How I Learned To Feel Undesirable

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2014-02-11 04:16Z by Steven

How I Learned To Feel Undesirable

Code Switch: Fronter of Race, Culure and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-02-04

Noah Cho

For the past few weeks, we’ve convened a conversation about romance across racial and cultural lines. Some of the most eloquent accounts we encountered came from a Bay Area junior high school teacher named Noah Cho. We asked him to expand on some of his experiences in this essay.

It’s an odd feeling, as an adult, to look at a photo of your parents and feel perplexed by it. As a young child, I believed that most sets of parents looked like mine — a Korean man, a white woman — and it never registered to me that other parents looked different, or that their love could be something culturally undesirable.

But as I have moved through 32 years of looking at myself in the mirror, a time in which the vast majority of interracial couples I have known have looked nothing like my parents, I have come to see their love as something rare. Most men in interracial couples I have encountered do not look like my dad. They do not have his skin tone, or his combination of dark hair and dark eyes. My mom often tells me stories about when she began dating my father in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s, and I could only infer from her stories that her predominantly white community felt confused and unsure why a white woman would find an Asian man attractive.

I learned, slowly, painfully, over the course of my life that most people shared the opinion of my mother’s community. I know this, because I look like my father.

When I look in the mirror, I do not see someone that I understand to be handsome by Western standards. I look mostly Asian, and like so many other heterosexual Asian males before me, I have internalized a lifetime of believing that my features, my face, my skin tone, in tandem, make me unattractive and undesirable…

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Skin color remains big barrier

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Campus Life, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2014-02-02 22:16Z by Steven

Skin color remains big barrier

The Korea Times
2014-01-27

Park Si-soo

Min Kyung-joon (alias) is a “good boy” in many aspects.

The freshman at a middle school in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, has been acknowledged by his teachers for his outstanding academic achievement and affable personality. Min is also very actively engaged in sports, which explains why he is one of the top players of an intramural soccer club.

Notwithstanding his good standing, he still has a hard time associating with his classmates, mainly because of his “exotic” appearance. The 15-year-old’s father is Pakistani and his mother a Korean native.

“That’s a huge disadvantage in making new friends among young children,” said Kim Young-im, a counselor who has interviewed numerous biracial children, including Min, in Ansan, home to one of the country’s largest population of low income immigrants.

“Children tend to get along with those who share similarity in looks and other visible characteristics. But he is different (from others) in many ways.”

For that reason, Kim added, it’s a common trend in the industrial town to see “exotic-looking” teenagers hanging out together, isolating themselves from their peers of Korean parentage.

“This is a problem that is very difficult to address,” the counselor said. “The government and school authorities have tried hard to solve this with various kinds of measures. But I think many of these programs turned out to be in vain.”

The number of biracial students like Min in Korea is estimated at 55,780 as of last year, representing 0.86 percent of the 6.53 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools nationwide. The figure is expected to steadily increase to reach five percent by 2020, according to the education ministry…

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New Rabbi at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue ‘a Pioneer’

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion, United States, Women on 2014-01-28 18:44Z by Steven

New Rabbi at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue ‘a Pioneer’

The Wall Street Journal
2014-01-17

Sophia Hollander

Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl Is Daughter of a Korean Buddhist Immigrant and an American Jew

Growing up as the daughter of a Korean Buddhist immigrant and an American Jew in Tacoma, Wash., Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl said some family members always wondered: Could she ever be fully accepted as a Jew?

Any lingering doubts were eliminated last week when the congregation of Midtown’s historic Central Synagogue voted her to succeed Rabbi Peter Rubinstein, 71, when he retires later this year. Her appointment will take effect July 1.

Rabbi Buchdahl, who is 41, will become one of only a few women—and likely the only Asian-American—leading a major U.S. synagogue. Central Synagogue boasts 100 full-time employees and an endowment that exceeds $30 million.

“She really is a pioneer,” said Rabbi B. Elka Abrahamson, president of the Wexner Foundation, which develops Jewish leaders in North America and Israel. “She represents a new generation of women.” According to the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the largest rabbinical organization in North America, about 30% of Reform-movement rabbis are women.

Her appointment comes at a critical moment for American Judaism. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that the number of U.S. adults identifying as Jewish has dropped by half since the late 1950s. Fewer than a third of Jewish adults said they belonged to a synagogue, temple or other congregation…

…In addition to her unusual cultural heritage, Rabbi Buchdahl has been quick to blur other lines. According to the Central Conference of American Rabbis, she is one of only about a dozen people in the U.S. and Canada ordained as both a rabbi and a cantor

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“We Have Created Our Own Meaning for Hapa Identity”: The Mobilization of Self-Proclaimed Hapas within Institutions of Higher Education

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-01-24 03:10Z by Steven

“We Have Created Our Own Meaning for Hapa Identity”: The Mobilization of Self-Proclaimed Hapas within Institutions of Higher Education

Amerasia Journal
Volume 35, Number 2 (2009)
pages 191-213

Patricia E. Literte, Associate Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

This article examines Hapa student organizations on two university campuses—one public and one private. Drawing on qualitative data, this research interrogates the processes whereby young people who identify as Hapa come to: (1) recognize that race has importance in their lives, (2) rearticulate or reinterpret dominant racial thinking, and (3) translate their racial identities and experiences into organizations to negotiate the concrete and symbolic implications of race. This research also examines how institutions of higher education, in particular, student services that have a racial orientation (e.g., Asian Pacific American Student Services), are responding to Hapa organizations.

He’s [Keanu Reeves] the face of globalization. Born in Beirut to an English mother and a father of Hawaiian and Chinese descent, he’s a citizen of the world.

From Keanu Reeves, to Tiger Woods, to Barack Obama, multiracial people have increasingly received media attention, and as reflected in this description of Reeves, multiracial people are perceived as manifestations of the grand melting pot. Yet they can also be unsettling figures, symbolizing the breakdown of racial, cultural, and national boundaries which are central to the construction of identities.

While society often fixates on public figures who are mixed race, the creation of multiracial identities is the story not just of individuals, but of a post-Civil Rights generation. While racially mixed people have always existed, a concurrent rise in interracial marriages and racial tolerance in recent decades has resulted in a population that increasingly seeks to assert multiracial identities. As a group, multiracial people tend to be disproportionately young and concentrated on the West Coast, particularly in California and Hawaii. According to data from the 2000 Census, 26.3 percent of the two or more races population is between the ages of 18 to 34 versus 23.7 percent for the total population. These age based discrepancies are larger with younger persons. 15.5 percent of the two or more races population is between 10 and 17, compared to 11.5 percent of the general population, and 25.2 percent of the two or more races population is under age ten, in contrast to 14.1 percent of the total population. The median age for the two or more races population is 23.4…

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Dr. Linda Isako Angst discusses Hapa Identity

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Audio, Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2014-01-23 20:28Z by Steven

Dr. Linda Isako Angst discusses Hapa Identity

APA Compass
KBOO FM Community Radio
Portland, Oregon
2012-02-03

Anna Preble, Host

Linda Isako Angst, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Oxford College of Emory University, Oxford, Georgia

Dr. Linda Isako Angst, educator and anthropologist, and discusses ethnic identity, racially mixed identity, and stereotypes during a Hapa diversity workshop and interview with APA Compass’ Anna Preble.

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

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“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang

Posted in Arts, Asian Diaspora, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2014-01-22 15:33Z by Steven

“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang

Mu Preforming Arts presents: New Eyes Festival
Staged readings of the newest script from the Asian American theater canon
2014-01-23 through 2014-01-26

The Playwrights’ Center
2301 East Franklin Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406

“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang
Friday, 2014-01-24, 19:30 CST (Local Time)

Weaving together the stories of Lee, a Shanghai-born man who immigrates to America during World War II, his son, a first generation Asian American, and his granddaughter whose mixed-race identity strains her relationship with her conformist father. The three family members’ stories are accompanied by a quartet of Chinese Stones, brought to America in pockets and soles of shoes, who transform slowly as the Huang family acculturates over generations.

Jessica Huang (Elysium Blues) is a multi-racial, Minneapolis-based playwright, co-founder, producer and core writer of the Unit Collective, and a 2012 recipient of a Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center. Various stages of her work have been produced locally at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Pillsbury House Theatre, RedEye, and Pangea World Theater, and nationally at 2nd Generation in New York City, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the Kennedy Center and the Source Festival in Washington DC.

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Detecting Winnifred Eaton

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2014-01-19 04:33Z by Steven

Detecting Winnifred Eaton

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Published online: 2014-01-16
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt078

Jinny Huh, Assistant Professor of English
University of Vermont

In her recent introduction to Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), Karen E. H. Skinazi explores the relationship between racial ambiguity—that of both the anonymous author and the heroines in Marion and its predecessor, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915)—and the audience’s ability to detect racial coding. “Me’s success,” Skinazi states, “has been predicated on a mystery that allowed each reader the chance to become a literary Sherlock Holmes, cracking the codes of its vault of shocking secrets” (xvii). Later, Skinazi writes that a New York Times reviewer, playing detective, solves Eaton’s racial passing utilizing the science of detection à la Edgar Allan Poe (xxi-xxii). Skinazi’s allusions to the art of detection, although brief, are astute, leading to this essay’s rereading of Eaton’s legacy through the lens of detection and the anxieties produced by its failures, especially the threat of racial passing. It is no coincidence that Eaton published her fiction at a time when both classic detective fiction and African American passing tales were at the peak of their popularity.

Few critics have examined Eaton’s role in the detective genre. This essay responds to this oversight by arguing that Eaton’s reliance on a trope of racial and ethnic passing, both in her choice of pseudonym and in her Japanese romances, cannot be fully appreciated without situating her within the context of the panic about detecting passing that swept America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The unique lens of detective fiction allows us further to conceptualize Eaton’s role as a founding figure of Asian American fiction. This essay also highlights Eaton’s familiarity with rules of genre, particularly detective fiction and African American passing narratives, and her participation in the construction of racial epistemologies that were then being codified by…

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Growing Up Half Asian American: Curse or Gift?

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States on 2014-01-17 17:08Z by Steven

Growing Up Half Asian American: Curse or Gift?

Asian Fortune: your source for all things asian american
2014-01-15

Tamara Treichel

In this era of globalization and liberalization, being – and identifying as – biracial is becoming increasingly common. Yet only a few decades ago, unions between the races which may lead to biracial offspring were punishable by law in different countries. Think about Nazi-era Germany and eugenics, where Rassenschaender (“defilers of race”) were paraded through the streets for marrying or having intimate relationships with “non-Aryans,” Apartheid-era South Africa, where interracial relationships were also punishable by law, and yes, even the proverbial melting pot, the United States….

…In fact, interracial marriages were prohibited in the United States as early as colonial times, and were only permitted in the United States some three centuries later, in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia finally legalized marriage across racial lines.

Asian Fortune talked to several HAPAs both at home and as far abroad as Tokyo about the challenges and opportunities facing this unique demographic group. (A note on terminology: HAPA is used here in the sense of Half Asian Pacific American; meanwhile, there is a Hawaiian Pidgin term hapa, which means “part” or “mixed,” and Hawaiians use it to refer to persons of any kind of mixed ethnic heritage). Many of them talked about the difficulties they have in identifying with any particular race…

Kip Fulbeck, a well-known artist, slam poet and filmmaker said he identified with HAPA more than any specific race. Fulbeck is the author of several books including Part Asian, 100% HAPA as well as the director of a dozen films such as Banana Split and Lilo & Me. His “HAPA Project” is a stunning collection of portraits and handwritten words of HAPA individuals…

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2 Hapa Parents and 19 Hapa artists: Our Visit to War Baby / Love Child at the Wing Luke

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States on 2014-01-15 20:22Z by Steven

2 Hapa Parents and 19 Hapa artists: Our Visit to War Baby / Love Child at the Wing Luke

Multiracial Asian Families: Parenting around race, ethnicity and what it means to be mixed Asian
Sunday, 2014-01-12

Sharon H Chang

Cold, rain. Gray-stained morning. Husband and I are sitting in the car at 5 till, draining coffee dregs, waiting for Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience to open. We’re about to visit War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian Art before it closes in a week. We just dropped the kid off at preschool. It’s taken us a full month to get here and many thwarted attempts. And now we finally made it, we’re thrilled and stunned-awkward-silent at the same time. This is the unique challenge I think parents face in trying to raise their race-consciousness and by association, the race-savvy of their parenting (something our children desperately need). How in the world do you find: time to read books, childcare to get to places/events, opportunities to meet and converse with like-minded people/parents?? The truth is so often — you just don’t. Your kid is sick, abort mission. The babysitter cancelled or you can’t find one at all, abort mission. You feel like you’re gonna die from exhaustion, abort mission. The roof is leaking and your basement flooded, abort mission. So needless to say, this was a glorious triumphant morning for me and my partner. 2 Hapas with a Hapa son about to experience the art of 19 Hapa artists. That’s a whole lot of kickbutt Hapa-ness…

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A Tie That Binds Across Cultures

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Interviews, United States on 2014-01-15 19:14Z by Steven

A Tie That Binds Across Cultures

The New York Times
2014-01-10

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more.

Bob and Chiyoko Bermant met in 1973 as graduate students at the University of Kansas. Bob was majoring in psychology, and Chiyoko, who is Japanese, was studying linguistics. They married in 1974 before moving to Waukesha, Wis., where Bob is a professor at the local University of Wisconsin campus. Chiyoko works as a docent at the Ten Chimneys Estate and does Japanese-English translations for a local martial arts master. The couple has one adult son.

How did you meet?

Bob: She was looking for help with English grammar for her papers. One of my roommates was Japanese and told her I would help.

Chiyoko: Bob asked me to come to their apartment. I thought he was going to write in red ink where I had missed an “s” or the first person and it turned out he very thoroughly and patiently went over the paper with me…

Did you face prejudice as a mixed-race couple in the Midwest?

Bob: The only thing I remember was in Lawrence right after we were engaged we went into a Denny’s and they wouldn’t serve us. We just walked out.

How about Chiyoko’s parents?

Chiyoko: From the beginning my mother said that it would not work and nothing I could say or do changed her determination until the end of her life. That does not mean she didn’t like Bob. She saw me as a kind of war bride or mail-order bride.

My parents were divorced and my father was more open-minded. Once we were married, he just wanted to know when he was going to have a grandchild…

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