Q: What is your particular interest in torture?

A: I'm not just interested in torture. That's part of what I'm interested in, and it's probably the most spectacular part.

I'm interested in a much broader European and American experience, and Chinese experience, of Chinese bodies in pain. And some of those reactions, some of those experiences, have to do with [westerners and Chinese people] looking at images of Chinese people being tortured.

But some of them have to do with things like the first Western missionary hospital in China, which also obviously deals with Chinese bodies in pain, but does so in order to heal them.

I take public transportation to and from school every day. As I walk to the bus stop, I hear kids in the school bus call me “chink” and many other things that are negative about Asians. When this happens I feel a sense of non-belonging. [1]

There were always those kids that called you names or tried to put you into that (pause) if you’re not white you’re not American. [2]

AAPI students are the targets of both overt and subtle forms of racism. These experiences with racism—from the overt acts of anti-AAPI violence to more subtle instances of exclusion—are often informed by stereotypes. Numerous studies highlight the fact that AAPI students are stereotyped by their non-AAPI peers and by school staff. Many stereotypes of AAPI students exist: the smart and hard-working Asian, the lazy and incapable Pacific Islander, the illiterate refugee draining the community’s resources, the gangster, the quiet and mysterious Other, and so forth. In this section, particular attention will be paid to the negative impact on AAPI students of two of the most pervasive and persistent stereotypes of AAPIs, namely, the model minority stereotype and the perpetual foreigner stereotype.

Asian immigrants' drive for material success and shame-based culture may be causing many to place impossibly strict expectations on their children. Health and social workers say rates of depression are disproportionately high among Asian American youths, and in some cases this results in suicide.

San Francisco -- It's become cliché: Asian parents browbeat their kids into pursuing prestigious professions in technology, medicine or law, and their children suffer the resulting stress and depression. But speaking with other Asian professionals at a recent social gathering, I found we all agreed that we shared the same affliction.

Growing up on Long Island, where almost everyone around her was white, Lee-Ann Hanham would forget she had been adopted from South Korea. Really forget, she said, until she would pass a mirror.

"And you would stop and you would be surprised that, 'Oh my God, I'm not 5 foot 10, blond-haired and blue- eyed,' " Hanham recalls.

"It was difficult trying to seek out anything Asian outside the Chinese restaurants," she said. "I remember we did have Asian dolls, but there was no talking about it. It just kind of was."

Multiracial patients must 'win the lottery' to find bone marrow match

By Erin Texeira
©2005 The Associated Press
February 2, 2005

Luke Do was a lively 18-month-old awaiting the birth of his first sibling when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.

The hopes of his parents, both doctors in San Jose, immediately turned to a bone marrow transplant, but they soon learned some distressing news -- Luke's ethnic heritage made him a tough match.

Sarah Gaskins, Luke's mother, has Japanese and European ancestors and his father, Lam Do, is Vietnamese-American. Because bone marrow matches usually are made with a relative or someone with the same racial or ethnic background as the patient, multiracial people rarely have success.

Radish Kadian is typical of the Asian immigrants to the United States who are working to provide money and assistance to families and friends affected by the devastating tsunamis that struck southern Asia. “I think most of us woke up on Christmas Day with this shocking news of the disaster,” says Dr. Kadian, a physician and local activist in Washington, D.C.’s Indian American community. “It certainly dampened the festive spirit of Christmas."

Dr. Kadian says the community mobilized to take action immediately after hearing news of the tragedy. But the timing of the disaster has complicated the relief effort. “A lot of people are on vacation and are not easily available,” he says. “And this is also the time when many of them travel to India with their children and others because schools and colleges are closed. So it has been somewhat more difficult than normal."

Anne Le left her high-tech marketing job to open a restaurant in Palo Alto inspired by her parents' business. Chris and Peter Ho quit corporate jobs in New York to follow in their uncle's footsteps and start a dry cleaning business in Sunnyvale.

They were bred to achieve what their parents could not. But even with college degrees and professional careers under their belts, these children of Asian immigrants are returning to the same niche businesses their families entered into as a first stop in America.

And in doing that, they are challenging a long-held economic model for upward mobility among immigrants and redefining traditional notions of success.

It is the night of my cousin Sayanti's wedding and I am huddled on a rooftop with my gang of cousins. It is nearly 4 a.m., and we keep warm by wrapping woolen shawls around our shoulders and passing around a bottle of whiskey. There is a steady exchange of drinking stories, dirty jokes carefully translated out of colloquial Bengali to English, and bursts of laughter. The auspicious full moon is falling, and prayers from the Muslim neighborhood across the Ganges leak into the sky.

I lean my head back against the crumbling brick and feel overwhelmed by the textures of India. But somewhere between the yawns and the plumes of cigarette smoke, I realize this is the first time I have truly felt at home here.

Lily's marriage began falling apart within days of her arrival from Hong Kong. Her American-born husband would not allow her to drive the car or go outside their Costa Mesa house alone. He forbade her to talk to neighbors or see a doctor when she or her son Kenny (from a previous relationship) were sick.

Then he began hitting and kicking her. He stuffed socks into Kenny's mouth when the 3-year old boy cried. On Christmas Day 2000, he beat them so badly that neighbors called police. The county's Children and Family Services agency put Kenny in foster care.

In February, Lily was on her own at an emergency shelter in Fullerton where no one spoke Mandarin Chinese. She encountered only frustration with the county system as she sought reunion with Kenny.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. --A Southern Baptist agency that produces Sunday School materials has come under fire from some Asian-Americans for its 2004 Vacation Bible School curriculum called "Rickshaw Rally--Racing to the Son."

"The rickshaw symbolizes poverty and slavery," said Paul Kim, pastor of Berkland Baptist Church in Cambridge, Mass. "'Rickshaw Rally' is misrepresenting Asian-American cultures."

The rickshaw, a two-wheeled carriage that at one time was pulled by one or two men in East Asia, is included in the logo of the curriculum produced by LifeWay Christian Resources for use in summer sessions designed to combine fun and faith for children.

OAKLAND - Breaking stereotypes that paint Asian-American kids strictly as straight-A students, a new report on East Bay youths finds that some Asian teens have among the highest juvenile arrest rates in their areas and are failing to meet school standards.

In particular, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander youths are struggling to thrive in neighborhoods such as Oakland plagued by problems such as juvenile crime and rising school dropout rates, according to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit research group. It unveiled its report Wednesday at an Oakland High School news conference.

For example, Samoans had the second-highest juvenile arrest rate in Oakland at 8 percent, second to African-Americans, the report found. Oakland's 807 Laotian and 122 Korean juveniles tied for third in juvenile arrest rates at 7 percent.

PHILADELPHIA — Hoping to highlight the lonely fate of Amerasians, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will ask U.S. President George Bush to help the “GI babies” during Bush's visit to Manila next month.

Also known as “Children of the Dust,” Amerasians were born out of relationships between American military servicemen or personnel and Filipino women from 1941 to August 1993.

When the U.S. bases closed down, they left between 20,000 to 50,000 fatherless children mostly living in poverty and deprivation in the Philippines.

In a letter to President Arroyo, the Endowment for Strategic Leadership for Asian Americans (ESLAAI) urged her to include the Amerasians as one of her talking points with President Bush.

Liz Rogers lives in Portland, where she is a caseworker for Asian and Pacific Islander families at the Asian Family Center. Born in Korea, Rogers, 25, was adopted at 15 months by a Massachusetts couple from a Korean foster family.

Rogers' parents, who had three biological children and a son they also adopted from Korea, encouraged her to explore her roots; in college, she majored in sociology and East Asian languages. Here, she reflects on her upbringing:

"Growing up, I didn't have much opportunity to make connections with other adoptees, let alone other Koreans. But my parents knew they didn't have the answers for everything, so they encouraged me to go to whatever lengths I needed to find them.

"It wasn't until I went away to college that I realized I was a person of color and had friends of color. Adoption had always been an open issue in my family. But race and adoption only began to crisscross for me after I left for college. I went to China my junior year and, for the first time, I was surrounded by people who looked like me.

The Xiong family of Brooklyn Park is a perfect example of what economic progress looks like in the Hmong community.

The oldest son, 34-year-old Shoua, and his wife, Soua, work late into the night making medical devices at a Chaska factory. His mother, Yer Yang, looks after the couple's five children until her two other sons, Toua, 24, and Kao, 20, come home from work. The matriarch's youngest daughter-in-law, Ying Yang, 21, helps with the cooking and cleaning.

All those who work help pay the bills. Although their wages are modest, pooling their income has allowed them to start moving into the middle class. Together, they can afford to pay for a four-bedroom house that they bought four years ago in a neighborhood filled with manicured lawns and shade trees.

This is how the melting pot looks when it's being stirred: Kimberly Cha, a Hmong teenager in denim shorts. She is 15. Her English is accent-free, though she speaks only Hmong with her parents and three younger siblings.

On a warm summer night, Kimberly is in the basement of the Portland Baha'i Center, teaching traditional Hmong stitchery to younger girls. She knows the Hmong word for what she's doing: paj ntaub. But she can't remember how to spell it.

South Koreans make them, Americans buy them

Seoul, South Korea. Five pregnant women sleep on blankets on the tile floor of a small room. They keep their personal belongings in three wooden closets on one wall above their feet. This is home, at least until the babies come. The dormitory is called Ae Ran Won, and it is one of a dozen homes for unmarried women in South Korea. Ae Ran Won can hold fifty pregnant women in its ten rooms, but when I was there in November, it had only thirty-five. These women supply the raw material for a peculiar South Korean business: the export of babies to the United States. U.S. families are adopting 6,000 Korean children a year, most of them infants, at a price of about $5,000 a head.

Tammy Tran worries that what's driving her generation of Vietnamese-Americans to do well in school and succeed are also the same things driving them to further assimilate into American culture and lose their Vietnamese culture.

"It's happening already; there's a total identity crisis going on," said Tran, 23, of Westminster. "Vietnamese kids today aren't really connected to their roots because they're so busy living the American life."

An analysis of new census data reveals severe levels of poverty among Asian American children living in New York City, the Asian American Federation of New York said today.

The public policy leadership organization announced its findings as Asian Americans ­ the fastest-growing population group in New York City ­ are struggling to recoup September 11th-related economic losses and as proposed city budget cuts threaten vital services for poor Asian American children.

A young man who came to America years ago finds his ability to speak, think or write in Chinese slipping away. That, and teenage angst, makes communication with his parents an everyday struggle and brings up questions of identity.

I was born in China and came here when I was six. I drew pictures on the airplane on the way to America. On the side of those pictures I wrote words in Chinese. I do not know what those words mean anymore.

Sometime between that flight and now I stopped thinking, speaking and writing in Chinese.

It's come to a point where it's difficult to talk to my own parents. They don't speak much English. They've tried to learn, but only managed to pick up a few words. My mom can kind of make a coherent sentence because she interacts with customers at work as a cashier. She sometimes leaves little notes on the kitchen table like, "eat soup & chicken."

B.D. Wong's Real-Life Journey to Becoming a Gay Father

The young Asian American hostess in the smart blue uniform at the Compass Rose is happy to provide an out-of-the-way table for a reporter to tape an interview with B.D. Wong, who is staying upstairs at the Westin St. Francis.

"This one would be fairly quiet, I think," she says with a professional smile. Then, unable to help herself, she adds: "Wow, B.D. Wong is here. Oh, I love him -- an Asian actor."

A few minutes later, the actor who has often campaigned for greater visibility for Asians in film, television and stage, grins broadly when he's told about Janice Yee Bolosan's comment. He knows how she feels. Growing up in the Sunset District as Bradley Darryl Wong, he remembers being confused and then angry watching all those TV shows with no Asian faces. And although he's beaten the odds in his own career since his Tony-winning gender-bending turn in the title role of "M. Butterfly," it still gets him upset that things haven't improved that much for other Asian American actors.

I see you reading your Chinese newspapers
To keep up with this, your world
And the old country
And often, during these times
Or in precious conversation with you
Hindered by language
I have read your reading eyes
And all the tales untold
Gleaning each character
Of my native language
So I can learn to speak
For you
Using this English
For love--is understanding
And so we each know
You are a modest man
Not of words, but of action and deeds

Census: Mix of success, struggle

Stockton's Eugenio Ragasa, a Filipino immigrant and a member of the largest single Asian group in the county, lives with his wife in a gated community and has a six-figure income. It's a different story for Touch Tung, a Cambodian refugee whose family of five hovers just above the poverty line.

Just as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month came to an end last week, the Census Bureau released a new portrait of the group that reveals a diverse and complex community that defies generalization.

A Century of Social Memory in a Chinese American Family

This article is not the history of a Chinese American family, but an analysis of how Ah Quin, a Chinese American immigrant pioneer, is remembered by his descendants.(1) It explores what is remembered and what is forgotten, and how memory is shaped.

The life experience of Ah Quin has become an increasingly important part of our social memory of the early Chinese American experience.(2) After coming to the U.S. in 1863 at the age of fifteen from the Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong Province (the native region of most early Chinese immigrants), he worked as a laborer in a number of places in California and Alaska. He moved to San Diego in 1880 as a railroad labor contractor, a job he obtained because of his bilingual skills and contact with white Americans.(3) He remained there for the rest of his life, becoming a small businessman and a community leader (he was known as "mayor of Chinatown") and raising a large family (he and his wife had twelve children). We have considerable knowledge of Ah Quin's life for two important reasons. First, he left numerous personal documents, especially a lengthy diary that he kept intermittently between 1877 and 1910. Although written primarily in English, in an apparent effort to improve his fluency in that language, rather than in his native Chinese, it candidly recorded his daily activities and private thoughts. Secondly, his descendants of different generations have made efforts to maintain memories of Ah Quin.(4)