EthnicMajority

(Washington Post) America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

As the Lunar New Year begins Monday, annual festivities in Washington, D.C.’s shriveled Chinatown are, for the first time, being promoted by a large marketing firm. New York’s Chinatown, one of the nation’s oldest, has lost its status as home to the city’s largest Chinese population, based on the 2010 census.

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(Los Angeles Times) LMFAO’s head-pounding “Party Rock Anthem” pulsated through North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre as a multiracial group of young performers stormed the stage, promising in song to provide a lively evening of laughs. They then launched into a rapid-fire parade of sketches filled with gleeful raunch and pokes at racial stereotypes.

The performance had the usual trappings of a night out at any comedy club around town. But little about this invitation-only night was typical. The actors, writers and directors were all amateur, and they were mostly people of color — young blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians — performing original material they had helped to develop before a crowd of managers, agents and creative executives from major networks and studios.

The event marked the culmination of this year’s CBS Diversity Sketch Comedy Showcase, an annual talent forum that also functions as a three-month boot camp designed to boost the chances of minorities hoping to land roles on TV comedies and dramas.

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(UPI) The number of U.S. adults getting cancer screening tests is not meeting targets, especially among Asian and Hispanic Americans, federal health officials found.

A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, found in 2010, breast cancer screening rates were 72.4 percent, below the Healthy People 2020target of 81 percent; cervical cancer screening was 83 percent, below the target of 93 percent; and colorectal cancer screening was 58.6 percent, below the target of 70.5 percent.

Screening rates for all three cancers were significantly lower among Asians — 64.1 percent for breast cancer, 75.4 percent for cervical cancer and 46.9 percent for colorectal cancer — compared to other groups, the study found.

Hispanics were less likely to be screened for cervical cancer (78.7 percent) and colorectal cancer (46.5 percent, when compared with non-Hispanics at 83.8 percent and 59.9 percent, respectively, the report said.

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(American Lawyer) It's the start of Chinese New Year—the Year of the Dragon—but Asian Pacific Americans lawyers might not be in a mood to celebrate. According to The American Lawyer's 2011 midlevel minority associates survey, APAs are not happy campers.

But let's start with a positive: APAs are not griping about their work. Amazingly, they like it! APAs reported the highest score of all groups (including whites, black/African Americans, and Hispanics) for "overall satisfaction with work" and "quality of assignments."

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(Huffington Post) Minhee Cho went to Papa John's for some fast food goodness. Little did she know, she would get it served with a side of racism.

At around 12:30 p.m. today, Papa John's customer Minhee Cho tweeted a photo of a receipt she received at a Papa John's restaurant in uptown, New York City.

In it, under the customer's name section, the restaurant employee who rang up the order used the racial slur "lady chinky eyes" to describe her.

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(Huffington Post) As the University of California looks to shore up its shaky financial situation in the face of decreased funding from Sacramento, the system's effort to increase the proportion of out-of-state students has had an interesting effect–pushing out Asian American students at the expense of Chinese ones.

According to a Bloomberg report, in the years since administrators instructed U.C. San Diego to bring in more out-of-state students, the number of Chinese students enrolled at the Southern California university has seen a twelve-fold increase.

During the same period, the total number of Asian American students in the entire system decreased by just under 30 percent.

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(Voice of America) Eight years ago, “Mrs. Kim” came to the United States from China “to pursue her American Dream,” but thanks to unscrupulous business practices familiar to many Asian immigrants working in low-wage industries, things went horribly wrong.

Kim, who did not want to use her real name because she is still involved in litigation, began life in the U.S. preparing dumplings and side dishes at a Korean restaurant in Bergen County, New Jersey.

The job went well for a few years. It was hard, but Kim was getting paid for her efforts.

“When I first started working, [the owner] agreed to pay me $600 per week,” she said. “Specific hours were not indicated, but she did indicate I would have to work over 12 hours per day.”

Though she worked as many as 17 hours a day, when the restaurant’s business started to decline, the owner began paying employees late or not paying them at all.

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(Beritabiz) Kwanhyun Park, the 18-year-old son of Korean immigrants, spent four years at Beverly Hills High School earning the straight As and high test scores he thought would get him into the University of California, San Diego. They weren’t enough.

The sought-after school, half a mile from the Pacific Ocean, admitted 1,460 fewer California residents this year to accept higher-paying students from out-of-state, many from China.

“I was shocked,” said Park, who also was rejected from four other UC schools, including the top-ranked campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles, even with a 4.0 grade-point average and an SAT score above the UC San Diego average. “I took it terribly. I felt like I was doing well and I failed.”

The University of California system, rocked by budget cuts, is enrolling record numbers of out-of-state and international students, who pay almost twice that of in-state residents. Among those being squeezed out: high-achieving Asian-Americans, many of them children of immigrants, who for decades flocked to the state’s elite public colleges to move up the economic ladder.

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(ABC News) A senator is calling on the Defense Department to conduct a system-wide review of alleged hazing incidents in the military, after eight soldiers in Afghanistan were charged in connection with the death of Army Pvt. Danny Chen, who apparently committed suicide in October.

Chen had told family and friends that he was the target of persistent racial taunts and abusive treatment by his comrades in arms.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, requested the investigation due to concern that Chen's death is a reflection of a larger problem of military hazing.

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(Kansas City Star) The Army filed charges Wednesday against eight Alaska-based soldiers in the death of a 19-year-old Army private, in a sign that the military is investigating whether racial harassment could have led him to commit suicide.

Pvt. Danny Chen's body was found in a guard tower in Afghanistan's Kandahar province in October, two months into his deployment. The New York native died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, but Chen's family and the Chinese-American community pressed the military to explain what led Chen to kill himself. The New York Times later reported that investigators had told Chen's family that superiors had abused him and taunted him with ethnic slurs.

"There was some serious misconduct in this situation," said Jacinta Ma, the deputy director of the Asian American Justice Center, who was part of a group of Asian-American organizations that met with Pentagon officials this month on behalf of Chen's family to discuss their concerns that Chen's case is not an isolated incident.

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