As with most people, I don’t remember much of my early childhood;  I emigrated to the State from Taiwan when I was 5 years old and the only relevant and vivid memories I have from my time on the Formosan island was sitting 2 feet away from a sizable television watching Michael Jordan win his first championships.  I still have the Bulls snap-back from back then; the logo is faded and the brim is bent, but it represents the simplest and only remnants of a forgotten upraising.

So it wasn’t far-fetched to feel a sense of pride as Jeremy Lin dropped 25 on the Nets, playing against a premiere point guard in Deron Williams,  and then 28 on Utah to take command of a team without two of the top 15 players in the league, let alone his team.  Tonight, he plays against John Wall, the player picked in draft in 2010 before anyone else, the same draft that Lin himself wasn’t picked in.  Facebook and Twitter will explode like it did the last two games, and the story will continue to write itself.

The day after the Nets game, I watched the Super Bowl with a few other Asian Americans and an innocuous conversation started about Jeremy Lin’s success.  I had, over the last 24 hours, scoured over all media coverage of Jeremy Lin and absorbed much of it as I could, and as I juxtaposed that coverage, on ESPN, basketball and sports blogs, and newspapers,  with the conversation I had with Asian American peers, I realized that the dialogue was different; we we’re appreciating him for different reasons.

If you look into it, Lin’s exposure is rather curious.  Averaging 26 points over 2 games isn’t much to rave about; it doesn’t always happen, but it does happen.  After all, there are rookies and sophomores out there who are having better years than Jeremy Lin (Kemba Walker, Kyrie Irving, Ricky Rubio, Paul George to name a few), with less exposure.  And while the event is historic , the history is terribly uninteresting.  Who cares that no one’s put up a 25 point, 8 assist game in their first start since Hall of Famer Isaiah Thomas did it?  Or that the last person to score 20 points in the NBA from the Ivy League was journeyman Chris Dudley, who only averaged 3 points per game in his career?  To put in perspective; I doubt many NBA fans remember when Brandon Jennings dropped 55 points his rookie year; and the story was gone in a matter of days, if not hours.  It definitely helps that he’s in biggest market in the United States, but what if someone else did it?  What if that player were Iman Shumpert?  Would it still be news? Would there be LinSanity?

The point is, America’s intrigued with Jeremy Lin because he’s Asian, but America fails to acknowledge it openly; solely hinting at the phenomenon without addressing it.  That’s like completely ignoring a festering wound that’s the size of the elephant sitting in the room.  In many cases, it can’t.  Overt conversations about race is a marketing and media third rail; you may be able to walk by and approach it, but you’re dead if you touch it.  ABC/ESPN can’t dedicate segments his ethnic identity, it faces too much pressure from third parties.  It’s more than that; Jeremy Lin has been forced to carry on his shoulder the burden of an entire race simply by association and under-representation, and the Asian American community perpetuates this.  In the same way that his success is OUR success in tearing down stereotypes and fighting bigotry, his potential failure becomes OUR failure, and that become dangerous.

That becomes dangerous because if he does fail, Asians are then perceived as weak and emasculated; physically inferior to a game dominated by African and Euro-Americans.  It’s dangerous because if he succeeds, it perpetuates the Model Minority (I’m sorry, but the VioLin?  Is that not the most tiger-mother coded reference ever?  That’s the best you could come up with?  Thousands of fans carrying violins?  Because you can’t spell it without L-I-N?  Why not MandoLins?  There’s an abbreviation for mandarin in there too!  Let’s talk about how he can’t play at UCLA or Stanford because they’re a Division 1 school, but was a sure-in at an Ivy League school.)

Now don’t get me wrong,  Jeremy Lin might not fail, but that’s no guarantee for his success either.  But the subtleties of race made this a story, and by ignoring a deeper conversation about it as a nation, the Asian American community sets itself up to criticism.  Maybe, just maybe, he stops being a novelty, but I doubt it.  This isn’t something we can openly address; and if America doesn’t address it, the Asian American community always will; we’re going to “ride him like freakin’ Secretariat.” And if we’re lucky, he’ll carry us into a new age of racial understanding, but if not?

Virginia Tech’s starting left tackle this past season Ed Wang declared for the NFL draft and is projected by CBS to be the 11th best offensive tackle, hoping to be selected in the third round.    At 6’5, 315 pounds, Wang owes much of his athletic prowess and physical gifts to his bloodline, as both of his parents were Olympics track athletes in the 70′s, whose strict guidance helped him earn a scholarship to Virginia Tech years before, thereby beginning his conversion from tight end to offensive lineman.

In reality, Chinese-Jamaican safety Patrick Chung of the New England Patriots broke barriers just years before, but if Wang is drafted, he would be the first player of 100% Chinese descent to be the NFL, granting Asian Americans another role model in the NFL; putting him in the likes of Hines Ward, Vietnamese Dat Nguyen and Korean Eugene Chung (also a former Virginia Tech player)

Personally, I think it would be awesome if Green Bay drafted him.  I would instantly purchase his jersey if the Packers selected him tomorrow.  Despite the resigning of long tenured offensive lineman and the drafting of Iowa star Bryan Bulaga, the Pack still have a very great need at offensive tackle.

The draft resumes tomorrow at 6PM EST.  It might be a marathon, but if you have enough patience, you just might see history being made.

A couple of years ago, I was introduced to Band of Brothers, the hugely successful HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne and their accomplishments in the European theater in World War II, and was instantly hooked.  The miniseries focused more on individual American soldiers and their subsequent achievements and flaws and kept, save for a few instances, the Nazi’s in a faceless shroud.  It was effective one-sided, dehumanization that made you cheer for the soldiers of Easy Company even more.

Yet very rarely did you ever consider the Nazi’s to be “evil”.  In one episode, the viewer discovers that an American had answered the call to return to the Fatherland, and that one Easy Company trooper lived just miles away from his Nazi enemy.  The exception does come from the episode highlighting the Holocaust, but the drama focused primarily on the characters; mostly because most Americans live and feed off the stories from the European Theater — we see them so often that we do not even need to hear them anymore — and we know that the Nazis were, as an organization, evil (and that’s why Inglorious Basterds doesn’t need a narrative preface).

The spiritual successor of Band of Brothers, The Pacific, which aired its first episode this past Sunday, is different.  Besides Pearl Harbor, the nuclear bombings, and maybe the Battle of Midway; the stories of the Pacific Theater need to be introduced through a historical lens and can not lend itself on characters alone (which is why we hear the series producer Tom Hanks in the beginning of the episode introducing Guadalcanal).   Understudied history SHOULD quickly become gray history, in which there should be no black and white of good and evil.  But it doesn’t.  Because we are Americans, and we won.  Unlike the war in Europe, good and evil carries implications of racial politics and that’s where America finds itself at a crossroad.

The argument suddenly boils down between racial lines.  Tom Hanks caught himself in controversy with a cover story in Time Magazine, and attracted mindless dribble (mostly conservatives bashing Hollywood for being unpatriotic), but I link to  a more elegant response by Victor Davis Hanson, that states that combat was motivated and fought on racial tensions, but only as a result of war.  More simply put, it was what was accepted at the time, and appears to justify “racism”.  His points address his thesis well; war was fought and atrocities were committed on both sides, “racial animosity” was not one-sided;  that I accept, but the argument blatantly disregards Japanese American Internment, which I consider racist.   I also have a problem with him justifying such atrocities as a result of war and justifying the use of the Atomic Bomb as a “last resort”.  That, in my eyes, is unacceptable, but I’m probably just as “uneducated” as Tom Hanks… I digress.

My point is this, the first episode of the The Pacific was historically accurate in its usage of derogatory terms (IE. Japs, yellow bastards… so on).  It ended by juxtaposing a Japanese atrocity with an American one, enlisting faceless soldiers to do wicked things until one of the show’s stars put an end to it, an overly blatant attempt to be political correct.  Now, I’m to assume that the process of dehumanization affected everyone except for our heroic protagonists;  it tried so hard to be not politically correct that I almost found it offensive (racist is too strong of a term).   The authors of the memoirs the miniseries was based upon mostly likely weren’t racist, but that’s probably because they wrote their memoirs after they regained their humanity, after the war was over.  I’m sure even the most honorable crossed acceptable racial lines (and moral lines), even with the standards of the 40′s, but at what point do we allow modern views of political correctness  alter the realism of popular media based on history (say Mad Men and its misogyny) and at what point does it become offensive?  Is it wrong to accept different standards because the times were different?

IMDB lists a Frank Lee to portray Chuck “Cho” Yang on the castlist, I assume that’s when the series will seriously delve into issues of Asian American racial politics, but if you gave me a realistic, albeit offensive portrayal of the War fought in the Pacific Theater, I’d accept it more than the facade of political correctness given to me by this episode.  Nonetheless, the show has been just as thrilling and enjoyable as its spiritual predecessor; and I look forward to more episodes.

Cao won his seat over troubled eight time incumbent William Jefferson, who still received 47% of the vote despite charges of bribery and corruption (Louisiana politics, do you expect any less?).  Rep. Cao is very “moderate” for a Republican, as highlighted by his vote for the Health Care Plan; he has to be, if he wants to have any chance to be re-elected in a very blue district.

Signed in February 19th, 1942 by President F.D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066 granted military personnel the right to move en masse many Japanese Americans, of which the majority were American citizens, into internment camps for a good two years.  The move forced many of these individuals to sacrifice much of their possessions, property, and even family.  People like Star Trek star George Takei, Malcolm X’s confidant Yuri Kochiyama, civil activist Richard Aoki and about 120,000 others had their lives shaped by these internment camps.  In short, Japanese Internment is seen as a black stain in American history, and is often considered a hypocritical blind move by the American government by many due to its various associations with the Nazi’s concentration camps, but I digress.  The most well known of these internment camps is in Manzanar, CA but before much of the interned were forced into Manzanar, they first settled into temporary staging areas held at various stables and race tracks in places like Pomona, Fresno, Salinas, and so on; the most famous of them the Santa Anita Race Track.  The exhibit hopes to bring much of the forgotten history of Japanese Internment back into the forefront of our view on World War II, which is generally viewed as the perennial battle in which the good of the Allies defeated the evil of the Axis.

I grew up around the area and often drove by without drawing any connections between the race track and its dark, hidden past.   The race track sits right next to a modern mall and when I went to the mall in middle school, I always considered the track to be a relic of the past; mostly because I failed to understand the excitement of horse racing and failed to recognize the significance of the venue to the sport.  I guess it would be as if I looked down upon the Rose Bowl simply because I didn’t watch football.  I didn’t know of its purpose, let alone its role in 1942.  Therefore, I’m excited to visit the exhibit not only because I hope to catch some great exhibits and read some excerpts from primary sources first hand, but also because it gives me a reason to step into a place so heralded by horse racing enthusiasts.

A year or so ago, we had a post about Hepatitis B and how it disproportionately affects Asian Americans. For those who don’t already know, Hep B is a disease that attacks the liver without many noticeable symptoms leading many to dub it as the “silent killer” because those who could be infected rarely get tested for it to be diagnosed.  Hep B leads to complications with the liver, in forms of liver cancer and liver failure, and could very much lead to death.

Hepb.org claims that over 12 million people in the United States have Hepatitis B and that it has an infection rate of 100,000 a year.  An estimated 2 million people have chronic Hepatitis B in the United States and over half of those are of Asian decent.  For that very reason, the B Here Campaign is trying to raise awareness on Hep B and it effects on the Asian American community.  Recruiting many Asian American artists and performers, the B Here Campaign is bringing the likes of David Choi, KevJumba, AJ Rafael, Kaba Modern, Paul Dateh and others to UC Irvine, UC Davis, and the University of Houston to the spread the word.  The performance and exhibit at UC Irvine will actually be tomorrow night, (they’ll visit Houston on the 13th and Davis on the 27th) so make sure you head on out! Visit willyoubhere.com for more info.

As a college student, I can say with some confidence that these numbers tell less than half the story.  While there may be a bunch of Asian American students at various campuses across America (especially on the West Coast), it does not mean that they are active in discussions about race or participate in Asian American clubs.  I know from personal experience that a high number of Asian American students or Asian American clubs do not necessarily translate to dialogue or debate; in fact I attend a college on the top 15 list and felt very much ostracized because I didn’t think there was enough discussion about race.  Another quick note is that Harvard, Dartmouth, and Tufts, the three college campuses that had some noticeable controversy involving Asian American in the past year, are not in the Top 25 for universities or liberal art colleges.  However, take the information with a grain of salt as the statistics could have very much changed within the last 9 years.

Therefore, to update that list Angry Asian Man and the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress is calling out for nominations for the “best” college for Asian Americans.  I share because I worry that race relations have taken a backseat on many college campuses and that more and more students are becoming apathetic about race when it is still a pressing issue.  Therefore I request that all students who have the time and opportunity to nominate their school do so; if you feel like you are struggling to answer some of these questions, it’s because your college should be doing a lot more! I just submitted my school.. you should do the same!

(Flickr photo credit: Paul Keleher)