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Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads Lecture: On Becoming Chinese American with Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

When: January 23, 2008 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Growing up the child of immigrants, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang was both part of and slightly outside of Chinese culture and mainstream American culture. What does it mean to be Chinese American? Ms. Wang's discussion will touch on issues raised by this year's theme, China and America: Bridging Two Worlds, and the selected book, The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute To His Toisanese Mother, by William Poy Lee. As acting editor of IMDiversity.com Asian American Village, Ms. Wang has written extensively on issues of identity and culture as process rather than simply one moment in time. She will share the stories of the different ways she has wrestled with identity and culture through her life, including during childhood, as a young adult, and as a parent.

Transcript

  • [00:00:00.00] KEN: Good evening. We are going to start the program in just a minute. I just wanted go over a couple of quick announcements. First of all, thanks for coming out tonight. Welcome to the program. As you can see, I don't have to do much of an introduction for Frances, since she has a great title slide up there. But I did want to remind people, if you have cellphones, to please either turn them off or put them on vibrate so they don't go off during the program. Also, if you have time, if you could fill out one of the evaluation forms in the back, they are in different places back there. This helps us find out how you learned about the program, what you thought of the program, and what kind of other programs you might want to see in the future.
  • [00:01:07.85] Frances' program tonight is part of our Ann Arbor/Ypsi Reads 2008 series. If you are familiar with the book, it is "The Eighth Promise," and I wanted to mention that the author, William Poy Lee, is in town right now, but he will be speaking at a free lecture at the Washtenaw Community College Morris Lawrence Building on Friday at 7:30. If you want to pick up one of these postcards, they are in the back, which has all the information on it about his lecture. And it's an open event, open to the public. Without further ado, we will turn the program over to Frances.
  • [00:02:10.42] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: Thank you very much for having me here tonight. It is always a pleasure to be able to get back to the Ann Arbor District Library, where my children and I spent so many hundreds of hours, and where my daughter, [? Mango ?] has 400 books checked out at any given time. I have been asked to speak tonight on the Chinese-American experience, to offer another story, an Ann Arbor story, to contrast and compare with William Poy Lee's story in "The Eighth Promise." I am not an academic. I like to say that I'm a recovering academic. And, actually, I think of myself as a teller of stories. Yet, this being Ann Arbor, it's very difficult to resist academics. So what I'd like to do tonight is start off with some of my stories, so that you know who I am and where I'm coming from.
  • [00:02:44.31] These are excerpted from my new manuscript, "When I Am Most Myself: Discovering Identity in the Space Between Cultures." In case anyone knows of any publishers or agents, anyone at U of M Press? And then I will do a short introduction to Chinese-American and Asian-American history, and my apologies ahead of time, it is going to go blazing fast because it's 150 years of history in 15 minutes. And then we will do a short video clip from the Grace Lee project which will be fun, and then there be a blast of photos, which I call stereotype busters, which will ask us to rethink the question, "What does it mean to be Chinese-American or Asian-American?"
  • [00:03:28.78] I was born and raised in California, which is now a no-majority state. But it was not always like that. I want to start with some pictures from my childhood. You remember all those right? Oh, now there's some Asians, of course they were all dead or wounded or bad guys. He was Asian, sort of, I never quite figured that one out. "Happy Days," my first love, Arnold. Arnold, from "Happy Days." So that was the one Asian that I saw on TV. And, of course, there's "Star Trek" and Mr. Sulu, and we can't forget Connie, the bane of every Chinese-American girl in existence. The perfect family, and then here's my family, oops, I went too fast. And that's my family, that's me.
  • [00:04:21.69] And then I wanted to read a little bit from "The Eighth Promise", that really resonated with me. That I think will kind of set the tone. Right in the prologue, William Poy Lee talks about going to Toisan and meeting his auntie [? Kowloon ?] and her friend [? Hung ?] [? Yet ?] the town postman. And he writes, "To my surprise, [? Hung ?] [? Yet ?] was loud, boisterous and opinionated. Far different from the mostly quiet and reserved Chinese I knew in America. Within minutes he and Auntie [? Kowloon ?] were laughing out loud, moving and gesturing as if they owned the street. Well, they did own the streets, in a way that Chinese-Americans of my father's generation, and generations before, did not. Grimly and quietly, knowing that other Americans, white Americans, owned the streets of San Francisco. In the America of my father's youth, Chinese-Americans walked with terror, their eyes averted, stealthy like shadows, and quickly scampered around white Americans to avoid the glares, cussing and inevitable violence of the everyday enforcers of America's racial caste system of the time.
  • [00:05:32.88] But here I was, deep in the homeland of my own people, marveling at my relatives' free and easy body language, as natural as that of any free people, and so unlike the reserved, contracted bodies of many Chinese-Americans. And now that I could compare a constriction obviously inflicted by our harsh historical experience. And everyone spoke Toisanese as if it were the universal language of the world, the only language. Here, it felt that, by contrast, only those with a limited education were stuck with big city Cantonese. As for those Mandarin speakers, well, they must be foreigners, official dialect of China or not.
  • [00:06:21.64] So, with that, these are some of my [UNINTELLIGIBLE] of becoming Chinese-American.
  • [00:06:27.69] My parents were always very clear about who we were. You are Chinese because your blood is Chinese. You will always be Chinese, and no one can ever take that away from you. But your passport, your citizenship, is American because you were born in America. You can even be President someday, unlike us, because you are a natural born citizen. I was 100% Chinese and 100% American, the best of both worlds. At the same time, I grew up referring to all Caucasians as foreigners, gweilo, and interchanging the Chinese words for American, [? magoren ?] and foreigner, gweilo. Any other Asians, such as Japanese, Thai, Korean, Indian, or Taiwanese, we would specify as such. We never grouped them together as Asians, [? thoranyen ?] in Chinese, although once in a while we would in English. Orientals, in those days.
  • [00:07:26.86] However, only Caucasian people could be true Americans, it seemed. Once in a while, at a party, one of my parents' friends would remark how funny it was that we were calling Americans foreigners in their own country, since we were actually the foreigners, but that never changed our practice. The terms Asian, Asian-American, Asian-Pacific-American, Asian-Pacific-Is lander-American, Chinese-American even American-Born-Chinese, ABC, were not really popular yet. I would not encounter those terms until college, and even then, I dismissed them.
  • [00:07:59.92]
  • [00:08:00.77] I saw myself as Chinese, sometimes overseas Chinese, or part of the Chinese diaspora. I did not understand the connection I had with other Asians, or the importance of calling myself American. During college at UC Berkeley, I remember when people started to rally for Asian-American studies. In my naivete, I thought that was unnecessary. I thought I already knew about the Asian-American experience because I had grown up Asian in America. Big deal. Plus, I had California history in fourth and tenth grades, so I knew all about the railroads and laundries and Chinese Exclusion Act. I thought it was more important to study the real thing, Chinese history and philosophy. It was not until I went to graduate school in Michigan that I began to understand those labels. It was in Ann Arbor that for the first time, I felt like a minority. Not that there were so many Asians around when I was growing up in California, but there were always a lot of different types of people. Everyone was some color or other, and many had immigration in their recent family histories. In Michigan, there was only black and white and they did not mix.
  • [00:09:16.11] I remember my first day in Michigan, as my aunt and uncle drove me in from the airport. I looked out the window and saw a restaurant, Canton Bar and Grill, and I was surprised: Oh, so there are Chinese people here. But then I noticed that next to it was the Canton Public Library and Canton City Hall. And I realized that this was not Canton, like in Chinese people, but Canton, Michigan, a whole other place. For the first time since grade school, people were asking me, "Where are you from? No, no no, before that." When I rented a car, the man tried to build rapport by asking me in Chinese, his one word, if I wanted insurance, [? bayushay ?]. I was surprised. How did he know that I could speak Chinese? Then I realized that he did not think I could speak English. Coming back from visiting my grandparents in Toronto, I got stopped at the U.S.-Canadian border longer than I'd ever been stopped on the west coast.
  • [00:10:25.52] "Citizenship?" "U.S." As if not believing me, "Where were you born?" "Los Angeles." Surprise. "Really?" "Passport, please."
  • [00:10:37.50] Americans didn't need passports to go into Canada then, but I started always carrying mine. When I walked into a store that I had not been in for six months, the clerks all remembered me. I felt visible, vulnerable in my nakedness, obviously foreign and strange. I was 22 years old. I had never felt this way before. I began to see myself differently. It was not as clear as it had once been. First I began to identify myself as Chinese-American because I was American-born, not to be confused with foreign students. I can speak the language, honest. I had never had to prove that before. Then I became Asian-American, because it was clear that no one here could tell us apart. There were only a handful of Asian-American graduate students on the liberal arts side of campus then. All in the same Minority Merit Fellowship. Too few to afford the luxury of further dividing down ethnic lines. Then I became a person of color. I found myself on all sorts of different email lists that publicized and warned of acts of discrimination and police brutality, mostly against African-Americans, but we were all afraid. We raised our fists in protest and solidarity. I went to lectures about the psychological trauma of being a minority.
  • [00:12:01.10] I realized that none of my previous American history courses had ever made it past World War II. I knew nothing of the `60s or the civil rights movement. When I asked my advisor about some of the strange experiences I was having here in Michigan, he informed me that there was no more sexism or racism. Not since the `50s, anyways. In other words, I was imagining it. It was all in my head. I was crazy.
  • [00:12:33.26] What really saved me was networking with other Asian-Pacific-Americans and stumbling upon U of M's first Asian-Pacific American Studies course, taught by Steve [? Sumida. ?] Once I discovered history and community, I was able to put things into a larger context and realized that I wasn't crazy, that it wasn't my fault. We read all the landmark novels. We learned the history behind each one. We memorized the dates and the laws, and got involved in literary fights. We met Asian-American poets, writers, musicians. We talked about each book late into the night, in coffee houses as we walked each other home. We put ourselves into historical context. We learned each other's cultures, Hawaii, the camps, Chinatown, farming, the suburbs, the South Korean, Christian, second generation, fourth generation. We learned how to refer to white people in many different languages and dialects, all colorful. And we ate spam wasubi.
  • [00:13:35.92] And then I got married and had children. Which, as everybody knows, changes everything. When I first had children, I lived on the Old West Side and spent a lot of time at the neighborhood park, Worcester Park, where I was often the only Asian among mostly white mothers. The Midwest is a land of small talk, and that is what mothers of young children do while hanging out at the park. As I listened to the other mothers chit-chatting, I noticed that unless I spoke first, the Caucasian mothers would not speak to me. Once I said something, of course, then they would answer, and we would have a normal conversation. Well, after the requisite questions about where I came from, and how come I speak English so well, that is. So they must have been afraid that I might not speak English. The Hispanic-Americans, on the other hand, always spoke to me. They knew.
  • [00:14:32.16] When my oldest daughter was three years old, and took her first dance class at the Parks and Rec, all the Caucasian mothers clustered to watch from outside the door and talk about the different dance schools in town. A Korean woman who was also sitting off to the side, started talking to me. And although we spoke English, none of the other mothers said one word to us for the next six weeks. She was an immigrant, and I was American-born, but I understood her concerns about her daughter mastering English while also retaining Korean. My children called her "auntie."
  • [00:15:07.10] The same thing happened in every class my children take. And for those people who know me, we've taken a lot of classes. Then I thought well, maybe once I make more friends, and I don't have to worry so much about strangers assuming that I'm a foreigner and that I don't belong. After all, first impressions are just that. Maybe if I just spent time with people, we could get past concerns about whether or not I spoke English, and get on to more interesting conversation, please.
  • [00:15:39.91] But sometimes even good friends surprise me. A Jewish friend once asked me to explain to her son about culture as if it was something only people of color could possess, and then sing a song in Chinese for him. An employer who did not know I was six months pregnant at the time, went on and on once about how petite I was. My family's from northern China. I had never been petite in my life.
  • [00:16:07.18] After four years, a neighbor still confused me with the Japanese-American woman next door. No, I'm the other one.
  • [00:16:17.72] Of course, Asian people make cultural blunders and say crazy things too sometimes. A relative once asked if my Caucasian boyfriend at the time could smell better than us because his nose was so much bigger. But at least she was embarrassed to ask. I am often struck by how little Caucasian-American friends know about other cultures. My African-American and Native-American friends may not know specific details about Chinese culture, but they are aware that radically different cultures exist in America. They will say, in our culture, or in the South where I grew up, we...
  • [00:16:56.22] Asians may not know the details of various American cultures either, but do understand that there are many different ways of doing things. Many Caucasians I know, speak of right and wrong ways of doing things. They do not say "Our family always has Ann Martha cinnamon rolls at Thanksgiving," but, "You have to have cinnamon rolls for it to be Thanksgiving." Ergo, I've never had a Thanksgiving, because I've never had cinnamon rolls then.
  • [00:17:26.54] Sometimes I worry that I'm over-reacting, letting the careless words and ignorance of a few drive me out of myself, make me doubt myself. If only I had a tougher skin. Then, it will happen again. The day I finished the first draft of this article, and I was wondering if I was too extreme, I drove out of the library parking lot over here, and the 300-pound parking lot attendant asked me "Are you from the Philippines?" "No," I said.
  • [00:17:56.88] Work on this article inspired me, for once, to refuse to engage in this game. But he went on anyway. "My sister-in-law is from the Philippines, and I love Oriental food. She tells me, 'Don't ask what it is, just eat it.'" I smiled politely, but after all these years, I feel I should have made more progress than this. I'm sure people mean well, but sometimes I just do not feel like explaining my whole family history to a stranger while standing in line to buy hot dogs for my tired and whining children at Top of the Park. I do not want to apologize any more for the strangeness of Asian food. Like the narrator in "The Eighth Promise," I yearn to be normal.
  • [00:18:44.53] As my children grew older, and I began to fall into various community networks, I was surprised to find comfort and kinship in the company of immigrants and other minorities, especially those of Asian background, and all Asian backgrounds. Now when the phone rings at our house, the caller is as likely to speak Mandarin Chinese as English, friends and telemarketers alike. For a lifetime, I felt that my English personality was more me, because it was more articulate and outgoing than my Chinese personality, the dutiful and obedient daughter. Now, my Chinese personality is suddenly maturing, becoming stronger, funnier, bossier, too. The English personality is becoming more meek and quiet. Probably because Caucasian-Americans cannot seem to understand me, no matter how good my English is.
  • [00:19:40.92] Although I will always be able to express myself more eloquently in English, right now Mandarin can better convey the nuances and color of what I'm feeling. It fits better, like a warm and comfortable sweater my grandmother knit just for me. It is the language in which I was mothered, and so it feels most natural for mothering my own children.
  • [00:20:04.13] I sometimes even feel like we were using a borrowed tongue when I speak English with my children, as though, because we are Chinese, English is not ours. Other Asians hear my lack of accent and know I'm American-born and what that means. I don't have to explain anything. Hearing my third generation children speak Chinese, they are impressed that my girls have retained Chinese, rather than worried about whether or not they can speak English. They assume that I belong, that I'm from Taiwan or China like them, and upon learning that I am actually American-born, they still let me belong.
  • [00:20:46.53] With other ethnic Asians, I also know how to behave properly without having to think about it. When I'm invited to the [? Chows ?] or the [? Carbongas' ?] home, I know to bring a gift of fruit, [? mimochi, ?] take off my shoes, protest that I do not want any tea, and never, NEVER, finish the last bite of food.
  • [00:21:07.28] At last the etiquette has become natural. My Asian friends and I nurse each others' homesickness without having to justify how anyone could possibly miss strange and obscure things like thousand year-old eggs or smelly tofu. When my mother sends goodies from California like persimmons, Japanese pears, Chinese dates or mooncakes, I share the bounty with appreciative friends, ooh and aah and reminisce about how long it has been since they have had one. The week before Chinese New Year, when all the mothers give presentations or coordinate celebrations at their childrens' schools, we compare activity ideas, exchange picture books and help each other find red envelopes for lanterns, usually distant Chicago or maybe so-and-so has extra or, hey, I heard someone's husband is going on a business trip to China next week.
  • [00:22:00.67] The community is always reaching out to me and offering to help before I even get a chance to ask. Best of all, when we go to each others' homes, we get treated to good Asian food, yay. And how proud I was at my daughter's fourth birthday party, when a new friend from Taiwan, [? Kowdi, ?] exclaimed, "You made three times too much food! You really are Chinese!"
  • [00:22:31.45] I once gave a talk about Chinese-American history to a group of students attending first grade. They had been learning about China in social studies, but since this class was 35% Asian, Asian-American, I thought they should learn something about China, about Chinese-American history too. To know that they have a place and a history here in America.
  • [00:22:54.44] I started off by asking the kids, where do Chinese people come from? The Asian-American kids were right-on. Taiwan, China, Japan, Australia, Germany, Michigan, Tennessee. Then one little Caucasian boy in the back, raised his hand and said, "Chinatown." And one third of the kids said, "Oh, I was going to say that." I was stunned, speechless, because Ann Arbor is one of the few places in the world where there is no Chinatown. Although it's currently undergoing a revival, the Detroit Chinatown was basically destroyed when the John Lodge freeway was built on top of it during the `50s. The nearest Chinatowns are four and five hours away, in Toronto, in Chicago. And yet, the stereotype is so ingrained, that six-year-olds, at a school that's 35% Asian, know with certainty that Chinese people live in Chinatown, and not, say, next door.
  • [00:23:59.72] Now, fast forward to when those kids are college age. Two-and-a-half years ago, there was a hate crime on the U of M campus, where two Caucasian students were charged with either urinating or throwing beer off of a balcony onto an Asian-American couple that was walking by, and then hurling racial epithets at them when they complained.
  • [00:24:18.47] There was a huge uproar on campus, but at one of the Town Hall meetings, it was revealed that the people who were most upset were the grad students from California and New York and the faculty, who are also largely from someplace else. The undergraduates, who had mostly grown up in Michigan were simply used to it. They were not surprised. This was normal to them.
  • [00:24:44.28] This is not normal! But there is room for hope. I believe that if we educate our children and their peers, the next generation will be better equipped to deal with these issues.
  • [00:25:00.56] I think we can all learn a lot from my second daughter, [? Howhow. ?] When she was in first grade, she forgot her snow boots one cold February morning. I took them to school and found her out on the playground. As I handed them to her, I was talking to her in Chinese, and a little girl ran by and said, [? "Howhow, ?] don't you know how to speak English yet?"
  • [00:25:23.01] I wanted to pick this kid up by her little blonde ponytails and say, "Look, kid, you have been in the same classroom with her for six months. How could you not know that she speaks English?" But my daughter didn't miss a beat. She just smiled, the charming way that she does, and she said, "Yes, I speak English and Chinese and Spanish. The three most spoken languages in the world. I can go anywhere in the world and be able to talk to people." When she was in fourth grade, she told me that she eats lunch with all the cool Asians. I ask her, "Who are the cool Asians?" And she lists all her friends, Samantha, Amanda, Sherry, Chelsea. I ask her, "Who gets to decide who the cool Asians are?" She doesn't even understand my question. "We do, of course, all Asians are cool." She can't even conceive that some day, other kids will deny her the label "popular" or "Homecoming Queen," because she is Asian.
  • [00:26:34.61] Even my oldest daughter, Margo, who's very quiet, noticed when a classmate's sixth grade report on the California gold rush, neglected to say anything about the Chinese. She said, "You forgot to talk about the Chinese," and proceeded to tell the whole class all about it.
  • [00:26:54.39] A friend from Taiwan once said to me, "What is wrong with you ABCs, American-Born-Chinese? You and that Frank Wu are so sensitive!" Now, Frank Wu by the way, is no slouch He is the Dean of Wayne State Law School, and the first Chinese-American law school dean in the country. But you know in her eyes, there was something wrong with us ABCs for being so sensitive.
  • [00:27:21.49] But I think one of the reasons we are so sensitive is that we believe what we have been taught about America, and we want it to live up to the hype. We want it to be true and fair, not only for our sakes, but for America's sake. Unlike immigrants, who can at least theoretically "go back where you came from," we have no place to go. We are American. This is our home.
  • [00:27:49.69] When Huron High School Symphony went on a trip to Austria two years ago, a friend of mine who's Hapa, which means half Asian, accompanied the group. And she said the people in Europe were so confused because this Grammy Award-winning group was so diverse, with students of so many different ethnicities. She said, people kept asking, "What country are you people from?" And she felt so proud. This is America, and this is Ann Arbor, and this is what Michigan could be.
  • [00:28:25.22] So now, we are going to move onto the next part. So we are going to talk about Chinese-American and Asian-American history as fast as can be. 150 years. And I'll just really breeze through these things.
  • [00:28:46.26] But through it all, what I'm going to be doing, I'm going to go back and forth in time between the past and the present. Show how it resonates in the present and show how, throughout history, there has been a history of resistance. So if you were taught anything in school, probably not, none of us were taught this in school, but if you were taught anything in school about how people were just abused and abused and abused, that's part of the story. But really there's a whole history of resistance that lines through it. And when I do this presentation for high school kids and such, this is the important thing I want them to bring home, there's a history of resistance.
  • [00:29:21.36] I'm supposed to be talking about Chinese-Americans, but the history of it, we will be touching on Asian-American things because well, frankly, you know, they can't tell us apart sometimes. This is courtesy of my friend Elie.
  • [00:29:41.01] So the history of it, you know, sometimes people think, "Oh Asians are so new here, right?" "Where are you from?" is a standard question because it's assumed that we are all newcomers. But look, the first Filipinos, the first Asians, came to America in 1587. The first Asian-American settlement was 1763. Asians have been here a very long time.
  • [00:30:03.67] And then if you want to talk specifically about Chinese, according to the Buddhist churches in America, there is evidence that in 499 BC, there was a Chinese monk that came and traveled up and down the coast of the Americas. According to Gavin Menzies, a very controversial book, the Chinese discovered America in 1421. But I don't know about that.
  • [00:30:25.44] The one that is accepted in Asian-American studies courses, is that for sure, the first Chinese to arrive in America were 1785. There were three Chinese sailors on a cargo ship that got stranded here when their captain decided not to go back. So 1785. Chinese have been here a very long time. And have been a part of American history as well. So, you know, we have at least fifty Chinese who fought during the Civil War on both sides in 1860, and they were part of Reconstruction. The Chinese were recruited into the South to replace the labor of African-American slaves, and they quickly realized it wasn't such a good deal, so they moved off the plantations to grocery stores. But they had segregated schools and all that stuff as well during that time.
  • [00:31:16.44] Now this is the history that most people know about is during the gold rush, 1848. Gold was found, and everyone flocked to California. And so there were Chinese miners, so Chinese were mining, but it was not an easy life to be mining because there were foreign miners' taxes. There were all these different legislations. The Chinese people could not hold claims. If you already had a claim, well that's null, and white miners could go and beat up anybody, kill anybody that they wanted. And also, Chinese people were not allowed to testify in court, it's People vs [? Hall. ?] For example, you know if someone came and killed me right here, and all of you people were Chinese, none of you could testify. And so of course the person who killed me would say,"Well I didn't kill her." That's the end, right? So that's where the expression, "He doesn't stand a Chinaman's chance" comes from, because people were not allowed to testify in court.
  • [00:32:16.67] And then the Chinese were recruited to build the transcontinental railroad. Greatest American engineering triumph of the 19th century. And, you know, it was really hard work. You have all heard the stories of people hanging off the cliffs in baskets, using explosives. Lots of people died and were buried in the snow. It was tough work and they were, of course, totally abused
  • [00:32:36.69] But they also had a labor strike in 1867. There was a labor strike when the Chinese railroad workers said, "Hey, we want same number of hours, same amount of pay." They lost, of course, because the people starved them out. But, they had a strike. I like that. And so here's a picture of the map. They had a race, of course. I think, you know, the Chinese were coming from this side, building the railroad this way, and then from this side, you had Irish laborers, and they were trying to have a race to see who could build the most track. And one day, the record was ten miles of track laid in one day by the Central Pacific by the Chinese laborers. And they were amazed. Nobody believed that they could do this.
  • [00:33:23.91] And here is the very historic photo of when they hit the golden spike, the silver spike. Interesting, if you look closely, there are no Chinese people in the picture. I saw this picture when I was growing up and it never occurred to me, "There are no Chinese people in this picture." And I think a year and a half ago, GE recreated this picture for a commercial that they had, and again, no Chinese people in the picture. So this has resonance in the current day.
  • [00:33:50.77] And one of the things to show how it has resonance is the reason people didn't think that the Chinese could be laborers, that they could work in those days, was that they said they thought they were so effeminate. Now this is a stereotype that carries over into today. But why did they think they were effeminate? Well one was that they took hot water baths, they used soap, you know, like a woman. And then they came out of the bath smelling of perfume. They drank tea in little tiny cups such as ladies would use, and they didn't eat manly beans and beef, but un-Christian food, which was the Chinese food that they imported. So we forget all the reasons.
  • [00:34:29.92] Of course, now everybody takes baths every day in hot water with soap, right? We wouldn't think that makes us unmanly. But all that's left is this stereotype, this lingering resonance that Chinese are effeminate, that Chinese men are effeminate. And this comes out in 2004. "Details" magazine did this spread about "Is this guy gay or Asian?" And it has all sorts of, you know ridiculous things. There was a huge protest, of course. Gay or Asian, it was not [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:35:02.42] After the railroads, people went into manufacturing, they were brought in as strike breakers, they worked in agriculture, shrimp, abalone fishing industry. They worked in laundries and restaurants. And Dennis Kearney was the famous Irish immigrant, who was very anti-Chinese. And what they were afraid of at the time, was that the Chinese, of course, would stay and take over. And one of the things that happened is the development of Chinatowns.
  • [00:35:34.47] Now, we think of Chinatown these days as a tourist destination, right? But in those days, it was a ghetto, right? Chinese people were like, "You go to Chinatown, and don't you leave the limits". So people weren't really allowed to leave. And then, when they were there, they did the work that nobody else wanted to do, like laundry, women's work again, and restaurants. Because in those days, that was the wild west, right? You got a bunch of gold miners and cowboys and stuff. There are no women around to wash clothes, and that's why the Chinese went into that line of work, because nobody else wanted to do it.
  • [00:36:03.61] And so we have again, this is like the Yellow Peril, this is the idea that they are going to come over, and rape the women, and stay and take over. This is the result of the Chinese Exclusion Act, but it resonates today, in 2002. We still have these stereotypes and images that come up in the media. And also, there was a huge national protest started by [? Lynn ?] Sung of Ann Arbor against this Kung Fu costume Halloween mask at Meijer's.
  • [00:36:34.14] So some of the anti-Asian legislation that came up was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and that carried all the way to 1943. And what this says is Chinese cannot come, basically. Chinese were not allowed to come in unless they were businessmen, or if they were the sons of American citizens. Women were not allowed because they didn't want people to have families and they didn't want people to stay. Like come and work, you know, serve us and then go, please. The great San Francisco earthquake was very advantageous, that was 1906, because there was a fire and all the birth certificates were burned, so people were able to then claim "Oh, I'm a citizen, I'm a citizen, I'm a citizen." And they knew that, of course, it wasn't true. There was a statistic, it was like 800 times the number, so something as if every Chinese woman in America, because there weren't very many, had had 800 kids. Then that's how you accounted for the number of American citizens that suddenly cropped up. But this is a sense of resistance. This is how they kind of got along with restrictive laws.
  • [00:37:46.24] And then, because once all these people were citizens, they could then leave and enter the country freely, and then they could also claim that they had sons. So I went to China, I saw my wife, and amazingly enough, she had a son. Four years later I went back to China, I saw my wife, she had another son. And so, they, of course, claimed a son every time they went, and then they could sell these papers to other families, and then we had paper sons.
  • [00:38:16.43] So sometimes in the old Chinatown families, you see people who have, like, an English-Chinese name, and then a Chinese-Chinese name, and this is a result of the paper son thing. And Lee talks about this in the book, but not in such detail. And so, of course people knew this, so immigration in Angel Island was really harsh with them, and they asked them all sorts of bizarre questions, because they wanted to prove that people really came from these villages. So they would ask them. So imagine, someone asked you "How many steps between your bathroom and your refrigerator?" OK, "At the place that you work, how many steps from your desk to the drinking fountain?" Who knows, right? "How many water buffalo are owned in your village?" I mean, those are numbers that change right? But those were the kind of questions that they had. And so they had cheat sheets, little Cliff Notes that they had to study and memorize before they came.
  • [00:39:08.38] And Chinese exclusion was finally lifted in World War II because America and China were allies against the Japanese, and America had to say, "Oh, of course, of course, we like you." And at the time also, the Asians were ineligible for naturalization, and they were the only ones. And there were many court cases that challenged this. There was a Japanese-American man who said, "Look, my skin is whiter than any Greek immigrant's or Italian immigrant. Look, and I'm wearing American clothes, I'm eating American food, I'm speaking English, I'm American." And they said, "No, no, no, no, no."
  • [00:39:43.48] And the Indian, there was another case. There was an Indian man, who said, "Well, you know, in India, you know, we have the Caucasoid mountains. We are the original Causasians." And they said, "no, no, no, no, That's not what we mean." And so people kept trying to challenge the court cases, resisting.
  • [00:40:00.22] And so, how many here were born in America? OK, you are all American citizens. In part, because of Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court said in the Fourteenth Amendment all people born in the U.S. are American citizens, except, of course, Asians for many years.
  • [00:40:20.01] And what happened to this guy is that he went out of the country to go visit his mom. He came back and they wouldn't let him back in. And so he had to file this court case. But then, you know, it became established, but the documentation during the time, is really interesting. Because they said, they, the founders of our country, did not intend this, and that would be horrible. But there's resonance today. In 1997 and 1999, in San Diego, this guy wanted to deny citizenship at birth to children born in the United States of parents who were not citizens, because this is the new, [? Frank Lu ?] calls this the fear, like there used to be a fear of welfare mothers who just had lots and lots of children in order to get welfare.
  • [00:40:59.67] Well, the new fear is these women from Mexico who are pregnant and running across the border at the last minute to have a child who is an American citizen. But he's trying to ban this. But, because, of Wong Kim Ark you can't do that. And, of course, there were all sorts of restrictive laws at the time that were enforced only for Asians: pole tax, you know, anyone who's carrying vegetables with a pole as opposed to using horse and cart. Guess who that was? That was the Asian, and all different taxes.
  • [00:41:33.91] Now, Yick Wo vs. Hopkins is mentioned in the book, so I wanted to pull that out specifically. What happened in this case, there were laundries that were made of wood, and laundries that were made of brick. And they decided, OK, from now on, all laundries should be made of brick. And if your laundry is made of wood, we will put you in jail. Well, they only arrested the Chinese people and the one woman who owned a laundry, and they let the Caucasians who had wooden laundries, they just let them go. So this is when this case came up, and it says that if you're going to prosecute people, you have to prosecute people equally. And so this is where the modern day resonance, right, driving while black. Everyone's driving down the street but how come only the African-Americans are getting pulled over, so that's the resonance for today.
  • [00:42:20.57] And then there were alien land laws that said that Asians couldn't own land. So basically, Asians would get this horrible piece of land, work it, make it finally produce something after about three years, and then they have to hand it over. They couldn't own it, but they could only lease it for a certain time. And then, over time, this was declared unconstitutional, but it was stuck on the books for many years. And what happened in 2002 in New Mexico, they tried to get it off the books and it failed by 54% to 42%.
  • [00:42:53.57] People said, "Oh, maybe, you know, we shouldn't, because of the war on terror, you know," they're afraid of post 9/11. And so it passed again in 2006, but only by 69%. I mean, really by the skin of our teeth, because they're afraid. They said, "Well, even though we don't enforce this, you know, we're afraid. What if all these foreigners come and own land." You know, and people have tried to a lot of education to explain that people ineligible for citizenship, that's code for Asian. Because at the time, only Asians were not eligible for citizenship. But it's scary to think that this is, you know, in this day, how close it came. Oh, and then our favorite anti-miscegenation laws that prohibit the intermarriage between, people of different races. Actually, only between whites and non-whites, they didn't care about the non-whites intermarrying so much.
  • [00:43:43.05] But the last anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1967. That was not a very long time ago. And at the time, it was still 17 states, all of the former slave states plus Oklahoma. And then again, it was kind of hanging around on a lot of people's law books, right? So in 1998, South Carolina voted to get rid of it. It only passed by 62%. In 2000, Alabama voted to get rid of it. It only passed by 59%. This is really scary stuff! And the new issue, of course, gay marriage, is a very similar thing, you know, who can marry who, and should the state legislate this.
  • [00:44:21.42] And I gave this talk once at a private school in the northeast side of Ann Arbor, and I mentioned Abercrombie & Fitch, and the kids all go, Yeah, Abercrombie & Fitch! I said no no no, shhh, don't cheer yet. Because what happens, there was this big case, they used all these old laundry and all these old stereotypes. They put them on t-shirts and were selling them with huge protests by Stanford and Berkeley students all done through the internet, and they got them to pull the t-shirts off the shelves, and they also had a class action discrimination lawsuit because they were only hiring people who fit the image. And Asians who did not fit the image were stuck in the back storeroom.
  • [00:45:00.90] That one we'll skip. And then Japanese internment. We'll just fly through this. The Japanese were interred during World War II. Among two-thirds of them were American citizens, and the resistance was, they enlisted for the Army and fought. The most highly decorated regiments during World War II were the Japanese-Americans. All these Asian forces. Senator Daniel Inouye was there too.
  • [00:45:26.67] And then, the other way that people resisted was, again, court cases. They said, "You know, you've got me locked up in jail, you got my mom locked up in jail, and you want me to enlist? Sure, I'll enlist. But you've got to let my mom go." They said, "no, no, no, no." So they put these guys in jail. And Fred Korematsu was one fellow who protested this. And here he is with Rosa Parks. And because of this -- Oh, no, no, no, this is a different case. I'm sorry. He refused to go to internment camp. He said at the time, he was just, you know, like 17 and hanging out with his girlfriend, he didn't really want to go. But, you know, they put him in jail. And then, in the end, it was appealed. But in the end, he won. It took a long time, a really long time. He'd won, but then, Congress apologized, and they had reparations.
  • [00:46:22.94] But don't get too excited, because in 2003, this is the Chair of Homeland Security, says, Well, you know, despite all that evidence, despite all those apologies, despite all the money, you know, it was justified that we interred all those Japanese-Americans, because, you know, we were at war, and it was dangerous for them to be out on the streets, and probably some of them were going to harm us, just like these Arab-Americans post 9/11.
  • [00:46:56.18] So this is scary stuff, sometimes. Because after 9/11, if you recall, there was a lot of talk about putting Arab-Americans into internment camps. And Norman Mineta, thank goodness, was the Secretary of Transportation at the time. He goes, "Hey, you can't do that. I was there. Don't do this." And, of course, the Republicans said, "Oh boo, hoo. Norman Mineta in his little Boy Scout uniform." It was just a surreal conversation.
  • [00:47:24.15] Then World War II came. The first person to be drafted in World War II was a Chinese-American, a young man from Oakland at 20. Because the Chinese were not married, they didn't have families, 22% of the population were drafted or enlisted. But because of World War II, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. And so instead of no Chinese being allowed now 105 could be allowed into the country every year.
  • [00:47:49.94] But, more significantly, the War Brides Act allowed the veterans to bring home brides. So finally, Chinese-Americans could go to China, meet a nice Chinese girl, bring her back. Of course, they couldn't marry anyone else, so then, they could start families. And this is the beginning of the Chinatowns. And this is where the book "Eighth Promise" begins.
  • [00:48:12.15] Oh, and I discovered that the War Brides Act was the work of a Michigan Congressman, who wrote it in 1943. Civil Rights Act, of course, was great. And then, we're almost done. Hang in there.
  • [00:48:26.03] Post-1965 immigration waves. So the Immigration Act, in 1965, this is a critical year. This is when a lot of Asians start coming because we don't have the Chinese Exclusion Act any more. We don't have this quota of 105. It allows for basically equal opportunity. People from all different countries can come to America, and it was being used as a psychological tool against communism. It's like, oh, people can vote with their feet, was the idea. They can choose American freedom, and we will show those commies this way.
  • [00:49:01.76] So this was part of the idea. But during that time, 1965, a lot of scientists, engineers, doctors, and graduate students all came, and because these are the highly educated intelligentsia who came, like my parents and their kids, that's me, was, we developed the model minority myth. And this is what people think, "Oh those Asians, they are so hard working. They are all so smart." No, their parents were educated. Their parents were the cream of the crop who came in 1965. So, of course, like Ann Arbor, you got a whole bunch of professors. Of course their kids are going to be bright, or at least well educated and well pushed.
  • [00:49:37.90] And then in the 1960s, there was a call for Asian-American studies in the university. And this was part of the whole civil rights thing. And we're almost done.
  • [00:49:49.21] Then the `70s and `80s came and, then we have more refugees coming in from the wars in Southeast Asia. Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Hmong. And this was a very different demographic. And this really blasts the model minority myth because these people were coming with a, it just was a very different demographic.
  • [00:50:08.87] And after California banned affirmative action, what happened was the numbers of these ethnic groups dropped. So they couldn't go to college any more. And that's the fear that this will happen in Michigan too, because of after Proposal Two. Because if you just say, "Oh, Asians, Asians are doing fine. Look we have all these Asians at UC Berkeley".
  • [00:50:32.03] Well, all Asians are not the same. If you look across ethnic groups, then you find we used to have this many Hmong with affirmative action. And without affirmative action, suddenly, there are no more Hmong, and so this is our Michigan link. I don't know how we're going to do it.
  • [00:50:49.81] And then we have anti-Asian hate crime. This was significant because this happened in Detroit in 1982. This is why I was scared to death to come here for graduate school. Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit on the night before his wedding, because at the time, there were lot of out-of-work auto workers and they thought he was Japanese. And so they killed him, and then they only got three years probation. They were fined $3,780, and never spent a day in jail.
  • [00:51:21.00] And this is what got the Asian-American community to say, "Oh, we can't do this as just Chinese-Americans or Japanese-Americans, they all think we look alike. We'd better stick together on this." And it was huge for the Asian-American movement. But again, it continues to happen. After 9/11, people were so afraid of terrorists with beards, that the first person to be killed was a Sikh man from India, who had nothing to do with, you know, Sikh is a different religion, India's a different country. He just has a beard and a turban. So Sikhs had a lot of trouble after 9/11. Actually all Asian-Americans did. And the Asian-American Legal, AALDEF, Legal Defense Education Fund, something like that, in New York, they document all the hate crimes. It was, like, a Japanese guy on the subway in Boston that got attacked. There was a little Chinese-American girl in Connecticut that was attacked. There were a lot of Sikhs, a lot of Muslims, a lot of of people with beards, basically.
  • [00:52:36.62] But the guy who did it said "Hey, you should thank me." He didn't get it. You know, this is not the right guy. So then Doctor Wen Ho Lee is another stereotype that really hit the Chinese-American community hard. The idea that Chinese are all spies.
  • [00:52:59.66] Sorry, I'm just rushing through all this. So now, since this is a Presidential election year, at the last election, Senator George Allen of Virginia, he was filmed on YouTube, this was when YouTube entered the political arena, and he made fun of his opponent's track record, they're called, this Indian-American student, college student, was filming him, and he said, "Oh, look at this guy in the yellow shirt. What's his name? A macaca or something." And macaca is a word for monkey, so it definitely is a racial epithet in a certain community. Coincidentally, the community Jim Webb's mother comes from. And so he said, "Hey, let's give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." He said this all on tape, and he was not afraid or ashamed to do it at all. But the funny thing is that, Siddarth, he was born and raised in Virginia, right? Allen was born in California. And so there was this huge uproar. A lot of national exposure, and he lost the election. And at the time, he was a Presidential possibility. People were talking about him, and thank goodness we got him out.
  • [00:54:07.54] Grace Lee Project, OK. This is from the Grace Lee Project. It's a very short film, two minutes, lets you relax, recover, and I'll stop talking for two minutes. This is fun, this is really fun.
  • [00:54:19.94] My name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:21.92] Hi, I'm Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:22.71] My name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:23.95] I'm Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:25.03] Hi, my name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:25.52] My name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:25.87] This is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:26.65] My name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:27.68] This is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:28.55] My name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:28.63] Aloha, my name is Grace Lee.
  • [00:54:28.81] The Grace Lee I know is the valedictorian of my high school. Also, probably, I think she was either studying law or medicine.
  • [00:54:37.50] She is very intelligent.
  • [00:54:43.72] She was really smart.
  • [00:54:47.07] Every Grace Lee I ever met had an essence of purity to them.
  • [00:55:05.75] Like she was just the nicest girl.
  • [00:55:06.96] She's nice and she's smart.
  • [00:55:07.41] And she's quiet., very quiet.
  • [00:55:08.73] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
  • [00:55:08.86] She was really smart.
  • [00:55:11.57] We used to call her Grace X, cause she was such a revolutionary.
  • [00:55:14.75] These are voodoo dolls and I made this one.
  • [00:55:18.94] The Grace Lee I know of tried to burn down my high school.
  • [00:55:22.80] I didn't know her very well, but she just looked like a typical Asian.
  • [00:55:25.49] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
  • [00:55:25.59] Every one of us in this society has been damaged by this society.
  • [00:55:28.84] We were never told that we were adopted. But my brother and I always knew it.
  • [00:55:34.88] I committed my life to Jesus. And personally, in my heart, it's just great.
  • [00:55:35.23] My name is so common.
  • [00:55:35.93] Let's just say the word "sex" and just get it over with. "Sex."
  • [00:55:37.82] Personally, I think it's a beautiful name.
  • [00:55:44.54] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: I love that piece. Just to think about identity in that way.
  • [00:55:59.48] So now I'll segue very quickly into pop culture. I'm sure you're all exhausted, but this is where it gets fun and light and easy.
  • [00:56:08.79] Pop culture. Asian-Americans in the media tend to be missing overall. If you look at the mainstream shows, LA, Hawaii. Has anyone been to LA, Hawaii, New York, Boston, a hospital? You ever seen an Asian there? OK? So this is the OC on Fox in Orange County, which I know has the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. This is how they cast it, which contrasts with "Better Luck Tomorrow," which is also set in Orange County, which has an all-Asian cast. And the joke with that film was that the only Caucasians cast in the movie were people in roles that were traditionally given to Asians in mainstream films.
  • [00:56:47.84] So, like, the pizza delivery guy is Caucasian and stuff like that. "Bringing Down the House" was a book about an MIT blackjack team, all Asian. When they made it into a movie, they got rid of all the Asians. They recast them as all Caucasian to make it more realistic, I guess. That was last year.
  • [00:57:10.53] I mean those are fun because that's pop culture. And the worry is that it's seductive, it looks real. But then it becomes worrisome when you talk about the news media and the coverage of Hurricane Katrina was criticized for being very unbalanced. And rapper Kanye West came on and said, "You know, you're not doing this right." And actually it was more the whole plight of even these Americans that were down there to Hurricane Katrina, 30,000 people. And they were completely unequipped to deal with them. And so that was the big problem to Hurricane Katrina, but you never saw this in the mainstream media. This was covered in the ethnic press, and actually the fundraising was all done through the ethnic communities.
  • [00:57:56.89] Can you read this? Do you want me to read it aloud? OK. So this is Secret Asian Man, who's one of the cartoon strips on our magazine. And it says Hollywood, thanks. So how come the Asian hero never gets the girl? First guy: "Oh Jack, you saved those kids, repaired the nuclear reactor, and killed all the bad guys. And now you've saved me. Come here, you stud muffin."
  • [00:58:19.80] "Oh Tyrone, you saved those kids, put out the project fires, and killed all the crack dealers, and now you have saved me. Come here, you ebony warrior."
  • [00:58:27.36] And "Oh, Sam, Secret Asian Man, you saved those kids, found the stolen money, cured cancer, built a water-fueled car, and kicked the snot out of about 53 henchmen, and now you have saved me. Thanks. A lot. Shake."
  • [00:58:40.67] So this is the way it's represented a lot in the mainstream media. And so, as we leave, we're going to blast through some photos now of stereotype-defined Asian-Pacific-Americans.
  • [00:58:53.76] And what I'd like you to do is to think, when you think of the stereotype, when you think Asian-American or Chinese-American, what comes to mind? A lot of these, even for me, growing up here, right? A lot of these are stereotypes, and things that we've been told about Asians, right? From the mainstream media. But if you look at real people, it's quite different.
  • [00:59:13.81] This is Grace Lee Boggs, who was in that short film, and she's an activist in Detroit. She was the MLK speaker a few years back. And then we have Norm Mineta, our first Asian-American cabinet member. Elane Chao was the first Asian-American woman cabinet member. Gary Locke, the Governor of Washington state, and I love this picture of him with Apollo Ohno, I just had to put it in there. And Hoon-Yung Hopgood, Michigan Representative is a Korean adoptee. Frank Wu who as I mentioned earlier, Dean of the Wayne State Law School. Only Chinese-American, or Asian-American law school dean in the country.
  • [00:59:54.17] And then we have, you know, there are stereotypes, Asians can't do sports, right? We have athletes. Dr. Sammy Lee was an Olympian. We got The Rock, we got Yao Ming. Oh, that also, you know, Asians are short. We got Yao Ming. And we got Apollo Ohno in the Olympics. I love the Olympics. I love watching Toby Dawson, the Korean adoptee, Michelle Kwan, everyone loves Michelle Kwan.
  • [01:00:17.26] And actually there was a lot of controversy with Michelle Kwan in the earlier part of her career. Whenever she wouldn't get the gold as expected, or lost it to another one of her teammates, the headlines, more than once, said American beats Kwan. It's like, you know, hello, Michelle's American too. We're on the same team. But people forgot that.
  • [01:00:39.33] Sarah Chang, I always tell the kids, she practices six hours every day. Right? Chang is a U of M professor and a full MacArthur genius. Then we have APAs in music. The kids love this, rapper Jayzee is Asian? He is. He's half Filipino. Michelle Branch is half Indonesian. We have all these people, Linkin Park, James Iha. Designer Vera Wang is Chinese.
  • [01:01:06.71] Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Memorial. She also did the Wave Field. Up on North Campus. It is very cool. You should go check it out. It's tucked away between buildings. Chinese-American U.S. Astronaut. First American to vote for president from space. Kalpana Chawla is the first Indian-American woman in space. David Ho, AIDS researcher, as Time man of the year.
  • [01:01:29.40] I love this. This is in the spelling bees that they have. This boy won in 2005, and that year, of the top ten, I think seven were Asian-American. They were Indian or Chinese or Korean. But of course, when they made the movie, "Akila and the Bee." they changed them all to African-American.
  • [01:01:49.72] Now we have M. Night Shyamalan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee as directors. We have Asian-Americans in film. Kristen Kreuk, actually she's Canadian, Chinese-Canadian. Lucy Liu, U of M grad. She studied Chinese, I always tell my kids, she studied Chinese at the U of M. We have comedian Bobby Lee.
  • [01:02:10.17] And we even have cartoon characters. Dean Cain as Superman. The kids love this, "Superman is Chinese?" Keanu Reeves. Oh, and this is where I get excited. "People" magazine's eighth sexiest man alive in 2005 , Daniel Dae Kim. You know things are bad, you go, "Yay, we're eighth sexiest man!" Which is only worse when you go to 2006, "Oh,yay, we're the 11th sexiest man!" And then, "Now we're "13th, yay, we're 13th!" But that we were included at all is just amazing. I'm sure 20 years ago it never occurred to anyone that, you know, maybe you should look at the Asian guys and see if you might want to include some. Yul Kwan turned a lot of heads during Survivor, when he won Survivor.
  • [01:03:00.87] So, I think I'm done. This is just what I leave for the kids when I'm doing it with them. Do you want to have a Q&A? I know I'm ending quite abruptly, as I always do. I run a mile a minute and then I just stop cold. So there's a microphone if people have questions. And I hope we can have a little bit of discussion.
  • [01:03:27.34] KEN: We'll bring the microphone to you, since the program is being taped.
  • [01:03:30.23] SPEAKER 1: Yes I had a professor. In fact, he was quite a dear friend, and he lived in Ann Arbor, and he could never talk about his parents, and really, no one knew why. They were illegal aliens in California. And supposedly, I don't remember exactly when it was, but there was an amnesty for them, wasn't it?
  • [01:04:01.28] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: I believe so. I don't know the details.
  • [01:04:05.19] SPEAKER 1: Oh, you don't know when that was? Because I know after that, that we were able to meet them, and so forth. So yeah, I think that's possible.
  • [01:04:16.55] FRANCES: I have a book. We can look it up afterwards. Maxine Hong Kingston talks about this too. In her book, "Woman Warrior" that when she was in elementary school, the teachers would ask her, so what's your mother's name? Mama. What's your father's name? Papa. And they're like, no, no, What are their real names? But they couldn't say them out loud. Same thing.
  • [01:04:46.69] Ah, come on let's talk.
  • [01:04:49.82] AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
  • [01:04:51.05] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG:: Oh, right, of course, yes of course, of course.
  • [01:05:01.00] SPEAKER 2: I just wanted to say that you really express your feelings so beautifully as if we are with you. I mean, in everything, and I can remember my grandson saying, "We can't beat these Chinese people. They are so smart. [INAUDIBLE]
  • [01:05:23.23] SPEAKER 1: Francis, we've talked about this a lot. But, I just wanted to make a couple of comments, too, because with all the residences that are going on. And I feel a little bit churlish saying this, because I'm sitting here in the Ann Arbor District Library, and I'm so excited that we're reading the book, William Poy Lee's book, but every time I come to the library, every time I see the advertisements for this Ann Arbor/Ypsi Read, I cannot help being struck by the theme, which is China and the U.S., Bridging two worlds.
  • [01:06:09.37] And the thing is the last time I checked, China and the United States were part of the same world, and they had a very interconnected history. And so I find it very, very striking that even in the midst of trying to bust stereotypes, we are so deeply embedded in the idea that east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet, that subconsciously, we keep reiterating it. And especially in thinking about your talk, you know, it's almost as if those of us who exist in different cultures at the same time. Whether those be ethnic cultures, whether they be geographic cultures, whether they be subcultures, defined by religious affiliation or sexual orientation or profession or whatever, that one of the things we are dealing with is that other people are constantly imposing their labels on us, and we're not allowed to just be. We're not allowed to embrace both sides. Because if you embrace your Chinese side, then somehow you are not American enough.
  • [01:07:06.77] And so I just wanted to sort of throw that out as a discussion point, as we're thinking about, you know, what are the linkages between China and the United States. It's not just the bodies of the Chinese-Americans that should be carrying all the weight. That indeed, you know, president Angell of the University of Michigan was the first Ambassador to China. We have lots of connections, and one of the ways to start thinking about this is to stop thinking of them as two very, very distinct, and somehow incompatible worlds.
  • [01:07:37.24] SPEAKER 3: You mention the idea of the model minority. And I guess it always kind of surprised me that there's this feeling in the Chinese community or the Asian community, of not liking that. I mean I would think that would be a proud -- so I'm wondering why.
  • [01:08:03.26] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: OK, that's a great question. That's a very great question. And I'm looking at these high school students I know in the back here. The problem with the model minority myth, there are a few problems.
  • [01:08:13.09] One is that it's a stereotype. And it just pigeonholes everyone in the same, you're all the same, OK?
  • [01:08:19.86] Second of all, it says well, what about the kids that aren't so bright, who aren't doing so well in school. Well, what's wrong with you, right? Or, say, the kids who are struggling a little bit, but the teachers don't notice because, well, they're Asian, they must be doing fine.
  • [01:08:43.29] And then also there are these ethnic groups that really are struggling, that have significant barriers. I'm trying to think if I should talk about this. I was talking to some people about AP classes because in Ann Arbor we have talked about the achievement gap. And this is a big topic in Ann Arbor. For the past 20 years. We were talking about it 20 years ago, we're still talking about the achievement gap between African-Americans and Caucasians. They say that we have to figure out how to get the African-Americans into more AP classes and the Hispanic-Americans into AP classes.
  • [01:09:26.43] I'm like, what about Native-Americans, what about Hmong-Americans and, you know, other disadvantaged Asians? Oh, but Asians are doing fine. Look at this data. I'm like, well, the data is not necessarily telling you about individual students, and that's the problem with data. So those are some of the problems. Well there's also the idea that if you are a model minority stereotype, that's all you can be, right? Helen Zia, who's a very famous journalist, brilliant writer, she was in New York and she was at a party. She talked about being at a party once, and someone said, "Hey you Asians really know how to have fun." And the person was surprised. And she's like, "You live in New York. You are surrounded by all these Asians, and you don't know that Asians can have fun? I mean, well why wouldn't the Asians be able to have fun, right?"
  • [01:10:19.72] And so this is part of that stereotype that kind of seeps in. There are, of course, much worse stereotypes, so we're not complaining about that. That is not a worse stereotype, but there are difficulties with it.
  • [01:10:33.69] SPEAKER 4: Frances, I would like to add more about it, model minority. In the state of Michigan, the Department of Community Health keeps health statistics in three categories. Black, white, and other. So if Asian-Americans have barriers to healthcare, because of their cultural differences, linguistics differences, no one would know. Because we are buried in other. And that's another problem. "Well, you're a model minority, what problems can you have?"
  • [01:11:09.84] SPEAKER 1: I just wanted to, since Amy brought up that point, I just wanted to bring up another problem with the model minority stereotype. If you look historically, that stereotype arose in the `60s and it was explicitly used to put down African-Americans, because the rhetoric goes, "Look, the Asians have made it, what's wrong with the rest of you?" And so I think we need to realize that that stereotype, even though it seems positive, was born of racism. And it's perpetuated by racism. Because as long as we can maintain the fiction that this group doesn't have any problems at all, not withstanding the murder of Vincent Chin twelve years after this model minority stereotype had been supposedly discovered. The fact that it's not true, the fact that it's supported by racism, and the fact that it perpetuates more racism, I think is a problem.
  • [01:12:05.04] And some of you may have read, there was a Wall Street Journal article a few years ago called the "New White Flight." The old white flight is when the African-Americans move into your neighborhood and the whites move out because they're afraid that the neighborhood's going down the tubes, that's the stereotype. The new white flight is, there are a lot of Asians moving in and the whites move out because now the math classes in school are going to be too hard. All right, so the model minority stereotype may seem innocuous, but it breeds other things. And so, for example, Asians are really well behaved and they are really good at math,. Therefore, we can't give them managerial positions because they don't have those kind of go-getting people skills, right?
  • [01:12:44.11] And people have talked about the bamboo ceiling for managers of Asian descent. And so, you know, I'm really glad we brought this up, because there are a lot of these stereotypes that seem positive, right, but if people went saying "Oh, yeah, you know, African-Americans, they're just all naturally gifted at basketball." We would recognize that or "Theyre all really good at sports" We would recognize that as a pernicious stereotype., but somehow saying that Asians are all good at math, or whatever it happens to be is still very much acceptable, and that's allowed by the fact that people think Asians don't have any problems anywhere.
  • [01:13:13.51] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: In Cupertino and Monterey Park, when they did have these white flights, I mean, I read some of the conversations that people were having, they're like, "Oh well the school's no good because there are no sports because there's too many Asians."
  • [01:13:27.14] And the Asian kids, the high school kids are saying, "Hello, I do sports. I'm on honor roll. I do yearbook. I do all this stuff. You know, we do sports." But the other people didn't recognize that. And, you, know, it's interesting because in Ann Arbor, people are very polite. And nobody wants to talk about race. But you know I've lived here 19 years, and it really has taken me until the last year to really feel comfortable here, to really find my place here.
  • [01:13:56.45] And when you think about it, that was 19 years. That's kind of embarrassing. But I think it's something that, really, wow, that there's something going on. So you're looking, searching for that space where you can just be, you know.
  • [01:14:16.15] KEN: I also want to thank you for coming out and giving this lecture. It's good, actually, for the Asians to see your role as being out there in front, in discussing this in front of all these people. But, anyway another thing I wanted to kind of add to this, that statement right there "What can I do," is that addressing to all of us?
  • [01:14:40.27] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: Absolutely.
  • [01:14:41.98] KEN: With that, I think that's for Asians and Asian-Americans. Then I think we should actually look at those statements, and really take that pretty seriously too, I think. Because as much as we could see these unfair experiences one may actually have out there, but I think we also have to question those assumptions and stereotypes that we have also towards others, not just whites or blacks. With our own experience, I think we also have our own assumptions and stereotypes that we bring about, too, as Asian-Americans. So I think we should also take that into consideration.
  • [01:15:30.89] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: You know, I am just amazed, because when I watch the next generation, the kids growing up, especially in the part of town where I live where it's very diverse on our side of town. And the kids are very cool and hip, and they know all this stuff and they can speak up. I've heard all these stories because I'm a story teller, so people tell me their stories. But I hear stories of, you know, the Girl Scout troop from King School goes to Frankenmuth. And the lady from Frankenmuth tells them all sorts of weird stuff, and there like, "No, I don't think so." And then like how do you know about this, how do you know anything about Muslims? Like, I'm Muslim. Well, you don't look Muslim. Like, well I am, right? And that sort of thing. I am totally into educating the kids and their peers. So that as they grow up, this becomes natural, it becomes normal.
  • [01:16:26.28] But also for all of us, I think it's really important that we reach out and become friends with other people, really get to know other people. And that's really hard to do. Because I work in this area, so I crash into race all the time. I say the wrong thing all the time and, I hear the most shocking things all the time And I'm abused, of course, all the time too.
  • [01:16:51.06] But, I'll hear people from Taiwan saying things about people from China. They're saying things about people from Korea and Vietnam and then about Caucasians, about African-Americans. And you know everyone is saying stuff about each other. And then sometimes I see groups of people that you think, this is like a very diverse community, everyone should know each other. Well, they're all still segregated, right? You have the Korean moms over here and the Chinese moms over there. Well, maybe it's language, but then you have African-American dads over there, and the Caucasian parents there. Why is everyone so separated? And I just kind of observe, I just kind of watch and ask my annoying questions. But the kids, I mean, I think if we educate our kids and they can be spared this, I hope, in the next generation. Spared is not quite the right word, but they can leap over these hurdles.
  • [01:17:43.20] I was born and raised in California. My parents are immigrants. I came here for graduate school, in the philosophy department, and I'm a writer now. I write for an online Asian-American magazine. And I'm the Arts and Culture editor. And I don't know, what else do I do? Working on a manuscript, I do a lot of speaking in town. So if your PTOs need anyone to come and speak, invite me. PTOs, libraries, you know. I love to speak. Because this year's the China theme year at U of M, and because of the Ann Arbor/Ypsi Reads, I've been doing a lot of university.
  • [01:18:27.35] I am also the Outreach Coordinator of the Ann Arbor Chinese Center of Michigan, which is one of the Chinese schools. And I bring children out to perform all across southeastern Michigan. And I think that's really great for the kids because they learn about their culture and their heritage. They get a chance to perform it, and they get to share it with their friends. And their people get to see it and then they're educating people. But they also get a lot of positive reinforcement.
  • [01:18:55.43] And then as they work with other groups, like if it's an international night at Eastern Michigan University or U of M or King School, they get to see there are other cultures, they get to learn about other cultures. And actually at King School, what we've done over the years as it's evolved, it used to be the kids would perform, and the Indian kids would do the Indian dance, the Korean kids would do the Korean dance, but now they're all learning each others' dances as well. And it's great, I mean there's no better way to learn about another culture then to just be in it, and do the movements and learn the words and the songs, and to just really incorporate that into your body, I think.
  • [01:19:39.04] I wake up at three o'clock every morning and I write, and it probably takes me a good two hours to just get the stuff out of my head onto the page. And then I can stand up, and I can breathe, and I can face the day. You know what has really helped, actually, this is it, because I was talking about how it has taken me 19 years to really feel at home in Ann Arbor. And I've got an article coming up in the Observer, in March, that talks about this, I've taken 19 years.
  • [01:20:10.74] What has really helped the most, and this is why I really think it's important, and I spoke about it somewhat but didn't really emphasize it enough, I think, is community. I think community is key and really important. And that has really been what has really helped me find my place. And in one of the last chapters of my book, that I wrote this past summer, talks about this moment when I am most myself. And that's where the title comes from. Why don't I tell you the story? I'm a storyteller.
  • [01:20:45.94] About a year ago, there was a play on campus called "Silver River" and David Henry Hwang, who is this very famous Asian-American playwright, [? Rike ?] [? Shun ?] did the music, he was a very famous guy, [? Hon ?] [? King ?] [? Sen ?] was the director from Singapore, very famous, beautiful production. It mixed Chinese opera, modern dance. It's just an incredible thing.
  • [01:21:08.45] And so I was, as the Arts and Culture editor of "Asian-American Village," I went to all these talks and did all this stuff. And then I got invited to a reception. But I was having some difficulty. Because I have four children, and so, getting the logistics of getting the kids and the babysitters and getting to this event, is really complicated. And I got a phone call, and some said, "Oh, you can call this person." I said well, I don't really know her well. Well, she called me. Someone told her, who told her, who told her that I needed help. She called me and said "I'm going to come pick up your kids at seven o'clock. "You are? OK." And then someone else called and said "Your husband can't go with you to the reception?" I'll go with you to the reception." "Oh, OK." And then someone else said, "Well you know you need some help watching your little brother, I'll help."
  • [01:21:57.60] And so all these had come from the community, and I was like wow, I really have a place here.
  • [01:22:05.32] It was like for years I used to think, oh you know, I go the grocery store and people look at me funny, and I walk down the street, people ask me these weird questions. I said, you know, I'm making a mistake here. I've been trying to find my place in the larger community, and maybe for me that's not the right community. I should be looking at my smaller community. And in the Asian-American community on the northeast corner of town, I know it's a very small area and a very small subgroup, but I have found a home there, and a place there. And once I kind of became secure, then I could branch out. And then it didn't have to be only Chinese from Taiwan, but it could be Chinese from China too. It could be Asians from India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka. And then, oh, then I could be friends with people from the Middle East. Lebanese people, and then, oh, I can be friends with Jewish people. And it just kind of expanded. It is just like once I found a place where I could be secure, then I didn't have to be afraid. And then I could kind of expand, just kind of relax really, and make friends with other people, and really find my place.
  • [01:23:08.56] And the way the story ends up is, then I went to this reception. And I met the director, and we had a wonderful conversation, and we saw the play. But that night I was just so on fire. I was so animated, and all my friends noticed. And they said there was something about that night, something was different, and they said you looked different, your hair looked different. I combed my hair before I got there, but somehow my hair looked different, and there was something about that night. And I hold onto that. It was like that, was a moment, and these moments in time don't come very often in our lives I think. But that was a moment when I was most myself. And I try to just capture those moments when I can.
  • [01:23:57.46] But community, community is key. Community, good friends, family. That's what makes it happen.
  • [01:24:13.16] [INAUDIBLE]
  • [01:24:13.42] It's a name of a magazine. The website is IMdiversity.com. And when you go to IMdiversity.com, there are five different ethnic villages in a bar across the top. African-American village, Asian-American village, Hispanic-American village, Native-American village, women's village, global minority village, six ethnic villages. So, in each one is its own magazine that has education, sports, politics, that sort of thing. It's all around arts and culture, family and lifestyle. and I'm in the Asian-American village.
  • [01:24:54.25] [INAUDIBLE]
  • [01:24:58.11] All around the world. It's on the internet, so we have readers all around the world, mostly American, but I get letters from people all around the world because I write about issues about raising children with cultures. So sometimes I'll get letters like, oh, I'm Turkish, and my wife is Indonesian, and here we are living in France, and we have these problems. I get these letters all the time.
  • [01:25:21.33] So the issues are the same. It really doesn't matter in terms of language, anyway. It doesn't matter what the languages are, or what your family background is, or what country you are living in, they're really the same. If you're talking about a minority language that you're trying to hang onto and pass to your kids. And I also have another website, my personal website. If you could remember, franceskaihwawang.com. But that's kind of long, so multiculturaltoolbox.com. And you can see all my upcoming events and the different articles that I write and different, stuff that's going on.
  • [01:25:57.65] SPEAKER 2: I'm really touched by your [? energy ?] and what you talk about. How you find your community and find your place. I'm wondering, in the process of trying to look for your own identity, what role did your parents play, and what kind of influence they had on you? I'm asking this question personally because I have a three-month old boy, and I'm really scared that I may have to raise an American-born Chinese. What kind of suggestions do you have for us?
  • [01:26:32.67] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: That's a whole other talk that I do. It's called "Multicultural Toolbox," come and invite me. Well, all the research says that the parents are the single most important influence in a child's life. I actually hit up, [? in the ?] now, raising my children now, and I see what my parents did and didn't do. I was raised very Confucian, very old school, very conservative, also Catholic. So we used to joke, yeah we're Chinese and Catholic. We've got guilt and shame.
  • [01:27:09.29] [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:27:09.60] And sometimes, I wish I had raised my kids that way. Boy, it sure would be easier. We're raising them Buddhist. Have compassion. Catholicism is much easier. But, joking aside, I think you need just to explain things. Talk to the kids, show them how you see the world. My kids complain about this all the time, that I tell them too much. Is [? Hawa ?] still here? Do you have an answer for this? She's reading, she's not listening. She's so bored by all this. She's heard it a million times. Does that help? I don't know. I'll have to think about this. There are ways to pass on the culture, because as you saw from the beginning pictures, they're not going to get it from the mainstream.
  • [01:28:03.36] So about culture, in terms of culture, if you want your kids to know anything about culture, if you want them to be polite to aunties, to call adults aunties and not, say, by their first namees, you have to teach them, because they're not going to get it from the mainstream. The mainstream is, what it is and it's going to be a while before any of us get shown up there. And I think we're very fortunate right now, that multiculturism is hip and cool. And we are just so lucky. Because it was not like that a generation or two ago. And I've talked to people whose families tried to downplay their heritage, hide their heritage, forget their heritage.
  • [01:28:40.61] And it's sad, and by the time you get to the third and fourth generation, there's a real hunger for it. They're like, why didn't you teach me this before. And you're, back in those days we couldn't. But there's a real hunger for it when you get to the fourth generation. So we're really lucky, I think, that we can do this. And the schools support it, and the teachers support it. It's very hip. So we're lucky.You
  • [01:29:07.06] We've been raised at school. I mean I was a good student, very, you know, model minority. But I was a good student. I believed all those lessons they taught us about the Constitution, and the the Declaration, and all those things almost like the principles that the country was founded on. I mean I was raised, I believed in that, and, really, that's what I want. And when I get involved in politics, I try not to get involved in politics, but of course, I always do at the last minute, and it's, I'm very idealistic. It drives my parents crazy, but I'm very idealistic, and I want to believe. I want America to be a certain way. I want the world to be a certain way. I want people to be compassionate and all that stuff.
  • [01:29:48.38] And so in terms of a dream for Ann Arbor, a dream for Michigan, a dream for America. I think that I don't know about this stuff. But the dreams, I mean, that's what makes us artists and writers and poets, and that's what moves us, I think.
  • [01:30:05.66] I'm done.
  • [01:30:16.17] [APPLAUSE]
  • [01:30:16.44] FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG: Thank you very much for coming, everyone.
  • [01:30:19.91] SPEAKER 4: This concludes our broadcast. For a complete listing of upcoming events at the Ann Arbor District Library, visit our website at www dot addl dot org, or call the library at 734-327-4200. Press option 3 for events listings.
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January 23, 2008 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

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