EthnicMajority

(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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(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 Chicago) Will graphic new warning labels on cigarette packs help stem the rising number of Asian-Americans who are picking up the habit?

The Food and Drug Administration just released new cigarette warning labels which feature graphic pictures of the dangers of tobacco use.

In large immigrant communities, like Chinatown, smoking rates are well above the national average. Many smokers began their habit in Asian countries where smoking is more common, and because of language and cultural barriers, they find it difficult to find the support needed to quit.

They are illegal to sell in the United States, but that hasn’t kept Chinese cigarettes emblazoned with the symbol for good fortune from finding a large market in Chicago’s Chinatown. It’s part of the uphill battle faced by anti-smoking groups in that neighborhood.

“Our population is more socially isolated in an ethnic enclave. And so they don’t receive health messages through the mainstream media,” said Meme Wang, Asian Health Coalition.

A recent study commissioned by the Asian Health Coalition found that one in three men in Chinatown smokes, well above rates for Chicago and the nation.

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(Los Angeles Times) Two Korean Americans were in jail Thursday, two others were released on bail and two more were being sought in connection with the robbery and assault of a Chinese American man in Diamond Bar in what authorities described as a hate crime.

The Feb. 6 incident began when the 25-year-old victim placed an order for takeout at a Korean restaurant in the 18300 block of East Colima Road in Rowland Heights, said Sgt. Steven Kim of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Asian Gang Team.

A group of seven Korean American men were eating inside the restaurant when one of them approached the victim, whose name was not released, and asked if he was Korean. He responded that he was Chinese and shortly after received his order and left the restaurant.

The man who had approached the victim followed him outside, accompanied by five other men. Once outside, the suspects began beating the victim with their hands and feet “for no apparent reason,” Kim said.

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(AFP) More than a century after the United States shut its doors to Chinese immigrants, Asian American lawmakers are seeking an official apology that they hope will serve as a lesson for future generations.

Approved by Congress in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act banned immigration by Chinese workers and their naturalization as US citizens, marking the first time the United States explicitly closed itself to a particular nationality.

Census figures show that more than 100,000 ethnic Chinese were living in the United States at the end of the 19th century. Many had been recruited to build the transcontinental railroad, but faced racism from white workers.

Representative Judy Chu, a Chinese American who took over this month as the new chair of the Asian American caucus in Congress, said that legislation offering an apology for the act would be a key priority.

Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 during World War II after Japan highlighted the law in propaganda questioning China’s alliance with the United States.

But apology advocates note that the US government has never voiced regret.

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(Bloomberg.com) Li Na will try to add a Grand Slam singles title to her list of tennis firsts for China in today’s Australian Open women’s final against Kim Clijsters.

Li, the 28-year-old ninth seed, takes an 11-match winning run into the championship match at Melbourne Park. She beat Clijsters in Sydney two weeks ago to become the only Chinese player to win a first-tier event on the women’s tour.

“I beat her last time,” Li, who was introduced to tennis at age 9 after playing badminton for two years, said in a news conference. “Doesn’t mean anything in here. I know it’s a tough match.”

While Chinese women have won Olympic gold medals and Grand Slam titles in doubles, individual bests at the majors have been limited to semifinal appearances, including Li’s run alongside Zheng Jie to the last four in Melbourne a year ago.

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(International Business Times) The Asian-American community is demanding an apology from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, for mockingly imitating Chinese President Hu Jintao during the Jan. 19 segment of his talk show.

During his talk show, Limbaugh said, “He (Jintao) was speaking and they weren’t translating [during a speech given by Jintao at the White House earlier last week]. They normally translate every couple of words. Hu Jintao was just going ‘ching chong, ching chong cha.’” The demands for an apology are being led by California Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat, who viewed Limbaugh’s mockery of Jintao as racist and derogatory against the Chinese people.

In recent days, Yee has rallied civil rights groups in a boycott of companies like Pro Flowers, Sleep Train and Domino’s Pizza that advertise on Limbaugh’s national talk radio show.

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(AsianWeek) On January 8, Yale professor and writer Amy Chua published an article entitled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” in The Wall Street Journal. It caused what has been called “a firestorm of controversy“.

Chua’s article has brought an important issue to light, though I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the scathing comments I’ve read so far. I haven’t read all of them (3397 comments at the writing of this).

The important issue is: What’s the point of all this achievement anyways?

In my shifting through standardized test data during my doctoral years, I noticed pretty consistently that Asian Americans tended to outscore their peers. This is even true when they’re compared to White students, who they either score close to or higher than. Apparently, this trend continues as seen in College Board’s Total Group Profile Report for the 2009 SATs. (To be fair, it should be taken into account that API make up only 5% of the nation, so there’s naturally a smaller sample size.) I’m not familiar with classical music performance statistics of Asian Americans compared to their peers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if similar results were found. Although I attended high school in a very diverse neighborhood, with almost equal amounts of Hispanic, White, and Asian students, the most advanced classes were always filled with Asian Americans. I think we had eight valedictorians in my graduating high school class, all of Asian heritage. I think it is evidence such as these, both statistical and anecdotal, that have lead people like Chua to think that Chinese American parents or Asian American parents in general are “better parents” since they produce more “successful children”.

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(Wall Street Journal) A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.

I’m using the term “Chinese mother” loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I’m also using the term “Western parents” loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.

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(Contra Costa Times) As he sailed on a ferry to Angel Island State Park last week, clad in the hooded, brown robe of a Franciscan friar, the Rev. Franklin Fong imagined his ancestors who landed on the island some 80 years ago.

“It takes every generation of native-born folks to recognize, you know, there’s something to learn from our own history,” Fong said. “Because if we don’t know our history, we’re destined to repeat it.”

The friar at Oakland’s St. Elizabeth Catholic Church was one of about 350 people, nearly all of them Chinese-Americans, who took a pilgrimage Saturday to the island’s old immigration station. They prayed, shared stories and sought to make connections between the plight of Asian immigrants who faced discrimination a century ago and the challenges faced by newcomers today.

“I think the challenges are very similar,” Fong said. “Obviously, the time is different. The circumstances are different. The nations providing the immigrants are different, but in many ways we have the same fears, the same anxieties about why these people are coming and what are we going to do about them.”

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