I have a confession to make: I am a lousy model minority. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the majority isn't going to want me as the model for any minority, let alone my own people.

Unlike the mythical model minority, I am not quiet and polite. I am often loud, sometimes abrasive and I use the F-word a lot. (My mother doesn't read anything on the Internet, so I don't have to worry about repercussions from that last confession.) My math skills are only average. I do not own a calculator with a graphing function.

If I'm a lousy model minority, I'm an even lousier stereotypical Asian woman. The geisha and the "China doll" are deferential, obedient and demure. Me? I don’t own a kimono. I can’t bat my eyes. I cut off all my silky, ink-black hair because I got sick of people touching it. (Don’t touch my HAIR!) I even enjoy drinking beer out of the bottle and listening to loud rock music.

By Sarah Wolper
© 2007 BoUNCe Magazine
September 2007

The 9th annual Multicultural Awareness Fair, held last week in the Student Union, was deemed a great success by all in attendance, despite the fact that next to no multicultural awareness actually resulted from the event. Much delicious food, however, was consumed.

“Mmph. Oh god, these are soooo good,” said sophomore Janice Corrigan, as she devoured a samosa at the Indian Student Association table. “I don’t know what’s in these or how you people make them, but wow.”

Corrigan did not take a pamphlet on the upcoming Indian cultural festivals on campus, although she did take a fourth samosa and a plate of saffron rice.

Carl Bell was waiting his turn to check in at his hotel. A well-regarded psychiatrist and academic, he was traveling for a television appearance. The TV station had flown him first-class and sent a chauffeur-driven car to pick him up at the airport. But just before he stepped up to speak with the hotel clerk, a white man marched in and cut him off. Bell, who is black, was indignant.

“Do you think I’m waiting for a bus?” He demanded. “I’m standing right here!”

The man claimed he simply hadn’t seen him.

Routine, even subtle, racial discrimination places significant mental stress on minorities that may provoke the development of chronic illness, new research suggests.

The finding is based on perceptions of discrimination and health histories elicited from Asian-Americans across the United States.

"Post-civil rights, most people think of discrimination as the commitment of a hate crime. But I think it's important to realize that discrimination occurs on a daily basis," said study lead author Gilbert C. Gee, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "And what the research is showing is that everyday slights can turn into long-term health effects."

Being Asian and American is often a complex balancing act.

The challenge for millions of people is managing to assimilate into American society while maintaining the principles of cultural heritage.

About 13.5 million U.S. residents say they are Asian or a combination of another race and Asian, according to a 2004 census report. The number represents 4.7 percent of American households.

The 1990 census counted 6.9 million Asians.

The demographic includes dozens of ethnic groups, languages, religions, customs and origins from across the globe, stretching from Japan and China to Pakistan and India. Academic observers and community members say the diversity within the group is so rich and disparate, it seems folly to treat it as a single bloc.

Pastors aren't being prepared to handle congregational conflicts over cultural and generational issues, experts say

Asian American churches are going through a "crisis of leadership" because seminaries are not preparing a new generation of pastors to work in multi-generational and multicultural settings, Asian American Christian leaders say.

The problem, the leaders say, affects churches throughout the country but is particularly pronounced in California.

[Editor's Note: A recent study by five Columbia University researchers led by Professor Derald Wing Sue identified the following eight common themes that arose in Asian Americans' lived experiences of race.]

Theme 1: Alien in Own Land

This theme emerges from both focus groups and can be described as a microaggression which embodies the assumption that all Asian Americans are foreigners or foreign-born. An example of this theme was universally voiced by Asian Americans of all ethnicities and manifested in questions or remarks like “Where are you from?” “Where were you born?” or “You speak good English.”

In his popular 1881 guide to home decorating, Clarence Cook praised “Oriental” furniture and ornaments as the perfect way to garnish the average American home. He admired the “handsome” Eastern rugs, “picturesque” Chinese bamboo chairs and the Japanese art, furniture, scrolls and fans that were “so perfect for decoration.”

The 1800s and early 1900s—despite the mounting anti-Asian sentiment at the time—illustrates an era when everyone in America was screaming for Chinoiserie and Japonisme.

Fast-forward to the new millennium.

Enter chow mein, sushi, herbal medicines, Chinese tattoos, feng shui, Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan and, of course, Pikachu.

The fascination for things Asian is just as fervent today as it was a century ago. America’s commercial culture has ensured as much through clever marketing strategies. But when hip-hop artists and NBA players flash Chinese tattoos on their bodies and Madonna takes on a Hindu façade to create a fashion statement and the cast of the “Matrix” embraces kung fu techniques for survival, what does it mean for the Asian-American community?

FARMERS BRANCH -- After a CBS 11 News exclusive, the Farmers Branch Police Chief has been suspended without pay for ten days, and will be required to go into counseling.

The action comes after the chief admitted to making insensitive and inappropriate remarks regarding a Vietnamese police recruit.

In his 32 years with the City of Farmers Branch, 15 as chief, Jimmy Fawcett has had a spotless record. But it now has the stain of an "unpaid suspension" and "mandatory counseling".

Ever since September 11, but especially after the London subway bombings, I have been getting "the look" on public transportation and at airports. To put it mildly, my days of picking up girls on a plane are over. Even getting up to piss on a plane causes at least one lady to piss herself. It's like a chain reaction.

It's strange for me to get these looks since I was born in this country, have lived the American dream, hang out with very few other brown-skinned folk, and often forget that I'm not white (you know, American). I'm proud of my background/culture, but I'm American first and only.

Is it a coincidence that no one else is sitting near us? Is it an accident that he's pushed out his corporate ID card so that it's clearly visible over his jacket, hanging like the open page of a passport?

Public transport can be a world of unspoken signals and gestures - but am I right in thinking that he looks self-conscious, sometimes burying his face in his arms as though asleep?

White racism enforces white supremacy. White supremacy is a system of order and a way of perceiving reality. Its purpose is to keep whites on top and set them free. Colored minorities in white reality are stereotypes. Each racial stereotype comes in two models, the acceptable and the unacceptable. The hostile black stud has his acceptable counterpart in the form of Stepin Fetchit. For the savage, kill-crazy Geronimo, there is Tonto and the Hollywood version of Cochise. For the mad dog General Santa Ana there's the Cisco Kid and Pancho. For Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, there is Charlie Chan and his Number One Son. The unacceptable model is unacceptable because he cannot be controlled by whites. The acceptable model is acceptable because he is tractable. There is racist hate and racist love.

SAN FRANCISCO - Chinese immigrant workers marched through the streets of downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, shouting slogans and waving signs to protest the loss of garment jobs they say are being shipped to China. More than 120 employees of San Francisco-based apparel maker Nova Knits Inc. claim they were laid off last month without notice, severance pay or benefits in violation of state labor laws. The workers - mostly middle-aged Chinese women who speak little English - believe their jobs are being sent to China, the world's largest clothing manufacturer.

"We believe they continue to have business, but they plan to outsource it overseas," said protest organizer Leon Chow, who heads the Chinese Progressive Association. "All the workers ask for is a little respect."

Life is not always pleasant when living in the U.S. as a teenager, especially if you're Chinese. Last school year I experienced many difficulties, although homework had never bothered me, but when I was out in society problems started to show.

When I moved to my new house last Thanksgiving the teenagers were very nice to me so knowing them wasn't bad. The community was nice, the adults looked well educated, so I thought that the teenagers must be pretty smart and do good in school. But it turned out that I misjudged it and after three months my neighbors started picking on and laughing at me.

New York City's Pakistani Americans tended to experience greater poverty, earn less, speak less English and live in larger households than city residents as a whole, according to a 2000 census analysis by the Asian American Federation of New York.

The Federation, a nonprofit organization, released results of its evaluation December 1 in the latest in a series of ethnic and geographic profiles to deepen understanding of Asian American populations in the New York metropolitan area.

"Our profile of New York City's Pakistani American population provides an important snapshot of an immigrant group facing severe poverty and language challenges," said Cao K. O, executive director of the Asian American Federation.

Clergy of Color Help Expand Horizons of White Churches

Whenever he closed his eyes and listened, the Rev. Gerard A. Green Jr. was reminded that he was a black pastor leading a predominantly white church.

No one said "Amen" aloud during the sermons. The choir sang without clapping. And after the services, there were whispers among the parishioners of Epworth United Methodist Church in Gaithersburg: Why did their new pastor need to raise his voice and gesture to make his points?

Korean-American and Vietnamese-American women, who have high rates of cervical cancer, are less likely to be screened for the disease, according to two studies in Santa Clara County funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The recently released studies shed light on several aspects of Asian-American health, focusing on specific groups in Santa Clara County and other locations nationwide. Researchers say lumping all Asians together gives an inaccurate picture.

"When you average all the groups together, you lose the ability to identify the higher-risk groups," said Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, a researcher involved in the study looking at the overall health of Vietnamese-Americans in Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Clara counties, as well as Cambodians in Massachusetts.

A formerly taboo topic among Asian-Americans and Latinos comes out into the open as skin tone consciousness sparks a backlash

By Vanessa E. Jones
©2004 The Boston Globe
August 19, 2004

Whether you call it "colorism" or the "color complex," the politics of skin tone play an active role in the African-American community. The groundbreaking 1992 book "The Color Complex" brought the phenomenon of favoritism toward light-skinned blacks into the mainstream. It traced its origins to America's slave-holding past, when white masters mated with their African slaves. But colorism's grip on society continues into the 21st century. You see it in the honey-colored hootchies who reign in R&B; and hip-hop videos. You see it in the faces of golden-toned celebrities -- Halle Berry, Queen Latifah, and Beyonce -- whom major cosmetic companies hire to endorse their products.

What you hear less about is how the color complex threads through the Asian-American and Latino communities. In these worlds, elders caution children to stay out of the sun so they don't get too tan. The ideal spouse is often pale. These sentiments are the vestiges of home countries where skin color has everything to do with perceptions of class and wealth.

A former lieutenant governor, the president of a national cable channel, the person who introduced frozen pizza to the Japanese, and a Zen Buddhist priest all agree on one thing: Women can and should be as successful as they want to be.

The four Asian Americans are examples of people who have overcome the challenges of being minority women to achieve personal and professional success.

It sounds like a bad joke: a Chinese man turned down for a job in a Chinese country by a Chinese because he looked Chinese. But PNS commentator Tony Shen finds that the idea that an American is a white person prevails in Taiwan much as it does in Kansas City -- with unhappy effects in all places.

"We don't hire people who look Chinese," was the first thing she said.

I had prepared myself for the usual job interview queries like "Tell me about your relevant experience," and "Why do you want to work for us?"

This, the fastest interview of my life, did not take place in a small Louisiana town in 1930, but in 1997 in a city of more than a million in Taiwan.

Not only was I summarily denied employment because of my race, a Chinese had denied me (a Chinese-American) a job in a Chinese country because I looked Chinese.

Jennifer Hochschild, a Harvard professor of government and Afro-American studies believes that skin color, rather than race, may be a better indicator of status in the United States.

In a talk May 6th 2003 at Stanford University entitled "The Politics and Morality of a Skin Tone Ordering," Hochschild's "strong" hypothesis was, in her words, that across races "the darker a person's skin color, the lower he or she is likely to be on any scale of whatever is broadly perceived to be desirable in the United States."

In other words, in America, one is still better off as a dark-skinned Hispanic than as an African American. And within these minority groups the less dark-skinned you are, the better off you are socially.

It is the kind of American success story we like to celebrate.

An enterprising immigrant -- a professional musician in another life and world -- arrives from China and starts a small business, using vans to drive his fellow immigrants to their jobs in New York City. Business booms. Pretty soon Pei Lin Liang is running cut-rate, no-frills bus service between Boston and New York. The appeal could not be simpler: $10 one way.

The customers love it -- and not just Asians, but anyone looking to save a buck, particularly the young. What Southwest Airlines did to the economics of air fares, Liang's little bus line, Fung Wah Bus, is now doing to the established order of the I-95 bus business. And in an era of overpaid chief executives, Liang, who speaks little English and lives in New York, still drives a bus regularly.

The People's Bus is one great story, but this, of course, is Boston. Here the powers that be have harassed Liang and his company at every turn. The City of Boston has issued $11,000 in tickets to Fung Wah since March. State regulators, prodded by the deep-pocketed competitors, are turning up the heat. Those competitors, Peter Pan and Greyhound, have sued Fung Wah. And its insurer, Hanover Insurance, has moved to cancel its insurance. Welcome to Boston, Pei Lin Liang.

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) - Asians are projected to be the fastest-growing major population category over the next half-century, outpacing blacks, whites and Hispanics. Recent Census Bureau projections show the Asian population could grow by a third, to 14 million, by 2010 and more than triple to 33 million in 2050.

Immigrants from India and Vietnam contributed to the population surge during the 1990s. That's when the Eden Center strip mall took hold in Falls Church, Va., about nine miles west of the nation's capital.

On a recent weekday afternoon, shoppers strolled down the corridors and sidewalks of the 120-shop mall with bags and children in hand. A group of older men huddled around a table watching two others play a game of Chinese chess, while some visitors perused videos at a rental store. The yellow-and-red striped flag of the former South Vietnam fluttered high above the parking lot, next to an American flag.

When Minneapolis photographer Wing Huie and his ceramicist wife, Tara, set off in her new neon-green Volkswagen bug in August 2001, they had no fixed agenda. They planned to spend up to a year on the road, following their whims, seeing the country, maybe taking some pictures on the way. Or maybe not.

Nine months and 39 states later, they returned with more than 7,000 photos and 40 hours of videotaped interviews with dozens of people from Washington, D.C., to Sand Point, Idaho, and Honolulu. They've distilled that vast sea of words, photos and moving images clips of Elvis impersonators, law professors and railroad workers; photos of landscapes, streetscapes and sky into an exhibition opening Friday in the freshly renovated and relocated galleries of the Minnesota Museum of American Art in downtown St. Paul.

A recent report on Korean Americans that populate Los Angeles County dispels notions of a "model minority." The study shows that Koreans lag other ethnic groups in homeownership and fall behind other Asians in income. Korean Americans also experienced a higher rate of isolation because of language barriers, according to the report.

In homeownership, Koreans ranked 16th among 21 ethnic groups who owned homes in Los Angeles county, according to a report by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, which studied 2000 census data. Only 33 percent of Koreans owned their abodes. They lagged behind blacks and Latinos who owned homes at a rate of 37 percent and 38 percent, respectively. An average of 50 percent of Asian Pacific Americans and 48 percent of American households owned homes. Taiwanese topped the list of those who owned homes at 69 percent.