Chinese Americans
From Chinatown streets to Washington D.C.
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 | posts | No Comments
It started with chatter on Chinatown street corners, and soon, the conversations moved into neighborhood community centers.
Hold the terror trials here? In my neighborhood?
Apparently so.
Federal officials had announced in November plans to hold the trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other self-professed 9/11 terrorists in a federal courthouse – right in the middle of Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Steps away from the Pearl Street courthouse is Columbus Park; where seniors bellow out Beijing opera in the pavilion, where men gather to play cards and Chinese chess, and where teens kick around soccer balls on the astro turf.
Around the corner are Vietnamese pho eateries on Centre Street, and a plethora of small household supply shops and grocery stores.
On nearby Mulberry Street, three Chinese funeral homes serve the Chinese American community – and honor the Chinese American dead – in New York City and across the entire eastern seaboard.
New York City’s Chinatown is not just a place of business. It’s home to one of the city’s oldest communities.
The trials, which are expected to last several years, would have locked down those neighborhood streets and cut the area into security zones bordered by metal barriers and armed guards. The tightest security zone would heavily restrict pedestrian and vehicle traffic in the heart of Chinatown, an area still rebuilding and recovering from the effects of 9/11.
Chinatown and lower Manhattan residents mobilized quickly. They knew they had to fight this before it got too far.
Community board officials soon joined in, sending a resolution to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder proposing alternative venues: Governors Island, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a federal courthouse in White Plains, Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh and a federal institution in Otisville.
Support from city politicians followed, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who changed his mind on the matter.
He had originally called moving the trials to Governors Island “dumb.”
Chinatown residents did not miss a beat – they fired back calling the plan to hold the trials in their neighborhood “dumber.”
Then things started to change. Whether it was because of the mayor, I don’t know. But things snow balled. Politicians and lawmakers jumped on the bandwagon.
Gov. David Paterson, Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said this week they were open to a move, and Republican Congressman Peter King introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of Justice Department funds to try Guantanamo detainees in federal civilian courts.
The growing chorus of dissent went straight through to Washington D.C.: Move the terror trials out of Manhattan.
Late Thursday night, news broke that federal officials were talking about moving the trials.
Today, it’s clear the message got through. The Obama administration is now looking at other options.
A source in Chinatown, who relentlessly called and emailed me about this story, talked to me on Friday about the “power of the people to make the impossible possible.”
I am so proud of the Chinatown community here in New York City. Literally from the grassroots level, from neighbors talking to neighbors, they fought through the politics and the bureaucracy to get their message to the federal government.
In a forwarded e-mail, a member of the Chinese community wrote this:
“…no more just firecrackers and lion dance. From now on, we are not going to be taken granted, and we’ll say “NO.” Don’t dare to take advantage of our amiable manner again, no more. We’ll play hard ball too from now on.”
It’s a profound message because Chinese Americans have stereotypically been “model citizens.” They don’t like to rock the boat, they don’t like to make too much noise. They typically keep their heads down, work hard, and earn money so they can send their kids to good schools.
But when something like this comes along, they knew they had to fight it all the way. And they did. Bravo.
Museum of Chinese in America finds new home
Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | posts | 1 Comment
The skylit courtyard at the center of the new museum space. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
For years, they dreamed of a bigger space to work with.
That dream will come true when their new facility opens Sept. 22.The 14,000-square-foot space, six times bigger than its original home, was designed by Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and touted by some big-name movers and shakers including “Brokeback Mountain” director Ang Lee, architect I.M. Pei, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and playwright David Henry Hwang.
But despite the big names attached to the $8.1 million project, the museum is run by a small staff of nine, including newly appointed director S. Alice Mong.
“We are a very lean organization,” Mong said. “As you can see there’s no fat.”
For nearly 30 years, the museum has been housed in a 2,000-square-foot space at 70 Mulberry St. on the second floor of a 19th-century schoolhouse. There is no way to feature the hundreds of documents and objects collected over the years, sharing the history and culture of Chinese immigrants in America and the role their descendants played in constructing American society.With the new space, there is more room for the vast collection, a bigger staff and a growing fan base. There are nearly 4 million Chinese Americans in the U.S.
“It’s our story,” said Mong, who immigrated with her family from Taiwan in 1973. “There isn’t another national museum for Chinese Americans. We hope to be a cultural anchor not only for the local Chinese in New York but for Chinese across the United States and around the world.”
The Journey Wall - donors receive a plaque with their family name, where they came from, and where they settled in America. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
The new museum, converted from an industrial machine repair shop on Centre Street, features a skylit courtyard reminiscent of courtyards found in the center of a traditional Chinese home. In the front lobby is an art installation called “The Journey Wall,” which consists of bronze tiles that show where Chinese American families came from and where they settled in the United States.
Fundraising for the new space began in 2004, spearheaded by museum co-founder Charles Lai.
“Having this new facility gives us the legitimacy and the credibility we have always sought,” Lai said. “It allows people to realize that together with our wonderful programs and strong content, we are worthy of a higher level of support.”
Lai said one donor had, for years, contributed $100 annually. When the donor recently learned of the museum’s plans to move into a bigger space, he wrote a check for $100,000.
So far, the museum has raised $12 million, and Mong said it is well on the way to reaching its $15 million goal. Mong said the museum is in good financial shape because fundraising began long before the economy went bad. So far, all donors have come through with their promised pledges.
Mong attributes the success to the museum’s niche cause.
One of the new objects that will be featured in the museum’s main exhibit hall is a wooden replica of the carvings found in the Angel Island Barracks in California. Some 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay during the first half of the 1900s. During their internment, many carved poems in the walls in traditional Chinese characters, detailing their fear and despair.
“When people come to Chinatown, they are saying, ‘Oh, look there’s the Buddhist temple, the place where the ducks hang from the window and let me get to the place with knockoff Coach bags,’” Lai said. “There is another part of the story. There are complexities and realities in the Chinese American community and we want them (visitors) to experience and understand that.”
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On the Net:
Part of what a humane society does is recognize past injustices and address them.”
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | posts | No Comments
Is “sorry” better late than never?
Last week, the California legislature apologized to the state’s Chinese-American community for racist laws barring Chinese from owning land or property, marrying whites, working in the public sector and testifying against whites in court. That was back in the mid-19th century during California’s Gold Rush. About 25,000 Chinese crossed the Pacific ocean to work as laborers in mines and to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
The story, written by editor/reporter Ling Woo Liu, of Time Asia, notes that this apology is just the latest in a number of official acts of remorse around the world:
In 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a similar apology, expressing regret to Chinese Canadians for unequal taxes imposed on them in the late 19th century. Last February, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to his country’s Aborigines for racist laws of the past, including the forced separation of children from their parents. Five months later, the U.S. Congress formally apologized to black Americans for slavery and the later Jim Crow laws, which were not repealed until the 1960s. And most notably, in 1988 the U.S. government decided to pay $20,000 to each of the surviving 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned in camps during World War II. Says Donald Tamaki, a San Francisco–based attorney who helped overturn wrongful WWII-era convictions of Japanese Americans: ”Part of what a humane society does is recognize past injustices and address them.”
Liu ends her piece by commenting on how times have changed. These days, there’s a rush to bring Chinese tourists to California and and the Governator is working hard to foster business and trade with the PRC.
In 2005, Schwarzenegger toured China for six days to promote California’s produce, technology and raw materials. China is now California’s fourth largest export market, after Mexico, Canada and Japan. In 2008 California exported $10.9 billion worth of goods to China, up 40% since 2005.
Read the entire story here. (Thanks to Christal, for the link!)
On Speaking Chinese at Home, a Pulitzer, and more..
Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | posts | No Comments
Earlier this month, when sister-brother team Tammy and Victor Jih won The Amazing Race, I was cheerleading for them, dancing in my room, in my pajamas, in my small NYC apartment.
In the 14th season of the show, in which 11 teams compete in a race around the world, the Jihs – Chinese born Americans and Harvard-educated lawyers – crossed the finish line first to win the $1 million.
They were strong competitors from the start, smart, athletic, dominating many of the challenges and coming first in five legs of the race. The second last leg of the race took place in China (Guilin and Beijing), where Tammy and Victor were able to stay at the head of the game because they could speak Mandarin. The Jihs have credited their mother, an immigrant from Taiwan, as the person who forced them to speak Chinese even though Victor and Tammy were both born and raised in America. They were annoyed as children. $1 million later, they are grateful.
Their language skills came in handy when talking to taxi drivers, booking plane tickets, and in one challenge, pronouncing the names of traditional Beijing dishes to a Chinese chef. And, over and over the siblings exclaimed to amused Chinese locals that they were overseas Chinese in a race and if they didn’t win, their Chinese parents would be embarrassed to death.
A blogger for the Chicago-Sun Times asks if the Jihs had an “unfair advantage”: Was it fair for Tammy and Victor to dominate the challenges in China, considering that they are of Chinese descent and speak Chinese? Especially considering one of the challenges was, um, to speak Chinese?
Being able to speak one of the most popular languages in the world is, of course, an advantage. It’s not only an advantage in The Amazing Race, but in many of life’s experiences — for getting into a good school, getting a good job, traveling. So why an unfair advantage? If it were a Spanish speaking team won in Spain or French speaking team won in France, would we be asking the same questions? If the Jihs were white and could speak Chinese, would that be an “unfair advantage” too? In one challenge that required the teams to swim laps in a pool, Tammy (who was smart and planned ahead) had taken swimming lessons before entering The Amazing Race. Does that give her an unfair advantage because other teams didn’t know how to swim?
No doubt, the Jihs had an advantage in the China leg, but they dominated the entire race and therefore demonstrated their strengths (besides their Chinese language abilities) throughout. To question whether the Jihs really deserved the prize is really applying double standards. It’s time people got with the program and recognized that being bilingual, even in America, is normal and acceptable these days. *rolls eyes*
Today, I’m at my parent’s home in Canada, and as I type, I listen to the sounds of the house; kitchen dishes clanging, water and soap in the laundry machine swishing, a smooth mix of English and Cantonese. I grew up speaking both languages. My parents, both university-educated here in Canada, are fluent in both English and Chinese. Having educated parents who speak and write in English has been a blessing, but it has also allowed me to get away with using English a lot over the years.
Hence, my sub-standard Chinese.
Having been away from China for almost a year now, I have been witness to lapses of what I will call temporary amnesia. It makes me feel better to classify this forgetfulness as temporary. Inside my head, the bank of Chinese characters I had painfully memorized and locked away safely after hours and hours of studying in Beijing, seems to be slipping away. There’s a leak somewhere. And I need to patch it up. Last week, I tried to write the word “apple” in Chinese. 苹果 . I couldn’t remember how. My pencil hovered over my piece of paper for a few seconds before I had to look it up on the computer.
The patch can be applied in a number of ways.
Point 1) Self Study
Counterpoint – Can’t find time and discipline to sit down and do this during my “free” time.
Point 2) Get a tutor
Counterpoint – When I’m reporting for the Associated Press this summer, will I really have the time? I know I won’t.
Point 3) Return to China.
Within hours of returning to Hong Kong or China, it all starts coming back. So, I think, that’s what I’m going to do.
Last week, at my Columbia graduation, I was awarded a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. I can travel anywhere in the world and write stories. So, naturally, this was the perfect opportunity for me to get back to China. !!! I didn’t think I’d make it back to the motherland so soon. I am super excited. Now to find a great story to write about..
~~
(To watch an interview with Victor and Tammy Jih, see them here on Regis and Kelly)
父母亲常常为子女作出牺牲
Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | posts | 1 Comment
I’m going home this weekend to visit my parents.
The International Herald Tribune published this op-ed today. I often think about how hard my parents worked so my brother and I could have a good life.
Chinatown – 唐人街
By PETER ENG
HONG KONG — She’s an immigrant of the most traditional, stubborn sort, my mother, who recently turned 86 . Although she arrived in the United States from Hong Kong more than 40 years ago, Lai Wau Chiu Eng still speaks little English. Like my father, she had little interest in learning except for the few pidgin phrases they needed to run their “Chinese hand laundry” in New York.
To her, only Chinese mattered; the Americans were the gweilo, the “foreign devils.” Other than Chinatown, the only places she knew in the city were the supermarket and the Chinese take-out places near her apartment. She’s now in an assisted-living home for Asians in Seattle.
Despite our parents’ efforts, I and my six brothers went on a much different path. All I wanted was to fit in with my classmates and not be slotted as “that Chinese boy.” I had to help out in the laundry after school, but I hated it. I had to go to Cantonese school on Sundays, but I hated it. By my teenage years, I had lost most of my native language.
My mother grew up in a little village in Guangdong Province, in southeastern China. I’ve visited those dark, stifling warrens, still without electricity or running water.
Several years ago, my mother went back for the first time. She didn’t talk much about it then. But such things remain in the recesses of the heart and mind, where we preserve, amid all the wanderings of a lifetime, our sense of who we really are. And they surface when we start counting our days.
When my father was dying in a New York hospital in 1977, he told us that he wanted to go back to Hong Kong. A few years ago, my mother had a stroke that left her homebound. Recently over dinner she mentioned that village in Guangdong. “Wai,” she said, as always calling me by my Chinese name, “do you think it would be a good idea for me to go back to live there? I could go back and fix it up.”
Mainland China feels foreign to me, but in Hong Kong I do share a common identity with my mother. My parents fled to Hong Kong in the early 1950’s after the Communists won the civil war. They tended chickens in the New Territories for a living before migrating to the United States so that their children could get a good education.
I visited Red Water Bridge again recently, as I often feel compelled to. The row of family shops on the main road has been razed, replaced by a sanitized central market compound. The government has moved residents to public housing blocks up north so it can redevelop the village. Just off the main road, down a narrow path that snakes along a sewerage canal, our house still stands. It is a one-story, ramshackle structure. The water well, where as a boy I saw big drowned rats, is still there out front.
In my pidgin Cantonese, I spoke with Mrs. Wong, a family friend who ran a tailor shop on the main road when I was growing up. I found the old woman on the 24th floor of the public housing block. She asked how my mother was doing in retirement. “Your mother always worked so hard, tending to the chickens. It was a lot of hardship for her. Oh, your mother…,” Mrs. Wong said, her voice giving way to admiration and pity.
Shame filled me and tears came. I now know that in hating the narrow-mindedness of my parents, I myself was narrow-minded.
I know our old house will be knocked down soon. So I stand before the high metal fence silent and still, preserving sight, sound and smell. In that house I see how simple people struggle, and succeed, in breaking the bonds of their history. I see how far I have come, and what my parents sacrificed to see me through this journey.
Civil war raged in China when my mother was born in 1923. She grew up poor and illiterate, and she hardly knew her own mother, who had gone abroad to find work. (“I was only 15 when she went to Malaysia,” my mother says. “Since then I’ve only seen her in my dreams.”) Then my mother toiled in two lands of exile, Hong Kong and America. But always she thought only of seeing to it that her sons were healthy and successful, with no need to toil as she did.
I thought of the courage it took for her to run that laundry alone for more than a decade after my father died. I walked by the place recently. Inside I saw another Asian immigrant hard at work. A mother, no doubt.
Blogging on China and the Chinese in America
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | posts | 2 Comments
Hello, world. I’m finally starting up a new blog. It’s been awhile. I was an avid blogger years ago during my first year of university. I wrote about some news but blogged mostly about my personal comings and goings. This time around, I’m going to be blogging about two of my interests that have developed over the years: China and the Chinese in America.
My interest in Chinese Americans stems from being born and raised in Toronto (where there is a huge Chinese population) and growing up in a Chinese American household. My parents, Chinese immigrants, raised me in the best of both worlds. Homemade Cantonese soya sauce chicken one night. Lasagna the next. I have always felt close to Chinese culture and grew up with the conversational Cantonese and Mandarin language skills. Through high school and my undergraduate degree, I yearned to improve my language skills. While I could converse, I could not read and write. I felt incomplete and in many ways, barred from fully understanding China and Chinese culture. In addition to my personal urgings, China began to dominate news headlines and understanding this place became all the more important.
In September 2007, I moved to Beijing and enrolled in the Chinese language program at Tsinghua University. For a year, I spent my days and nights studying and on holidays, I traveled throughout the country.
I returned to America in September 2008 to start my Master’s at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. I began reporting in Manhattan’s Chinatown and in early March, finished a 6,000 word magazine feature on Fujanese immigrant mothers in Brooklyn. In June 2009, I’ll be reporting for the Associated Press in New York, with a special focus on the city’s Chinese community.
I am going to continue learning about China and about America’s Chinese immigrants. Some day, I’d like to go back to China and report as a foreign correspondent. On this blog, I will share interesting news on China, my thoughts on various China-related topics, and some of my own reporting, too. Please visit often. I hope you’ll find the blog enlightening, informative and entertaining.
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suzannebma[at]gmail[dot]com
Suzanne Ma is a multimedia reporter
currently based in Hong Kong.
She is the recipient of
the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
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