Book Review: “Asian American Dreams” by Helen Zia

Apologies for a semester of no posts… it’s hard to feel da yellow rage when the humdrum tedium of life makes you focus on the little picture, the day-by-day.

Now that it’s winter break, I’ve gotten a chance to finally read “Asian American Dreams” by Helen Zia, a book given to me during my participation in Penn’s APALI (Asian Pacific American Leadership Initiative) program. I’m sure there are a lot of great, comprehensive reviews out there, so I just wanted to relay my impressions of the book.

First of all, Ms. Zia is an amazing woman. She spoke at Penn’s East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU) conference last year (March 2010), and it was not the first conference she’s spoken at. Unfortunately, due to a combination of changing times and changing political attitude, I’m sure her speech left a slightly different impact than what she would have experienced ten or even five years ago. To people familiar with the community’s issues, she stops as nothing short of inspirational. Having dropped out of med school to become a community organizer, and having spent time in journalism, construction, factory work, and a variety of legal battles, she’s clearly dedicated her life to fighting for rights most of my college age peers probably don’t realize have been fought for.

I said “unfortunately” earlier, because I think the magnitude of her words may be beginning to lose its impact on people who don’t realize the full historical context of Asian American rights. One of my Asian American friends, a Chinese American born in a mostly rural small town in western Pennsylvania, was flat out terrified by her fervor. Having largely grown up around Caucasian Americans and only recently making Asian American acquaintances, he found her far too overbearing and criticized her for shaking up the accepted peacefulness of his life. The situation is, by blending in, playing along with the few stereotypical Asian jokes, and generally making light of the situation, there have not been enough tensions in his life to warrant standing up and fighting against the system. Due to the work of previous Asian American rights activists, we are in an environment where we can get by and even live great lives, as long as we don’t disturb the system too much. We’ve actually been afforded a lot of rights and opportunities in a relatively short amount of time. So he wonders why Ms. Zia is continuing to fight and rile people up, when we can just keep our heads down and be American like immigrants are supposed to be.

So that’s the context of the college-aged reader today: where do we stand in the “Asian American activism” spectrum? And it’s with those thoughts that I started reading the book.

Coverage: Rather than being a comprehensive introduction to all Asian American history ever, or even going very far in depth with the kinds of issues Asian Americans face, Ms. Zia’s book instead focuses on the history of the activist movement. In this way, she does a good job of pulling in personal narratives, historical contexts, prevailing social attitudes, urban studies and demography, legal and constitutional battles, and “homeland politics” together to illustrate a few case studies of more dramatic points in Asian American activism. The cases she focuses heavily on are early immigrant rights and restrictions leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, the rights of Alaskan cannery workers (especially Filipino), sexual identity and ethnic identity, model minority myth and the negative impacts on economically disadvantaged Asian Americans (esp. Hmong, Cambodian, and Vietnamese refugees), a lot of Afro-Korean relations (centered around grocery stores), the dichotomy/wealth gap in South Asian immigrants, and also the possibility of a pan-Asian support system (via Vincent Chin and other instances). She covers a broad variety of topics, though she devotes two chapters to the Afro-Korean grocer situation, both in NY and LA.

Presentation: The presentation of each case was similar: the underlying reasons for the conflict were presented, the stakeholders were introduced, and in each case, the APAs lost some battles but won the war, or vice versa, in which at least they left behind a new generation of activists. The chapters tended to end on an encouraging note, but it’s hard not to get disappointed from reading about the multiple frustrations and restrictions in “working with the system.” Any frustrations I had were really frustrations with history. Seeing the compilation of lost battles for equal rights was disheartening, though after the fact, it evokes a lot of appreciation for the rights we are afforded now. Any event in history, told from the perspective of the losers, is presented this way. A lot of lives and livelihoods were lost in pursuit of equality, but at least, they left behind inspiration for future generations.

Takeaways: The problem is, this message falls upon a generation that probably won’t pick up the call to “activism’ as readily. In a lot of ways, that’s really not a problem. Society adapts with the necessities of the era, though usually a generation late. (We’re like antibiotics to a virus — by the time the cure is ready, the strain has evolved. Not to compare anybody to a virus or anything, I’m just saying reacting takes time, like a generation.) In a few more generations, I’m fairly confident that a lot of the problems addressed in this book will be just history, and not an ongoing struggle like some of the chapters alluded to. So, this book wasn’t as fulfilling as I hoped it would be. It gave me a really comprehensive, detailed, and in many ways, inspiring history of the Asian American activist movement, but a book that would mean more at this present time is one that addresses the issues we face going forward. There are a lot of topics mentioned that I think merit further exploration: model minority myth (read: affirmative action), homeland politics (read: the ever wavering relations with Asian countries), language barriers, high-tech/low-tech immigrants, and more. I also would have liked to hear more suggestions on how she can realistically see this change being implemented. Rather than just issuing a blanket call to action and activism, the path forward is often one of compromises, trading one right for another depending on the political situation at hand. So, because this book isn’t as forward-looking as I hoped, it wasn’t exactly the panacea I imagined it would be for all Asian American issues, ever. However, as a vital primer in APA history and activism, it’s definitely a worthwhile read. It will probably have the most impact on people who already care about the community issues, and for people who are faintly aware and would love to learn more.

Chinese Ad: “Why Do Great Nations Fail”

I don’t really find this ad funny, nor do I find it a “chilling” portent of what the future could look like if government waste continues. I find it sinophobic. The image of a gloating, bad-ass professor lecturing about the technological 2030 future echoes every shadowy portrayal of the “mystical East,” as if we the Chinese were an inscrutable peoples, always waiting in the wings to pounce at a moment of weakness. While debates of the potentially impending economic clash have valid points, this type of advertisement seizes more on ignorance and plays on sinophobia to push the targeted audience towards fear and realization. “If the government doesn’t stop wasteful spending, the Chinese are going to own us by 2030!” What a disappointing ad.

However, this was incredibly well filmed. Probably a humongous waste of resources.

Baba says Chinese Cool for Thought

Chinese development interests me largely because of its dichotomies. Its modern historical set-up has got to be the most interesting I’ve ever heard of, to the point that my interest in China’s developing society is comprised less of my own personal ties to the country and culture but more out of my fascination as a historical observer and resident over-imaginative mind. I’m currently most interested in: Chinese nationalism, minorities and identities, language and dialect, modern hip hop/music, social subcultures, urban development, global and regional hegemony, netizens, the Great Firewall, and the personal wealth/personal liberties trade off.

Links for the day:

The China Question

I don’t have much nationalist pride. It’s a symptom of being part of a diaspora, of experiencing immigration, of practicing cultural habits that aren’t in line with my citizenship. So while I don’t have much by way of nationalistic affinity with the States, I don’t exactly have pride and affinity for China as a nation, either. Chinese culture, history, and legacy is different from Chinese government, policies, and politics. The same thing goes for America. That leads me to wonder — as China’s economy takes the No. 2 spot in the world, with sinophobia is erupting all over Capitol Hill, are China and America actually on a collision course? That question is haunted by the shadow of another question: “What side are you on?” There’s been a lot of talk of a post-unilateral, Pax Americana world and what that would look like. Is it going to be Cold War bilateralism, US vs. PRC this time? (Another red enemy. Or yellow. Red and yellow? Orange.)

I’ve taken an interest in East Asian politics, partially because that’s the news that’s been barraging my RSS feeds:

I’m excited about China’s rise, largely from a historical perspective. The rise and fall of hegemonic powers tickles my interest in a nerdy, humanities-enthusiast kind of way. The last 150 years of Chinese history has particularly interested me, and I’m as curious as the rest of the world to see where it will go in the next 150 years. But I’m trying to be careful to split the cultural enthusiasm I feel for this issue with the more calculating, analytical concern I feel as something of a globalist and policy enthusiast. There are a lot of social and political changes to have to develop hand in hand with China’s burgeoning economy, or else the next hegemonic powerhouse will be a long ways off from the idealistic goal of world peace we all used to talk about in the 90s.

Gender: East and West

Among the things I have completely taken for granted is the blessings I have had growing up as a girl in the West. While issues like ethnicity and social status were often very plainly placed in front of me at an early age, I never faced any consequential sexism. Especially in schools, where I was praised for being a smart female student (though the smart Asian student question is more tenuous), I was repeatedly told as a young girl that I could do anything I set my mind to. Kitchen/sex jokes and chauvinistic comments aside, I faced gender inequality with the sense of indignant entitlement that only privileged people boast. Now that it’s been two decades, I’m starting to see firsthand the reality of glass ceilings, office politics, and the dramatic gender imbalances in many industries like science, technology, and finance. (While Wei Sun Christianson handles the position gracefully, women in cutthroat finance environments are often faced with the dichotomy of 1) be a soft, ineffectual woman who will never get promoted, or 2) be the hard-ass ice queen bitch that gets the work done but everyone hates.) But to keep things in perspective, these reads from around the world remind me how lucky I am, and how far there is to go for women worldwide:

Legend of Korra

I’m excited. I’m really, really excited. Tony sent me a link for the official confirmation of the “Legend of Korra” series, an Avatar: The Last Airbender spin-off.

Kay, so first of all, I don’t know why that was on Wall Street Journal of all places…

And secondly, I have been instinctively trained to cringe any time anyone mentions “spin off” shows. (I have a younger brother: once I saw 5 minutes of Yu-Gi-Oh GX, and it was enough to send me into convulsions.)

Thirdly, the picture of Korra looks like a man! She is humongous!

BUT I’M STILL EXCITED! I found myself liking that cartoon series a lot more than I expected, especially by the end. (I’m also glad Raymond, Charles, and a bunch of APALI people got on board too.) I’m just going to ignore the movie like it never happened, and put my faith into this series instead. The creators mentioned it would be more “steampunk,” which is always  good. You can’t get enough steampunk — even if the story and characters suck, the environment makes it a redeeming quality. Bonus points because LoK is an animated series, which means artists get to go wild. If this turns out sucking, my heart is going to be broken. I can only take one more bad hit like the Last Airbender movie before I give up on this series.

The Last Airbender: What Came Out of the Shyamalan Fuss?


Despite having already heard the bad reviews and steadying myself not to go see The Last Airbender, I got dragged to see it by a friend. Also, I was also curious to see what came of all of the ruckus made over the casting calls, so I wanted to check out exactly how Shyamalan handled this movie. So… okay. I’m going to try to give a fair opinion of this movie.First, I love the Avatar: The Last Airbender series. I liked it when it was way uncool to like a Nickolodeon cartoon (and it still is…) but hey, I thought it was inventive, creative, and well implemented. Fans of anime are probably more likely to accept the plot and character styles, and after the initial shock of Nickolodeon producing a pretty good animated series passes, it is easy to like. The original cartoon’s characters had great character development, the inspiration for the world they lived in and the element bending they were able to do made it an overall great show, especially towards the last two seasons. The level of thought put into the parallels between reality and the Avatar world in the original cartoon is probably what made the show appeal so much to older audiences, when it was probably targeted at more of a younger crowd for its original creation. Also, because of the variety of characters, it seems to draw both genders in pretty evenly. With a series that has this type of fan following, when M. Night Shyamalan got the rights to produce the movie, there was understandably a lot of anticipation for what the live action would bring. It had a potential to be really, really good.

But then, it went downhill. Starting from the casting, which was questionably racist (enough to start quite a grassroots movement on the internet). Penn’s very own Daily Pennsylvanian even mentioned this casting call here, citing the casting director as asking, “We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire… If you’re Korean, wear a kimono. If you’re from Belgium, wear lederhosen.” I would like to hope that most people who have gone to fifth grade in America can surmise kimono = Japanese and lederhosen = German, but let’s overlook that. The cultural elements of the original show drew very heavily from Inuit and pan-Asian cultures. The Fire Nation’s characters have Japanese-esque names (Zuko, Iroh, Ozai, Roku) though some have Chinese influences (General Zhao), they write in Chinese (perhaps an older time in East Asia), the architecture is very obviously Eastern Asian (pagoda pagoda temple pagoda), and their ships are perhaps inspired by late 1800s-1900s/industrializing Asia. The Water tribe people live in the Earth’s poles and observe Inuit lifestyles. The Earth Kingdom’s capital is called “Ba Sing Se,” observes a similar governmental structure as that of historical East Asia, everyone wears those types of flowing robes, and the names are like “Dai Li” and “Toph Beifong” (not so much the Toph, though). It’s clear that while the cultures aren’t imitated exactly and weren’t meant to be imitated exactly, the obvious East Asian influence is there.

The ruckus came from the very evident casting of an entirely Caucasian leading cast (Aang, Katara, Sokka — everyone’s names, by the way, are pronounced differently from the cartoon and it grates on fans’ nerves). Here is a great kid’s show which is clearly inspired by East Asian culture, so why aren’t the leads cast as East Asians for the sake of accuracy with the show? If this show about Asian-looking people can be popular, why can’t this Hollywood movie be popular as well? I was getting ready to completely boycott this film when Jesse McCartney was rumored to be cast as Prince Zuko, the slightly emo, banished Fire Nation prince who serves as the villain in Season 1 and turns good towards the end. Instead, Shyamalan seemed to bend a little and cast him as Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire fame) instead. So, with a South Asian prince, the entire Fire Nation immediately turns Indian. Hey, at least it’s moving to the …. same continent? I am relieved at least that Shyamalan cared enough about the “racebending” to make the architecture of the Fire Nation more South Asian than the Chinese style temples of the original show. But why?

The plus side: at least there wasn’t any yellowfacing. Well, in the most literal sense. I didn’t see anyone with taped up eyes or obvious attempts to try to be East Asian. They just weren’t. Katara and Sokka’s family in the Southern water tribe were the only caucasian family there, and they were surrounded by a bunch of East Asian extras who stood around looking destitute. Even if I approached this from a color-blind perspective, I don’t know if I was just supposed to ignore the fact that they were the only white people there or pretend that they’re actually the same as the villagers surrounding them. That is, are they playing Asian people or does race not matter at all? There doesn’t seem to be any logical sense in anything, since the Earth Kingdom appears to be made of Asian and Pacific Islander refugees (including one earthbending refugee group where all of the Asian extras huddle looking very third-world, and mutter English lines without an accent), and there is one random black village. Monk Gyatsu is… a very jolly looking black guy. The Air Nomads were this weird mix of the kind of monasteries one would see in Laos or Cambodia, with people from all over. If it were truly a “cosmopolitan” world where race was irrelevant, then the casting of the Air Nomads would make the most sense. There were Indians, white people, black people, Asians, one Hispanic-looking boy, and it looked like more of a world where race was irrelevant. That’s fine. But it just gets hard to ignore the entire villages of Asian side characters and the glaringly Caucasian main characters with Asian-sounding names.

I’m also not sure how to handle the cultural influence of the Fire Nation being casted off as Indian rather than East Asian. Somewhere in the transition, only about 75% of the cultural influences got carried over. Their names are still East Asian. Rather than writing in Chinese and they write in this weird pseudo fake-Chinese maybe-Sanskrit mix. I really don’t know how they intended to do this movie when they had cast blonde boy band star McCartney. It makes sense if I think of the Indian influences as Shyamalan pulling off of what he knew (presumably he was more comfortable adapting his own culture than trying to manifest this East Asian cultural influence), but why? This movie clearly found enough English speaking East Asian and Pacific Islander actors to fill the ranks of the Earth Kingdom extras that get pushed around this whole movie. I don’t even know what to think about the Water Tribe. They started out Asian in the south, minus the main characters, and by the time they got to the north, they were like… Russian, except Princess Yue was played by Seychelle Gabriel who is like… Latina. What the heck is going on?

Okay, okay, so I’ve griped enough about the problems with racial consistency and casting of main characters entirely as Caucasians. The actual acting by Katara and Sokka were so painful that within the first thirty seconds of the movie, I was squirming in my seat. They were stiff, unnatural, and unbelievable as characters. They spent the majority of their on-screen time gaping straight on at the camera. I’ve heard that most people believed Noah Ringer, Aang’s character, did better than expected. He wasn’t… as bad…. as he really could have been, but his inexperience shows as well. Everybody does the “wait-2-seconds-before-I-respond” awkward pause, so there was no chemistry between the characters. The three main characters were just so stiff and stilted that it made the special effects and already difficult-to-accept fantasy world even harder to get absorbed in. Plus, the main set for the first scene looked like it was filmed indoors with a paper backdrop. Shyamalan spent so much money on the special effects for later battles in the movie, but he couldn’t make the first five minutes of the movie look like something that wasn’t produced before the 1980s.

The plot of the first half of the movie is understandably rushed and condensed. There is a lot of backstory that occurs in the first season, with the Fire Nation’s genocide, Aang’s identity as the Avatar, what exactly the Avatar is, what happened to all the Airbenders, and all this Avatar jargon that would massively confuse anyone who didn’t follow the main series. I’m not really going to fault them on that condensing, except that the random Earth Nation encounters with “third world Asians” who are unable to help themselves was a little irking. Surprisingly…. the CGed animals (the humongous flying bison Apa and flying lemur Momo) didn’t suck enough to stick out annoyingly. The fact that the Fire Lord Ozai and Zuko’s evil sister Azula had absolutely no presence can also be faulted to the fact that the actors are all noobs. Seriously, I think some of the extras were better actors than them. The Earth bender they encounter could have easily played General Zhao.

The main part of the movie is focused on the Seige of the North, which is the conclusion of Season 1. It’s a fairly epic battle and they spend a lot of time talking about the Spirit World and how important it is, which is not really emphasized in the main series because… it’s lame. Sokka and Katara’s grandmother gives this speech in the beginning of the movie about how important the Spirit World is and how they can win this battle by the power of… heart…. (gag) that I almost had to leave the theater then. They manage to hit on all the important parts in the Seige of the North series though, including Zuko’s kidnapping of Aang, killing of the moon spirit, Yue dying, Zhao losing, and the Fire Nation being repelled, and it’s in this area that the special effects are most believable. The semi-decent job done with the climactic battle of this movie is ruined afterwards by the really awkward “cliffhanger” leading into the next movie, about Ozai sending Azula to go hunt Aang and Zuko and such. Are the second and third seasons even going to be made after this movie tanks? I dunno…


This is movie is every bit as awkward, stilted, and questionably offensive as the majority says, but there was ONE thing that I found acceptable. As uncomfortable as I am shifting the entire influence of the Fire Nation in my head from East to South Asian, Zuko and his uncle Iroh are actually suitable casts, if I take this movie independently from the series. Dev Patel is probably the most experienced actor in this movie, and he did a good job of playing a conflicted prince, though his character in the beginning was a little awkward as well. (He’s supposed to be a very angry guy, but he and everyone else in this movie always paused for 1-2 seconds before reacting.) Iroh is not the funny, wise, fat guy that he is in the series, but he has an air of goodness and wisdom that Iroh channels. Zuko’s best part was in the Siege of the North, in a brief moment when he expresses his uncertainty about whether he would fight Zhao or follow what Iroh says and pull back. That is the most expression I have seen in this entire movie, and that 3 seconds made me accept the different adaptation of the Fire Nation and Dev Patel’s casting.

I really do not know if I see a future in this version of the movie. Maybe, if somebody else took this movie up, recast Sokka and Katara, and tried to make everything flow more smoothly, it could work. Honestly, except for the fight scenes, everything looked like it was produced twenty years ago.

I’m very uncertain how I feel about yellowface in this movie, since minorities always tend to be very sensitive on how they are represented in the media (since it is so rare that they are presented…) and will probably gripe if their one largely Asian-influenced show is cast so that the Caucasians happen to be the protagonists and other races as helpless extras or villains.  Should I be upset that perhaps Paramount was afraid that a movie casting entirely non-white characters wouldn’t be popularly accepted by American audiences? (Nobody in the entire series really looks white, though Aang might come closest as a raceless bald kid.) On the other hand, should I as the viewer be “colorblind” as the intention of the casting claimed to have intended? That is, is it enough that this movie, which is SO STRONGLY Asian influenced, feature so many Asian characters despite the main characters being white?

We could argue about this race issue forever, but even despite all of that, this movie was awkward and stilted. The fight scenes made it marginally bearable. The special effects could use a lot of work. The soundtrack for the show, which was great, was nothing impressive in the movie. Dev Patel and his uncle unexpectedly did a moderately adequate job with their roles. After the initial shock of the main influence of the Fire Nation shifting from Chinese to Indian passed, it wasn’t bad and was pretty consistent. (While the Earth Nation seems to be happy mixed Third World land, the villainous Fire Nation is 100% South Asian.) This was a debacle by all means, but a small part of me still hopes and prays that someone will take on the 2nd and 3rd movies and do a much better job. Recast everybody if you have to…. this series would be worth a great adaptation. Unfortunately, this ended up more like Dragonball, which falls in the category of Bad Live Actions We Do Not Talk About.

P.S. In the previews, I saw a preview for The Green Hornet. WTF JAY CHOU IS IN IT?! Never in my life did I imagine Jay Chou would be in a movie with Seth Rogen.

Beijing, a Personal Account

I made a friend this summer, and while she was nothing like her coquettish, flashy younger sister Shanghai, I got to know the best and worst of her. Mostly, it was the best I saw, for her darkest sides even I have yet to experience. It would take a lifetime to truly understand her deepest machinations, to learn what really makes her tick. Yet, from just spending five weeks with her, I was lucky enough to see her at her most knowledgeable, honorable, and magnificent moments.

She has a difficult temperament at times, but in her family, she is the most welcoming. She is perhaps not the oldest, but she is still the head of their family and makes her authority known to all. But with the authority that she commands, she is quick to lead by example, offering her hospitality especially to her younger, wayward siblings who stumble awkwardly in her footsteps. They’re not all as graced with the fortunate upbringing she had, and some have only ever known destitute conditions and absolute, utter poverty. But for all the help they receive from her, they also receive her lessons, her ideology, and her perfectly clean-cut view of the world. She loves the way the portrait of her family comes as a whole, loves the uniformity of the colors and face shapes, and hates when the sizes and figures don’t match up. All the neighbors know she lets her eyes gloss over the black sheep of the family, implicitly snubbing them and carefully molding them into a figure of her when no one’s watching. Even if their blood relation is tenuous, she will not let them leave the family, because her family is among the biggest in the neighborhood, in size if not in wealth. She knows she has the leverage to make big impacts throughout society, if only she could quell the bickering within! But like Tolstoy’s world of unhappy families is unhappy in different ways, she can only let time slowly resolve the cracks before the whole picture falls apart.

She knows it’s a modern era, and she’s trying hard to adapt. I can see the traces of her that flaunt her traditional roots and the preeminent past of her family’s five thousand years of history, but in some of the places, modernization was inevitable. The secret, esteemed parts of herself were invaded like modern subway lines transgressing upon ancient Ming tombs and majestic graves, all for the sake of progress. She haughtily (though perhaps rightfully) considers herself among the most significant bastions of culture on this side of the Pacific, and is reluctant to whore herself to the West. Still, she can’t stand to see Shanghai get too far ahead of her. San Li Tun and Chaoyang District are the products of these jealousies, as she attempts to assert her Northern geniality to draw in the curious foreigners. It’s in these places that she is cleanest and most well behaved, so much so that the place has an air of forced cosmopolitanism. Behind the Western restaurants and attractions, a staff of Chinese bumble two steps behind, unable to ignore their cultural habits despite wearing western clothes and learning edgy words.

The race to stay on top of the changing world leaves her tired. Rather than deal with her problems, sometimes it’s easier for her to blow them away. Ignoring these “minor inconveniences” makes her look irresponsible; instead, she tucks them away from criticism when it matters. One day, a weary mother holding a deformed infant with bulging eyes and lolling tongue haunts a street corner, shaking an empty tin. The next day, she is replaced by a street light. Beggars with feet melted off from industrial chemical accidents manage to crawl away into a purgatory between this world and the next. Amputees look physically and spiritually halved. But when the equivalent of a societal thunderstorm rocks the streets, the rain forces all the forgotten creatures from their damp hiding places. She keeps putting band aids onto broken arms. She calls it a miraculous healing, all the while vowing that there is no god who performs divine miracles.

But there is still some sort of sacredness in her temples and lakes. From 5am till 11pm, these parks are the only quiet places left within the inner three rings of her municipal center. The same wild head of shaggy willow hair that inspired Tang poets inspire modern wordsmiths at the Summer Palace. The waters at Beijing University’s Weiming Lake reflect a blue more vivid than the often smoggy sky from which it draws its reflection. The universities and libraries in universities still breed brilliant minds. It’s harder to read a book in the National Library than it is to stream an American movie on dial-up Ethernet internet, but a deep reverence for academic masochism vis-à-vis civil service exams has reincarnated itself in the form of the gao kao. But her people are thirsty for money, desperate for wealth and status. For money and education, they are glad to go along with my friend, so long as her means accomplish the desired end. (Since two decades ago, everybody has loved Deng’s monochrome, mouse-catching cats.) There are more megamalls than colleges, but more colleges than unblocked blogging sites. While culture was reviled and art was a crutch in the armpit of politics just half a century ago, it is becoming a more available commodity now. Some artists shack up in the abandoned factories of 798, hanging pieces from painted pipes and graffiti-stained walls. They used to be on the run from the government of propriety, till they were saved by the capitalism of tourism. For the price of artistic freedom, they work with camera-waving tourists who poke their heads into creative hives. Gawk, photo flash, then repeat. But it’s a small price to pay.

For all the criticisms she receives from her neighbors over her firepower and her armaments, there are more armies of schoolchildren in baggy uniform sweats stomping through her afternoon streets than barely-out-of-college guards nervously gripping the barrels of their guns. They’re thinking about eating their mom’s cooking when they go home. The students are chattering cheerfully about computer games and pop stars. Young adolescents hold hands nervously and excitedly; they’re the first generation to experience romance at such a young age. Their fathers and mothers may have once taken to the streets with machine guns to fight Rightists, and their grandparents knew the sound of falling Japanese bombs. But these children know cell phone ringtones, matching couple shirts, and the taste of pizza. They also know the pressures of the college entrance exam and the loneliness of a single-child family. Some girls abuse false eyelashes; some boys abuse hair gel. It’s all in good fun – they’re a “cool” generation, but never punk enough to stray from the safety of family and propriety. But they’re still taking steps forward, however slowly.

Her entire existence is like that — so many paradoxes, so many dichotomies. It’s in the contradictions and dualisms that she thrives. Meet her for just days, and you will never understand how she can contain so many personalities all in one body. You will only look for ways to confirm stereotypes and preconceptions. But get to know her for five weeks, and you can just begin to understand how much you do not know. That’s Beijing.

Asian American Women’s Mental Health

In the past few days, I have learned quite a few unfortunate happenings – my coworker and close friend’s grandfather passed away last night, prompting him to fly home from Beijing early, I learned that one of my friend’s very close friends (a beautiful, smart young woman in college) committed suicide after suffering from seven years of eating disorders and depression, and also was learned that Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanjing and The Chinese in America as well as one of my heroes, had also committed suicide in 2004 following her work on Nanjing and the Bataan Death March.

The mental health issues of Asian Americans, especially females, had never struck me as critically important because as an Asian American female, I have been so blessed never to have to do with depression, eating disorders, or other sorts of mental trauma. In a family that treated mental disorders as unnatural and functions of some blamable part of one’s upbringing, I thought that it was something negligible, or rather, entirely undiscussed. It was only after doing APALI this semester that I realized the extent to which this existed in society. Actively seeking out articles on the topic and hearing my peers talk about these issues for the first time was a big dose of reality. While “model minority” may be a heavily tried term from the 80s, familial pressures and societal expectations do heavily affect many APA women’s views of themselves, especially at a young age. For suicide to be the second highest cause of death for women between 15 and 24 is not even a sombering statistic, it is a crushing one. When I think of how I spent/spend my 15-24 years, I think of riding bikes, laughing with friends, studying for calculus tests, pressured by my school and my peers but motivated by their support and the occasional success I got from my ambitions. To think about what would have happened if I pushed myself just a little too much, saw just a little more failure for my attempts, or just didn’t go to a school that was nerdy and quirky enough to support ambitious girls and give them the confidence to succeed, I am actually terrified. I’m terrified for young Asian American women all over who are at this risk, and terrified that my future daughter may one day have to encounter this as well.

Though I was never pushed to the extent of any of these cases, I remember feeling depressed and pressured. Some of that set in early on, before I was old enough to make tangible threats out of my frustration. Middle school was a war zone for me, like it was for everybody, but I had such a great experience in high school that it turned everything around. If my years had continued just like my middle school, I can’t even begin to imagine my potential unhappiness.

I’m not really sure what to do to help, though. I see a lot of efforts to start a dialogue on this topic. And even though I read some of these articles, glanced at the figures, and even participated in a discussion group about this earlier this year, it took the impact of hearing of a death hitting close to home and the realization that one of my heroes who I admired so much also suffered from such depression that really made me want to look for some way to help. I’d like to at least read a little more about the topic and see if there are opportunities to get involved.