Happy Tueasday
11/15/05
Argh…it’s only Tuesday…
Supposed to have a cold snap arrive today (temps in the 30’s)…at least I found one of my thicker jackets…still not looking forward to it…
Sign that I’m not in So Cal anymore of the day: the DMV here is split in two- the Department of Transportation (for your registration needs) and the Department of Safety (for Driver’s License issues)…they had to make it difficult don’t they?
Ai yah……….
Plus more evidence people hate Asians:
NEW YORK - Eighteen-year-old Chen Tsu was waiting on a Brooklyn subway platform after school when four high school classmates approached him and demanded cash. He showed them his empty pockets, but they attacked him anyway, taking turns pummeling his face.
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He was scared and injured — bruised and swollen for several days — but hardly surprised.
At his school, Lafayette High in Brooklyn, Chinese immigrant students like him are harassed and bullied so routinely that school officials in June agreed to a
Department of Justice' name=c1>SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3>
Department of Justice consent decree to curb alleged "severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates." Since then, the Justice Department credits Lafayette officials with addressing the problem — but the case is far from isolated.
Nationwide, Asian students say they're often beaten, threatened and called ethnic slurs by other young people, and school safety data suggest that the problem may be worsening. Youth advocates say these Asian teens, stereotyped as high-achieving students who rarely fight back, have for years borne the brunt of ethnic tension as Asian communities expand and neighborhoods become more racially diverse.
"We suspect that in areas that have rapidly growing populations of Asian-Americans, there often times is a sort of culture clashing," said Aimee Baldillo of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. Youth harassment is "something we see everywhere in different pockets of the U.S. where there's a large influx of (Asian) people."
In the last five years, Census data show, Asians — mostly Chinese — have grown from 5 percent to nearly 10 percent of Brooklyn residents. In the Bensonhurst neighborhood, historically home to Italian and Jewish families, more than 20 percent of residents now are Asian. Those changes have escalated ethnic tension on campuses such as Lafayette High, according to Khin Mai Aung, staff attorney at the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is advocating for Lafayette students.
"The schools are the one place where everyone is forced to come together," Aung said.
Brooklyn's changes mirror Asian growth nationally. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders grew from 3.7 million to nearly 12 million. After Latinos, Asians are the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group.
Stories of Asian youth being bullied and worse are common. In recent years:
• A Chinese middle schooler in San Francisco was mercilessly taunted until his teacher hid him in her classroom at lunchtime.
• Three Korean-American students were beaten so badly near their Queens high school that they skipped school for weeks and begged to be transferred.
• A 16-year-old from Vietnam was killed last year in a massive brawl in Boston.
Some lawmakers have responded. The New York City Council, after hearing hours of testimony from Asian youth, last year passed a bill to track bullying and train educators on prevention. Also last year, California Assemblywoman Judy Chu won passage of a new law to allow hate crimes victims more time — up to three years — to file civil suits; the bill was inspired by a 2003 San Francisco incident in which five Asian teens were attacked by a mob of youth.
In August, the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center organized a first-ever conference on the subject in Sacramento. Isami Arifuku, assistant director of the center, said she expected about 200 participants but nearly double that number attended.
Experts offer several broad explanations for the bullying problem.
In the broadest strokes, Baldillo said, Asian youth are sometimes small in stature and often adhere to cultural mores urging them to avoid confrontation and focus on academics. Many don't report bullying because they fear repercussions or don't want to embarrass their families, she added.
Language barriers also exacerbate the situation. "I have to hear, '(Expletive) Chinese!' at least three times a day, and they always say it to people who look weaker and don't speak English," said Rita Zeng, 19 and a senior at Lafayette High. The parents of limited-English students often have little access to translators and struggle to advocate for their children, Aung said.
Chen Tsu described his beating in April at a subway station, saying through a translator: "Those guys looked like they could kill somebody. ... I was scared to go back to school."
Increasingly, some victims are fighting back. A 2003 California survey by the Services and Advocacy for Asian Youth Consortium found that 14 percent of Asian youth said they join gangs for protection. Department of Justice school crime data found the number of Asian youth carrying weapons nearly tripled from 1999 to 2001.
"There are more Asian kids being brought to juvenile court for assault and battery," Arifuku said. "The thing we're finding in their history is that they had been picked on — called names and teased — and in some cases they lashed out and retaliated."
Advocates and students say that, typically, large fights erupt after weeks or months of verbal taunting.
That's what happened at Edison High School in Fresno, Calif., according to Malcolm Yeung of the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. For months starting late last year, Hmong students had been repeatedly called names and had food thrown at them.
"There had been patterns of this happening over and over again," said Yeung, whose group investigated the case on behalf of Asian students. "But the school had overlooked the issue."
On Feb. 25, the lunchtime taunting escalated into fights involving at least 30 students, according to Susan Bedi, spokesman for Fresno Unified School District. Seven students were treated for injuries, 12 were suspended and two faced expulsion, she said. Eight were convicted of misdemeanor assault, said Fresno police Sgt. Anthony Martinez.
This year, officials at Edison High added more security and started an on-campus human relations council to address ethnic tension, Bedi said.
At Lafayette High, tension has long been high on campus and in surrounding areas, said Steve Chung, president of the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn, whose group was founded in late 2002 after an earlier student beating. That incident "was like the ignition — it started a fire" in the community.
The student, a straight-A senior, was thrashed to unconsciousness while anti-Chinese slurs were yelled at him. Some news reported dubbed the school "Horror High," and Chinese students began going public about the problem.
"The more we dug into Lafayette High School, the more we found," Chung said.
Aung's probing revealed that school administrators seemed reluctant to intervene, translation services for parents and students was spotty and teachers who reported the problems may have been punished.
School officials say some reports were exaggerated. But "the problems there went back many, many years," said Michael Best, general counsel for New York City schools. Since signing the consent decree in June, he said, "the situation at the school in our view is very, very different." A Justice Department spokesman agreed that the school has been "very responsive."
Teachers this year are getting training to curb harassment, translation services throughout the district have been beefed up, and race relations experts are working with students and staff on campus, deputy New York schools chancellor Carmen Farina said.
Last year, Lafayette's longtime principal retired, and many are optimistic about the new principal, Jolanta Rohloff. In addition, new vice principal Iris Chiu is fluent in Chinese and working closely with parents and students. "We actively sought someone that we knew could handle the delicacy of the school," Farina said.
Still, she said, an incident already has been reported since school started: An Asian student was attacked by several classmates on his way to the subway. He suffered minor injuries.
________________________________________________________________________________
Plus a thing on overachievers (which I never was- I’m too lazy):
There they were looking out from the back page of the Tribune's main section Wednesday. Those brainy bespectacled young Asian women who "year after year ... outpace their peers on state tests," the story said.And there they were on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section last month: two Korean sisters flogging their book "Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can Too."And then there I was at my desk Wednesday reading an e-mail from a stranger who reminded me that exactly one year ago the high-achieving Asian-American author Iris Chang escaped it all by ending her own life.That's when I knew I had to write this little rant.You see, as much as the mainstream press wants to applaud Asian-American emphasis on high achievement and never bringing "down the whole race" with "a B," as one Asian student said to our reporter, we rarely look at the downsides of such pressure.Those downsides can include extreme fear of failure, unpleasantly competitive natures, withdrawal from society, stress-related disorders and most sadly, Asian-American women holding the highest suicide rates in the nation among women age 15 to 24--an American age category that holds the highest general suicide rates to begin with, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.6 suicides in 4 monthsBetween December 2003 and April 2004, the Chicago-based Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative anecdotally recorded six suicides in the Chicago area of Asian-Americans under age 30, according to Aruna Jha, the agency's founder and a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago.And an article in the latest issue of the journal Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior states that for reasons not clear, Asian students are 1.59 times more likely to seriously consider attempting suicide than their white peers.This isn't big news in the Asian-American community, but rather our dirty little secret.Just about everyone knows someone whose relative died mysteriously. But no one wants to talk about it. And for some who are living with the terrible shameful secret, they couldn't talk about it even if they wanted to.Just last month a fellow Asian journalist told me about a local Korean mother who spent an afternoon sobbing in the journalist's car as she recounted her daughter's suicide at an Ivy League school. No one in the community knew about it. And she was forbidden by her husband to speak of it. So for years she's kept her daughter's story locked up inside, just as her daughter kept her frailties locked up inside until she saw no escape from high expectations except in death.Later in an e-mail, the journalist, who was from New York, told me that she, in fact, met three such Korean mothers during her visit to Chicago.But the pressures don't just come from parents. In the United States, where the model minority myth is peddled regularly by the media, and in books such as "Top of the Class," the stereotypes begin to perpetuate themselves. Luckily, Asians and others familiar with the issue are starting to talk back.The New York Times' interview with "Top of the Class" authors Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim noted that, "Some educators believe such a single-minded focus on achievement can be harmful." It quoted anthropologist and Asian studies professor Kyeyoung Park, who observed that some Asian-American kids can seem lost and disoriented when they get to a university.Still, the angry letters came flowing in the following week. Ruchika Bajaj, the mental health policy coordinator for the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families in New York, wrote, "The Kim sisters believe that strict households and associating failure with family dishonor is the best way to raise a successful child. Taking this position, they do a disservice to the Asian community by perpetuating the model minority myth that all Asians are successful and over-achievers. The results reported provide an image of success that is only skin deep. By stressing the model minority myth, we are placing undue academic, social and emotional burdens on youth and further supporting unrealistic stereotypes."Another passage from the Times interview read, "The authors themselves acknowledge that Asian career values can be hazardous to one's health if taken to an extreme degree, as in Japan, where pressures to excel in an exam-focused educational system have been linked with high dropout rates, social withdrawal and suicide.Jha says many Asian-American students don't feel like they have the freedom to tell parents what they really want to do in life, "So the students are performing but not necessarily in arenas that they enjoy."A grain of truthIndeed, when we yellow scribes get together at Asian American Journalism Association conferences, there is almost always a crack during some speech that goes like this: "I think it's clear why we are all here today. [Pause] Because we were no good at science and math."Sure, we all crack up because we see a kernel of truth in it, but the fact that a bunch of Asian-American journalists are meeting at all makes it clear that not all of us have gone the lucrative smarty-pants route. And that we--the disappointing losers who went into a low-paying profession like writing--can be reasonably happy too, even if our parents probably lie to their friends about what we do.But as the immigrant generations march on and greater acceptance of Asians-Americans in non-traditional fields grows, so may a greater acceptance of non-traditional Asian academic mediocrity.State test result day also happens to be report card day for Chicago Public Schools, a day that inspired terror in some of my Asian-American pals growing up. In my Asian-Hispanic household, however, it was never a big deal. When I get home tonight to look at the report card of my one-quarter Asian son who started 1st grade in CPS this year, I will applaud his good grades and discuss the bad ones. But I won't love him any less for them. As a half-Asian parent, sure I'd like my son to be a high academic achiever, but most of all I'd like him to be a kind and happy little guy.
Argh…it’s only Tuesday…
Supposed to have a cold snap arrive today (temps in the 30’s)…at least I found one of my thicker jackets…still not looking forward to it…
Sign that I’m not in So Cal anymore of the day: the DMV here is split in two- the Department of Transportation (for your registration needs) and the Department of Safety (for Driver’s License issues)…they had to make it difficult don’t they?
Ai yah……….
Plus more evidence people hate Asians:
NEW YORK - Eighteen-year-old Chen Tsu was waiting on a Brooklyn subway platform after school when four high school classmates approached him and demanded cash. He showed them his empty pockets, but they attacked him anyway, taking turns pummeling his face.
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He was scared and injured — bruised and swollen for several days — but hardly surprised.
At his school, Lafayette High in Brooklyn, Chinese immigrant students like him are harassed and bullied so routinely that school officials in June agreed to a
Department of Justice' name=c1>SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3>
Department of Justice consent decree to curb alleged "severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates." Since then, the Justice Department credits Lafayette officials with addressing the problem — but the case is far from isolated.
Nationwide, Asian students say they're often beaten, threatened and called ethnic slurs by other young people, and school safety data suggest that the problem may be worsening. Youth advocates say these Asian teens, stereotyped as high-achieving students who rarely fight back, have for years borne the brunt of ethnic tension as Asian communities expand and neighborhoods become more racially diverse.
"We suspect that in areas that have rapidly growing populations of Asian-Americans, there often times is a sort of culture clashing," said Aimee Baldillo of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. Youth harassment is "something we see everywhere in different pockets of the U.S. where there's a large influx of (Asian) people."
In the last five years, Census data show, Asians — mostly Chinese — have grown from 5 percent to nearly 10 percent of Brooklyn residents. In the Bensonhurst neighborhood, historically home to Italian and Jewish families, more than 20 percent of residents now are Asian. Those changes have escalated ethnic tension on campuses such as Lafayette High, according to Khin Mai Aung, staff attorney at the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is advocating for Lafayette students.
"The schools are the one place where everyone is forced to come together," Aung said.
Brooklyn's changes mirror Asian growth nationally. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders grew from 3.7 million to nearly 12 million. After Latinos, Asians are the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group.
Stories of Asian youth being bullied and worse are common. In recent years:
• A Chinese middle schooler in San Francisco was mercilessly taunted until his teacher hid him in her classroom at lunchtime.
• Three Korean-American students were beaten so badly near their Queens high school that they skipped school for weeks and begged to be transferred.
• A 16-year-old from Vietnam was killed last year in a massive brawl in Boston.
Some lawmakers have responded. The New York City Council, after hearing hours of testimony from Asian youth, last year passed a bill to track bullying and train educators on prevention. Also last year, California Assemblywoman Judy Chu won passage of a new law to allow hate crimes victims more time — up to three years — to file civil suits; the bill was inspired by a 2003 San Francisco incident in which five Asian teens were attacked by a mob of youth.
In August, the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center organized a first-ever conference on the subject in Sacramento. Isami Arifuku, assistant director of the center, said she expected about 200 participants but nearly double that number attended.
Experts offer several broad explanations for the bullying problem.
In the broadest strokes, Baldillo said, Asian youth are sometimes small in stature and often adhere to cultural mores urging them to avoid confrontation and focus on academics. Many don't report bullying because they fear repercussions or don't want to embarrass their families, she added.
Language barriers also exacerbate the situation. "I have to hear, '(Expletive) Chinese!' at least three times a day, and they always say it to people who look weaker and don't speak English," said Rita Zeng, 19 and a senior at Lafayette High. The parents of limited-English students often have little access to translators and struggle to advocate for their children, Aung said.
Chen Tsu described his beating in April at a subway station, saying through a translator: "Those guys looked like they could kill somebody. ... I was scared to go back to school."
Increasingly, some victims are fighting back. A 2003 California survey by the Services and Advocacy for Asian Youth Consortium found that 14 percent of Asian youth said they join gangs for protection. Department of Justice school crime data found the number of Asian youth carrying weapons nearly tripled from 1999 to 2001.
"There are more Asian kids being brought to juvenile court for assault and battery," Arifuku said. "The thing we're finding in their history is that they had been picked on — called names and teased — and in some cases they lashed out and retaliated."
Advocates and students say that, typically, large fights erupt after weeks or months of verbal taunting.
That's what happened at Edison High School in Fresno, Calif., according to Malcolm Yeung of the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. For months starting late last year, Hmong students had been repeatedly called names and had food thrown at them.
"There had been patterns of this happening over and over again," said Yeung, whose group investigated the case on behalf of Asian students. "But the school had overlooked the issue."
On Feb. 25, the lunchtime taunting escalated into fights involving at least 30 students, according to Susan Bedi, spokesman for Fresno Unified School District. Seven students were treated for injuries, 12 were suspended and two faced expulsion, she said. Eight were convicted of misdemeanor assault, said Fresno police Sgt. Anthony Martinez.
This year, officials at Edison High added more security and started an on-campus human relations council to address ethnic tension, Bedi said.
At Lafayette High, tension has long been high on campus and in surrounding areas, said Steve Chung, president of the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn, whose group was founded in late 2002 after an earlier student beating. That incident "was like the ignition — it started a fire" in the community.
The student, a straight-A senior, was thrashed to unconsciousness while anti-Chinese slurs were yelled at him. Some news reported dubbed the school "Horror High," and Chinese students began going public about the problem.
"The more we dug into Lafayette High School, the more we found," Chung said.
Aung's probing revealed that school administrators seemed reluctant to intervene, translation services for parents and students was spotty and teachers who reported the problems may have been punished.
School officials say some reports were exaggerated. But "the problems there went back many, many years," said Michael Best, general counsel for New York City schools. Since signing the consent decree in June, he said, "the situation at the school in our view is very, very different." A Justice Department spokesman agreed that the school has been "very responsive."
Teachers this year are getting training to curb harassment, translation services throughout the district have been beefed up, and race relations experts are working with students and staff on campus, deputy New York schools chancellor Carmen Farina said.
Last year, Lafayette's longtime principal retired, and many are optimistic about the new principal, Jolanta Rohloff. In addition, new vice principal Iris Chiu is fluent in Chinese and working closely with parents and students. "We actively sought someone that we knew could handle the delicacy of the school," Farina said.
Still, she said, an incident already has been reported since school started: An Asian student was attacked by several classmates on his way to the subway. He suffered minor injuries.
________________________________________________________________________________
Plus a thing on overachievers (which I never was- I’m too lazy):
There they were looking out from the back page of the Tribune's main section Wednesday. Those brainy bespectacled young Asian women who "year after year ... outpace their peers on state tests," the story said.And there they were on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section last month: two Korean sisters flogging their book "Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can Too."And then there I was at my desk Wednesday reading an e-mail from a stranger who reminded me that exactly one year ago the high-achieving Asian-American author Iris Chang escaped it all by ending her own life.That's when I knew I had to write this little rant.You see, as much as the mainstream press wants to applaud Asian-American emphasis on high achievement and never bringing "down the whole race" with "a B," as one Asian student said to our reporter, we rarely look at the downsides of such pressure.Those downsides can include extreme fear of failure, unpleasantly competitive natures, withdrawal from society, stress-related disorders and most sadly, Asian-American women holding the highest suicide rates in the nation among women age 15 to 24--an American age category that holds the highest general suicide rates to begin with, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.6 suicides in 4 monthsBetween December 2003 and April 2004, the Chicago-based Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative anecdotally recorded six suicides in the Chicago area of Asian-Americans under age 30, according to Aruna Jha, the agency's founder and a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago.And an article in the latest issue of the journal Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior states that for reasons not clear, Asian students are 1.59 times more likely to seriously consider attempting suicide than their white peers.This isn't big news in the Asian-American community, but rather our dirty little secret.Just about everyone knows someone whose relative died mysteriously. But no one wants to talk about it. And for some who are living with the terrible shameful secret, they couldn't talk about it even if they wanted to.Just last month a fellow Asian journalist told me about a local Korean mother who spent an afternoon sobbing in the journalist's car as she recounted her daughter's suicide at an Ivy League school. No one in the community knew about it. And she was forbidden by her husband to speak of it. So for years she's kept her daughter's story locked up inside, just as her daughter kept her frailties locked up inside until she saw no escape from high expectations except in death.Later in an e-mail, the journalist, who was from New York, told me that she, in fact, met three such Korean mothers during her visit to Chicago.But the pressures don't just come from parents. In the United States, where the model minority myth is peddled regularly by the media, and in books such as "Top of the Class," the stereotypes begin to perpetuate themselves. Luckily, Asians and others familiar with the issue are starting to talk back.The New York Times' interview with "Top of the Class" authors Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim noted that, "Some educators believe such a single-minded focus on achievement can be harmful." It quoted anthropologist and Asian studies professor Kyeyoung Park, who observed that some Asian-American kids can seem lost and disoriented when they get to a university.Still, the angry letters came flowing in the following week. Ruchika Bajaj, the mental health policy coordinator for the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families in New York, wrote, "The Kim sisters believe that strict households and associating failure with family dishonor is the best way to raise a successful child. Taking this position, they do a disservice to the Asian community by perpetuating the model minority myth that all Asians are successful and over-achievers. The results reported provide an image of success that is only skin deep. By stressing the model minority myth, we are placing undue academic, social and emotional burdens on youth and further supporting unrealistic stereotypes."Another passage from the Times interview read, "The authors themselves acknowledge that Asian career values can be hazardous to one's health if taken to an extreme degree, as in Japan, where pressures to excel in an exam-focused educational system have been linked with high dropout rates, social withdrawal and suicide.Jha says many Asian-American students don't feel like they have the freedom to tell parents what they really want to do in life, "So the students are performing but not necessarily in arenas that they enjoy."A grain of truthIndeed, when we yellow scribes get together at Asian American Journalism Association conferences, there is almost always a crack during some speech that goes like this: "I think it's clear why we are all here today. [Pause] Because we were no good at science and math."Sure, we all crack up because we see a kernel of truth in it, but the fact that a bunch of Asian-American journalists are meeting at all makes it clear that not all of us have gone the lucrative smarty-pants route. And that we--the disappointing losers who went into a low-paying profession like writing--can be reasonably happy too, even if our parents probably lie to their friends about what we do.But as the immigrant generations march on and greater acceptance of Asians-Americans in non-traditional fields grows, so may a greater acceptance of non-traditional Asian academic mediocrity.State test result day also happens to be report card day for Chicago Public Schools, a day that inspired terror in some of my Asian-American pals growing up. In my Asian-Hispanic household, however, it was never a big deal. When I get home tonight to look at the report card of my one-quarter Asian son who started 1st grade in CPS this year, I will applaud his good grades and discuss the bad ones. But I won't love him any less for them. As a half-Asian parent, sure I'd like my son to be a high academic achiever, but most of all I'd like him to be a kind and happy little guy.
posted by Catterpillarboy at 5:41 AM
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