8 Asians

Like I’ve said, there seems to have been a slew of commercials (Target, CVS) recently with Asian Americans being portrayed as normal Americans, rather than for fodder. Now, Comcast has an ad touting its HD quality compared with AT&T’s U-verse with an Asian dad & son, along with Shaq. If you haven’t noticed lately, Shaq and Ben Stein have been spokesmen for Comcast this past year or so. Anyways, the kid kind of reminds me a little of Russell from Up. [Because he's, you know, Asian. And chubby. -Editor]

Barack Obama’s bow-at-the-waist to Emperor Akihito has garnered some pretty harsh responses in the US. Namely, it is anti-Obama critics jumping on the President’s gesture with the ferocity of a jock at my high school who’s just been implicated as being gay.

That the President of the World’s Super Power akin to something along the lines of God of Earth, the United States of America should feel the need to bend over for a small Asian man (repeatedly, as Obama also bowed in an equally as controversial greeting to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah at a G20 meeting recently) is thought of as repulsive, weak and definitively, unamerican by his critics.

Never mind that in Japanese tradition, the Emperor is a direct descendant of a divine being (the sun goddess, and thus probably even more powerful than any ‘god of earth’) and in American tradition, the president is just some chap who is popular.

Are the Obama critics really so afraid of being respectful of Asian traditions that they care about the angle of the President’s back? Is the WW2 anti-Japanese sentiment resurging to combine with some weirdo homophobic pride in a hybrid critique of the nation’s first non-white president?

Perhaps it would be more productive to critique the deep bowing of Obama to a symbolic ruler who represents a government that refuses to acknowledge many of its wartime atrocities and genocidal policies towards its Indigenous cultures. Or would such a critique be too close to the truth of America’s own national history?

No doubt by now, you’ve probably heard of the Fort Hood murder rampage by Major Nidal Malik Hasan. This past Tuesday, the funeral for the thirteen fallen soldiers was held; in attendance along with President Obama was Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. The Times does a nice profile of the challenges Shinseki faces since he’s been sworn into office:

“For months, Mr. Shinseki has been crisscrossing the country as President Obama’s pinstriped evangelist for veterans’ care, raising concerns about a coming tide of post-traumatic stress cases, traumatic brain injuries and other physical and psychological scars of battle… The problems are daunting. Nearly 8 million of the 23.4 million veterans are enrolled in the veterans system, which administers compensation for disabled veterans and runs the nation’s largest health care system … But amid the plaudits, some advocates wonder how well a general can run a bureaucracy filled with unionized civil servants. He can hire and fire at will only a few dozen of the department’s 298,000 employees. And some friends worry whether Mr. Shinseki, famously plainspoken and earnest, can survive in sharp-elbowed Washington.”

After reading the daunting challenges, who the hell would want this job? I give a lot of credit to Shinseki to taking on the challenges of trying to transform this unwieldy government agency; it’s a true testament that Shinseki has risen to every call of duty.

By Jude

Tuesday, 11 November, students at Sisowath High School received the first copies of a textbook detailing the autogenocide led by the Khmer Rouge regime in the years 1975 – 1978. Published by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, this textbook replaces five lines written on the Pol Pot era in current history books. Due to the changing political climate of the country, teaching about the events during Democratic Kampuchea has been anything but straightforward. With the Khmer Rouge retaining political influence well into the mid-1990s and former cadres occupying government roles, an honest portrayal of this period has been scant and gradually minimized from public education. This textbook comes also with the documentation of testimonies from the on-going Khmer Rouge tribunals conducted some 45 minutes outside of Phnom Penh.

Considering that I had the benefit to take an Asian American Studies course and learn about the genocide, I find it to be an odd privilege to possess this knowledge in light of the release of this textbook. In the United States, many Khmer Americans either seek to hear the stories of their parents, sometimes successful and other times not; or maybe never think to ask because their parents fall silent on why they ever came to the US. Public k-12 education also has not been a reliable institution to learn about a genocide that occurred partly in reaction to a US-supported ruler.

I find it shocking that many young people in Cambodia today do not believe the stories of their elders surrounding the genocide. It only makes more salient the notion of what is the “official record” that is accepted history. Who writes the textbooks, who is left out, who is valorized — such factors have significant impacts on how a generation is raised. Hopefully this textbook will correct a dangerous historical amnesia in Cambodia’s up and coming new leaders. With almost half the population under the age of 20, I believe the imperative of knowing one’s history is even more marked in Cambodia. The author of the textbook expressed, “The young generation has the responsibility to repair this broken glass. They need to understand what happened in their country before they can move forward to build up democracy, peace and reconciliation.”

For those of us who were not adopted, we can only begin to imagine what it would be like to be raised in a culture completely different from the one we were born into, but this may give us some insight: a new study by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute finds that among first-generation adopted South Koreans, 78% of respondents considered themselves white or wanted to be white when they were children. The study was based on the responses of 179 SK adoptees with two white parents.

South Koreans make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the U.S., and they comprise an estimated 10% of the total South Korean population here. The first generations of adoptive parents were told to assimilate the children into American culture without regard for the children’s native culture; as a result, older South Korean adoptees tended to have the mindset of being white or wanting to be white.

Nowadays, adoptive parents are encouraged to maintain ties to their adopted children’s native background. They send their kids to “culture camps” to learn more about where they came from. They take the kids on a family trip to their native country. They enroll them in classes to learn their native language. The adoption mindset definitely shifted in the right direction by encouraging kids to learn more about where they came from — instead of avoiding it.