The Price of Malaysia's Racism
By JOHN R. MALOTT
Malaysia's national tourism agency promotes the country as "a bubbling, bustling melting pot of races and religions where Malays, Indians, Chinese and many other ethnic groups live together in peace and harmony." Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak echoed this view when he announced his government's theme, One Malaysia. "What makes Malaysia unique," Mr. Najib said, "is the diversity of our peoples. One Malaysia's goal is to preserve and enhance this unity in diversity, which has always been our strength and remains our best hope for the future."
If Mr. Najib is serious about achieving that goal, a long look in the mirror might be in order first. Despite the government's new catchphrase, racial and religious tensions are higher today than when Mr. Najib took office in 2009. Indeed, they are worse than at any time since 1969, when at least 200 people died in racial clashes between the majority Malay and minority Chinese communities. The recent deterioration is due to the troubling fact that the country's leadership is tolerating, and in some cases provoking, ethnic factionalism through words and actions.
For instance, when the Catholic archbishop of Kuala Lumpur invited the prime minister for a Christmas Day open house last December, Hardev Kaur, an aide to Mr. Najib, said Christian crosses would have to be removed. There could be no carols or prayers, so as not to offend the prime minister, who is Muslim. Ms. Kaur later insisted that she "had made it clear that it was a request and not an instruction," as if any Malaysian could say no to a request from the prime minister's office.
Similar examples of insensitivity abound. In September 2009, Minister of Home Affairs Hishammuddin Onn met with protesters who had carried the decapitated head of a cow, a sacred animal in the Hindu religion, to an Indian temple. Mr. Hishammuddin then held a press conference defending their actions. Two months later, Defense Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi told Parliament that one reason Malaysia's armed forces are overwhelmingly Malay is that other ethnic groups have a "low spirit of patriotism." Under public pressure, he later apologized.
The leading Malay language newspaper, Utusan Melayu, prints what opposition leader Lim Kit Siang calls a daily staple of falsehoods that stoke racial hatred. Utusan, which is owned by Mr. Najib's political party, has claimed that the opposition would make Malaysia a colony of China and abolish the Malay monarchy. It regularly attacks Chinese Malaysian politicians, and even suggested that one of them, parliamentarian Teresa Kok, should be killed.
This steady erosion of tolerance is more than a political challenge. It's an economic problem as well.
Once one of the developing world's stars, Malaysia's economy has underperformed for the past decade. To meet its much-vaunted goal of becoming a developed nation by 2020, Malaysia needs to grow by 8% per year during this decade. That level of growth will require major private investment from both domestic and foreign sources, upgraded human skills, and significant economic reform. Worsening racial and religious tensions stand in the way.
Almost 500,000 Malaysians left the country between 2007 and 2009, more than doubling the number of Malaysian professionals who live overseas. It appears that most were skilled ethnic Chinese and Indian Malaysians, tired of being treated as second-class citizens in their own country and denied the opportunity to compete on a level playing field, whether in education, business, or government. Many of these emigrants, as well as the many Malaysian students who study overseas and never return (again, most of whom are ethnic Chinese and Indian), have the business, engineering, and scientific skills that Malaysia needs for its future. They also have the cultural and linguistic savvy to enhance Malaysia's economic ties with Asia's two biggest growing markets, China and India.
Of course, one could argue that discrimination isn't new for these Chinese and Indians. Malaysia's affirmative action policies for its Malay majority—which give them preference in everything from stock allocation to housing discounts—have been in place for decades. So what is driving the ethnic minorities away now?
First, these minorities increasingly feel that they have lost a voice in their own government. The Chinese and Indian political parties in the ruling coalition are supposed to protect the interests of their communities, but over the past few years, they have been neutered. They stand largely silent in the face of the growing racial insults hurled by their Malay political partners. Today over 90% of the civil service, police, military, university lecturers, and overseas diplomatic staff are Malay. Even TalentCorp, the government agency created in 2010 that is supposed to encourage overseas Malaysians to return home, is headed by a Malay, with an all-Malay Board of Trustees.
Second, economic reform and adjustments to the government's affirmative action policies are on hold. Although Mr. Najib held out the hope of change a year ago with his New Economic Model, which promised an "inclusive" affirmative action policy that would be, in Mr. Najib's words, "market friendly, merit-based, transparent and needs-based," he has failed to follow through. This is because of opposition from right-wing militant Malay groups such as Perkasa, which believe that a move towards meritocracy and transparency threatens what they call "Malay rights."
But stalling reform will mean a further loss in competitiveness and slower growth. It also means that the cronyism and no-bid contracts that favor the well-connected will continue. All this sends a discouraging signal to many young Malaysians that no matter how hard they study or work, they will have a hard time getting ahead.
Mr. Najib may not actually believe much of the rhetoric emanating from his party and his government's officers, but he tolerates it because he needs to shore up his Malay base. It's politically convenient at a time when his party faces its most serious opposition challenge in recent memory—and especially when the opposition is challenging the government on ethnic policy and its economic consequences. One young opposition leader, parliamentarian Nurul Izzah Anwar, the daughter of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, has proposed a national debate on what she called the alternative visions of Malaysia's future—whether it should be a Malay nation or a Malaysian nation. For that, she earned the wrath of Perkasa; the government suggested her remark was "seditious."
Malaysia's government might find it politically expedient to stir the racial and religious pot, but its opportunism comes with an economic price tag. Its citizens will continue to vote with their feet and take their money and talents with them. And foreign investors, concerned about racial instability and the absence of meaningful economic reform, will continue to look elsewhere to do business.
Mr. Malott was the U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia, 1995-1998.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Mayor Lee Leads Growing Asian-American Clout
Mayor Lee Leads Growing Asian-American Clout
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
The Asian Law Caucus was a fledgling civil rights organization when Edwin M. Lee began there as a law clerk more than three decades ago.
Working out of two dingy rooms above a garment shop in Chinatown, Mr. Lee and a handful of lawyers defended poor immigrants whose concerns included the threat of deportation and restaurant owners who refused to pay their wages.
Now the Asian Law Caucus is putting the final touches on its new 9,000-square-foot office with floor-to-ceiling windows near the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid. Mr. Lee, the group’s most famous alumnus, is settling into a new office as well.
Mr. Lee’s rise to become the city’s first Asian-American mayor — an interim appointment last week that followed Gavin Newsom’s election as lieutenant governor — mirrors the 40-year arc of a handful of community organizations that sprang up in the 1970s to represent the Bay Area’s growing Asian population. Those groups now wield considerable political clout.
Until these organizations emerged, “the Chinese community didn’t have that engaged, political grass roots that could mobilize,” said Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It’s easy to see that all coming to fruition now.”
Today, nonprofit organizations like the Chinatown Community Development Center have set up “a pipeline of young Asian activists,” said Randy Shaw, the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which operates many of the city’s low-income housing units. “They’re trained as organizers and then they go out into the world,” he said. “This is the future.”
While some local Asian-American politicians, like State Senator Leland Yee, followed a different path, many among the current generation of elected officials started out as community organizers.
The recently elected Supervisor Jane Kim, who is of Korean descent, and David Chiu, the Chinese-American president of the Board of Supervisors, both worked at the Chinatown Community Development Center.
Another Chinese-American supervisor, Eric Mar, who like Mr. Chiu was elected in 2008, worked as a law clerk in the 1980s under Mr. Lee at the Asian Law Caucus.
In Oakland, the politics of the recently elected Mayor Jean Quan were shaped during her many years as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, Ms. Quan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, planned Bay Area-wide demonstrations with Mr. Lee, then a staff lawyer at the caucus, to protest the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was beaten to death in Detroit.
“You don’t have a lot of Chinese leaders coming out of small-business backgrounds, nor are they the sons and daughters of elected officials,” said Henry Der, the former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. “It was the activism during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s that created opportunities for appointments that opened the doors.”
A confluence of factors propelled the rise of Asian-American community organizations as a political force, according to observers.
Part of it is demographic. The local Asian population, particularly Chinese, has surged in recent years, with an influx of immigrants coming from both Hong Kong and the mainland. The immigrants have brought with them Cantonese and Mandarin dialects that have slowly swept aside the Taishanese heard in Chinatown for a century before their arrival.
By 2009, about one-third of San Francisco County’s population was Asian, including 21 percent Chinese.
These immigrants, often poor and elderly, were organized by leaders like Gordon Chin, the head of the Community Development Center, into increasingly potent forces that lobbied for health services, public safety and better housing conditions.
Organizers like Mr. Chin and Rose Pak, the influential consultant for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce who helped engineer Mr. Lee’s appointment as mayor, also forged alliances with business interests and the political establishment that would prove critical.
“People who come from activist backgrounds generally don’t have political power, and they needed money,” said Ling-Chi Wang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “But they formed fascinating coalitions.”
During the 1980s real estate boom, for instance, Chinatown leaders, many of whom were veterans of progressive social movements, became worried about commercial development encroaching from the south. They struck a deal with John L. Molinari, the former pro-business president of the Board of Supervisors and an ally of then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, guaranteeing the preservation of Grant Avenue, which has become the spine of Chinatown.
In 1989, Ms. Pak tapped into her Chinese business connections to raise significant campaign contributions for the progressive Art Agnos, who was Mr. Molinari’s opponent in the mayoral race. Mr. Agnos won and appointed Mr. Lee, by then the managing attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, to his first government job.
Over the next 20 years, Mr. Lee transformed into a career public servant, receiving appointments from Mayors Willie L. Brown Jr. and Gavin Newsom, both of whom maintained close relationships with Ms. Pak and Mr. Chin.
Mr. Lee was born in 1952 in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, to parents who emigrated from Guangdong Province in China in the 1930s. His father served in the Korean War and died when Mr. Lee was 15. His mother raised her children while working as a seamstress.
Mr. Lee received a full scholarship to Bowdoin College and moved to the Bay Area in 1975 to enroll in law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
He began at the Asian Law Caucus in his second semester and immediately began working on housing issues that after three years led to San Francisco’s first organized rent strike in 1978.
“Decades ago, I was about as anti-establishment as one could be,” Mr. Lee said after his swearing-in Tuesday in the City Hall rotunda. “But today, like you, I’m trying to make the establishment work for all San Franciscans.”
William R. Tamayo, who worked at the Asian Law Caucus as a staff attorney and is now a lawyer for the federal government, recalled giving up part of his $600-a-month salary to support Mr. Lee, who had put off taking the bar exam to lead the rent strike even though the caucus could not afford to pay him.
People who worked with Mr. Lee said he had become known not only for his work ethic and self-sacrifice but also for an understated manner that won him the trust of immigrants throughout Chinatown.
Mr. Lee understood both Cantonese and Taishanese, the dialect spoken by many immigrants, his colleagues said.
Mr. Lee left nonprofit work in 1989, when Mayor Agnos offered him an advisory position in his administration.
In his inaugural remarks, Mr. Lee spoke not of his two decades in government but of his formative years, as he acknowledged some of the people who shaped his worldview and then elevated him to the top.
"As a Chinese-American, I am well aware of my community’s long and troubled and proud history in this city," Mr. Lee told the crowd. “The San Francisco of old was directly involved in racism and neglect. The San Francisco that I fought as an attorney began to change.”
“And now today, Rose,” he said, casting a smile at his friend Ms. Pak. “Our struggle is here, and it is succeeding.”
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
The Asian Law Caucus was a fledgling civil rights organization when Edwin M. Lee began there as a law clerk more than three decades ago.
Working out of two dingy rooms above a garment shop in Chinatown, Mr. Lee and a handful of lawyers defended poor immigrants whose concerns included the threat of deportation and restaurant owners who refused to pay their wages.
Now the Asian Law Caucus is putting the final touches on its new 9,000-square-foot office with floor-to-ceiling windows near the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid. Mr. Lee, the group’s most famous alumnus, is settling into a new office as well.
Mr. Lee’s rise to become the city’s first Asian-American mayor — an interim appointment last week that followed Gavin Newsom’s election as lieutenant governor — mirrors the 40-year arc of a handful of community organizations that sprang up in the 1970s to represent the Bay Area’s growing Asian population. Those groups now wield considerable political clout.
Until these organizations emerged, “the Chinese community didn’t have that engaged, political grass roots that could mobilize,” said Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It’s easy to see that all coming to fruition now.”
Today, nonprofit organizations like the Chinatown Community Development Center have set up “a pipeline of young Asian activists,” said Randy Shaw, the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which operates many of the city’s low-income housing units. “They’re trained as organizers and then they go out into the world,” he said. “This is the future.”
While some local Asian-American politicians, like State Senator Leland Yee, followed a different path, many among the current generation of elected officials started out as community organizers.
The recently elected Supervisor Jane Kim, who is of Korean descent, and David Chiu, the Chinese-American president of the Board of Supervisors, both worked at the Chinatown Community Development Center.
Another Chinese-American supervisor, Eric Mar, who like Mr. Chiu was elected in 2008, worked as a law clerk in the 1980s under Mr. Lee at the Asian Law Caucus.
In Oakland, the politics of the recently elected Mayor Jean Quan were shaped during her many years as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, Ms. Quan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, planned Bay Area-wide demonstrations with Mr. Lee, then a staff lawyer at the caucus, to protest the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was beaten to death in Detroit.
“You don’t have a lot of Chinese leaders coming out of small-business backgrounds, nor are they the sons and daughters of elected officials,” said Henry Der, the former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. “It was the activism during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s that created opportunities for appointments that opened the doors.”
A confluence of factors propelled the rise of Asian-American community organizations as a political force, according to observers.
Part of it is demographic. The local Asian population, particularly Chinese, has surged in recent years, with an influx of immigrants coming from both Hong Kong and the mainland. The immigrants have brought with them Cantonese and Mandarin dialects that have slowly swept aside the Taishanese heard in Chinatown for a century before their arrival.
By 2009, about one-third of San Francisco County’s population was Asian, including 21 percent Chinese.
These immigrants, often poor and elderly, were organized by leaders like Gordon Chin, the head of the Community Development Center, into increasingly potent forces that lobbied for health services, public safety and better housing conditions.
Organizers like Mr. Chin and Rose Pak, the influential consultant for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce who helped engineer Mr. Lee’s appointment as mayor, also forged alliances with business interests and the political establishment that would prove critical.
“People who come from activist backgrounds generally don’t have political power, and they needed money,” said Ling-Chi Wang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “But they formed fascinating coalitions.”
During the 1980s real estate boom, for instance, Chinatown leaders, many of whom were veterans of progressive social movements, became worried about commercial development encroaching from the south. They struck a deal with John L. Molinari, the former pro-business president of the Board of Supervisors and an ally of then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, guaranteeing the preservation of Grant Avenue, which has become the spine of Chinatown.
In 1989, Ms. Pak tapped into her Chinese business connections to raise significant campaign contributions for the progressive Art Agnos, who was Mr. Molinari’s opponent in the mayoral race. Mr. Agnos won and appointed Mr. Lee, by then the managing attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, to his first government job.
Over the next 20 years, Mr. Lee transformed into a career public servant, receiving appointments from Mayors Willie L. Brown Jr. and Gavin Newsom, both of whom maintained close relationships with Ms. Pak and Mr. Chin.
Mr. Lee was born in 1952 in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, to parents who emigrated from Guangdong Province in China in the 1930s. His father served in the Korean War and died when Mr. Lee was 15. His mother raised her children while working as a seamstress.
Mr. Lee received a full scholarship to Bowdoin College and moved to the Bay Area in 1975 to enroll in law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
He began at the Asian Law Caucus in his second semester and immediately began working on housing issues that after three years led to San Francisco’s first organized rent strike in 1978.
“Decades ago, I was about as anti-establishment as one could be,” Mr. Lee said after his swearing-in Tuesday in the City Hall rotunda. “But today, like you, I’m trying to make the establishment work for all San Franciscans.”
William R. Tamayo, who worked at the Asian Law Caucus as a staff attorney and is now a lawyer for the federal government, recalled giving up part of his $600-a-month salary to support Mr. Lee, who had put off taking the bar exam to lead the rent strike even though the caucus could not afford to pay him.
People who worked with Mr. Lee said he had become known not only for his work ethic and self-sacrifice but also for an understated manner that won him the trust of immigrants throughout Chinatown.
Mr. Lee understood both Cantonese and Taishanese, the dialect spoken by many immigrants, his colleagues said.
Mr. Lee left nonprofit work in 1989, when Mayor Agnos offered him an advisory position in his administration.
In his inaugural remarks, Mr. Lee spoke not of his two decades in government but of his formative years, as he acknowledged some of the people who shaped his worldview and then elevated him to the top.
"As a Chinese-American, I am well aware of my community’s long and troubled and proud history in this city," Mr. Lee told the crowd. “The San Francisco of old was directly involved in racism and neglect. The San Francisco that I fought as an attorney began to change.”
“And now today, Rose,” he said, casting a smile at his friend Ms. Pak. “Our struggle is here, and it is succeeding.”
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Warriors' Jeremy Lin beat all kinds of odds in reaching the NBA
Warriors' Jeremy Lin beat all kinds of odds in reaching the NBA
October 30, 2010|7:36 p.m.
The odds of making an NBA roster are slim.
They're near impossible if you're Asian American (only two have done it), if you attend Harvard (only three), or if your name isn't one of the 60 called during the NBA draft.
And if, by chance, you happened to be blessed/cursed with sharing all three of these traits, the odds then would be, well . . .
"Very, very, very small," said Jeremy Lin, an undrafted Asian American Harvard alum rookie guard for the Golden State Warriors, No. 7 in Sunday's Staples Center program.
Lin, 22, took a statistics class in high school, and again in college — he majored in economics — so he knows Halley's Comet comes around more often (visible from Earth about every 75 years) than someone like him.
"It's definitely unbelievable," Lin said.
After leading his Palo Alto High team to a 2006 state title against powerhouse Santa Ana Mater Dei, Lin failed to get any Division I scholarship offers, despite being named state player of the year in several publications.
Some Pacific 10 Conference schools courted him as a walk-on, but the strongest pitches came from Harvard and Brown. Lin picked Harvard, which has produced eight U.S. presidents and 41 Nobel laureates but just three NBA players, the last nearly 60 years ago.
Had Lin simpler aspirations, the odds of finding gainful employment would have stacked nicely in his favor. The name "Harvard," after all, bumps resumes to the top of most application stacks.
But Lin was determined: Basketball or bust, never mind Harvard's pathetic NBA track record, or that Lin, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, was trying to become just the third player of full Asian descent to earn an NBA paycheck.
"I didn't have any backup plan. I didn't apply for any jobs," Lin said. "I was going to try for the NBA."
Lin recognizes how a few key things fell into place late for him to make it.
After four years at Harvard in which he became the first player in Ivy League history with 1,450 points, 450 rebounds, 400 assists and 200 steals, eight NBA teams invited him to pre-draft workouts. But none drafted him.
Then, Lin received one invite to play on a summer league team: the Dallas Mavericks, a team that would play against the Washington Wizards with No. 1 overall pick John Wall. And on the night the Mavericks and Wizards squared off, another Mavericks guard happened to be injured, so Lin received more playing time than usual.
And soon, the focus turned from Wall to the 6-foot-3 Lin, who kept one-upping the Kentucky star in one-on-one matchups. With the crowd on his side, Lin finished with 13 points, and a few days later, teams, including the Lakers, started calling.
Eventually, Lin, a Palo Alto native, chose his hometown Warriors, where in limited minutes he'll play the combo guard position after playing point in college.
In July, he signed a two-year deal with the Warriors — the first year partially guaranteed, and the second with a team option that Warriors General Manager Larry Riley has said is likely to be picked up.
However, Lin is now on a team with talented guards Monta Ellis and Stephen Curry, so he's near the bottom of the Warriors' depth chart.
Warriors Coach Keith Smart said Lin is "a driver, not a shooter," but that he can defend, rebound and is a quick learner, though he now needs to learn that "you have other good players on the team, it's not just you anymore."
Lin, a devout Christian, one day hopes to become a minister, regardless of where professional basketball takes him.
But that he ever made it to the NBA at all, considering the odds, is, well . . .
"A miracle from God," he said.
baxter.holmes@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
October 30, 2010|7:36 p.m.
The odds of making an NBA roster are slim.
They're near impossible if you're Asian American (only two have done it), if you attend Harvard (only three), or if your name isn't one of the 60 called during the NBA draft.
And if, by chance, you happened to be blessed/cursed with sharing all three of these traits, the odds then would be, well . . .
"Very, very, very small," said Jeremy Lin, an undrafted Asian American Harvard alum rookie guard for the Golden State Warriors, No. 7 in Sunday's Staples Center program.
Lin, 22, took a statistics class in high school, and again in college — he majored in economics — so he knows Halley's Comet comes around more often (visible from Earth about every 75 years) than someone like him.
"It's definitely unbelievable," Lin said.
After leading his Palo Alto High team to a 2006 state title against powerhouse Santa Ana Mater Dei, Lin failed to get any Division I scholarship offers, despite being named state player of the year in several publications.
Some Pacific 10 Conference schools courted him as a walk-on, but the strongest pitches came from Harvard and Brown. Lin picked Harvard, which has produced eight U.S. presidents and 41 Nobel laureates but just three NBA players, the last nearly 60 years ago.
Had Lin simpler aspirations, the odds of finding gainful employment would have stacked nicely in his favor. The name "Harvard," after all, bumps resumes to the top of most application stacks.
But Lin was determined: Basketball or bust, never mind Harvard's pathetic NBA track record, or that Lin, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, was trying to become just the third player of full Asian descent to earn an NBA paycheck.
"I didn't have any backup plan. I didn't apply for any jobs," Lin said. "I was going to try for the NBA."
Lin recognizes how a few key things fell into place late for him to make it.
After four years at Harvard in which he became the first player in Ivy League history with 1,450 points, 450 rebounds, 400 assists and 200 steals, eight NBA teams invited him to pre-draft workouts. But none drafted him.
Then, Lin received one invite to play on a summer league team: the Dallas Mavericks, a team that would play against the Washington Wizards with No. 1 overall pick John Wall. And on the night the Mavericks and Wizards squared off, another Mavericks guard happened to be injured, so Lin received more playing time than usual.
And soon, the focus turned from Wall to the 6-foot-3 Lin, who kept one-upping the Kentucky star in one-on-one matchups. With the crowd on his side, Lin finished with 13 points, and a few days later, teams, including the Lakers, started calling.
Eventually, Lin, a Palo Alto native, chose his hometown Warriors, where in limited minutes he'll play the combo guard position after playing point in college.
In July, he signed a two-year deal with the Warriors — the first year partially guaranteed, and the second with a team option that Warriors General Manager Larry Riley has said is likely to be picked up.
However, Lin is now on a team with talented guards Monta Ellis and Stephen Curry, so he's near the bottom of the Warriors' depth chart.
Warriors Coach Keith Smart said Lin is "a driver, not a shooter," but that he can defend, rebound and is a quick learner, though he now needs to learn that "you have other good players on the team, it's not just you anymore."
Lin, a devout Christian, one day hopes to become a minister, regardless of where professional basketball takes him.
But that he ever made it to the NBA at all, considering the odds, is, well . . .
"A miracle from God," he said.
baxter.holmes@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
Monday, September 13, 2010
Chinese Remake the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label
Chinese Remake the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label
Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
Published: September 12, 2010
PRATO, Italy — Over the years, Italy learned the difficult lesson that it could no longer compete with China on price. And so, its business class dreamed, Italy would sell quality, not quantity. For centuries, this walled medieval city just outside of Florence has produced some of the world’s finest fabrics, becoming a powerhouse for “Made in Italy” chic.
And then, China came here.
Chinese laborers, first a few immigrants, then tens of thousands, began settling in Prato in the late 1980s. They transformed the textile hub into a low-end garment manufacturing capital — enriching many, stoking resentment and prompting recent crackdowns that in turn have brought cries of bigotry and hypocrisy.
The city is now home to the largest concentration of Chinese in Europe — some legal, many more not. Here in the heart of Tuscany, Chinese laborers work round the clock in some 3,200 businesses making low-end clothes, shoes and accessories, often with materials imported from China, for sale at midprice and low-end retailers worldwide.
It is a “Made in Italy” problem: Enabled by Italy’s weak institutions and high tolerance for rule-bending, the Chinese have blurred the line between “Made in China” and “Made in Italy,” undermining Italy’s cachet and ability to market its goods exclusively as high end.
Part of the resentment is cultural: The city’s classic Italian feel is giving way to that of a Chinatown, with signs in Italian and Chinese, and groceries that sell food imported from China.
But what seems to gall some Italians most is that the Chinese are beating them at their own game — tax evasion and brilliant ways of navigating Italy’s notoriously complex bureaucracy — and have created a thriving, if largely underground, new sector while many Prato businesses have gone under. The result is a toxic combination of residual fears about immigration and the economy.
“This could be the future of Italy,” said Edoardo Nesi, the culture commissioner of Prato Province. “Italy should pay attention to the risks.”
The situation has steadily grown beyond the control of state tax and immigration authorities. According to the Bank of Italy, Chinese individuals in Prato channel an estimated $1.5 million a day to China, mainly earnings from the garment and textile trade. Profits of that magnitude are not showing up in tax records, and some local officials say the Chinese prefer to repatriate their profits rather than invest locally.
The authorities also say that Chinese and probably Italian organized crime is on the rise, involving not only illegal fabric imports, but also human trafficking, prostitution, gambling and money laundering.
The rest of Italy is watching closely. “Lots of businesses from Emilia Romagna, Puglia and the Veneto say, ‘We don’t want to wind up like Prato,’ ” said Silvia Pieraccini, the author of “The Chinese Siege,” a book about the rise of the “pronto moda” or “fast fashion” economy.
Tensions have been running high since the Italian authorities stepped up raids this spring on workshops that use illegal labor, and grew even more when Italian prosecutors arrested 24 people and investigated 100 businesses in the Prato area in late June. The charges included money laundering, prostitution, counterfeiting and classifying foreign-made products as “Made in Italy.”
Yet many Chinese in Prato are offended at the idea that they have ruined the city. Instead, some argue, they have helped rescue Prato from total economic irrelevance, another way of saying that if the Italian state fails to innovate and modernize the economy, somebody else just might.
“If the Chinese hadn’t gone to Prato, would there be pronto moda?” asked Matteo Wong, 30, who was born in China and raised in Prato and runs a consulting office for Chinese immigrants. “Did the Chinese take jobs away from Italians? If anything, they brought lots of jobs to Italians.”
In recent months, Prato has become a diplomatic point of contention. Italian officials say the Chinese government has not done enough so far to address the issue of illegal immigrants, and they are seeking a bilateral accord with China to identify and deport them. Some Prato residents suspect that the flood of immigrants is part of a strategy by Beijing to exploit the Italian market, though the Chinese government does not generally use illegal migrants to carry out its overseas development plans.
Italian officials say Prato is expected to be on the agenda when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visits Rome in October.
China in Italy’s Backyard
According to the Prato chamber of commerce, the number of Italian-owned textile businesses registered in Prato has dropped in half since 2001 to just below 3,000, 200 fewer than those now owned by Chinese, almost all in the garment sector. Once a major fabric producer and exporter, Prato now accounts for 27 percent of Italy’s fabric imports from China.
Resentment runs high. “You take someone from Prato with two unemployed kids and when a Chinese person drives by in a Porsche Cayenne or a Mercedes bought with money earned from illegally exploiting immigrant workers, and this climate is risky,” said Domenico Savi, Prato’s chief of police until June.
According to the Prato mayor’s office, there are 11,500 legal Chinese immigrants, out of Prato’s total population of 187,000. But the office estimates the city has an additional 25,000 illegal immigrants, a majority of them Chinese.
With its bureaucracy, protectionist policies and organized crime, Italy is arguably Western Europe’s least business-friendly country. Yet in Prato, the Chinese have managed to create an entirely new economy from scratch in a matter of years.
A common technique used, often with the aid of knowledgeable Italian tax consultants and lawyers, is to open a business, close it before the tax police can catch up, then reopen the same workspace with a new tax code number.
“The Chinese are very clever. They’re not like other immigrants, who can be pretty thick,” said Riccardo Marini, a textile manufacturer and the head of the Prato branch of Confindustria, the Italian industrialists’ organization.
“The difficulty,” he added ruefully, “is in finding a shared understanding of the rules of the game.”
Prato’s streets have slowly become more and more Chinese, as the Chinese have bought out Italian-owned shops and apartments, often paying in cash. Public schools are increasingly filled with Chinese pupils.
Hypocrisy abounds. “The people in Prato are ostriches,” said Patrizia Bardazzi, who with her husband has run a high-end clothing shop in downtown Prato for 40 years. “I know people who rent space to the Chinese and then say, ‘I don’t come into the center because there are too many Chinese.’ They rent out the space and take the money and go to Forte dei Marmi,” she added, referring to the Tuscan resort town.
A short walk past the city’s medieval walls, past the cathedral with Filippo Lippi’s Renaissance frescoes, lies Via Pistoiese, the heart of Prato’s Chinatown. Here, shop signs in Chinese and Italian advertise wedding photography, hardware, electronics and gambling parlors.
Outside a supermarket selling foodstuffs imported from China, an electronic job board flashes a running ticker of garment-industry jobs.
The work — long hours at sewing machines — takes place in back-room workshops with makeshift sleeping quarters. The heart of the “fast fashion” sector is an industrial area on the outskirts of town, Macrolotto, filled with Chinese fashion wholesalers.
Here, vans from across Europe line the parking lots as retailers buy “Made in Italy” clothing to resell back home at a huge markup. By buying in relatively small quantities and taking advantage of the fluid borders of the European Union, most manage to avoid paying import tariffs.
On a recent afternoon, a couple from Montenegro loaded racks of cotton summer dresses into boxes in the back of their van. The wife wielded a label gun, tagging each dress “Made in Italy.”
Just blocks away, Li Zhang, who immigrated to Italy in 1991 from Wenzhou, a city in southeastern China known for its global network of entrepreneurs, explained how his clothing company, Luma, produced on-demand fashion.
He showed off bolts of fabric, which he said he bought locally or in India or China. He often buys white fabric and has it dyed and cut by other Chinese companies in Prato before giving the pieces to subcontractors to produce the requested items — 1,000 green skirts, in a typical example — in a matter of weeks, if not days.
Mr. Zhang and hundreds of other Chinese like him are at the center of Prato’s so-called gray economy, whose businesses are partly above board in that they pay taxes, and partly underground, in that they rely on subcontractors who often use illegal labor. (Asked if his subcontractors used illegal labor, Mr. Zhang laughed and said, “You’d have to ask the subcontractors.”)
Since founding Luma in 1998, Mr. Zhang said, he has exported clothes to 30 countries, including China, Mexico, Venezuela, Jordan and Lebanon. He said that his biggest order was for the Italian retailer Piazza Italia, but that he had also sold to wholesalers who said they had sold to Zara, Mango, Top Shop and Guess, European retailers specializing in bargain chic.
The raids, he said, are hindering business, unsettling the local Chinese community to the point that many workers had gone into hiding.
“People are afraid,” Mr. Zhang said. “This was a political decision. At first, they left us too free. Now they are tightening things too much.”
The New Sheriff in Town
Much of the tightening comes from Prato’s new administration. In 2009, the traditionally left-wing city elected its first right-wing mayor in the postwar era, whose winning campaign tapped into powerful local fears of a “Chinese invasion,” and who seeks a broader European Union response to Chinese immigration.
“How can China leave a mark like this in the E.U.?” the mayor, Roberto Cenni, asked. “Noise, bad habits, prostitution. People can’t live anymore. They’re sick of it.”
An elegant man in a well-cut gray suit, Mr. Cenni is a former president and a current shareholder of Go-Fin, a Prato holding company that is behind several midrange Italian fashion companies. At least one of these, Sasch, has moved much of its production to China within the last 10 years.
Powerless to reverse the broader economic currents, the mayor has instead focused on small initiatives, including new rules that prohibit drying fish on balconies and require all Prato shopkeepers to speak Italian. These have won him praise from some local people, but also criticism for bigotry.
The mayor has also stepped up raids on Chinese businesses. Critics say they are little more than media spectacles, but local Chinese have seen them as unwarranted attacks.
On a rainy recent morning, a team of police officers, tax collectors and other state officers swooped in on two Chinese workshops in a residential and industrial area just outside Prato’s downtown.
Tucked behind apartment houses, the garage-like space was filled with rows of sewing machines, with white fabric strewn about and lace shirts lying unfinished on the concrete floor.
The police rounded up the workers in the courtyard. A woman in plastic flip-flops carried a black bucket filled with urine downstairs, accompanied by a young boy wearing only underwear. “Pantaloni,” she told the officers in broken Italian, “Pants.” “O.K., let him put on pants,” an amenable officer agreed with a shrug.
Next door, the police brought some Chinese workers in a small, windowless bedroom to be identified. A woman in a blue T-shirt sat on the bed and sobbed uncontrollably.
The officials sorted through paperwork. “This is the last name, right?” one asked an interpreter.
Between the two workspaces stood a little house with hydrangeas in the yard. The Italian couple in the doorway did not want to reveal their names.
“It’s an ant colony,” the man said. “Who knows how many? They closed the door and covered up the windows.”
His cautious wife tugged on his arm. “You can’t get into these discussions,” she said, drawing him back inside.
Soon an owner of the workspace came in from his home down the block. Paolo Bonaiuti, 73, a tall man with white hair, blue eyes and a look of unflappability, waved his lease, showing that he rented out the space for $2,220 a month. To judge from their expressions, the police officers did not look as if they believed it.
Italy’s Immigration Woes
But crackdowns like these can only do so much. In the first half of this year, the authorities raided 154 Chinese-owned businesses — out of more than 3,000. To do the job, “We’d need an army of people,” said Lina Iervasi, the head of the Prato Police Department’s immigration office.
Earlier this year, several officers in that office were arrested on charges that they took bribes in exchange for granting residence permits.
“We don’t go on the hunt for the illegal immigrants. We’re not so crazy as to do that,” said Mr. Savi, the former police chief. “But we seek a balance between norms and reality.”
That balance has been strikingly hard to find.
Many illegal Chinese immigrants arrive by bus from Russia or the Balkans, and either destroy their passports or give them away to the organized crime groups that help bring them. Many others overstay their tourist visas.
“Italy has a 20th-century immigration law; it tends to think of immigrants as a phenomenon linked to work, in which people move from poor countries to rich ones,” said Andrea Frattani, a former social welfare commissioner in Prato’s previous center-left government.
Instead, he argued, what Italy is witnessing in Prato is “a precise strategy” on the part of the Chinese government to create an economic foothold in Europe.
Asked at a recent public appearance if that was the case, China’s ambassador to Italy, Ding Wei, said only that Prato had been a central issue in his portfolio since he arrived in the spring, and that he had sent advisers to investigate.
“I’ve been very attentive to resolving the question of Prato, which is unique and particular,” he said in late July. “It should not have an impact on the cooperation between our countries.”
Italians in Prato are feeling less sanguine. “At 20, I was sure the world was mine,” said Mr. Nesi, 45, the culture commissioner and a writer whose family sold its three-generation, high-end textile business in 2004.
“It’s hard to accept that all this happened in a short time,” he said, bewildered. “It makes us feel old and without hope.”
The problems will not be resolved easily. “There’s no plan,” said Xu Qiu Lin, a local entrepreneur and the only Chinese member of Confindustria in Prato, echoing a widespread sentiment. “There’s no plan; that’s the problem.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
Published: September 12, 2010
PRATO, Italy — Over the years, Italy learned the difficult lesson that it could no longer compete with China on price. And so, its business class dreamed, Italy would sell quality, not quantity. For centuries, this walled medieval city just outside of Florence has produced some of the world’s finest fabrics, becoming a powerhouse for “Made in Italy” chic.
And then, China came here.
Chinese laborers, first a few immigrants, then tens of thousands, began settling in Prato in the late 1980s. They transformed the textile hub into a low-end garment manufacturing capital — enriching many, stoking resentment and prompting recent crackdowns that in turn have brought cries of bigotry and hypocrisy.
The city is now home to the largest concentration of Chinese in Europe — some legal, many more not. Here in the heart of Tuscany, Chinese laborers work round the clock in some 3,200 businesses making low-end clothes, shoes and accessories, often with materials imported from China, for sale at midprice and low-end retailers worldwide.
It is a “Made in Italy” problem: Enabled by Italy’s weak institutions and high tolerance for rule-bending, the Chinese have blurred the line between “Made in China” and “Made in Italy,” undermining Italy’s cachet and ability to market its goods exclusively as high end.
Part of the resentment is cultural: The city’s classic Italian feel is giving way to that of a Chinatown, with signs in Italian and Chinese, and groceries that sell food imported from China.
But what seems to gall some Italians most is that the Chinese are beating them at their own game — tax evasion and brilliant ways of navigating Italy’s notoriously complex bureaucracy — and have created a thriving, if largely underground, new sector while many Prato businesses have gone under. The result is a toxic combination of residual fears about immigration and the economy.
“This could be the future of Italy,” said Edoardo Nesi, the culture commissioner of Prato Province. “Italy should pay attention to the risks.”
The situation has steadily grown beyond the control of state tax and immigration authorities. According to the Bank of Italy, Chinese individuals in Prato channel an estimated $1.5 million a day to China, mainly earnings from the garment and textile trade. Profits of that magnitude are not showing up in tax records, and some local officials say the Chinese prefer to repatriate their profits rather than invest locally.
The authorities also say that Chinese and probably Italian organized crime is on the rise, involving not only illegal fabric imports, but also human trafficking, prostitution, gambling and money laundering.
The rest of Italy is watching closely. “Lots of businesses from Emilia Romagna, Puglia and the Veneto say, ‘We don’t want to wind up like Prato,’ ” said Silvia Pieraccini, the author of “The Chinese Siege,” a book about the rise of the “pronto moda” or “fast fashion” economy.
Tensions have been running high since the Italian authorities stepped up raids this spring on workshops that use illegal labor, and grew even more when Italian prosecutors arrested 24 people and investigated 100 businesses in the Prato area in late June. The charges included money laundering, prostitution, counterfeiting and classifying foreign-made products as “Made in Italy.”
Yet many Chinese in Prato are offended at the idea that they have ruined the city. Instead, some argue, they have helped rescue Prato from total economic irrelevance, another way of saying that if the Italian state fails to innovate and modernize the economy, somebody else just might.
“If the Chinese hadn’t gone to Prato, would there be pronto moda?” asked Matteo Wong, 30, who was born in China and raised in Prato and runs a consulting office for Chinese immigrants. “Did the Chinese take jobs away from Italians? If anything, they brought lots of jobs to Italians.”
In recent months, Prato has become a diplomatic point of contention. Italian officials say the Chinese government has not done enough so far to address the issue of illegal immigrants, and they are seeking a bilateral accord with China to identify and deport them. Some Prato residents suspect that the flood of immigrants is part of a strategy by Beijing to exploit the Italian market, though the Chinese government does not generally use illegal migrants to carry out its overseas development plans.
Italian officials say Prato is expected to be on the agenda when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visits Rome in October.
China in Italy’s Backyard
According to the Prato chamber of commerce, the number of Italian-owned textile businesses registered in Prato has dropped in half since 2001 to just below 3,000, 200 fewer than those now owned by Chinese, almost all in the garment sector. Once a major fabric producer and exporter, Prato now accounts for 27 percent of Italy’s fabric imports from China.
Resentment runs high. “You take someone from Prato with two unemployed kids and when a Chinese person drives by in a Porsche Cayenne or a Mercedes bought with money earned from illegally exploiting immigrant workers, and this climate is risky,” said Domenico Savi, Prato’s chief of police until June.
According to the Prato mayor’s office, there are 11,500 legal Chinese immigrants, out of Prato’s total population of 187,000. But the office estimates the city has an additional 25,000 illegal immigrants, a majority of them Chinese.
With its bureaucracy, protectionist policies and organized crime, Italy is arguably Western Europe’s least business-friendly country. Yet in Prato, the Chinese have managed to create an entirely new economy from scratch in a matter of years.
A common technique used, often with the aid of knowledgeable Italian tax consultants and lawyers, is to open a business, close it before the tax police can catch up, then reopen the same workspace with a new tax code number.
“The Chinese are very clever. They’re not like other immigrants, who can be pretty thick,” said Riccardo Marini, a textile manufacturer and the head of the Prato branch of Confindustria, the Italian industrialists’ organization.
“The difficulty,” he added ruefully, “is in finding a shared understanding of the rules of the game.”
Prato’s streets have slowly become more and more Chinese, as the Chinese have bought out Italian-owned shops and apartments, often paying in cash. Public schools are increasingly filled with Chinese pupils.
Hypocrisy abounds. “The people in Prato are ostriches,” said Patrizia Bardazzi, who with her husband has run a high-end clothing shop in downtown Prato for 40 years. “I know people who rent space to the Chinese and then say, ‘I don’t come into the center because there are too many Chinese.’ They rent out the space and take the money and go to Forte dei Marmi,” she added, referring to the Tuscan resort town.
A short walk past the city’s medieval walls, past the cathedral with Filippo Lippi’s Renaissance frescoes, lies Via Pistoiese, the heart of Prato’s Chinatown. Here, shop signs in Chinese and Italian advertise wedding photography, hardware, electronics and gambling parlors.
Outside a supermarket selling foodstuffs imported from China, an electronic job board flashes a running ticker of garment-industry jobs.
The work — long hours at sewing machines — takes place in back-room workshops with makeshift sleeping quarters. The heart of the “fast fashion” sector is an industrial area on the outskirts of town, Macrolotto, filled with Chinese fashion wholesalers.
Here, vans from across Europe line the parking lots as retailers buy “Made in Italy” clothing to resell back home at a huge markup. By buying in relatively small quantities and taking advantage of the fluid borders of the European Union, most manage to avoid paying import tariffs.
On a recent afternoon, a couple from Montenegro loaded racks of cotton summer dresses into boxes in the back of their van. The wife wielded a label gun, tagging each dress “Made in Italy.”
Just blocks away, Li Zhang, who immigrated to Italy in 1991 from Wenzhou, a city in southeastern China known for its global network of entrepreneurs, explained how his clothing company, Luma, produced on-demand fashion.
He showed off bolts of fabric, which he said he bought locally or in India or China. He often buys white fabric and has it dyed and cut by other Chinese companies in Prato before giving the pieces to subcontractors to produce the requested items — 1,000 green skirts, in a typical example — in a matter of weeks, if not days.
Mr. Zhang and hundreds of other Chinese like him are at the center of Prato’s so-called gray economy, whose businesses are partly above board in that they pay taxes, and partly underground, in that they rely on subcontractors who often use illegal labor. (Asked if his subcontractors used illegal labor, Mr. Zhang laughed and said, “You’d have to ask the subcontractors.”)
Since founding Luma in 1998, Mr. Zhang said, he has exported clothes to 30 countries, including China, Mexico, Venezuela, Jordan and Lebanon. He said that his biggest order was for the Italian retailer Piazza Italia, but that he had also sold to wholesalers who said they had sold to Zara, Mango, Top Shop and Guess, European retailers specializing in bargain chic.
The raids, he said, are hindering business, unsettling the local Chinese community to the point that many workers had gone into hiding.
“People are afraid,” Mr. Zhang said. “This was a political decision. At first, they left us too free. Now they are tightening things too much.”
The New Sheriff in Town
Much of the tightening comes from Prato’s new administration. In 2009, the traditionally left-wing city elected its first right-wing mayor in the postwar era, whose winning campaign tapped into powerful local fears of a “Chinese invasion,” and who seeks a broader European Union response to Chinese immigration.
“How can China leave a mark like this in the E.U.?” the mayor, Roberto Cenni, asked. “Noise, bad habits, prostitution. People can’t live anymore. They’re sick of it.”
An elegant man in a well-cut gray suit, Mr. Cenni is a former president and a current shareholder of Go-Fin, a Prato holding company that is behind several midrange Italian fashion companies. At least one of these, Sasch, has moved much of its production to China within the last 10 years.
Powerless to reverse the broader economic currents, the mayor has instead focused on small initiatives, including new rules that prohibit drying fish on balconies and require all Prato shopkeepers to speak Italian. These have won him praise from some local people, but also criticism for bigotry.
The mayor has also stepped up raids on Chinese businesses. Critics say they are little more than media spectacles, but local Chinese have seen them as unwarranted attacks.
On a rainy recent morning, a team of police officers, tax collectors and other state officers swooped in on two Chinese workshops in a residential and industrial area just outside Prato’s downtown.
Tucked behind apartment houses, the garage-like space was filled with rows of sewing machines, with white fabric strewn about and lace shirts lying unfinished on the concrete floor.
The police rounded up the workers in the courtyard. A woman in plastic flip-flops carried a black bucket filled with urine downstairs, accompanied by a young boy wearing only underwear. “Pantaloni,” she told the officers in broken Italian, “Pants.” “O.K., let him put on pants,” an amenable officer agreed with a shrug.
Next door, the police brought some Chinese workers in a small, windowless bedroom to be identified. A woman in a blue T-shirt sat on the bed and sobbed uncontrollably.
The officials sorted through paperwork. “This is the last name, right?” one asked an interpreter.
Between the two workspaces stood a little house with hydrangeas in the yard. The Italian couple in the doorway did not want to reveal their names.
“It’s an ant colony,” the man said. “Who knows how many? They closed the door and covered up the windows.”
His cautious wife tugged on his arm. “You can’t get into these discussions,” she said, drawing him back inside.
Soon an owner of the workspace came in from his home down the block. Paolo Bonaiuti, 73, a tall man with white hair, blue eyes and a look of unflappability, waved his lease, showing that he rented out the space for $2,220 a month. To judge from their expressions, the police officers did not look as if they believed it.
Italy’s Immigration Woes
But crackdowns like these can only do so much. In the first half of this year, the authorities raided 154 Chinese-owned businesses — out of more than 3,000. To do the job, “We’d need an army of people,” said Lina Iervasi, the head of the Prato Police Department’s immigration office.
Earlier this year, several officers in that office were arrested on charges that they took bribes in exchange for granting residence permits.
“We don’t go on the hunt for the illegal immigrants. We’re not so crazy as to do that,” said Mr. Savi, the former police chief. “But we seek a balance between norms and reality.”
That balance has been strikingly hard to find.
Many illegal Chinese immigrants arrive by bus from Russia or the Balkans, and either destroy their passports or give them away to the organized crime groups that help bring them. Many others overstay their tourist visas.
“Italy has a 20th-century immigration law; it tends to think of immigrants as a phenomenon linked to work, in which people move from poor countries to rich ones,” said Andrea Frattani, a former social welfare commissioner in Prato’s previous center-left government.
Instead, he argued, what Italy is witnessing in Prato is “a precise strategy” on the part of the Chinese government to create an economic foothold in Europe.
Asked at a recent public appearance if that was the case, China’s ambassador to Italy, Ding Wei, said only that Prato had been a central issue in his portfolio since he arrived in the spring, and that he had sent advisers to investigate.
“I’ve been very attentive to resolving the question of Prato, which is unique and particular,” he said in late July. “It should not have an impact on the cooperation between our countries.”
Italians in Prato are feeling less sanguine. “At 20, I was sure the world was mine,” said Mr. Nesi, 45, the culture commissioner and a writer whose family sold its three-generation, high-end textile business in 2004.
“It’s hard to accept that all this happened in a short time,” he said, bewildered. “It makes us feel old and without hope.”
The problems will not be resolved easily. “There’s no plan,” said Xu Qiu Lin, a local entrepreneur and the only Chinese member of Confindustria in Prato, echoing a widespread sentiment. “There’s no plan; that’s the problem.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Unemployment lasts longer for Asian Americans
Unemployment lasts longer for Asian Americans
By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
September 7, 2010
Asian Americans typically have the lowest unemployment rate of any ethnic group in the United States. But in this weak labor market, once they lose their jobs, they have an especially hard time reentering the labor force, data show.
In July, nearly half of all jobless Asian Americans in California had been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, compared with 40% of Latinos and 42% of whites, according to an analysis of data from the state Employment Development Department.
Experts said the strong family and cultural ties that bind Asian entrepreneurs and a largely foreign-born Asian workforce can be a liability during tough times; laid-off workers often aren't sure where to turn for work outside their ethnic circles.
About 13% of the 37 million people who live in California are of Asian descent, according to 2009 census data. About two-thirds of them are first-generation immigrants, said Paul Ong, a UCLA professor who has served as an advisor to the census. Many of them work in businesses owned by Asians, many of whom typically cut employees' hours as a first response to an economic downturn rather than let them go, Ong said. That explains in part why the California unemployment rate for Asians is relatively low, just 9.5% in July, compared with 17.1% for blacks, 14.9% for Latinos and 12.0% for whites.
But when these employers are forced to lay off staff, their workers often encounter hurdles to new employment. About half of Asian immigrants have difficulty speaking English, Ong said. Cultural differences also can prevent some from understanding how to apply for jobs with employers outside their communities, he said.
"They are heavily reliant on employers from the same ethnic group, so if for some reason those jobs are no longer available, it is more challenging for those workers to find employment, given the language and cultural barriers they face," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center.
Shirley Tam, a recent widow, returned to the workforce after a long absence caring for her sick husband. But the 50-year-old is finding that entry-level jobs are scarce.
"I don't have any more money," said Tam, pulling out a bank statement that showed she had $54 left in her savings account. "I need a job. I just need a chance."
She recently began attending college part time to get an accounting degree to improve her employment prospects.
Southern California's Asian community is diverse and employed in all manner of industries. Still, Asians are heavily represented in some sectors that have been particularly hard hit by the economic downturn, including garment-making. The number of people employed in apparel manufacturing in the state has fallen 23% to 58,500 since 2007, according to the Employment Development Department.
Also, new federal regulations require employees to verify workers' Social Security documentation. That has proved especially disruptive to businesses in the garment industry. Los Angeles clothing maker American Apparel Inc., for example, said in July that 1,600 of its employees were not authorized to work in the U.S.
Some employers are avoiding potential problems by not hiring immigrants, said Mark Masaoka, policy coordinator for the Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council.
Asian American banks, which invested heavily in commercial real estate during the boom, have faltered during the downturn, said Sung Won Sohn, a Cal State Channel Islands professor and the former chief executive of the Korean American Hanmi Bank. Koreatown's Mirae Bank was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and acquired by Wilshire State Bank, a Los Angeles company. Innovative Bank, based in Oakland, was acquired by Koreatown's Center Bank.
And the Korean community has many small businesses in immigrant neighborhoods, which are probably affected by the retail slowdown, said Glenn Omatsu, a professor at Cal State Northridge. In addition, many Pacific Islanders work in the construction industry, which has lost 42% of its jobs in California — or 402,800 positions — since a February 2006 peak.
Some Asian Americans have computer engineering or software jobs that are vulnerable to outsourcing, said C.N. Le, director of the Asian American studies program at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. And a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment rippling through the country might also hurt Asian Americans' chances of finding work.
"In times of recession, Americans are most likely to feel economically threatened by immigrants, and their prejudices, suspicions and tensions rise to the surface," he said. "That can happen on a personal level or an institutional level."
In the Asian American enclaves of El Monte and South El Monte, unemployment in July reached 15.5% and 15.1%, respectively. Garden Grove's unemployment rate was 11.8%.
Rosemead resident Wesley Huang worked at Wells Fargo Bank for 11 years before losing his job three years ago. After a short stint with the U.S. Census Bureau, he's now back to job hunting again, trying to find work as a teacher. He speaks four languages but says it's tough to find work even with that skill.
"There are so many people competing for jobs," he said.
The poor economy has some looking for alternatives. The U.S. military saw its highest proportion of Asian recruits in 2009. Almost one-fourth of all Army recruits in Los Angeles County last year were Asian American, although they make up only about 13% of the county's population. And Asian Americans suffered the sharpest decline in homeownership in 2008, falling 1.24 percentage points, compared with a 0.4-percentage-point decline for whites, according to the American Community Survey.
That's because many Asian American small-business owners relied on home loans to support their businesses and are now at risk of losing both their homes and their businesses, Masaoka said.
Accountant Teresa Tran has been out of work for two years, and her husband, who was in marketing, is also unemployed. They're living on money they've been able to take out of their El Monte home. Tran now goes to a job center in El Monte at least once a week, often taking her kids along. "I go everywhere and don't get a call back," she said.
Bruce Cheun has a degree in sociology and experience in business administration. He spent the last year looking for work while taking care of his ailing mother. He doesn't have a car and hasn't yet found a job. The Hacienda Heights resident said he wished there were more resources for people like him.
"I don't think things are turning around."
By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
September 7, 2010
Asian Americans typically have the lowest unemployment rate of any ethnic group in the United States. But in this weak labor market, once they lose their jobs, they have an especially hard time reentering the labor force, data show.
In July, nearly half of all jobless Asian Americans in California had been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, compared with 40% of Latinos and 42% of whites, according to an analysis of data from the state Employment Development Department.
Experts said the strong family and cultural ties that bind Asian entrepreneurs and a largely foreign-born Asian workforce can be a liability during tough times; laid-off workers often aren't sure where to turn for work outside their ethnic circles.
About 13% of the 37 million people who live in California are of Asian descent, according to 2009 census data. About two-thirds of them are first-generation immigrants, said Paul Ong, a UCLA professor who has served as an advisor to the census. Many of them work in businesses owned by Asians, many of whom typically cut employees' hours as a first response to an economic downturn rather than let them go, Ong said. That explains in part why the California unemployment rate for Asians is relatively low, just 9.5% in July, compared with 17.1% for blacks, 14.9% for Latinos and 12.0% for whites.
But when these employers are forced to lay off staff, their workers often encounter hurdles to new employment. About half of Asian immigrants have difficulty speaking English, Ong said. Cultural differences also can prevent some from understanding how to apply for jobs with employers outside their communities, he said.
"They are heavily reliant on employers from the same ethnic group, so if for some reason those jobs are no longer available, it is more challenging for those workers to find employment, given the language and cultural barriers they face," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center.
Shirley Tam, a recent widow, returned to the workforce after a long absence caring for her sick husband. But the 50-year-old is finding that entry-level jobs are scarce.
"I don't have any more money," said Tam, pulling out a bank statement that showed she had $54 left in her savings account. "I need a job. I just need a chance."
She recently began attending college part time to get an accounting degree to improve her employment prospects.
Southern California's Asian community is diverse and employed in all manner of industries. Still, Asians are heavily represented in some sectors that have been particularly hard hit by the economic downturn, including garment-making. The number of people employed in apparel manufacturing in the state has fallen 23% to 58,500 since 2007, according to the Employment Development Department.
Also, new federal regulations require employees to verify workers' Social Security documentation. That has proved especially disruptive to businesses in the garment industry. Los Angeles clothing maker American Apparel Inc., for example, said in July that 1,600 of its employees were not authorized to work in the U.S.
Some employers are avoiding potential problems by not hiring immigrants, said Mark Masaoka, policy coordinator for the Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council.
Asian American banks, which invested heavily in commercial real estate during the boom, have faltered during the downturn, said Sung Won Sohn, a Cal State Channel Islands professor and the former chief executive of the Korean American Hanmi Bank. Koreatown's Mirae Bank was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and acquired by Wilshire State Bank, a Los Angeles company. Innovative Bank, based in Oakland, was acquired by Koreatown's Center Bank.
And the Korean community has many small businesses in immigrant neighborhoods, which are probably affected by the retail slowdown, said Glenn Omatsu, a professor at Cal State Northridge. In addition, many Pacific Islanders work in the construction industry, which has lost 42% of its jobs in California — or 402,800 positions — since a February 2006 peak.
Some Asian Americans have computer engineering or software jobs that are vulnerable to outsourcing, said C.N. Le, director of the Asian American studies program at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. And a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment rippling through the country might also hurt Asian Americans' chances of finding work.
"In times of recession, Americans are most likely to feel economically threatened by immigrants, and their prejudices, suspicions and tensions rise to the surface," he said. "That can happen on a personal level or an institutional level."
In the Asian American enclaves of El Monte and South El Monte, unemployment in July reached 15.5% and 15.1%, respectively. Garden Grove's unemployment rate was 11.8%.
Rosemead resident Wesley Huang worked at Wells Fargo Bank for 11 years before losing his job three years ago. After a short stint with the U.S. Census Bureau, he's now back to job hunting again, trying to find work as a teacher. He speaks four languages but says it's tough to find work even with that skill.
"There are so many people competing for jobs," he said.
The poor economy has some looking for alternatives. The U.S. military saw its highest proportion of Asian recruits in 2009. Almost one-fourth of all Army recruits in Los Angeles County last year were Asian American, although they make up only about 13% of the county's population. And Asian Americans suffered the sharpest decline in homeownership in 2008, falling 1.24 percentage points, compared with a 0.4-percentage-point decline for whites, according to the American Community Survey.
That's because many Asian American small-business owners relied on home loans to support their businesses and are now at risk of losing both their homes and their businesses, Masaoka said.
Accountant Teresa Tran has been out of work for two years, and her husband, who was in marketing, is also unemployed. They're living on money they've been able to take out of their El Monte home. Tran now goes to a job center in El Monte at least once a week, often taking her kids along. "I go everywhere and don't get a call back," she said.
Bruce Cheun has a degree in sociology and experience in business administration. He spent the last year looking for work while taking care of his ailing mother. He doesn't have a car and hasn't yet found a job. The Hacienda Heights resident said he wished there were more resources for people like him.
"I don't think things are turning around."
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero
Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: NYTimes.com August 10, 2010
To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, another sort of Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying things like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” The California-born author and playwright Frank Chin, who has written essays denouncing Chan, would like to see him disappear altogether.
But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.
Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly.
Mr. Huang gives an equally full account of Chan’s movie history and of the actor with whom he was most memorably associated: a Swede named Warner Oland, who played a Jew in the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer,” and then, because he had vaguely Asian features, made a specialty of Oriental villains. (The original Chan, George Kuwa, was Japanese.) Oland was a heavy drinker, Mr. Huang writes, and liked to take a nip before slipping into the Chan persona: it slowed down his speech and put a congenial, Chan-like grin on his face. In 1938, after Oland had boozed himself to a premature death and was replaced by an American named Sidney Toler, movie producers encouraged him to try the same trick.
But the most interesting story in “Charlie Chan” is Mr. Huang’s own. “I have an alphabetic destiny,” he said, laughing, over lunch in Chinatown last week. In the late 1980s he had been a student at Beijing University and, after the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where he would have been on the day tanks opened fire if his parents hadn’t lured him home on a false pretense, he determined to leave China. He got hold of a guidebook to American colleges, and “Alabama starts with A,” he pointed out. “I was pretty desperate to get out of the country and the University of Alabama was the first school I looked up.” He added that when he got there, “Tuscaloosa was another planet,” and went on: “Nobody walked in the street. Everything was so slow, so clean and so empty.”
When he got sick of the South, Mr. Huang said, he decided to go to Buffalo for a Ph.D. in English literature. He felt, he writes in “Charlie Chan,” “like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.”
But why Buffalo? “Buffalo begins with B,” he said, grinning. He worked as a delivery boy there, but happily gave up the restaurant business. “Graduate school is really easy compared to restaurant work,” he pointed out.
At an estate sale he bought a couple of Biggers’s novels and was immediately hooked. He began renting all the Chan movies he could find.
Mr. Huang, who is 41, divorced and the father of a young daughter, speaks nearly perfect, idiomatic English. He learned the language, he said, from listening to Voice of America broadcasts with his family and also from going to church in Tuscaloosa. “On Sunday morning I’d stand on the corner carrying a Bible,” he explained, “and people would stop and ask what church I was going to. ‘Yours,’ I’d say. I saw a lot of churches that way.”
After Buffalo he spent four years teaching literature at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., before taking a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and next year he has a fellowship at Cornell. “I’m kind of stuck in the C’s right now,” he said, “and I can’t really move on. “Charlie Chan — that’s a double C.”
Chan was an obsession he pursued for years, he said, while trying to write a memoir called “The Yellow Alabaman” until a friend encouraged him to put that book aside and write instead about the detective. It was the aphorisms, the fortune-cookie sayings, that first attracted him, and then he became interested in the way Chan is a projection of American fears and American imaginings about China — an embodiment, as he writes in the book, of “both the racist heritage and the creative genius” of his adopted nation’s culture.
Over lunch he said: “I grew up watching Chinese opera, where you have some of that same exaggeration, and growing up in that literary culture was very useful for understanding cultural ventriloquism and the whole idea of crossing over. It was fascinating to see how Chan was a sort of ‘yellowface’ performance.” He added that in the 30s the Charlie Chan movies were immensely popular in China, of all places, where they were seen as an antidote to the sinister caricature of the Fu Manchu films, but that attitudes had changed. Not long ago he was discussing with a Chinese publisher the possibility of translating “Charlie Chan” himself and bringing it out in China. The publisher listened politely and said, “Right now we’re actually more interested in Fu Manchu.”
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: NYTimes.com August 10, 2010
To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, another sort of Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying things like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” The California-born author and playwright Frank Chin, who has written essays denouncing Chan, would like to see him disappear altogether.
But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.
Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly.
Mr. Huang gives an equally full account of Chan’s movie history and of the actor with whom he was most memorably associated: a Swede named Warner Oland, who played a Jew in the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer,” and then, because he had vaguely Asian features, made a specialty of Oriental villains. (The original Chan, George Kuwa, was Japanese.) Oland was a heavy drinker, Mr. Huang writes, and liked to take a nip before slipping into the Chan persona: it slowed down his speech and put a congenial, Chan-like grin on his face. In 1938, after Oland had boozed himself to a premature death and was replaced by an American named Sidney Toler, movie producers encouraged him to try the same trick.
But the most interesting story in “Charlie Chan” is Mr. Huang’s own. “I have an alphabetic destiny,” he said, laughing, over lunch in Chinatown last week. In the late 1980s he had been a student at Beijing University and, after the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where he would have been on the day tanks opened fire if his parents hadn’t lured him home on a false pretense, he determined to leave China. He got hold of a guidebook to American colleges, and “Alabama starts with A,” he pointed out. “I was pretty desperate to get out of the country and the University of Alabama was the first school I looked up.” He added that when he got there, “Tuscaloosa was another planet,” and went on: “Nobody walked in the street. Everything was so slow, so clean and so empty.”
When he got sick of the South, Mr. Huang said, he decided to go to Buffalo for a Ph.D. in English literature. He felt, he writes in “Charlie Chan,” “like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.”
But why Buffalo? “Buffalo begins with B,” he said, grinning. He worked as a delivery boy there, but happily gave up the restaurant business. “Graduate school is really easy compared to restaurant work,” he pointed out.
At an estate sale he bought a couple of Biggers’s novels and was immediately hooked. He began renting all the Chan movies he could find.
Mr. Huang, who is 41, divorced and the father of a young daughter, speaks nearly perfect, idiomatic English. He learned the language, he said, from listening to Voice of America broadcasts with his family and also from going to church in Tuscaloosa. “On Sunday morning I’d stand on the corner carrying a Bible,” he explained, “and people would stop and ask what church I was going to. ‘Yours,’ I’d say. I saw a lot of churches that way.”
After Buffalo he spent four years teaching literature at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., before taking a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and next year he has a fellowship at Cornell. “I’m kind of stuck in the C’s right now,” he said, “and I can’t really move on. “Charlie Chan — that’s a double C.”
Chan was an obsession he pursued for years, he said, while trying to write a memoir called “The Yellow Alabaman” until a friend encouraged him to put that book aside and write instead about the detective. It was the aphorisms, the fortune-cookie sayings, that first attracted him, and then he became interested in the way Chan is a projection of American fears and American imaginings about China — an embodiment, as he writes in the book, of “both the racist heritage and the creative genius” of his adopted nation’s culture.
Over lunch he said: “I grew up watching Chinese opera, where you have some of that same exaggeration, and growing up in that literary culture was very useful for understanding cultural ventriloquism and the whole idea of crossing over. It was fascinating to see how Chan was a sort of ‘yellowface’ performance.” He added that in the 30s the Charlie Chan movies were immensely popular in China, of all places, where they were seen as an antidote to the sinister caricature of the Fu Manchu films, but that attitudes had changed. Not long ago he was discussing with a Chinese publisher the possibility of translating “Charlie Chan” himself and bringing it out in China. The publisher listened politely and said, “Right now we’re actually more interested in Fu Manchu.”
Monday, July 19, 2010
Pain, fear and longing: memories of Angel Island
Pain, fear and longing: memories of Angel Island
By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times July 18,
The photograph that changed Charles Wong's life went on display Friday at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles. It is a small black-and-white portrait of a somber woman, a little boy in a new suit and a handsome youth on the cusp of manhood.
Wong found the family portrait — his family portrait — tucked in a suitcase, hidden in a closet, on the day his father, Gun Chown Wong, was buried. The woman in the photo was his mother, Jook Sue. The boy was Wong himself, 6 and scared. And the young man? He was the family secret.
In 1935, Gun Chown boarded the U.S. liner Coolidge and headed to Los Angeles, leaving his family behind in the Chinese village of Hoi-Seun. His first stop was Angel Island, the notorious immigration station in San Francisco Bay, which processed more than a million immigrants before closing in 1940.
By the time the Wong family could afford to reunite, Angel Island was history. So Jook Sue took her two sons to Hong Kong. That was where the portrait was taken, where she was interviewed repeatedly by immigration officials, where she was finally granted permission to fly west.
Charles was allowed to go with his mother. But Liang, 18, was denied entry. Forced to stay behind, he eventually jumped to his death from a five-story building. His family never spoke of him again.
Until Wong found the portrait, "I didn't know I had a brother. I had suppressed his memory," he recalled, as he wandered the Chinese American Museum, where workers were busy installing a new exhibit called "Remembering Angel Island."
"Our story is representative of Angel Island, of the possibility, of the difficulty and traumas that many others went through," said Wong, now 62, as he spoke of immigration's effect on his life, of his mother's depression, his father's silence, his own ongoing survivor's guilt. "It was not just our family."
The immigration station opened 100 years ago, and the exhibit highlights the stories of Angelenos who entered America through its doors. "Remembering Angel Island" is on view through May 29.
There are photos of the station's cramped quarters and dining halls, reproductions of poems that were etched on the walls by Chinese immigrants aching for home and fearing the future. The passport of 9-year-old Florence See is on display; a U.S. citizen, she was still detained and interrogated. See was the great-aunt of Los Angeles author Lisa See.
Actor Jack Ong created an installation in honor of his mother, Jeung Shee Ong, who fled Japanese troops in 1939 with five children in tow. She made it to Hong Kong, then sailed to America aboard the Coolidge only to languish for more than a month on Angel Island, according to the exhibit, "terrified of the ghosts of those who committed suicide in the barracks rather than face deportation back to China."
Angel Island is often described as the Ellis Island of the west. But Pauline Wong, executive director of the Chinese American Museum, is quick to point out that most immigrants processed in New York Harbor were quickly sent on their way, while those who came through the California facility were often held for weeks, months, even years.
Opened after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, it became the physical symbol of America's aggressive policies. Although immigrants from more than 80 countries spent time on the inhospitable island, Chinese immigrants arrived in greater numbers, were detained longer and deported more often than Europeans.
"The Angel Island experience is a very painful chapter in Chinese American history, a hidden chapter," said Eddie Wong, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Being held in the spartan barracks, repeatedly interrogated and subjected to invasive medical exams was an experience that "seared the psyche."
"For people like Tyrus Wong to speak out now," he said, "is a way of reconciling inner turmoil."
Artist Tyrus Wong, who is almost as old as the Angel Island Immigration Station itself, spent two weeks there alone as a young boy, a so-called paper son.
Because the exclusion act capped the Chinese population in America, very few new immigrants were allowed into the country. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the San Francisco Hall of Records, many Chinese immigrants claimed the identities of those whose paperwork was lost.
They became free to travel to China and bring back relatives or sell their documentation. Paper sons would study "coaching papers" with information about their stolen lives so they could pass detailed interrogations on Angel Island.
The coaching papers of Tyrus Wong's brother are on exhibit at the Chinese American Museum, and visitors can listen to a reenactment of his own interrogation.
His sojourn on Angel Island, he said, was a combination of terror and boredom: "I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. To me, it was just like jail."
maria.laganga@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times July 18,
The photograph that changed Charles Wong's life went on display Friday at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles. It is a small black-and-white portrait of a somber woman, a little boy in a new suit and a handsome youth on the cusp of manhood.
Wong found the family portrait — his family portrait — tucked in a suitcase, hidden in a closet, on the day his father, Gun Chown Wong, was buried. The woman in the photo was his mother, Jook Sue. The boy was Wong himself, 6 and scared. And the young man? He was the family secret.
In 1935, Gun Chown boarded the U.S. liner Coolidge and headed to Los Angeles, leaving his family behind in the Chinese village of Hoi-Seun. His first stop was Angel Island, the notorious immigration station in San Francisco Bay, which processed more than a million immigrants before closing in 1940.
By the time the Wong family could afford to reunite, Angel Island was history. So Jook Sue took her two sons to Hong Kong. That was where the portrait was taken, where she was interviewed repeatedly by immigration officials, where she was finally granted permission to fly west.
Charles was allowed to go with his mother. But Liang, 18, was denied entry. Forced to stay behind, he eventually jumped to his death from a five-story building. His family never spoke of him again.
Until Wong found the portrait, "I didn't know I had a brother. I had suppressed his memory," he recalled, as he wandered the Chinese American Museum, where workers were busy installing a new exhibit called "Remembering Angel Island."
"Our story is representative of Angel Island, of the possibility, of the difficulty and traumas that many others went through," said Wong, now 62, as he spoke of immigration's effect on his life, of his mother's depression, his father's silence, his own ongoing survivor's guilt. "It was not just our family."
The immigration station opened 100 years ago, and the exhibit highlights the stories of Angelenos who entered America through its doors. "Remembering Angel Island" is on view through May 29.
There are photos of the station's cramped quarters and dining halls, reproductions of poems that were etched on the walls by Chinese immigrants aching for home and fearing the future. The passport of 9-year-old Florence See is on display; a U.S. citizen, she was still detained and interrogated. See was the great-aunt of Los Angeles author Lisa See.
Actor Jack Ong created an installation in honor of his mother, Jeung Shee Ong, who fled Japanese troops in 1939 with five children in tow. She made it to Hong Kong, then sailed to America aboard the Coolidge only to languish for more than a month on Angel Island, according to the exhibit, "terrified of the ghosts of those who committed suicide in the barracks rather than face deportation back to China."
Angel Island is often described as the Ellis Island of the west. But Pauline Wong, executive director of the Chinese American Museum, is quick to point out that most immigrants processed in New York Harbor were quickly sent on their way, while those who came through the California facility were often held for weeks, months, even years.
Opened after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, it became the physical symbol of America's aggressive policies. Although immigrants from more than 80 countries spent time on the inhospitable island, Chinese immigrants arrived in greater numbers, were detained longer and deported more often than Europeans.
"The Angel Island experience is a very painful chapter in Chinese American history, a hidden chapter," said Eddie Wong, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Being held in the spartan barracks, repeatedly interrogated and subjected to invasive medical exams was an experience that "seared the psyche."
"For people like Tyrus Wong to speak out now," he said, "is a way of reconciling inner turmoil."
Artist Tyrus Wong, who is almost as old as the Angel Island Immigration Station itself, spent two weeks there alone as a young boy, a so-called paper son.
Because the exclusion act capped the Chinese population in America, very few new immigrants were allowed into the country. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the San Francisco Hall of Records, many Chinese immigrants claimed the identities of those whose paperwork was lost.
They became free to travel to China and bring back relatives or sell their documentation. Paper sons would study "coaching papers" with information about their stolen lives so they could pass detailed interrogations on Angel Island.
The coaching papers of Tyrus Wong's brother are on exhibit at the Chinese American Museum, and visitors can listen to a reenactment of his own interrogation.
His sojourn on Angel Island, he said, was a combination of terror and boredom: "I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. To me, it was just like jail."
maria.laganga@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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