Month: January 2004

Always count on F C to come through! I did a quickie search of my past as a poster king on USENET. I love some of these quips from an angry, egotistical, smartie-pants.

Background Note: We had a lot of threads devoted to identity and terminology. As you can imagine, the two are intertwined, can’t talk about identity without talking about terminology/names. Talked about “oriental” vs “asian american” vs “american” vs “ american”…

Some gems of mine from a 27 post thread:

“Finally, not to start another flame war on terminology but I appear to
be the only one who finds something irksome with the term Asian
American.” (March 12, 1991) Prior to this there were some posts about “Asian American” and I stated I found it to be insulting to me to be labeled such. I argued that I was an American, without the descriptive qualifier “Asian”.

From the same post:

“….what does an Asian American have to do with Western culture given
the person’s roots are Eastern? An interesting corollary question would
be: what is the heritage of an Asian American?”

In the same thread, responding to A. H from Stanford, I again railed against the term “Asian American”!

>[A.H]
> All the more reason to have Asian-American studies.
> At least then there would be *some* information opposed
> to the traditional stereotypes.

Yes, that’s the argument. A counter argument is that the effectiveness
of “studies” can not and do not overide the stereotypes and incorrect
perceptions that people who have not been in contact with different
ethnic groups. Books that seek to “bring” reality to ignorant people
are not real so therefore the effect is diminished. I also would argue
that the effect of media (ie. television and pictures) are more powerful
that than words in shaping the ideas of people.

> >[YC wrote:]
> >Finally, not to start another flame war on terminology but I appear to
> >be the only one who finds something irksome with the term Asian
> >American…
>[A.H wrote:]
> I’m not that fond of it either. How ’bout “Yellows”? 🙂

Heh heh. The term Asian American fails the “diversity” test if you
will. Those PC people who trumpet the ideal of “diversity” and use the
term Asian American fail to recognize that diversity can not exist when
you try to cram so many different ethnic Asian groups under “Asian
American”. Not only are the experiences between Korean Americans,
Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Indian Americans, Philipino
Americans, Vietnamese Americans etc as a whole but the individual
experience within each group is different depending on generation and
geographical location (ie. West vs. East and MidWest or North vs. South).

It does an injustice to these individual differences (aka diversity) by
lumping everything together into some term that hardly describes what
exactly it is to be an “Asian American”. The term implies a paradigm
that everyone exists under and follows but that is hardly true. And
it’s quite ironic.

Here’s another one, rather prescient hmmm:

>[Yale Poster]
> Now here’s a question for all you out there in net-land: what should
> replace “minority” in the language? I’m not too crazy about “person
> of color” either, since a) white is a color too, and b) it’s really close
> to “colored person,” which carries extremely negative connotations.

Why should there be a change? Are we going to create yet another
arbitrary “politically incorrect” term? You confuse the way “minority”
is used *in context* to describe American society, not the world.

Asians in this country are indeed minorities for they make up a small
percentage of the total population. However, using the word “minority”
has had an implicit comparison to the “majority” group (white in this
case) but with the continuing influx of ethnic groups, there may be a
time where “minority” and “majority” will become meaningless.

here’s another gem where I rant against the enforced separation of Asian Americans:

Some kind poster asks SCAA group what they thought of Asian greek organizations. I flamed back:
“I understand the need for such ethnic organizations. However, it merely
enforces a premeditated separation which defeats the very purpose that
these organizations were created in the first place.”

What I really meant was that creating these types of organizations, and not just fraternities/sororities but Asian whatever group doesn’t help bring integration and color-blind society. Back then I was a vocal and ardent supporter and speaker for the color-blind society in America and this put me in somewhat of a “minority” among my Asian American “activist” types. Often was labeled, banana, twinkie, sell-out, self-hater, conservative blah blah blah. I constantly railed against “ethnic” identifiers. The only one that I would accept as it defined me was “Chinese American”, not “Asian American”. I often used the liberal “diversity” petard against the misguided liberals championing “Asian American” terminology by saying that “Asian American” is actually limiting diversity by grouping possibly (dis-) similar ethnic groups under a single umbrella. In a true diversity environment, we ought to celebrate and acknowledge all our different ethnic backgrounds hence, “Chinese American” “Korean American” etc was much more in the spirit of diversity than “Asian American”. They didn’t like my argument :-). They didn’t like it because they knew I was right hehehe!

Anyways, I’m all pooped from reminiscing about my hot-headed past. So flame away :-)!

=YC

[Many of you will have come to this message from my Plaxo email — welcome! I invite you to read what the other Triscribe writers have written on the front page. If you would like to write for Triscribe, please read About Triscribe in the upper right column. The Triscribe web site rules prohibit the naming of anyone that isn’t in the public view, so you won’t see a whole lot of names used, but if you read the descriptions, you should know exactly who you are.]

I’m already late in this, my traditional new year’s message. Every year for the last 10 years or so I get on my soapbox and rant about a few things and make resolutions for the upcoming year. My delay in writing this was because I threw out my back getting some FreshDirect boxes (recommended if they deliver to your area and you actually buy $40-$50 of groceries) down the stairs. Part of this was just reviewing my photos and emails in such an incredible year in terms of experiences.

There is something essentially wrong with the way email is being used nowadays. This is the part of the message where I mention how much email I received last year. My collection of email for 2003 is 1.19 gigabytes, and that is with weeding out a lot of spam and bounced messages (real and bogus bounced messages added up to 286 megabytes, which are not counted in that total). That is two orders of magnitude over this time five years ago. On a weekly basis, I can say that no more than one-third of the emails that I receive are emails from people that I know or do business. I don’t believe the solution has anything to do with charging people postage to send emails, or slowing down email, or placing limits on the email received. Baysian filtering has been 95+% effective, but that 5% is still rather annoying. Two ideas have the most merit in my opinion: verifying the identity of the sender, or verifying the identity of the sender’s server (the SMTP server, for those techies out there). Yahoo’s proposal to use public key encryption and the draft Authenticated SMTP standard are the ones that are most likely to work.

I want to remember Usenet, which was the original Internet community bulletin board system. These days, I only refer to the newsgroups via Google, as the actual Usenet is routinely overwhelmed with spam and people nowadays don’t know how to stay on topic without “flaming” (insulting) each other. However, some of my longest-time friends are from the “Joy-Luck Club” of the New York branch of the soc.culture.hongkong newsgroup, whom we have shared dim sum or another meal together on a regular basis for the last ten years. (One of the first events was a viewing of The Joy Luck Club when it came out). Back then, it was dueling among which of the four “Sky Kings” or “Sky Queens” of Hong Kong entertainment would reign supreme this week, and when our next chance to go to Hong Kong would be. Nowadays, it costs about 50% of what it did in 1991 dollars to go to Hong Kong (1991 was my first trip to Hong Kong) and we have real jobs with real vacation time, but we are terrorized by SARS and are mourning the loss of a quarter of that HK entertainment royal family. Life goes on, but I am thankful for the schk Gang of Four that still keeps together.

While I didn’t do quite as much flying as I did in 2002, I did travel over 18,000 miles mostly for work: visiting my cousin in Kansas City, going to a convention at Duke University in North Carolina and driving down to a college friend in South Carolina, a $10 Chinatown to Chinatown bus ride to Boston (recommended – I was actually only one of two Chinese on board and it was far cleaner and efficient than Greyhound, Peter Pan, or even Amtrak), presenting at another conference in Anaheim, California a week after the forest fires and visiting friends from my law school study abroad in Hong Kong, and going to Honolulu for an Asian bar association meeting (lawyers’ convention). Happily, airline security, while I’m not sure it is more or less effective, it is more or less run with uniform standards, so much so that you know what you’re supposed to be doing when while crossing the checkpoint, whether you are in Durham, NC or Los Angeles, CA. Also, as a consequence of my 2002 flying, I had American Airlines Gold status during 2003, and it is quite a difference in treatment — having the card is like the Fast Forward in the Amazing Race – it lets you and your companion skip most lines and go through special shorter security checkpoints. I actually managed a 30 minute run to the gate at JFK from the Howard Beach A train station and I made it with 3 minutes to spare. I’ll really miss it this year.

What I learned is that living in these places is harder and easier than they would appear. I stepped into Walmart and Target for the first time and realized how easy it is to shop there and how incredibly expensive shopping for groceries is on the East and West Coasts. Houses that we in New York would consider multi-million dollar mansions go for under $200,000. On the other hand, the people who live in paradise actually work really hard. On Oahu, the island Honolulu is on, there is a second rush hour at about 3 PM for those workers who go from their office jobs to their second jobs working in the tourist industry. On that island, SPAM canned luncheon meat is $1.50, while milk is $6.00 a gallon.

As for my resolutions last year, I decided to start an online journal and keep better contact with my friends.

Establishing Triscribe as a blog (online web journal) has been rather successful. It took a while to figure out the parameters of the site and what would the ground rules would be. I realized — as one of a dozen “stunt bloggers” for the conference at Duke University in June — that it is very hard for just one person to contribute on a regular basis, but it is a lot easier when there are others working with you. There is something to “peer pressure” – it actually works.

SSW15 and YC have been contributing on a regular basis on many different topics, and it has helped me to keep touch with them in a more concrete manner in what is going on in our lives than instant messaging or even a phone call. If you’re Asian and have a JD (or if you just know me in real life and can write well), I invite you register and join our group. The other thing is using Plaxo to automatically update contact info. It really works well. Even if you don’t end up subscribing to Plaxo, please update your info for me by writing back.

So what about resolutions for the next year? The first one is to go to the gym on a regular basis. I’ve been very good in paying for the membership; I’ve been very bad in keeping with the program, and my physical fitness has suffered for it. The second is to stop being a packrat and reduce the clutter in my life. The New York Times recently had an article about how literally life-threatening hoarding is. In taking the first step in a 12 step program, I have to admit that I am a hoarder. P- has been helping me work on these two together, and for that I’m grateful. I’ve been pretty successful in my resolutions over the years, so hopefully when 2005 comes around, I can report these conquered also.

Thank you for your kindness and friendship, and I hope to share in your happiness in the coming year. Keep reading here for updates to the continuing saga. Happy New Year!

In One Suburb, Local Politics With Asian Roots (New York Times)

According to the article, 9 out of 28 local elected officials are Asian American. That’s amazing! The question is how to encourage public service from Asians.