potential to be important partners in improving the health of the communities they serve. Religious institutions may be especially important in immigrant groups, where language and cultural barriers make accessing more mainstream sources of information and support more difficult. A wide range of research suggests that religious institutions play an instrumental role in helping immigrants cope with the practical challenges of daily life. But the work of these religious institutions has been limited in public health initiatives and even more limited in work related to HIV/AIDS education and support. We were particularly interested in immigrant religious institutions’ potential role in HIV/AIDS work because of the high level of stigma that surrounds the condition. We thought that perhaps religious institutions, because of their role in defining community values, could help not only to provide HIV/AIDS education and support, but also to reduce stigma, which often gets in the way of HIV/AIDS work. We also wanted to evaluate the extent to which religious institutions might contribute to HIV/AIDS stigma by promoting negative messages about groups that are stereotyped as having HIV/AIDS, such as gay men. Our previous and current research suggests that negative views of homosexuality constitute much of the basis for HIV/AIDS stigma in Chinese immigrant religious institutions, but stigma and taboos related to disease and sex in general and unfounded fears of HIV infection through casual contact also contribute.
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“The End of Chinatown,” so proclaims the Atlantic Magazine, is a sensationalized assertion based on new population counts showing a moderate decline from the previous decade. Negative growth could predict a long-term slide, but as demographers know, projections are fraught with uncertainties. The dismal forecast of waning enclaves, of course, is not new. In 1949, Rose Hum Lee in a much more scholarly fashion declared “The Decline of Chinatowns in the United States.” A little more than a decade later, Chinatowns embarked on a four-decade expansion, driven by an unforeseen historical development on the immigration front. The inaccuracy of the earlier declaration, however, is no guarantee that today’s assertion is wrong. Too many unknowns cloud even the best crystal ball. Among the factors that influence the future trajectory are the decisions and actions taken by stakeholders. Communities are not merely passive victims of predetermined history, thus effective action requires knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to inform the political and policy discourse on the future of these neighborhoods by examining the economic factors transforming New York City’s Chinatown in recent times.
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During the past three years, I have met His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama three times: twice as his host at Hunter College in New York and once as his guest in Dharamsala, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, the site of Tibetan government-in-exile. People have asked me what is a leftist scholar engaged with civil rights and labor issues doing with a religious leader like the Dalai Lama. My answer is — it came naturally.
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Contemplating a Statue of
Douglas MacArthur on Corregidor Island
Evening star, still star, brilliant gleam in
The sky how I wish Douglas never returned
Had taken that slow boat to China instead
By way of Okinawa, by way of Japan.
Doggone Dugout Doug, what was in
That pipe you smoked, thinking you
Were our jut-jawed liberator when you
Were the oppressor, when the dreams
You handed the little brown brothers
Were as fleeting as corn-cob smoke
When all there is to show for it in the
Monsoon air of Corregidor, this lair
Of Chinese corsairs, Spanish jailers
And Yankee officers, is this bald-headed
Expatriate Minnesotan in the boots of
His occupier father determined to keep
These islands slices of American pie?
He is in love with the guns now silent
And his twisted odes on freedom
Lie as flotsam on the dark waters of
History, in love with the ruins of a life
That never was.
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Literature changes as it travels, creating new languages, new ideas, and new critics. Literature may even create a “third space” for telling stories differently than before. Thus, as Amitav Ghosh has stated, “stories are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose.”
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Historically, the City University of New York has provided access to higher education to new immigrants and their children. That mission continues today as CUNY is home to students from over one hundred countries. This paper looks at the unique immigration and educational experiences of one of these contemporary groups, specifically, the children of recent immigrants from the Fuzhou region of southeast China who have emerged over the past five years as a significant portion of the student body at CUNY’s Baruch College in Manhattan.
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“Asian American” and “Asia” Today 2012 was a year when the term “Asian American” regularly appeared in the media. The fatal shootings at a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The specious invocations of Asian American students in the Supreme Court case of Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas at Austin, the outcome of which could potentially end affirmative action as we know it. The misleadingly cheery Pew Report, “The Rise of Asian Americans.” The spineless and retrograde rulings in the cases against the eight soldiers who fatally bullied 19-year-old Private Danny Chen, who declined a full scholarship to CUNY’s own Baruch College in order to join the military. The passing of Hawai‘i Senator Daniel Inouye, a veteran of the racially segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, recipient of the Medal of Honor, and the highest-ranking APA politician in the U.S. history. The 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII. Edward Rothstein’s historically ignorant and ideologically offensive review of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center, on the front page of the New York Times Arts Section.1 Even the phenomenon of “Linsanity,” Jeremy Lin’s sudden rise to basketball stardom, despite — or perhaps because of — its spectacular reification of everything from Asian American masculinity to the Model Minority Myth, revealed how sedimented anti-Asian and Orientalist views remain in this country.
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