Families of two Broward servicemen killed in Afghanistan last week spent their weekend in mourning

By Kevin Deutsch
©2005 Miami Herald
July 4, 2005

James Erik Suh always wanted to be a Navy SEAL.

Growing up in Deerfield Beach, he sharpened his mind and bolstered his body, preparing for the rigorous mental and physical training he would face in the elite military squad. Suh's skills eventually got him into the SEALS. But on a dangerous mission in Afghanistan last week, they were not enough to save him.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Suh, 28, and Army Sgt. Kip Jacoby, 21, of Pompano Beach, were among 16 U.S. troops killed during an air mission to assist a special operations team missing in Afghanistan's mountains last week. The reinforcement troops were in a MH-47, a version of the twin-rotor Chinook helicopter, which was shot down by an enemy rocket-propelled grenade June 28.

The families of Suh and Jacoby mourned their loss over the weekend.

A Profile of Gordon Quan

For "Searching for Asian America"
©2004 National Asian American Telecommunications Association

Council Member Gordon Quan grew up in Houston's East End, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. After working as a teacher in an inner-city school, Quan became an attorney and practised immigration law for twenty years. His political career officially took off when he was elected to the Houston City Council in 2000. Quan was later unanimously approved by the Council to serve as Mayor Pro-Tem in 2002.

Born in China, Raised in Texas

I was born in mainland China, near Guangzhou, southern China. My parents are both U.S. citizens, actually, and my father had served in the U.S. army in Germany in World War II. My mother was born in Georgia, her family had a grocery store there. They were married in San Antonio, Texas but then returned to China after World War II. My father was studying under the GI Bill, and that's why I was born in China.

NEW YORK -- A street in New York's Chinatown was renamed "Zhe Zack Zeng Way" on Saturday in honor of Zack Zeng, a Chinese American who sacrificed his life to rescue other victims during the Sept. 11 terror attack in 2001.

At a renaming ceremony in an intersection of Chinatown, New York City Council member Allan Gerson said the street renaming creates a visible tribute that will remind younger generations the years of the inspiring heroism and humanity displayed by so many New Yorkers and exemplified by the brave actions of Zeng on Sept. 11, 2001.

George Ow Sr. almost didn't make it back to America. After his parents put him on the USS President Hoover in Hong Kong in 1937, Chinese pilots near Shanghai mistook the ocean liner for a Japanese troop ship and bombed it.

Only one person was killed, and the ship received only minor damage, but it had "to limp into San Francisco," Ow later told Santa Cruz historian Geoffrey Dunn.

Once in America, which Chinese immigrants then called the Golden Mountain, Ow reached the top. He rose from being a virtual orphan to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs and biggest philanthropists in Santa Cruz County.

Ow died at his Scotts Valley home July 26 at age 85. He left behind a multigenerational business family that has pumped money into the arts, health projects and hundreds of scholarships for the sons and daughters of farmworkers and other disadvantaged groups.

When the Japanese American Citizens League was born 75 years ago, the citizenship picture for Japanese-Americans was bleak, and growing worse each year.

"Let's go back to Pearl Harbor," said John Tateishi, executive director of the league, speaking by phone from its San Francisco headquarters. "By 1941 there were in California over 100 bills or statutes that discriminated very openly against Japanese-Americans.

"Chief among them were the alien land laws and the federal law that prohibited any Japanese immigrant from becoming an American citizen."

Times, of course, have radically changed. The JACL, which tomorrow will convene its national convention in Honolulu, has seen prospects improve immeasurably for its core members, who are practicing citizenship at respected echelons. The keynote speaker at the event's closing banquet on Saturday, for example, will be Norman Mineta, the nation's transportation secretary.

By Andrew Li-ren Wang
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 31, 2002

As a journalist, author, and activist, Helen Zia has been an influential voice for pan-Asian unity and political empowerment. She has also been an outspoken feminist and supporter of equal rights for gays and lesbians, many times finding herself at the confluence of race, gender, and sexual orientation issues. In her career she has repeatedly made the cause of disenfranchised people her own and told stories to the world.

Ms. Zia was born in New Jersey in 1952, the daughter of immigrants from Shanghai. At the time, there were less than 150,000 Chinese Americans in the country, most of whom were concentrated on the West Coast. As a child, she was proud of her heritage, though admittedly, she had little concept of the meaning of being Chinese in America. Her sense of cultural self-identity was fundamentally shaped by a society filled with stereotypical caricatures of Asians, in which any discussion of race was limited to black and white and the term "Asian American" had not yet been coined.

By Takei Okidata
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 1, 2002

Ms. Courtni Sunjoo Pugh has been a dynamic leader and campaign organizer for over a decade. Currently she is serving as the Coordinated Campaign Director in the new Congressional District (NV03) in Las Vegas, Nevada, which includes the Democratic Candidate for the 3rd Congressional District, Dario Herrera, Chairman of the Board of Clark County Commissioners.

Pugh has also recently joined Targeted Communications as a political consultant as well as mCapitol Management (mCM), Inc. as a Manager of Government Relations.

At Targeted Communications, Pugh assists in national marketing and political strategy. Targeted Communications is a growing Latino-owned communications firms based in Los Angeles, California.

mCM is a respected, results-driven government and business consulting firm that meets client’s needs through and unrivaled network of government leaders and key decision makers. As Manager of Government Relations, Pugh assists in professional strategy, lobbying and government relations services for for mCM in the public and private sector.

By Andrew Li-ren Wang
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 20, 2002

The career of Phil Tajitsu Nash is proof-positive that many roads can lead to the same destination. He is guided by a deeply held belief in social justice, a philosophy he has parlayed into a diverse career as a lawyer, lobbyist, activist, columnist, professor, and political strategist.

Mr. Nash was born in New York City in 1956 and at an early age moved to Maywood, New Jersey, where he grew up. His father, a 13th-generation Irish-English American, was a teacher whose forebears had founded the city of New Haven, Connecticut. His mother, a second-generation Japanese American whose family had experienced firsthand the hardship of internment, was a teacher and a nurse. From early childhood, they taught Phil and his siblings to cherish both Asian and European cultures and to understand that both heritages were part of a larger, eclectic American culture. They also instilled in their children an appreciation of the diversity of American people. Mr. Nash recalls that as a youngster his parents drove him to nearby Hackensack, New Jersey to swim at a pool with African American and Latino children so that he would interact with children from different backgrounds. It was in this diverse environment of Northern New Jersey that Mr. Nash's sense of social awareness first took root.

By Andrew Li-ren Wang
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 20, 2002

Don T. Nakanishi is the Director and a Professor of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. A political scientist by training (BA, Yale, 1971; PhD, Harvard, 1978, both in political science) he is the author of over 80 books, articles, and reports on the political participation of Asian Pacific Americans and other ethnic and racial groups in American politics; educational policy research; and the international political dimensions of minority experiences.

Among his most well-known publications is the National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac, which he started in 1978, and now co-edits with Professor James Lai of Santa Clara University.

Professor Nakanishi has received numerous awards for his scholarly achievements and public service, and is a highly sought out speaker. He has been a member of the board of directors for numerous national and local organizations, including the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, Board of Governors of the Association of Yale Alumni, Harvard University Graduate Alumni Council, Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, Japanese American National Museum, and Altamed Health Care Services of East Los Angeles.

By Andrew Li-ren Wang
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 4, 2002

As executive director of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA), Jose Montano encourages the civic and political empowerment of Filipino Americans, while convincing the political establishment of the importance and relevance of Filipino American issues.

Mr. Montano was born in 1968 during his father's tenure as a White House steward in the later years of the Johnson administration. As a child, he moved with his family to Norfolk, Virginia, the center of a sizable Filipino American population. After high school, Mr. Montano took a non-traditional path in earning a degree in political science from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., working along the way to fund his education. After graduation in 2000, he was instrumental to the success of a NaFFAA voter registration drive aimed at registering Filipino Americans in the D.C. metropolitan area. In December 2000, he became the national executive director at NaFFAA's Washington office, taking over for Jon Melegrito.

Mr. Montano describes NaFFAA as both a clearinghouse for information and news regarding the Filipino American community and as an advocacy group for Filipinos and Filipino Americans. NaFFAA's goals include the following: promoting civic and political participation of Filipino Americans; increasing awareness of the economic, social, and cultural contributions of Filipino Americans to the United States; ensuring social justice, fair treatment, and equal rights for Filipino Americans; strengthening Filipino American communities; and eliminating prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination against Filipino Americans.

By Jeanhee Hong
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 29, 2002

Pei-te Lien, one of the nation’s leading scholars on Asian American studies, is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah.

She began teaching at the University in 1995 and along with Political Science courses like Asian American Politics and American Racial and Ethnic Politics, regularly teaches Ethnic Studies courses, such as Contemporary Asian American Issues. Lien is particularly interested in analyzing the political behavior of Asian Americans and has written two significant books and several scholarly articles on the topic.

By Takei Okidata
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 1, 2002

For more than fifteen years, Daphne Kwok has been at the forefront of advocacy for the Asian Pacific American community. In April 2001, Ms. Kwok became the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational organization seeking to build a politically empowered Asian Pacific American (APA) community, to fill the political pipeline with APAs to enter and advance into elected office, and to be a resource about the APA community.

From 1990 to 2001, Ms. Kwok served as the Executive Director of the Organization of Chinese Americans, Inc. (OCA), a non-profit, civil rights organization. Her responsibilities included coordinating programs and services for 45 chapters, 37 college affiliates and representing over 10,000 members; monitoring issues pertaining to the Asian American community, e.g. Hate Crime, Campaign Finance Reform, Legal Immigration Reform, Census 2000, English-only, affirmative action.

Daphne Kwok testifies before Congress Ms. Kwok has testified before the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus on the impact of federal counter-intelligence and security investigations at the Department of Energy on Asian Pacific Americans, 1999. She has also testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the civil rights implications in the treatment of Asian Pacific Americans during the campaign finance controversy, 1997.

By Takei Okidata
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 3, 2002

Margaret Fung is Executive Director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a New York-based organization founded in 1974 to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans through litigation, advocacy and community education. She graduated from Barnard College and received her law degree from New York University Law School, where she was a member of the NYU Law Review, an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow and a Root-Tilden Scholar. Fung received an honorary LL.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Law School in 1997.

ARLINGTON, VA.  – The senior-ranking Defense Department civilian of Asian descent used the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal to shed positive light on a fellow Asian-Pacific American during a speech here May 10.

David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, pointed out that Asian-Pacific Americans serve in all sorts of positions in today's armed forces, including some of the most senior positions in the military. "That includes Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who has written a decisive report on the terrible issue of abuse of Iraqi prisoners," he noted.

Chu recounted how Taguba was born outside Manila in the Philippines and came to Hawaii when he was 11 years old. Taguba's father was a sergeant in the Army. After graduating from Idaho State University, the younger Taguba became an Army officer and rose to his present position as deputy commanding general for support, Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Iraq, Chu said. Taguba, the second-highest ranking Filipino-American officer in the Army, testified May 11 on his report about the prison abuse before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Chu talked about other Asian-Pacific Americans serving in the nation's armed forces and DoD's civilian workforce. He told nearly 900 participants at the third annual Asian Pacific American Federal Career Advancement Summit that this contrasts to the earlier periods in U.S. history when "Asian-Pacific Americans were not allowed to serve" in the military or defense civilian work force.

He noted that when World War II broke out, large numbers of Japanese Americans were interned. "It wasn't until 1943 that the units in Hawaii were formed and Japanese Americans were allowed to join the armed forces," Chu said.

WASHINGTON — Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, author of the searing report on U.S. mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners near Baghdad, grew up in racially diverse Hawaii, where he learned early in life that ethnicity need not be a barrier to success.

"Hawaii opened my mind to the capabilities and opportunity in America," Taguba told the publication AsianWeek in 1997, when he became the second Filipino American to attain the rank of brigadier general.

Now one of the Army's top Asian Americans, the 53-year-old Taguba was serving in the low-profile post of deputy commanding general of the 3rd Army when allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison began working their way up the military chain of command. The 3rd Army's area of responsibility extends from East Africa through the Middle East and into south-central Asia and includes Iraq and Afghanistan, countries in which prisoner abuse is being investigated.

Transcript
Hearing Before Senate Armed Services Committee
February 25, 2003

SEN. LEVIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?

GEN. ERIC K. SHINSEKI: In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements.  But I think --

SEN. LEVIN: How about a range?

GEN. SHINSEKI: I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.  We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.

Like many employees of big corporations, Kei Sugaoka's frustration and disillusionment with his employer -- in his case, General Electric Co. -- grew over the years.

But unlike many other unhappy employees, Sugaoka, a 51-year-old Martinez resident laid off in 1998 from his job as a senior field engineer, carefully preserved in his memory and on his computer hard drive a detailed record of letters he wrote, incidents he observed and events that occurred during his career.

Hurt and angered by his sacking, Sugaoka set out to make a case against his former employer. He sifted through a haystack of records accumulated during his more than two decades at GE. Eventually, he found a needle that would wreak havoc on one major GE customer, although it would barely scratch GE itself.

Sugaoka acted in late June 2000. He sent Japanese nuclear regulators a copy of a report on a 1989 reactor inspection and a letter alleging that regulators had been kept in the dark about a serious maintenance problem found then.

At first, nothing happened. But eventually, Sugaoka's charge triggered a chain of enforcement actions, economic reactions and public outrage that shook Japan's largest electric utility and prompted extensive reform in that nation's nuclear industry.

For the 34-year-old Korean-American, Kang Joon, what irritates him the most is not the fact that he has to serve in the nation's military after having lived in the United States for more than 25 years. What really bothers him is that he is now stuck with a janitor's job despite being a recipient of the prestigious National Defense Medal, an award he was given for his service in the U.S. Air Force during the first Gulf War.

Kang and his family moved to the U.S. in 1976 and he served in the U.S. armed forces from 1991 through 1993. "I mean I didn't do it (serve in the U.S. military) just for the U.S. I also did it for Korea," Kang said during an interview with The Korea Times on Friday.

"My father was a Korean War veteran and I knew the U.S. and other allies helped his country during the war. So I wanted to serve one of its allies because I thought I would never serve in the Korean army," he said.

Kang came back to live in his motherland when he was 32 years old after both his parents passed away in the U.S. "I knew any male had to serve in the military (in Korea), but I thought the age limit was 32. My pastor also told me that I'd be exempt from the Korean military service because I served in the U.S. military," Kang said.

However, when Kang tried to apply for his citizen's registration card, he found out that he was still required to serve out his mandatory two years as the Defense Ministry had changed their age limit to 35 a few years ago.

Many were drafted into the U.S. armed services while still in high school, during a time when their families were suffering job and housing discrimination in the United States.

But Chinese-American veterans of World War II, who held a reunion here last month, say they are not bitter.

The 90 veterans, ages 75 and up, filled musty green rooms within the USS Hornet with chatter as they toured the ship and shared war stories. It was the first time many had been aboard the decommissioned 894-foot Navy aircraft carrier.

The ship, now a museum docked at Alameda Point, has one thing in common with the veterans. It too is a World War II survivor.

More than 13,000 Chinese-American men served with U.S. forces during World War II, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Of those, 75 percent were in the U.S. Army, and 25 percent in the Army Air Force.

About 80 people used to attend meetings of the Association of Filipino Veterans of Orange County, but 25 is a good turnout these days. Memorial Day has become an increasingly significant holiday for these veterans, whose losses mount each year.

Only 50,000 of an estimated 400,000 Filipino World War II veterans survive. But demoralization, as much as time, has taken a heavy toll because natives of the former American colony who fought with the U.S. Army are still not eligible for the same benefits as other World War II veterans.

"We did everything the same as the people in the U.S. Army," said Fortunato C. Rivera, 79, founder of the local Filipino Veterans Association, who served as a corporal with the 14th Infantry Regiment, a guerrilla unit organized on American orders to resist the Japanese from 1942 to 1945.

Editor's Note:  Yuri Kochiyama turns 82 today. 

See also: Marching in Step with Dr. King

By Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson
A. Magazine
December 1, 1994

One of the earliest memories I have of my grandmother was Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1978. I was six years old and she took me along to a demonstration she was attending. On the train ride downtown, she explained to me that we were going to the Riverside Research Institute, a "think tank" for building weapons, including nuclear ones. This was the place where they made the bombs they used against the people of Vietnam. This was a place in which they thought up new ways to kill people. Despite my youth, I understood the importance of the cause.

Duties of this two-man crew will differ greatly from those of its three-member predecessors: as a result of the grounding of the American shuttle fleet after the loss of the Columbia on Feb. 1, space station building has come to a halt and normal supply lines are choked. The new crew will have less time for research and will have to pay extra attention to food, water and other consumables, which are in increasingly short supply without regular shuttle visits.

Dr. Edward T. Lu, the American half of the team, said the conservation efforts would make the mission more interesting and encourage the crew to be more imaginative. "We're going to probably have to improvise, with help from the ground, quite a lot more than other crews have done," he said in a preflight interview. "And I think that's going to make it much more challenging."

Yuri Kochiyama with her late husband Bill. Mr. Kochiyama dedicated his life to supporting his family and his wife's activist efforts.

Of all the afflictions that plague Yuri Kochiyama in her old age, only one bothers her enough to warrant a mention. "I can remember something from fifty years ago," she said, "but not what I did yesterday."

In typical Yuri fashion, this is not so much a complaint as an observation. She said this while searching for a stack of leaflets, anxiously sifting through the copious sheaves of paper, newspaper articles, and letters that crowd her tiny studio apartment. Piles of paper have settled permanently everywhere: on bookshelves and a desk, a pair of stools, and the floor -- even the twin-sized bed. Yuri doesn't remove them when she sleeps; she just curls up next to them.

The leaflets advertise a "speak out" taking place at the West Oakland library, and sponsored in part by the People's Resistance Against US Terrorism, a group that Yuri belongs to. Up for discussion are racial profiling, the curtailing of civil liberties, and the impact of the war upon those already in jail.

Mary Anne Foo's parents taught her to be a political activist because they suffered the sting of discrimination.

Her father worked in a grocery after college because, in the 1950s, Chinese-Americans couldn't get government jobs in his hometown of Marysville, where his family had lived since the 1860s.

Foo's mother spent three years during World War II in a Colorado internment camp for Japanese-Americans.

Foo suffered her share of indignities growing up in Marysville, a farm town north of Sacramento.

WASHINGTON -- When two-year-old Krishan Chaudhary is tucked under the covers, his bedtime stories are often read by his father--on video. "Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar are some of his favorites," said his mother Uma, as her husband Ravi, a captain in the United States Air Force posted at the Charleston Air Force Base, waited anxiously by the phone for orders to deploy.

The videotape is part of an "emergency packet" the couple put in place in anticipation of the long periods of separation. The video collection includes Ravi reading Krishan's favorite books, singing his favorite songs or just talking to him.

"War [with Iraq] isn't looming. It has been ongoing the second that first aircraft hit the World Trade Center," Capt. Chaudhary, a C-17 pilot, told India-West before the war was launched last week. "The day that (Sept. 11) happened, I sat down with Uma and Krishan and let them know that things were going to change for a little while and that this might be the biggest challenge our family may ever have to face."

"Yama ... Yama ... Ya-ma-shita. What the hell is that?" yelled one of his drill sergeants during the first roll call of Marine Corps Officer Candidate School.

The Hawaii-born sansei - a third-generation Japanese American - dismissed the remark as part of the "controlled stress" that comes with the territory in the Marine Corps. Like the glossy recruitment catalog read: " . . . make or break. Go or no go. It's where you ... and we ... find out if you've got what it takes to be an officer of Marines."