I read a lot of cultural psychology, and find that it is relevant to my experiences as an Asian American and explains a lot of the dynamics I see around me. I want to share some of these ideas and hope that they are relevant to others.

Most of these ideas come from Geert Hofstede, a cultural psychologist who surveyed the employees at the multinational company IBM and identified four dimensions or characteristics of cultures. The first of these is the power distance index (PDI).

Power Distance is the distance a person feels or keeps between themselves and a person in a position of power. Asian culture is high power distance, which means that subordinates maintain a distance from their superiors and have a sense of respect or even awe of them. On the other hand American culture is low power distance, which means that subordinates see their superiors as approachable and their superiors’ decisions as negotiable.

A person acquires their attitudes toward power from their upbringing. In British culture, for example, it is customary to treat children as “little adults.” They express their opinions, are allowed to contradict their parents and say what they want or don’t want. I think this explains what always seemed like a phenomenon to me– of very articulate children who are comfortable conversing with adults.

In a culture with higher power distance, a child does not speak as much with authority and is taught obedience. Disagreement may be taken as a sign of disrespect, and as a child you are expected to take what is given to you. Although countries are ranked along a gradient and it is all relative, Asian countries are generally high power distance.

The attitude a person acquired growing up transfers to the manager-subordinate relationship in the workplace. An Asian employee might not disagree with his or her manager because they do not want to “talk back” or disrespect him or her. They feel obligated to just accept whatever their superior says. This makes Western management techniques such as “Management by Objectives” ineffective because they presuppose that an employee would negotiate their objectives. However if the employee is uncomfortable saying “no,” they would simply agree to the projects and be stuck with an unreasonable workload.

Overall, management in high PDI cultures is more paternalistic — “the benevolent autocrat” or “good father,” whereas management in low PDI cultures is more “consultative.” In diverse workplaces the discrepancy between these styles can cause a lot of misunderstanding– a manager may increase the workload without considering or even remembering what the subordinate already has, and continue to do so as long as the subordinate doesn’t say anything to remind him of the situation. Meanwhile, the employee doesn’t say anything or make much of an attempt to reduce his workload. Instead he burns himself out accommodating the manager’s demands, even at the expense of his own health or well-being. He wonders at his manager’s appalling lack of consideration.

Does this strike a chord with anyone?

(source: Cultures and Organizations, Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede)

Something to do in New York: the National Asian American Theater Festival. This year’s festival seems to have very little connection to the performances from the first NAATF in 2007, which offered twenty-five groups and a lot more variety. Here are the options: Sharif Don’t Like It, a one man show about the treatment of people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent after 9/11, Bahu-Beti-Biwi, an Indian dance, Imelda, a musical about Imelda Marcos, APACUNT, a performance piece about a variety of Asian American topics, an interpretation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, and some screenplay readings.

I went to APACUNT on Wednesday, its opening night. The performance features a “panel” of three Asian American characters plus a “moderator” who is also the director. Each night has a different topic and on Wednesday it was “THE PAST: Isn’t it Semantic? The Unprofitability of “Asian American.” Alice Tuan, an academic, Kristina Wong, an actor obsessed with her reviews, and Soo-Jin Lee, an Audrey magazine-type character, discussed the label Asian American and then exhorted the audience to help them think of a different name. As in, we actually broke into groups and brainstormed names and some loose marketing ideas. Normally I love interactive and participatory over passive and spectator — but I wasn’t into it and in an audience of a dozen people, there’s limited room to disengage. Note: a British bloke in my group pulled at the corners of his eyes to describe the model Tyson Beckford. I guess he was too old to learn from Hannah Montana’s mistakes.

The remaining performances of APACUNT (pronounced appa-cunt) are:

Friday, Oct 16, 10:30pm
THE FUTILE:
Creating a National Asian American Network
Join the Rapture now or be left behind to die.
The Chinese will buy us all out, so you might as well start packing now.

Saturday, Oct 17, 10:30pm
SPECIAL TOPICS:
Writing in the Margins
I once stuck my dick in Judd Apatow’s mouth
Join the playletting, forge into our peanut gallery, and the freestyle challenge. Whine and cheese always provided. Special orations by Alice Tuan.

Sunday, Oct 18, 6pm
CLOSING PLENARY:
REINVENTING THE WHEEL: What spoke?
Free styling toward innovation in Asian American Theater and performance of the human in the 21st century.

The festival is held at Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, New York.

Another day. I was at work, where I don’t have a desk and move from place to place. I was sitting next to a guy whom I had never talked to. I said a few words to him. He said a few words back. Nothing remarkable– just casual conversation. A few minutes later he turns and talks to the person behind him about food. And says he hates Chinese food.

Is this a coincidence? Am I being paranoid? Or overly sensitive? Derald Wing Sue, professor of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, would say no. His research identifies this behavior as a “racial microaggression.” A racial microaggression is brief, everyday exchange that sends a denigrating message to a person of color. Very often it’s a subtle insult where you might not even know what’s wrong, but can sense that something negative is being said. Because it’s not overt and it’s small, it may feel too insignificant to comment on it. And yet at the same time, it bothers you.

Here’s an easier microaggression to describe: the passing shot of the guy who yells “Go back to China!” Professor Sue would classify this as a microassault. What are you supposed to do, turn around and start an argument with him? You are forced to let a lot of it go.

This type of racism is what people experience on a daily basis. While no one instance is that bad, they may cumulatively result in feelings of anger, frustration, ostracism, mistrust, and loss of self-esteem.

The American Psychologist article Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life calls for “research that points to adaptive ways of handling microaggressions” and “to increase awareness and sensitivity of whites to microaggressions so that they accept responsibility for their behaviors.” There’s also a more reader- friendly summary of the article in APA journal (APA here stands for American Psychological Association), Unmasking Racial Microaggressions.

And here’s a table I made from the article which shows some examples of racial microaggressions most relevant to Asians: Examples of Racial Microaggressions.

It’s notable that this researcher is currently based in New York (though he’s originally from Portland way back when, and then California). New York of all places is the ideal breeding grounds for micro-anything. There’s so many people here that you have microencounters all day.

(Featured image Flickr photo credit: rollenran)

In Los Angeles at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse, over a thousand Asian Americans spent their Labor Day rocking out at the International Secret Agents concert. Produced by the hip hop group Far*East Movement and Wong Fu Productions, the concert featured a variety of talent including the dance group Quest Crew, YouTube personality KevJumba and musicians David Choi and Kina Grannis.

Far*East Movement (FM) had the most spectacular performance with strobe lights, colored panels, and fog. Kev Nish said before the show, “we’re taking the secret agents to the moon, past the moon, up to Mars, past Neptune to a different galaxy.” Kev Nish, Prohgress, J-Splif, and DJ Virman wore silver jackets and space helmets. FM experienced their first success with the song “Round Round” in the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. They performed a few songs from their most recent album Animal and for the finale to the night got all the featured artists on the stage with them for their latest hit “Girls on the Dance Floor.”

The audience spontaneously rose to their feet when Quest Crew came on. This group of breakdancers won MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew (third season). Previously, member Ryan Conferido won lots of hearts on the first season of So You Think You Can Dance but got shafted from the title; Hok Konishi and D-Trix Sandoval were on the show in subsequent seasons. The energy in the auditorium surged and some stood on their chairs to see the breakdancers debut a new freestyle set developed just for the show. As a returning performer from the first ISA concert last year, Hok said he was excited “to see the faces that we saw last year and see them succeed at what they do. It’s really meeting friends and sharing the arts that we do.”

Lydia Paek from Quest Crew and Tom Ngo hosted the concert. Because the audience was a high school and college aged crowd, they talked about going back to school and their music and art classes. Tom Ngo played good sport to ongoing dialogue about whether he could ask out Kina Grannis. The skit had echoes of the short film “Yellow Fever” that Wong Fu Productions made in when they were at UCSD. It seems the guy is still figuring out how to get the girl.

Since “Yellow Fever,” Wesley Chan, Ted Fu, and Philip Wang of Wong Fu have made more films and online content, stayed busy with speaking engagements at colleges, and were recently featured on CNN. Said Philip Wang, “the hardest part was putting on the show last year. We were doing it all by ourselves with our own money and it was just FM. Then we had another show in San Francisco that was sold out, and now we’ve come back here, the ISA name is bigger now, the fans are more excited and this was a little easier.” They continue to strengthen the ISA brand and the other facets of their media company.

(Video credit: Pacific Rim Video)

Claustrophobia will play on opening night (tonight!) of the Asian American International Film Festival. The screening will be its New York premiere. Q&A with Ivy Ho follows.

Also playing tonight: Paper Heart, a documentary by Charlyne Yi who goes in search of other people’s stories of true love – and gets a little love story of her own (with Michael Cera!).

Claustrophobia is an introverted, reflective film about four co-workers in a carpool and the gray areas of their relationships to each other. The main character is Pearl (Karena Lin), a young marketing assistant who is in love with Tom (Ekin Cheng), a manager. Jewel, a glamorous princess who can’t be bothered to pick up her work phone, serves as a contrast to Pearl. Jewel has a more direct and confrontational style and plans to rat out some wrongdoings she knows about in the company. John, the fourth co-worker, provides further context and secondary plot.

The film is written by Ivy Ho, an award winning Hong Kong screenwriter. It has a reverse chronological structure that fits the oblique, indirect natures of its characters. It begins with the end– early on there is a scene of Tom encouraging Pearl to work somewhere else– and shows how they got to that point. As the film progresses the mood lightens slightly, and the viewer working backwards can see how the characters have sunk deeper and become more burdened by their secret feelings.

Because the film relies heavily on looks, body language, and other subtle cues, it will resonate more with people who are accustomed to paying close attention to people and what they aren’t saying. At times it can be bit frustrating, because they clearly have important things to resolve, but instead will have a dialogue about what to order for lunch. It’s easy to say These people just need to get over it! Find someone else my dear! but if you are honest with yourself you will admit that there is some self-recognition here, and something distinctly Asian about they way these characters communicate and mull over things.

Claustrophobia
100 min, Cantonese with English subtitles
6:45 PM @ Clearview Chelsea

Paper Heart
9:30 @ Clearview Chelsea

It is highly recommended to purchase tickets ahead of time- at the theater or online.

The owner of the site, Ben Huh, spoke at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop last night. It was a reminder that even a deceptively simple concept such as “zany pictures of cats” needs the right infrastructure and a million factors in the right place in order to grow and have a foothold in the wide, woolly web.

LOLcats began when someone received a picture of a grey kitty looking up in a tutu, with the words “I can has cheezburger?” He thought it was so funny that he bought the domain name icanhascheezburger.com, put the picture on it, and sent it to all his friends. His friends started emailing him pictures to add to the site. LOLcats was born.

Or was it? It might have died there, like a million funny things your friends do or say- but one of those friends happened to be Ben Huh. He bought the site a few months later and grew it into the site it is today. LOLcats is often cited as an example of a “meme,” a term borrowed from linguistics that is now used to refer to a catchy idea that spreads through the internet.

If there was one central or recurring idea during the talk, it was that a meme is user-driven. Huh made this distinction and adjusted people’s views several times. Are you afraid of AOL or some large, powerful company taking your idea? No, because these things never start from the top-down. They are driven from the bottom-up by users and fans. How do you promote a blog? You don’t, you create value and that builds your personal credibility and keeps people coming back. People who know you, “power users” and avid fans tell people about the blog. How do you kill a meme? You try to control it and say what it is or what it can and cannot be. You have to let your users tell you what it is and what they want it to be.

Huh notes that he doesn’t take the pictures, write the captions, or even choose which ones make it onto the site (a voting system does that). He simply created a place where a community could form and where people enjoy it and have fun. Concisely, his goal is “to entertain people for five minutes a day.”

LOLcats has been written up on 8asians and referenced in countless articles. The book based on the website has been on the New York Times bestseller list. But a quick poll of my own friends revealed none who had heard of it. As popular as it currently is, LOLcats has room to grow and continue.

This is a Google Map of Asian and Asian American resources in New York City. I started this map to help me remember them geographically so I could recommend the nearest “Asian thing” to any given person (New Yorkers are very lazy and often are only willing to go within twenty blocks of themselves.)

All of these have been around for years and will probably stick around. Well, Subway Cinema complained in last year’s Asian American Film Festival program guide that they are broke and might not continue. And yet the guide looked like a million dollars! Maybe it’s the rent at their Park Avenue office.

P.S. I threw in a few food trucks and izakayas in for fun and good measure. See the map for yourself, after the jump.

(Flickr photo credit: acnatta)

View Asian Organizations NYC in a larger map

GREEN: go, visit. walk in. has open-to- public-elements such as gallery.
YELLOW: an office, contact or appointment necessary
WHITE FLAG: temporary or annual festival
SQUIGGLY BLUE LINES: not specifically Asian but a related interest or culturally similar/relevant

The setting is an outdoor strip mall in New Jersey called “Peddlers Town.” The various shops and shopkeepers there serve as minor characters. Although Dae Joon (more often known as “Joon-a,” as his mother calls him) is the central character, some of the chapters make these minor characters the main focus. The point of view switches to theirs while the Koreans become secondary. At other times, the chapter is from the point of view of the mother, or from Hong, another shop owner in the mall.

It’s not as confusing as it sounds. Together, the chapters form an image of this Korean boy’s life in suburbia, and in accordance with contemporary literature, it’s readable, the plot moves ever forward, and even when the characters are miserable, one isn’t allowed to dwell on it for long. One moves on to other problems.

The story of the first generation Asian American is one of the great unsolved puzzles of contemporary literature. Although this latest attempt doesn’t resolve it completely, it hits the board a little closer to the mark.