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
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Malaysian Court Strikes Down Ban
Malaysian Court Strikes Down Ban
By JAMES HOOKWAY
Malaysia's High Court Thursday ruled that local Roman Catholics can resume referring to God as Allah in Malay-language publications, in a decision that appeared to partially halt the steady Islamization of the majority-Muslim nation in recent years.
The court overturned a three-year-old government ban that prevented the Catholic Church from using the term Allah as a translation for God in its local-language publications. The Arabic word has been used by various faiths in this predominantly Muslim nation for centuries, and the Church argues that it is the only suitable translation for God in the Malay language.
The ban came alongside a spate of other religious disputes that have convinced many Malaysians that their country is adopting an increasingly politicized interpretation of Islam that could browbeat its substantial non-Muslim ethnic-Chinese and Indian minorities and eventually turn off the international investors who helped develop the country's vibrant economy.
In recent months, a Muslim Shariah Court sentenced a woman who ordered a beer in a hotel bar to be caned, while a group of Muslim men desecrated the proposed location of a Hindu temple by tossing a severed cow's head onto the site as police stood aside. Political analysts say the country has become increasingly Islamist in its outlook over the past two decades, and Shariah law is now widely applied to the country's Muslims, who make up around 60% of Malaysia's population of 28 million people. Non-Muslims are governed by civil laws.
Thursday's ruling by Judge Lau Bee Lan, however, suggests that some parts of the Malaysian establishment are beginning to push back against this steady Islamization of what had been one of the world's most moderate outposts of the Muslim faith. Ms. Lau said Christians have a "constitutional right to use Allah," but the government can appeal to a higher court where the ban can be reinstated.
Prosecutors said they are still deciding whether to appeal, but political analysts, including James Chin, a political science professor at the Malaysian campus of Australia's Monash University, expect the battle to continue in the appeals court.
Still, Rev. Lawrence Andrew, the editor of the Malaysian Roman Catholic Church's Herald newspaper described the decision as a "landmark case for our nation," and said it upholds constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech and religion.
And there are signs that Malaysia's political leaders also are keen to preserve the country's religious freedoms. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Singapore in November, Prime Minister Najib Razak said the government would resist efforts by Islamist hardliners to turn Malaysia becoming a more faith-based nation. "We are going to maintain what we are today- a moderate, Muslim state. There may be some incidents along the way that take place, but that should not be seen" as evidence of a radical shift, he said.
The Herald newspaper filed the lawsuit against the ban on the word Allah in 2007. The government banned non-Muslims from using the word in their literature, fearing it would confuse or mislead Muslims, and said that the term should be used exclusively by Muslims.
The ban hindered the Malay-language edition of the Herald, which is mostly read by indigenous tribes who converted to Catholicism and other forms of Christianity decades ago. It added to the grievances of the Malaysia's religious minorities, who frequently say they are discriminated against by the Muslim-dominated government.
Earlier in 2009, the Malaysian government confiscated a shipment of 10,000 Bibles from Indonesia which shares a very similar language to Malaysia, because they used the word Allah.
By JAMES HOOKWAY
Malaysia's High Court Thursday ruled that local Roman Catholics can resume referring to God as Allah in Malay-language publications, in a decision that appeared to partially halt the steady Islamization of the majority-Muslim nation in recent years.
The court overturned a three-year-old government ban that prevented the Catholic Church from using the term Allah as a translation for God in its local-language publications. The Arabic word has been used by various faiths in this predominantly Muslim nation for centuries, and the Church argues that it is the only suitable translation for God in the Malay language.
The ban came alongside a spate of other religious disputes that have convinced many Malaysians that their country is adopting an increasingly politicized interpretation of Islam that could browbeat its substantial non-Muslim ethnic-Chinese and Indian minorities and eventually turn off the international investors who helped develop the country's vibrant economy.
In recent months, a Muslim Shariah Court sentenced a woman who ordered a beer in a hotel bar to be caned, while a group of Muslim men desecrated the proposed location of a Hindu temple by tossing a severed cow's head onto the site as police stood aside. Political analysts say the country has become increasingly Islamist in its outlook over the past two decades, and Shariah law is now widely applied to the country's Muslims, who make up around 60% of Malaysia's population of 28 million people. Non-Muslims are governed by civil laws.
Thursday's ruling by Judge Lau Bee Lan, however, suggests that some parts of the Malaysian establishment are beginning to push back against this steady Islamization of what had been one of the world's most moderate outposts of the Muslim faith. Ms. Lau said Christians have a "constitutional right to use Allah," but the government can appeal to a higher court where the ban can be reinstated.
Prosecutors said they are still deciding whether to appeal, but political analysts, including James Chin, a political science professor at the Malaysian campus of Australia's Monash University, expect the battle to continue in the appeals court.
Still, Rev. Lawrence Andrew, the editor of the Malaysian Roman Catholic Church's Herald newspaper described the decision as a "landmark case for our nation," and said it upholds constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech and religion.
And there are signs that Malaysia's political leaders also are keen to preserve the country's religious freedoms. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Singapore in November, Prime Minister Najib Razak said the government would resist efforts by Islamist hardliners to turn Malaysia becoming a more faith-based nation. "We are going to maintain what we are today- a moderate, Muslim state. There may be some incidents along the way that take place, but that should not be seen" as evidence of a radical shift, he said.
The Herald newspaper filed the lawsuit against the ban on the word Allah in 2007. The government banned non-Muslims from using the word in their literature, fearing it would confuse or mislead Muslims, and said that the term should be used exclusively by Muslims.
The ban hindered the Malay-language edition of the Herald, which is mostly read by indigenous tribes who converted to Catholicism and other forms of Christianity decades ago. It added to the grievances of the Malaysia's religious minorities, who frequently say they are discriminated against by the Muslim-dominated government.
Earlier in 2009, the Malaysian government confiscated a shipment of 10,000 Bibles from Indonesia which shares a very similar language to Malaysia, because they used the word Allah.
Monday, December 21, 2009
36 Hours in Kuala Lumpur
36 Hours in Kuala Lumpur
Roslan Rahman for The New York Times
Published: December 20, 2009
SITUATED at the juncture of two rivers, Kuala Lumpur means “muddy confluence” in Malay, but this fast-rising city has redefined itself. With its looming skyscrapers, stellar cuisine and thumping night life, the Malaysian capital has emerged as one of Southeast Asia’s most alluring metropolises, offering all the amenities of a major city but on a friendlier scale. It’s not just the rivers that converge: founded in 1857, Kuala Lumpur is full of odd juxtapositions. Old cafes are tucked under gleaming expressways. Calls to prayer beckon white-collar professionals from towers of steel and glass. And disparate ethnic groups — Malays, Straits Chinese and Indians — rub shoulders in glitzy malls and leafy parks, all of which gives this city a cosmopolitan flair unrivaled in the region.
4 p.m.
1) COLONIAL BEGINNINGS
Just 150 years ago, Kuala Lumpur, or KL as locals call it, was little more than a dingy outpost chopped out of the jungle by Chinese tin prospectors. But commerce served it well, and eventually Merdeka Square (at the intersection of Jalan Raja and Lebuh Pasar Besar) would become a center of British colonial life. The expansive, palm-tree-edged plaza is lined with 100-year-old landmarks like the Sultan Abdul Samad Building (Jalan Raja), which features a blend of Moorish and Mogul architecture that typifies the style favored by colonialists. Fittingly, the square is also the spot where the Malays declared their independence from Britain in 1957.
6:30 p.m.
2) HIGH LIFE
Ponder the city’s astronomic rise over a Champagne cocktail at the SkyBar, a futuristic lounge at the Traders Hotel (Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park; 60-3-2332-9888; www.skybar.com.my). The bar, on the 33rd floor (the space is dominated by the hotel’s pool), has picture-perfect views of the Petronas Twin Towers. Reserve one of the sunken, violet-hued couches for a front-row seat as the silver, scalloped buildings light up at night. Drinks from 29 ringgit (about $8.75 at 3.30 ringgit to the dollar).
8 p.m.
3) CATERED CONSUMPTION
Like many places of note in the city, Enak KL (Starhill Gallery, 181 Jalan Bukit Bintang; 60-3-2141-8973; www.enakkl.com) is in a mall. It serves some of the finest Malay cuisine in the city in an elegant space filled with heavy wooden furniture and batik wall hangings. Dishes, slow-cooked, rich and spicy, are based on recipes passed down in the Razaly family, the owners. Try the smoky-sweet beef rendang (27 ringgit), grilled prawns with a tangy tamarind-based sauce (28 ringgit) and the kambing masak merah: lamb shank topped with a cinnamon-cardamom tomato reduction (45 ringgit).
10 p.m.
4) DRESS CASUAL
As the name suggests, the loungey club No Black Tie (17 Jalan Mesui; 60-3-2142-3737; www.noblacktie.com.my) was conceived as an antidote to the stuffiness of classical-music halls. But it has since grown into one of the city’s coolest and most eclectic night spots. Covered in polished, honey-hued teak and twinkling with candlelight, the club hosts jazz, world music, cabaret, poetry and, yes, classical performances, attracting a well-heeled crowd who sip wine and nibble Japanese-themed hors d’oeuvres. Cover from 30 ringgit.
Saturday
10 a.m.
5) DIVINE DECORATION
The architecture alone is reason enough to visit the turquoise-domed Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (Jalan Lembah Perdana; 60-3-2274-2020; www.iamm.org.my). Built in 1998, the white interiors of the four-story structure are silent, airy and saturated with natural light — perfect for contemplating the collection of Islamic decorative art. After admiring old calligraphic scrolls, jewel-encrusted swords and embroidered horse blankets, take your enlightened understanding of Islamic iconography and design to the rose and ivory marble Masjid Jamek (Jalan Tun Perak), one of the city’s oldest mosques.
Noon
6) TWEET, TWEET, TWEET
The city’s unrelenting traffic jams take on a humorous form at the KL Bird Park (920 Jalan Cenderawasih, Lake Gardens; 60-3-2272-1010; www.klbirdpark.com), where you’ll share the path with psychedelic-hued scarlet ibises, posturing peacocks and Victoria crowned pigeons, whose electric-blue feather tiaras put their drab New York cousins to shame. The 21-acre aviary is home to more than 3,000 birds representing 200 species, some of which, like the snappy cassowary and loquacious, rainbow-colored lory, you’re allowed to hand feed. You can also feed yourself at Ikan Bakar Asli Pak Din (Stall No. 5, Tanglin Food Court, Jalan Cenderasari; 60-12-320-1731), a stall in a food court that’s a 10-minute walk away, which serves a terrific grilled fish from 5 ringgit.
2 p.m.
7) CULTURAL CRASH COURSE
Start your tour of Malaysia’s ethnic hodgepodge in Little India, where the narrow streets throb with Bollywood music, silk shops churning out Punjabi suits, roti vendors and men stringing fragrant jasmine garlands. Fuel up with a glass of teh tarik, a brew of black tea and condensed milk, before tackling nearby Chinatown, a bustling area with stores selling knockoff purses, medicinal herbs and delicate tea sets. For a quiet moment, duck into the 145-year-old Sin Sze Si Ya Temple (14a Lebuh Pudu), an incense- and red-lantern-filled space where Buddhists have their fortunes told. Finally, hop a cab across town to sleepy Kampung Baru, where Malay village life plays out in sun-beaten, pastel-hued wooden stilt houses surrounded by hot-pink bougainvilleas.
7 p.m.
8) NIGHT HAWKS
Though KL boasts its share of Michelin-worthy chefs, the best cuisine is arguably found in the open-air street kitchens known as hawker centers. The mega-popular food court along Jalan Alor kicks off around 4 p.m., serving sizzling, wok-fried noodles, freshly steamed seafood and mouthwatering barbecued meat late into the night. Try Cu Cha (71-75 Jalan Alor) for dishes like char kway teow (5 ringgit), flat rice noodles fried with clams and shrimp. Head to W.A.W. Restaurant (7 Jalan Alor) for what must be the world’s best chicken wings (4.40 ringgit).
10 p.m.
9) SIN CITY
Despite the Malaysian government’s efforts to curb drinking by imposing a steep “sin tax,” bars are thriving in Kuala Lumpur — a trend no more evident than along the stretch of Changkat Bukit Bintang, or CBB. The street is lined with Irish gastropubs, velvet-roped dance clubs and trendy restaurant-lounges. Hot spots include the year-old Werner’s on Changkat (50 Jalan Changkat Bukit Bintang; 60-3-2142-5670; www.wernerskl.com), a red-and-black-themed bar where passion fruit martinis (28 ringgit) are mixed to catchy beats. A few steps away is the concrete-and-brick Cloth & Clef (30 Jalan Changkat Bukit Bintang; 60-3-2143-3034; www.clothandclef.com), which draws pretty young things with live indie bands and D.J.’s. For a full-on club experience, taxi to Zouk (113 Jalan Ampang; 60-3-2171-1997; www.zoukclub.com.my), a complex with six individually themed dance floors.
Sunday
10 a.m.
10) COFFEE TALK
Kopi tiam, or coffeehouses, were once an integral part of Malaysian society but are hard to come by these days. Luckily, the caffeinated chit-chat hasn’t slowed down at Yut Kee (35 Jalan Dang Wangi; 60-3-2698-8108), which has been serving kopi peng (iced coffee with sweet milk) since 1928. Now in its third generation, the breezy cafe is beloved for its roti baba (7.50 ringgit), a luscious bread pocket stuffed with shredded pork and onions that’s dipped in Worcestershire sauce.
Noon
11) MAD FOR MALLS
Like much of Southeast Asia, Kuala Lumpur is a mall town — after all, the mercury often hovers around 90 degrees. There are plenty to choose from, but among the more interesting is Sungei Wang Plaza (Jalan Sultan Ismail; 60-3-2148-6109; www.sungeiwang.com), a teenagers’ mecca packed with some 700 shops peddling colorful head scarves, sequined microminis, Hello Kitty Pez dispensers and T-shirts with phrases like “The Love is All Need” — another example of the city’s exuberant and unpredictable convergences.
THE BASICS
Several carriers, including Cathay Pacific, Korean Air and Qatar Airways, connect Kuala Lumpur and New York with stopovers in Hong Kong, Seoul or Doha. A recent online search found round-trip airfares starting at $1,189. The hourlong taxi to the city center costs about 90 ringgit, or $27 at 3.30 ringgit to the dollar; a 30-minute express train is 35 ringgit.
The Mandarin Oriental (Kuala Lumpur City Centre; 60-3-2380-8888; www.mandarinoriental.com/kualalumpur) offers skyline views and rooms that feature king-size beds, marble baths and nightstands furnished with fresh orchids. Rates start at 539 ringgit, not including tax.
The 270-room Hotel Equatorial (Jalan Sultan Ismail; 60-3-2161-7777; www.equatorial.com) is centrally located, with comfortable beds, outdoor pool and sharp service. Rooms from 260 ringgit, not including tax.
Roslan Rahman for The New York Times
Published: December 20, 2009
SITUATED at the juncture of two rivers, Kuala Lumpur means “muddy confluence” in Malay, but this fast-rising city has redefined itself. With its looming skyscrapers, stellar cuisine and thumping night life, the Malaysian capital has emerged as one of Southeast Asia’s most alluring metropolises, offering all the amenities of a major city but on a friendlier scale. It’s not just the rivers that converge: founded in 1857, Kuala Lumpur is full of odd juxtapositions. Old cafes are tucked under gleaming expressways. Calls to prayer beckon white-collar professionals from towers of steel and glass. And disparate ethnic groups — Malays, Straits Chinese and Indians — rub shoulders in glitzy malls and leafy parks, all of which gives this city a cosmopolitan flair unrivaled in the region.
4 p.m.
1) COLONIAL BEGINNINGS
Just 150 years ago, Kuala Lumpur, or KL as locals call it, was little more than a dingy outpost chopped out of the jungle by Chinese tin prospectors. But commerce served it well, and eventually Merdeka Square (at the intersection of Jalan Raja and Lebuh Pasar Besar) would become a center of British colonial life. The expansive, palm-tree-edged plaza is lined with 100-year-old landmarks like the Sultan Abdul Samad Building (Jalan Raja), which features a blend of Moorish and Mogul architecture that typifies the style favored by colonialists. Fittingly, the square is also the spot where the Malays declared their independence from Britain in 1957.
6:30 p.m.
2) HIGH LIFE
Ponder the city’s astronomic rise over a Champagne cocktail at the SkyBar, a futuristic lounge at the Traders Hotel (Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park; 60-3-2332-9888; www.skybar.com.my). The bar, on the 33rd floor (the space is dominated by the hotel’s pool), has picture-perfect views of the Petronas Twin Towers. Reserve one of the sunken, violet-hued couches for a front-row seat as the silver, scalloped buildings light up at night. Drinks from 29 ringgit (about $8.75 at 3.30 ringgit to the dollar).
8 p.m.
3) CATERED CONSUMPTION
Like many places of note in the city, Enak KL (Starhill Gallery, 181 Jalan Bukit Bintang; 60-3-2141-8973; www.enakkl.com) is in a mall. It serves some of the finest Malay cuisine in the city in an elegant space filled with heavy wooden furniture and batik wall hangings. Dishes, slow-cooked, rich and spicy, are based on recipes passed down in the Razaly family, the owners. Try the smoky-sweet beef rendang (27 ringgit), grilled prawns with a tangy tamarind-based sauce (28 ringgit) and the kambing masak merah: lamb shank topped with a cinnamon-cardamom tomato reduction (45 ringgit).
10 p.m.
4) DRESS CASUAL
As the name suggests, the loungey club No Black Tie (17 Jalan Mesui; 60-3-2142-3737; www.noblacktie.com.my) was conceived as an antidote to the stuffiness of classical-music halls. But it has since grown into one of the city’s coolest and most eclectic night spots. Covered in polished, honey-hued teak and twinkling with candlelight, the club hosts jazz, world music, cabaret, poetry and, yes, classical performances, attracting a well-heeled crowd who sip wine and nibble Japanese-themed hors d’oeuvres. Cover from 30 ringgit.
Saturday
10 a.m.
5) DIVINE DECORATION
The architecture alone is reason enough to visit the turquoise-domed Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (Jalan Lembah Perdana; 60-3-2274-2020; www.iamm.org.my). Built in 1998, the white interiors of the four-story structure are silent, airy and saturated with natural light — perfect for contemplating the collection of Islamic decorative art. After admiring old calligraphic scrolls, jewel-encrusted swords and embroidered horse blankets, take your enlightened understanding of Islamic iconography and design to the rose and ivory marble Masjid Jamek (Jalan Tun Perak), one of the city’s oldest mosques.
Noon
6) TWEET, TWEET, TWEET
The city’s unrelenting traffic jams take on a humorous form at the KL Bird Park (920 Jalan Cenderawasih, Lake Gardens; 60-3-2272-1010; www.klbirdpark.com), where you’ll share the path with psychedelic-hued scarlet ibises, posturing peacocks and Victoria crowned pigeons, whose electric-blue feather tiaras put their drab New York cousins to shame. The 21-acre aviary is home to more than 3,000 birds representing 200 species, some of which, like the snappy cassowary and loquacious, rainbow-colored lory, you’re allowed to hand feed. You can also feed yourself at Ikan Bakar Asli Pak Din (Stall No. 5, Tanglin Food Court, Jalan Cenderasari; 60-12-320-1731), a stall in a food court that’s a 10-minute walk away, which serves a terrific grilled fish from 5 ringgit.
2 p.m.
7) CULTURAL CRASH COURSE
Start your tour of Malaysia’s ethnic hodgepodge in Little India, where the narrow streets throb with Bollywood music, silk shops churning out Punjabi suits, roti vendors and men stringing fragrant jasmine garlands. Fuel up with a glass of teh tarik, a brew of black tea and condensed milk, before tackling nearby Chinatown, a bustling area with stores selling knockoff purses, medicinal herbs and delicate tea sets. For a quiet moment, duck into the 145-year-old Sin Sze Si Ya Temple (14a Lebuh Pudu), an incense- and red-lantern-filled space where Buddhists have their fortunes told. Finally, hop a cab across town to sleepy Kampung Baru, where Malay village life plays out in sun-beaten, pastel-hued wooden stilt houses surrounded by hot-pink bougainvilleas.
7 p.m.
8) NIGHT HAWKS
Though KL boasts its share of Michelin-worthy chefs, the best cuisine is arguably found in the open-air street kitchens known as hawker centers. The mega-popular food court along Jalan Alor kicks off around 4 p.m., serving sizzling, wok-fried noodles, freshly steamed seafood and mouthwatering barbecued meat late into the night. Try Cu Cha (71-75 Jalan Alor) for dishes like char kway teow (5 ringgit), flat rice noodles fried with clams and shrimp. Head to W.A.W. Restaurant (7 Jalan Alor) for what must be the world’s best chicken wings (4.40 ringgit).
10 p.m.
9) SIN CITY
Despite the Malaysian government’s efforts to curb drinking by imposing a steep “sin tax,” bars are thriving in Kuala Lumpur — a trend no more evident than along the stretch of Changkat Bukit Bintang, or CBB. The street is lined with Irish gastropubs, velvet-roped dance clubs and trendy restaurant-lounges. Hot spots include the year-old Werner’s on Changkat (50 Jalan Changkat Bukit Bintang; 60-3-2142-5670; www.wernerskl.com), a red-and-black-themed bar where passion fruit martinis (28 ringgit) are mixed to catchy beats. A few steps away is the concrete-and-brick Cloth & Clef (30 Jalan Changkat Bukit Bintang; 60-3-2143-3034; www.clothandclef.com), which draws pretty young things with live indie bands and D.J.’s. For a full-on club experience, taxi to Zouk (113 Jalan Ampang; 60-3-2171-1997; www.zoukclub.com.my), a complex with six individually themed dance floors.
Sunday
10 a.m.
10) COFFEE TALK
Kopi tiam, or coffeehouses, were once an integral part of Malaysian society but are hard to come by these days. Luckily, the caffeinated chit-chat hasn’t slowed down at Yut Kee (35 Jalan Dang Wangi; 60-3-2698-8108), which has been serving kopi peng (iced coffee with sweet milk) since 1928. Now in its third generation, the breezy cafe is beloved for its roti baba (7.50 ringgit), a luscious bread pocket stuffed with shredded pork and onions that’s dipped in Worcestershire sauce.
Noon
11) MAD FOR MALLS
Like much of Southeast Asia, Kuala Lumpur is a mall town — after all, the mercury often hovers around 90 degrees. There are plenty to choose from, but among the more interesting is Sungei Wang Plaza (Jalan Sultan Ismail; 60-3-2148-6109; www.sungeiwang.com), a teenagers’ mecca packed with some 700 shops peddling colorful head scarves, sequined microminis, Hello Kitty Pez dispensers and T-shirts with phrases like “The Love is All Need” — another example of the city’s exuberant and unpredictable convergences.
THE BASICS
Several carriers, including Cathay Pacific, Korean Air and Qatar Airways, connect Kuala Lumpur and New York with stopovers in Hong Kong, Seoul or Doha. A recent online search found round-trip airfares starting at $1,189. The hourlong taxi to the city center costs about 90 ringgit, or $27 at 3.30 ringgit to the dollar; a 30-minute express train is 35 ringgit.
The Mandarin Oriental (Kuala Lumpur City Centre; 60-3-2380-8888; www.mandarinoriental.com/kualalumpur) offers skyline views and rooms that feature king-size beds, marble baths and nightstands furnished with fresh orchids. Rates start at 539 ringgit, not including tax.
The 270-room Hotel Equatorial (Jalan Sultan Ismail; 60-3-2161-7777; www.equatorial.com) is centrally located, with comfortable beds, outdoor pool and sharp service. Rooms from 260 ringgit, not including tax.
Monday, November 23, 2009
‘Useless' youths fuel calls for more funds
'Useless' youths fuel calls for more funds
PhilaSiu
The Standard, November 23, 2009
Most underprivileged city youths feel useless, a survey has found, prompting calls for the government to do more.
The survey, covering 849 Primary Three to Form Five students from poor families, was conducted by the Boys' & Girls' Clubs Association of Hong Kong.
About 52 percent of the respondents said they feel “totally useless” while almost 43 percent considered themselves “sometimes useless.”
And about 30 percent believe they are losers.
The monthly family incomes of all those surveyed is less than the median of HK$10,500 and some 40 percent live under the poverty line - with their families earning less than half the monthly median figure.
Association executive director Lilian Law Suk-kwan said the children lack self-esteem and confidence because they lack opportunities to take part in activities and express themselves. The Census and Statistics Department estimates that more than 1.23 million people in the city are living in poverty.
Of these, 210,000 are children under 14 years old.
Wong Kwai-yau, association supervisor for the Sha Tin district, said the Child Development Fund set up in April 2008 with a budget of HK$300 million has failed to help the targeted number of 13,600 children.
So far, only around 700 children have benefited from the fund.
A spokesman for the Labour and Welfare Bureau said the children who are being helped through the fund are the pioneers of the three-year project, launched last December.
The government will conduct an evaluation of the pioneer project first before deciding on the next step, the spokesman added.
Wong said: “The government always encourages teenagers to study hard.
“But how can they [the underprivileged] afford an associate degree that costs more than HK$40,000 a year?”
Law urged the Education Bureau to channel more funds to schools and underprivileged children.
The money may be used to purchase resources to facilitate learning like computers and desks.
It may also be used to give students allowances to pay for extra-curricular activities such as piano lessons, she said.
She pointed to the survey results that showed more than 30 percent do not have a desk at home or reliable computers to complete assignments.
About half the respondents do not participate in extra-curricular activities and 20 percent admit they are unable to control their emotions.
About 15 percent said they eat fewer than three meals a day.
Almost 20 percent said they do not have enough food for each meal.
PhilaSiu
The Standard, November 23, 2009
Most underprivileged city youths feel useless, a survey has found, prompting calls for the government to do more.
The survey, covering 849 Primary Three to Form Five students from poor families, was conducted by the Boys' & Girls' Clubs Association of Hong Kong.
About 52 percent of the respondents said they feel “totally useless” while almost 43 percent considered themselves “sometimes useless.”
And about 30 percent believe they are losers.
The monthly family incomes of all those surveyed is less than the median of HK$10,500 and some 40 percent live under the poverty line - with their families earning less than half the monthly median figure.
Association executive director Lilian Law Suk-kwan said the children lack self-esteem and confidence because they lack opportunities to take part in activities and express themselves. The Census and Statistics Department estimates that more than 1.23 million people in the city are living in poverty.
Of these, 210,000 are children under 14 years old.
Wong Kwai-yau, association supervisor for the Sha Tin district, said the Child Development Fund set up in April 2008 with a budget of HK$300 million has failed to help the targeted number of 13,600 children.
So far, only around 700 children have benefited from the fund.
A spokesman for the Labour and Welfare Bureau said the children who are being helped through the fund are the pioneers of the three-year project, launched last December.
The government will conduct an evaluation of the pioneer project first before deciding on the next step, the spokesman added.
Wong said: “The government always encourages teenagers to study hard.
“But how can they [the underprivileged] afford an associate degree that costs more than HK$40,000 a year?”
Law urged the Education Bureau to channel more funds to schools and underprivileged children.
The money may be used to purchase resources to facilitate learning like computers and desks.
It may also be used to give students allowances to pay for extra-curricular activities such as piano lessons, she said.
She pointed to the survey results that showed more than 30 percent do not have a desk at home or reliable computers to complete assignments.
About half the respondents do not participate in extra-curricular activities and 20 percent admit they are unable to control their emotions.
About 15 percent said they eat fewer than three meals a day.
Almost 20 percent said they do not have enough food for each meal.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Taiwan teens are lost and suicidal
Taiwan teens are lost and suicidal
Friday, November 20, 2009
About 60 percent of young people in Taiwan have considered suicide and more than third lack direction in life.
The results, a magazine survey claims, are because of a lack of public role models and weakened family support.
Taiwan-based CommonWealth magazine's first ever Life and Education Survey of 4,475 students between 15 and 22 found that most had thought about suicide, with 23 percent still considering it, survey center director Huang Ching- hsuan said.
About 34 percent of respondents said they had no idea what to do in life, the survey found.
“We were extremely surprised by the results,” Huang said, noting the high response rate.
In recent years teens in Taiwan have lost public role models including the 2008 death of Taiwan super-tycoon Wang Yung-ching and the conviction of ex-president Chen Shui-bian for graft this year, Huang said.
“This is an age of no role models. Teens today just know to get into good universities, but then what?”
Family ties have weakened over the same period as numbers of children per household decrease while both parents work.
Children are often sheltered to the point where they can't handle setbacks, even the death of a pet, said Huang.
CommonWealth, an authoritative privately funded magazine, has published surveys for about 10 years on trends in Taiwan.
After years of inflation and income stagnation that put pressure on common families, Taiwan unemployment surged to record levels earlier in the year as the economy went into recession.
As many as 4,400 people commit suicide every year.
REUTERS
Friday, November 20, 2009
About 60 percent of young people in Taiwan have considered suicide and more than third lack direction in life.
The results, a magazine survey claims, are because of a lack of public role models and weakened family support.
Taiwan-based CommonWealth magazine's first ever Life and Education Survey of 4,475 students between 15 and 22 found that most had thought about suicide, with 23 percent still considering it, survey center director Huang Ching- hsuan said.
About 34 percent of respondents said they had no idea what to do in life, the survey found.
“We were extremely surprised by the results,” Huang said, noting the high response rate.
In recent years teens in Taiwan have lost public role models including the 2008 death of Taiwan super-tycoon Wang Yung-ching and the conviction of ex-president Chen Shui-bian for graft this year, Huang said.
“This is an age of no role models. Teens today just know to get into good universities, but then what?”
Family ties have weakened over the same period as numbers of children per household decrease while both parents work.
Children are often sheltered to the point where they can't handle setbacks, even the death of a pet, said Huang.
CommonWealth, an authoritative privately funded magazine, has published surveys for about 10 years on trends in Taiwan.
After years of inflation and income stagnation that put pressure on common families, Taiwan unemployment surged to record levels earlier in the year as the economy went into recession.
As many as 4,400 people commit suicide every year.
REUTERS
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
For many Asian Americans, cultural factors help limit recession's impact
For many Asian Americans, cultural factors help limit recession's impact
By Haya El Nasser
USA TODAY
RALEIGH, N.C. - Until this summer, Loc Tran, 59, was a technician at Nortel, a global communications company that has facilities at Research Triangle Park here. Then she left and opened Pho' Cali, a Vietnamese restaurant.
When her brother lost his job at another local electronics company, he didn't become unemployed. He joined the family business. “My brother works here now,” Tran says.
The recession has been brutal for just about every segment of the population, but though the unemployment rate for Asian Americans has been inching upward, it has been far lower than the rates for whites, blacks, Hispanics or the nation as a whole. Among those groups, Asian Americans have had the lowest jobless rate every month since 2000, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking monthly unemployment among Asians.
The unemployment gap - 7.5% for Asians in October, compared with 10.2% nationwide -stems from a combination of education benchmarks and cultural traditions that foster family support when someone is out of work, researchers say.
“Asians in the United States, both native born Asians and Asian immigrants, have higher educational levels than other groups,” says Alan Berube, senior fellow and research director of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.
A recent Labor Department report on the work force shows a greater proportion of Asians than other racial or ethnic groups in management, professional and related occupations - jobs that require more schooling and are high-paying. About 47% work in management or professional jobs compared with 35% for the U.S. workforce as a whole.
Asians account for 5% of U.S. workers but make up a disproportionate share of computer software engineers (29%), computer programmers (20%), computer scientists and system analysts (16%).
“The character of this recession and how it's affected groups by educational attainment shows that information technology has done better, health care has done better,” Berube says.
Asians also are “tied in by a social network, a family network,” says Paul Ong, a professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA. “Rather than lay people off, you will find them spread the work out, and there is lots of use of family labor.”
Work ethics and close family ties certainly are not unique to Asians. But when coupled with high educational levels, those characteristics contribute to a lower unemployment rate. Hispanics, for example, demonstrate similar work and family values, but their population as a whole is not as educated as Asians.
Cultural and family ties are strong in immigrant-dominated communities and are powerful when combined with income and education, says Robert Lang, sociology professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
“Despite their upward mobility, Asians are still a minority group and thus more closely connected to one another than a native-born Caucasian American,” he says. “You're much more on your own if you're a middle-income, native-born white American, especially in a big city.”
Seema Agnani, executive director of Chhaya, a community organization in Jackson Heights, a South Asian neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., cautions that unemployment rates can be deceptively low because some immigrants work for cash and are not officially on a payroll.
“A lot of the folks who have lost income are not going to necessarily claim unemployment typically because they weren't working on the books in the first place,” she says.
The demographics of Asian Americans - from high educational levels to extended family networks - and complex cultural nuances help create the disparity in jobless rates:
•More educated. About 30% of Asians 25 and older have a bachelor's degree, and almost 20% have a graduate degree, compared with 17% and 10% for the nation overall. All other groups have a smaller share of college graduates: 18% of whites have a bachelor's degree, and 11% a more advanced degree; 12% and 6% of blacks; 9% and 4% of Hispanics.
•Larger households. The median income for Asian households is higher - $68,400 vs. $52,175 for all groups - but Asians have larger households, with more workers, Ong says. “If we look at per capita income rather than household income, it's another story.”
In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside area, for example, median household income is more than $65,000 a year for Asians, exceeding that of non-Hispanic whites by more than $10,000, the Census Bureau reports. Per capita income for Asians in this community, however, is lower than for whites.
•Family ties and small businesses. Hans Huang, 36, was a partner in a Raleigh law firm until it merged with another company. They parted ways. He started his own consulting firm and opened two restaurants - the hip 101 Lounge + Caf - and the Moonlight Pizza Company in downtown Raleigh.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Huang says investments his parents made also are in his and his sister's name - typical of the cohesion and financial support within many Asian families.
“There is a propensity for active networking with the community and family,” says Hai Ly Burk, who came to the USA as a refugee from Vietnam at age 3. She is a social worker at Duke Raleigh Hospital and president of the local chapter of the National Association of Asian American Professionals.
That sometimes can be more easily done in small, family-owned businesses than large corporations. Whites and Asians - and especially Asian immigrants - are more likely to be self-employed than other groups, the Labor Department says.
•Less risky jobs. Many Asians gravitate toward jobs that carry greater job security. A large number of Filipinos, for example, work as nurses, teachers and postal employees. “They are risk-averse … and tend to stay longer (in the same jobs) so they have seniority,” Ong says.
Health care is one of only two economic sectors to grow in the recession. The other is education.
Many Asians are doctors, nurses or technicians. Since the start of the recession, health care has added 597,000 jobs.
“Asian Americans are far more into the area of science technology and business in the corporate financial banking sector,” says Larry Shinagawa, director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland. “They are ensconced in government and education, though a significant portion are in small business.”
•Unemployment is frowned upon. There is a cultural resistance among Asians to being idle and collecting money for not working, Shinagawa says.
“Better to be underemployed than unemployed,” he says. “They're working in jobs where they're overly qualified and that has a lot to do with small business and a family network where they can support one another.”
Working-class Asians, especially immigrants, are likely to accept any job to earn money, says C.N. Le, director of Asian & Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
“That's all it is for them, as opposed to a lot of Americans who see their jobs as a reflection of their own identity and self-esteem,” says Le, creator of a website that focuses on Asian Americans, asian-nation.org.
National numbers mask the struggles of low-income Asian immigrants, many of them refugees such as the large Hmong community in Minnesota. Many in those communities aren't well-educated and don't speak English well.
Unemployment claims filed by Southeast Asians in Minnesota jumped 150% from 2007 to 2009, says Lisa Hasegawa, executive director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development.
Meanwhile, Chinatowns and Little Saigons in several cities are hurting because people are cutting back on restaurant spending, Shinagawa says, and small family businesses are being pushed out by big chains.
“Look at dry cleaners,” he says. “The Zip Cleaners (a chain) are taking over. In the past, bigger chain stores would never go into inner-city neighborhoods.” Now, “there is a recognition that people of color are a significant portion of the economy.”
Here in the Research Triangle, a region anchored by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, top-tier universities, high-tech companies and research centers have attracted Asian professionals.
Asians' unemployment rate here is even lower than their national rate, averaging just above 3% in the past year in Wake County, home of Raleigh. It was above 4% for non-Hispanic whites, almost 8% for blacks and above 5% for Hispanics, according to the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina.
Many highly educated Asians here have been recruited by companies and universities and granted special visas because of their expertise. If they're here, they have work. When the jobs disappear, they return home and never appear on U.S. unemployment rolls.
“With their American experience, they can leverage that and start their own company” back home, says Hector Javier, a native of Manila in the Philippines and a consultant in technology operations at Cisco Systems in the Research Triangle. “The first generation is going back.”
Not everyone is prospering. Cyndy Yu-Robinson, 43, was a public affairs officer for the Environmental Protection Agency in Durham. She wanted to go into the private sector and took a job as manager of corporate responsibility for computer maker Lenovo in March 2008. This year, Lenovo started cutting jobs, including hers.
“At first, it was disbelief. It couldn't be happening to me,” says Yu-Robinson, a mother of two. “I chose to go on unemployment because I want to take advantage of resources available to me to find the right job.”
She's active in Asian-American organizations and admits that hearing Asians' attitudes toward unemployment stings a bit. “If I didn't care about the kind of career, I would've taken any job,” Yu-Robinson says. “I don't want to just go back to government.”
While she lines up job interviews, she teaches up to eight karate classes a week at Triangle's Best Karate, the studio she owns with her husband.
Asad Abbasi, 54, came to the USA from Pakistan in 1973 and had never been without a job. He has a master's degree in engineering and was working for mobile phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson. When the tech bubble burst in 2002, he was laid off.
“In my life, just once,” Abbasi says. “I never went back. The heck with corporate America.”
He opened Baba Ghannouj restaurant in Cary, a Raleigh suburb, turning his cooking hobby into a job. He creates recipes, shops at the farmer's market and gets to know his customers. “It's less money, a lot of work but less torture,” Abbasi says.
By Haya El Nasser
USA TODAY
RALEIGH, N.C. - Until this summer, Loc Tran, 59, was a technician at Nortel, a global communications company that has facilities at Research Triangle Park here. Then she left and opened Pho' Cali, a Vietnamese restaurant.
When her brother lost his job at another local electronics company, he didn't become unemployed. He joined the family business. “My brother works here now,” Tran says.
The recession has been brutal for just about every segment of the population, but though the unemployment rate for Asian Americans has been inching upward, it has been far lower than the rates for whites, blacks, Hispanics or the nation as a whole. Among those groups, Asian Americans have had the lowest jobless rate every month since 2000, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking monthly unemployment among Asians.
The unemployment gap - 7.5% for Asians in October, compared with 10.2% nationwide -stems from a combination of education benchmarks and cultural traditions that foster family support when someone is out of work, researchers say.
“Asians in the United States, both native born Asians and Asian immigrants, have higher educational levels than other groups,” says Alan Berube, senior fellow and research director of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.
A recent Labor Department report on the work force shows a greater proportion of Asians than other racial or ethnic groups in management, professional and related occupations - jobs that require more schooling and are high-paying. About 47% work in management or professional jobs compared with 35% for the U.S. workforce as a whole.
Asians account for 5% of U.S. workers but make up a disproportionate share of computer software engineers (29%), computer programmers (20%), computer scientists and system analysts (16%).
“The character of this recession and how it's affected groups by educational attainment shows that information technology has done better, health care has done better,” Berube says.
Asians also are “tied in by a social network, a family network,” says Paul Ong, a professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA. “Rather than lay people off, you will find them spread the work out, and there is lots of use of family labor.”
Work ethics and close family ties certainly are not unique to Asians. But when coupled with high educational levels, those characteristics contribute to a lower unemployment rate. Hispanics, for example, demonstrate similar work and family values, but their population as a whole is not as educated as Asians.
Cultural and family ties are strong in immigrant-dominated communities and are powerful when combined with income and education, says Robert Lang, sociology professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
“Despite their upward mobility, Asians are still a minority group and thus more closely connected to one another than a native-born Caucasian American,” he says. “You're much more on your own if you're a middle-income, native-born white American, especially in a big city.”
Seema Agnani, executive director of Chhaya, a community organization in Jackson Heights, a South Asian neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., cautions that unemployment rates can be deceptively low because some immigrants work for cash and are not officially on a payroll.
“A lot of the folks who have lost income are not going to necessarily claim unemployment typically because they weren't working on the books in the first place,” she says.
The demographics of Asian Americans - from high educational levels to extended family networks - and complex cultural nuances help create the disparity in jobless rates:
•More educated. About 30% of Asians 25 and older have a bachelor's degree, and almost 20% have a graduate degree, compared with 17% and 10% for the nation overall. All other groups have a smaller share of college graduates: 18% of whites have a bachelor's degree, and 11% a more advanced degree; 12% and 6% of blacks; 9% and 4% of Hispanics.
•Larger households. The median income for Asian households is higher - $68,400 vs. $52,175 for all groups - but Asians have larger households, with more workers, Ong says. “If we look at per capita income rather than household income, it's another story.”
In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside area, for example, median household income is more than $65,000 a year for Asians, exceeding that of non-Hispanic whites by more than $10,000, the Census Bureau reports. Per capita income for Asians in this community, however, is lower than for whites.
•Family ties and small businesses. Hans Huang, 36, was a partner in a Raleigh law firm until it merged with another company. They parted ways. He started his own consulting firm and opened two restaurants - the hip 101 Lounge + Caf - and the Moonlight Pizza Company in downtown Raleigh.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Huang says investments his parents made also are in his and his sister's name - typical of the cohesion and financial support within many Asian families.
“There is a propensity for active networking with the community and family,” says Hai Ly Burk, who came to the USA as a refugee from Vietnam at age 3. She is a social worker at Duke Raleigh Hospital and president of the local chapter of the National Association of Asian American Professionals.
That sometimes can be more easily done in small, family-owned businesses than large corporations. Whites and Asians - and especially Asian immigrants - are more likely to be self-employed than other groups, the Labor Department says.
•Less risky jobs. Many Asians gravitate toward jobs that carry greater job security. A large number of Filipinos, for example, work as nurses, teachers and postal employees. “They are risk-averse … and tend to stay longer (in the same jobs) so they have seniority,” Ong says.
Health care is one of only two economic sectors to grow in the recession. The other is education.
Many Asians are doctors, nurses or technicians. Since the start of the recession, health care has added 597,000 jobs.
“Asian Americans are far more into the area of science technology and business in the corporate financial banking sector,” says Larry Shinagawa, director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland. “They are ensconced in government and education, though a significant portion are in small business.”
•Unemployment is frowned upon. There is a cultural resistance among Asians to being idle and collecting money for not working, Shinagawa says.
“Better to be underemployed than unemployed,” he says. “They're working in jobs where they're overly qualified and that has a lot to do with small business and a family network where they can support one another.”
Working-class Asians, especially immigrants, are likely to accept any job to earn money, says C.N. Le, director of Asian & Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
“That's all it is for them, as opposed to a lot of Americans who see their jobs as a reflection of their own identity and self-esteem,” says Le, creator of a website that focuses on Asian Americans, asian-nation.org.
National numbers mask the struggles of low-income Asian immigrants, many of them refugees such as the large Hmong community in Minnesota. Many in those communities aren't well-educated and don't speak English well.
Unemployment claims filed by Southeast Asians in Minnesota jumped 150% from 2007 to 2009, says Lisa Hasegawa, executive director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development.
Meanwhile, Chinatowns and Little Saigons in several cities are hurting because people are cutting back on restaurant spending, Shinagawa says, and small family businesses are being pushed out by big chains.
“Look at dry cleaners,” he says. “The Zip Cleaners (a chain) are taking over. In the past, bigger chain stores would never go into inner-city neighborhoods.” Now, “there is a recognition that people of color are a significant portion of the economy.”
Here in the Research Triangle, a region anchored by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, top-tier universities, high-tech companies and research centers have attracted Asian professionals.
Asians' unemployment rate here is even lower than their national rate, averaging just above 3% in the past year in Wake County, home of Raleigh. It was above 4% for non-Hispanic whites, almost 8% for blacks and above 5% for Hispanics, according to the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina.
Many highly educated Asians here have been recruited by companies and universities and granted special visas because of their expertise. If they're here, they have work. When the jobs disappear, they return home and never appear on U.S. unemployment rolls.
“With their American experience, they can leverage that and start their own company” back home, says Hector Javier, a native of Manila in the Philippines and a consultant in technology operations at Cisco Systems in the Research Triangle. “The first generation is going back.”
Not everyone is prospering. Cyndy Yu-Robinson, 43, was a public affairs officer for the Environmental Protection Agency in Durham. She wanted to go into the private sector and took a job as manager of corporate responsibility for computer maker Lenovo in March 2008. This year, Lenovo started cutting jobs, including hers.
“At first, it was disbelief. It couldn't be happening to me,” says Yu-Robinson, a mother of two. “I chose to go on unemployment because I want to take advantage of resources available to me to find the right job.”
She's active in Asian-American organizations and admits that hearing Asians' attitudes toward unemployment stings a bit. “If I didn't care about the kind of career, I would've taken any job,” Yu-Robinson says. “I don't want to just go back to government.”
While she lines up job interviews, she teaches up to eight karate classes a week at Triangle's Best Karate, the studio she owns with her husband.
Asad Abbasi, 54, came to the USA from Pakistan in 1973 and had never been without a job. He has a master's degree in engineering and was working for mobile phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson. When the tech bubble burst in 2002, he was laid off.
“In my life, just once,” Abbasi says. “I never went back. The heck with corporate America.”
He opened Baba Ghannouj restaurant in Cary, a Raleigh suburb, turning his cooking hobby into a job. He creates recipes, shops at the farmer's market and gets to know his customers. “It's less money, a lot of work but less torture,” Abbasi says.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Living in a cage in Hong Kong
Living in a cage in Hong Kong
By Eunice Yoon, CNN
October 28, 2009 -- Updated 1649 GMT (0049 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/28/cage.homes/index.html
Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- If you have ever complained that your apartment is the size of a shoebox, consider the living space of Hong Kong resident Chung For Lau.
Chung lives in a 625 square foot (58.06 square meter) flat here with 18 strangers.
The place is sectioned into tiny cubicles made of wooden planks and wire mesh. Everything he has acquired over the years -- clothes, dishes, figurines, a tired TV set -- is squeezed into this tiny cube, a modernized version of what is known here as a cage home.
With all the buzz over Hong Kong's exorbitant luxury property (like the recent record-breaking sale of a $57 million duplex), it may be hard to believe that people have been living in cage homes in this city for years.
But with Hong Kong home to some of the most densely-populated urban districts in the world, real estate has always come at a premium, no matter how small.
Chung's cage is a newer yet less-desirable model, we are told. The wire mesh one, which resembles an over-sized rabbit hutch, is apparently more comfortable.
Occupants have less privacy, but the temperatures don't get as high as in the wooden-mesh variety. A thermometer in Chung's home reached 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit). Sometimes it gets so hot, Chung said, that he wants to die.
Chung used to be a security guard. In the good old days he earned about $500 (HK$3,875) per month. But as the economic crisis set in, his full time job went to part time work until he was laid off this past summer.
As he stared into his bank passbook, Chung lamented that he wouldn't be able to make the $150 rent (HK$1,160) this month -- these cubes aren't cheap.
They are stacked on two levels -- $100 (HK$775) for a cube on the upper deck and $150 for the lower bunk.
The lower cubes are more expensive because you can just barely stand upright in them. Do the math and the apartment owner is collecting roughly $2,500 a month (HK$19,375) from these people.
The 19 occupants share two toilets. A small rubber hose attached to a leaky faucet is what they use to wash themselves. Social workers who monitor the apartments said the electricity is donated, so a few of them have TVs. One person on the upper deck has an aquarium.
One social workers said that because of the recession these homes are being occupied more frequently by those made jobless -- people in their 30s and 40s. The social worker said none of the younger people wanted to speak on camera for fear their chances of finding work would be hurt.
Chung, 67, is now waiting for welfare to kick in and is on a long list for public housing. The government says it is doing its best to meet its citizens' needs, but Chung says he has lost all hope. Economic recovery or not, he feels forgotten.
By Eunice Yoon, CNN
October 28, 2009 -- Updated 1649 GMT (0049 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/28/cage.homes/index.html
Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- If you have ever complained that your apartment is the size of a shoebox, consider the living space of Hong Kong resident Chung For Lau.
Chung lives in a 625 square foot (58.06 square meter) flat here with 18 strangers.
The place is sectioned into tiny cubicles made of wooden planks and wire mesh. Everything he has acquired over the years -- clothes, dishes, figurines, a tired TV set -- is squeezed into this tiny cube, a modernized version of what is known here as a cage home.
With all the buzz over Hong Kong's exorbitant luxury property (like the recent record-breaking sale of a $57 million duplex), it may be hard to believe that people have been living in cage homes in this city for years.
But with Hong Kong home to some of the most densely-populated urban districts in the world, real estate has always come at a premium, no matter how small.
Chung's cage is a newer yet less-desirable model, we are told. The wire mesh one, which resembles an over-sized rabbit hutch, is apparently more comfortable.
Occupants have less privacy, but the temperatures don't get as high as in the wooden-mesh variety. A thermometer in Chung's home reached 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit). Sometimes it gets so hot, Chung said, that he wants to die.
Chung used to be a security guard. In the good old days he earned about $500 (HK$3,875) per month. But as the economic crisis set in, his full time job went to part time work until he was laid off this past summer.
As he stared into his bank passbook, Chung lamented that he wouldn't be able to make the $150 rent (HK$1,160) this month -- these cubes aren't cheap.
They are stacked on two levels -- $100 (HK$775) for a cube on the upper deck and $150 for the lower bunk.
The lower cubes are more expensive because you can just barely stand upright in them. Do the math and the apartment owner is collecting roughly $2,500 a month (HK$19,375) from these people.
The 19 occupants share two toilets. A small rubber hose attached to a leaky faucet is what they use to wash themselves. Social workers who monitor the apartments said the electricity is donated, so a few of them have TVs. One person on the upper deck has an aquarium.
One social workers said that because of the recession these homes are being occupied more frequently by those made jobless -- people in their 30s and 40s. The social worker said none of the younger people wanted to speak on camera for fear their chances of finding work would be hurt.
Chung, 67, is now waiting for welfare to kick in and is on a long list for public housing. The government says it is doing its best to meet its citizens' needs, but Chung says he has lost all hope. Economic recovery or not, he feels forgotten.
Hong Kong's 'celebrity tutors' turn millionaires
Hong Kong's 'celebrity tutors' turn millionaires
By Anna Coren, CNN
November 10, 2009 -- Updated 0452 GMT (1252 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/08/hong.kong.celebrity.tutors/index.html
Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Dressed in Louis Vuitton from head to toe with the exception of a Gucci belt, Richard Eng stands out in his neighborhood in Hong Kong's New Territories. When we arrive at his home, the 45 year old father of one warmly welcomes us. His manners are as impeccable as the hairstyle and clothes that he proudly wears. But it's not the chic and manicured man standing in front of us that's caught our attention -- but the bright yellow Lamborghini parked in his driveway.
Now, as we all know, teachers around the world are renowned for being over worked and underpaid; but that rule does NOT apply to Hong Kong's “celebrity tutors” and Richard Eng is living proof. Twenty years ago he began working as a teacher. During the day he'd teach his school students, and then at night he'd work as a tutor. Through word of mouth, these evening classes grew to the point where he set up his own tutorial school. Eng then decided to take the business to the next level -- advertising in newspapers and on television and that's when the transformation began.
He understood the interest, fascination and obsession with celebrities and began marketing his services with that in mind. With billboards, glossy brochures, eye catching TV commercials and model photo shoots, he and his tutors in their designer gear, fashionable haircuts and Hollywood smiles, appear more like pop or movie stars promoting their latest album or film than anything resembling a teacher. And it's paid off.
He now operates 12 schools in Hong Kong and has just opened one in Tokyo. He has a total of 50,000 students, employs 300 staff and last year he personally took home more than US$1 million. Eng says: “This is a chance in Hong Kong for some people to teach and help students. At the same time, students come to class and see something beautiful and they learn exam skills ... that's why we're worth it and why we are here.”
With this success, Eng has reaped the financial rewards. He not only owns a US$500,000 Lamborghini that he drives to work most days, but also owns property all over Hong Kong and has a designer wardrobe and watch collection that would rival any fashionista. But he's not content with the status quo and has plans to expand into China next year.
He admits some of his students are attracted to his celebrity status but dismisses this as the core reason for his success. “I have to say they may come to me at the beginning out of curiosity, but as time goes by they realize I can teach them exam skills very important in Hong Kong.”
Tutorial schools are big business in Hong Kong. Four major schools dominate, but there are hundreds of others -- attended by approximately one third of all students. They pay approximately US$130 a month to improve their grades in a society where information is power.
One of Eng's students is 18-year-old Daisy Chung who has been attending his English class for the past two years. “My grade improved from C to B ... now I hope there's room for improvement.”
While the big names like Richard Eng are multi-millionaires, the average celebrity tutors earn more than US$120,000 a year. Government teachers take home less than half that. The Education Department says while the tutorial schools are popular, it doesn't endorse them. Deputy Secretary for Hong Kong Education Dr Stephanie Chan says: “I'm concerned how parents and students use the services ... whether the money is spent wisely, but if it proves to help then I don't have the right to say I disapprove of it.”
But as long as children's education is considered an investment, Eng and his colleagues will continue to make the sums of money that most people can only dream of.
By Anna Coren, CNN
November 10, 2009 -- Updated 0452 GMT (1252 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/08/hong.kong.celebrity.tutors/index.html
Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Dressed in Louis Vuitton from head to toe with the exception of a Gucci belt, Richard Eng stands out in his neighborhood in Hong Kong's New Territories. When we arrive at his home, the 45 year old father of one warmly welcomes us. His manners are as impeccable as the hairstyle and clothes that he proudly wears. But it's not the chic and manicured man standing in front of us that's caught our attention -- but the bright yellow Lamborghini parked in his driveway.
Now, as we all know, teachers around the world are renowned for being over worked and underpaid; but that rule does NOT apply to Hong Kong's “celebrity tutors” and Richard Eng is living proof. Twenty years ago he began working as a teacher. During the day he'd teach his school students, and then at night he'd work as a tutor. Through word of mouth, these evening classes grew to the point where he set up his own tutorial school. Eng then decided to take the business to the next level -- advertising in newspapers and on television and that's when the transformation began.
He understood the interest, fascination and obsession with celebrities and began marketing his services with that in mind. With billboards, glossy brochures, eye catching TV commercials and model photo shoots, he and his tutors in their designer gear, fashionable haircuts and Hollywood smiles, appear more like pop or movie stars promoting their latest album or film than anything resembling a teacher. And it's paid off.
He now operates 12 schools in Hong Kong and has just opened one in Tokyo. He has a total of 50,000 students, employs 300 staff and last year he personally took home more than US$1 million. Eng says: “This is a chance in Hong Kong for some people to teach and help students. At the same time, students come to class and see something beautiful and they learn exam skills ... that's why we're worth it and why we are here.”
With this success, Eng has reaped the financial rewards. He not only owns a US$500,000 Lamborghini that he drives to work most days, but also owns property all over Hong Kong and has a designer wardrobe and watch collection that would rival any fashionista. But he's not content with the status quo and has plans to expand into China next year.
He admits some of his students are attracted to his celebrity status but dismisses this as the core reason for his success. “I have to say they may come to me at the beginning out of curiosity, but as time goes by they realize I can teach them exam skills very important in Hong Kong.”
Tutorial schools are big business in Hong Kong. Four major schools dominate, but there are hundreds of others -- attended by approximately one third of all students. They pay approximately US$130 a month to improve their grades in a society where information is power.
One of Eng's students is 18-year-old Daisy Chung who has been attending his English class for the past two years. “My grade improved from C to B ... now I hope there's room for improvement.”
While the big names like Richard Eng are multi-millionaires, the average celebrity tutors earn more than US$120,000 a year. Government teachers take home less than half that. The Education Department says while the tutorial schools are popular, it doesn't endorse them. Deputy Secretary for Hong Kong Education Dr Stephanie Chan says: “I'm concerned how parents and students use the services ... whether the money is spent wisely, but if it proves to help then I don't have the right to say I disapprove of it.”
But as long as children's education is considered an investment, Eng and his colleagues will continue to make the sums of money that most people can only dream of.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Hong Kong vs. Singapore
Art Wars
Hong Kong vs. Singapore
By ALEXANDRA A. SENO
Wall Street Journal, OCTOBER 30, 2009
HONG KONG -- These are the trophies of a war between Singapore and Hong Kong: whimsical oils by Indonesian boy-wonder artist I Nyoman Masriadi; an abstract painting by Zao Wou-ki; and an ancient Chinese imperial throne worth US$11 million. All of these artworks turned up for sale in Hong Kong in recent months -- and set auction records.
Longtime rivals in trade and finance, Hong Kong and Singapore are vying to become Asia's regional arts hub, part of a strategy to be crowned Asia's top city. Already the third-largest art-auction market in the world, Hong Kong has picked up the pace by setting aside nearly US$3 billion for a massive development known as West Kowloon Cultural District, a move some people think will ultimately catapult Hong Kong to victory.
Both cities understand that “to build a super-competitive, super-productive society” that “can attract the world's best and brightest” professionals from an array of industries they need a world-class arts and culture scene, says Richard Florida, who studies global competitiveness and urban development at the University of Toronto. “What makes New York and London so robust, even at times of economic crisis, is that anyone in the world wants to go there (to work) and that's what Hong Kong and Singapore are trying to be.” Right now, Mr. Florida adds, “Hong Kong has the edge.”
On one side of the battle is the island-state of Singapore, with a total population of about five million. In the mid-1980s, during a recession, the country looked with envy at Hong Kong's cultural offerings and decided it could do better. Specifically it eyed Hong Kong's annual month-long arts festival that showcases local and international talent from jazz greats like Ornette Coleman to the English National Ballet to performers of Cantonese opera.
A 1989 Singapore government report cited the “importance of culture and the arts” not only as tools for nation-building and to generate revenue for the tourism and entertainment industries, but to “enhance our quality of life.”
A decade later, Singapore launched the first phase of its ambitious “Renaissance City” plan aimed at creating a “Distinctive Global City of Culture and the Arts.” It invested more than US$1 billion in infrastructure, including several museums and a 4,000-seat complex of theaters, studios and concert halls called the Esplanade, which opened in 2002, and spiced up its arts programming with diversity and a regional flavor.
New entities were founded, such as the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, one of the region's most dynamic arts organizations, which is housed in more than 40,000 square feet of converted warehouse space on the city's riverfront. The printmaking specialist quickly established a profile in the international culture world, collaborating early on projects with the likes of the established American artist Donald Sultan, and lately with Asia's cultural who's who, including Indonesian contemporary painter Agus Suwage and edgy Japanese installation artist Tabaimo.
And Singapore has been cleverly retrofitting colonial-era structures as arts venues. Following a renovation, the circa 1880s National Museum of Singapore reopened in 2006. A school and its chapel built in the 1850s was turned in 1996 into the Singapore Art Museum, a charming cultural space with exhibition galleries of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art that are on par with the best museums in the world. Down the street in another former school building, an extension called SAM at 8Q, specifically housing contemporary art, opened in August 2008. The National Art Gallery is set to throw open its doors in 2013 at the former Supreme Court and City Hall complexes.
The government launched a biennale in 2006 and over the past decade has enhanced its own annual arts festival. According to Singapore's National Arts Council, between 1997 and 2007, the “vibrancy” of the local arts scene, measured by the number of performances and exhibition days, quadruped to more than 26,000. The government has taken steps to attract world-class theater productions to Singapore, and it has loosened contraints on local productions. Today, mainstream theaters increasingly are allowed to take on political as well as social themes, such as homosexuality, the practice of which is illegal in Singapore.
To groom local talent, the National Arts Council sponsors a program for the performing, visual and literary arts that helps fund Singapore residents to do in-residency stints abroad.
But there's a key ingredient that Singapore so far hasn't been able to create: a big art-auction market. Some smaller art-auction houses hold sales in Singapore, but the big ones -- Christie's and Sotheby's -- have pulled out and moved their Southeast Asian art auctions to Hong Kong, the former British colony that is home to seven million people and became a Chinese territory in 1997.
For a city, having the ingredients for a thriving art market creates a virtuous circle. The powerful marketing machines of the big auction houses, including public previews of coming sales, raises awareness and appreciation of art in the community. All this encourages local artists to create more art. And that momentum, in turn, contributes to the development of a city's broader cultural scene, including music, theater and design.
“We are a financial city, so people understand money but don't always understand art,” says Claire Hsu, executive director of Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based regional culture think tank. “People pay attention to prices, thinking in terms of investment,” she adds, so “people have become interested in art.”
In 2007, Hong Kong became the world's third-largest auction market after New York and London, partly because of its proximity to mainland China and the emergence of China's deep-pocketed collectors. That put Hong Kong firmly on the global art-commerce map.
The point is “about attracting the people who make it matter -- artists, critics, curators and collectors,” says Eugene Tan, formerly head of Singapore's Institute of Contemporary Arts and a high-profile personality on the Singapore arts scene who recently relocated to Hong Kong. “Hong Kong has that advantage” of a collector base that “Singapore has always lacked.”
He and others contend that Hong Kong also has another advantage: a livelier local artists scene.
“Singapore is very planned,” Mr. Tan says, and in the long run, that can mean missing something that “can happen if things are allowed to grow organically.”
Christie's and Sotheby's, the world's two main auction houses, have carefully nurtured their businesses in Hong Kong for decades. Last year, Sotheby's consolidated its sales in Asia by moving its auctions of Southeast Asian contemporary art to Hong Kong from Singapore. That followed a similar move by Christie's in 2002.
Today, the bulk of both their revenues in Asia comes from Hong Kong sales of Chinese antiques and art, categories that have seen prices soar along with China's economic growth. At Sotheby's autumn sales this month in Hong Kong, for instance, an imperial carved throne from the Qianlong period (1736-95) sold for more than US$11 million, including the buyer's premium, a world record for any piece of Chinese furniture sold at auction. The buyer was a Chinese collector in Shanghai.
And at Christie's spring Hong Kong sales in late May, an Asian buyer paid the equivalent of US$4.6 million, including buyer's premium, for the 1957 painting “Nous Deux,” by Zao Wou-ki, the second-highest price ever paid at auction for his work. Harvard University's art-museum fund consigned the piece to Christie's Hong Kong salesroom expecting it to bring a higher price than in the U.S, partly because many collectors in this region consider Mr. Zao to be China's most important living artist. (By comparison, at the same Christie's sales, the entire 72-lot array of Southeast Asian art, which was 90% sold by value, raised just US$2.6 million.)
Relocating the Southeast Asian auctions to Hong Kong buoyed other categories as, for instance, collectors of Chinese contemporary works started to also buy Southeast Asian paintings. More South Korean and Indonesian collectors are turning up at the Hong Kong sales, too. “Since moving to Hong Kong, we saw a three-fold, four-fold increase in clients who participated in our sales of Southeast Asian art,” says Andrew Foster, Christie's Asia president. “Average values go higher as you have more bidders, that's just how auctions work.” He credits the move to Hong Kong with boosting the prices of some lots by as much as 1,000% from what the auction house estimates they would have brought in Singapore.
Several world records for Indonesian art have been established at Hong Kong sales. Right after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008, just as prices of contemporary Chinese paintings were cooling, Jogjakarta painter I Nyoman Masriadi's satirical triptych “The Man From Bantul (The Final Round),” dating from 2000, netted more than US$1 million at Sotheby's, a first for a contemporary piece from Southeast Asia.
What's more, the move to Hong Kong by the major two houses prompted some smaller ones to follow. “We will go where we feel there is a demand for Asian contemporary art, which right now is Hong Kong,” says Daniel Komala, chief executive of Indonesia's high profile Larasati Auctioneers, which still also holds auctions in Indonesia, Singapore and the Netherlands. Mr. Komala is spokesman for a group of four Asian auction houses, his own plus ones from South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, that staged an inaugural Hong Kong Asian Auction Week in May, selling a respectable 77% of the 146 lots on offer. The group plans another sale in November.
Galleries, too, are following the money. Among them is London's Ben Brown Fine Arts, which plans to formally open in Hong Kong in late November. Ben Brown represents such contemporary art marquee names as conceptual artist Jeff Koons and the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographer Andreas Gursky and sculptors Claude Lalanne and the late François-Xavier Lalanne. Tamsin Roberts, who will head the Hong Kong branch, says that the gallery has a number of clients in Hong Kong and now will have access to a new market, China. “Everyone is looking at the mainland,” she adds.
Besides geography, Hong Kong's tax system works in its favor. The import and export of artworks is duty-free and there is no sales tax. By comparison, Singapore has a consumption tax of 7%, while China levies a 34% import tax on artworks.
Still, Hong Kong has relatively high overhead costs. John Andreas, CEO of Southeast Asian art specialist Borobudur Auction in Singapore is impressed with Hong Kong's position in the art business but declares: “The cost in Hong Kong -- for hotels, venues, labor -- is at minimum four times of Singapore, but it doesn't mean that selling prices will be four times more.” Mr. Andreas, a collector himself who made his fortune in shipping, has no immediate plans to hold sales in Hong Kong. His five-year-old company conducts auctions in Jakarta and Singapore.
As for art infrastructure, Hong Kong does have some performing-arts venues as well as museums such as for heritage and science. But many of the spaces aren't inviting; there hasn't been a significant art museum built in about 20 years. And while Hong Kong's overall arts scene has improved in recent times and draws such international attractions as the Chanel Mobile Art show, much of the focus, unlike Singapore's more diverse regional offerings, is on Chinese-oriented art and antiques displays.
The Hong Kong government first hit upon the idea in 1998 of building an integrated arts and culture neighborhood on 40 hectares of reclaimed land in the West Kowloon district. After many fits and starts, planning for the project recently picked up some momentum. Earlier this year, at a time when funding to museums and the arts in some countries was being trimmed, the Hong Kong government approved a HK$21.6 billion ($2.8 billion) cash endowment for the project. Then it named Henry Tang, heir to a textile fortune and a collector of Chinese paintings who is also the No. 2 official in the Hong Kong government, to oversee the project, which is currently undergoing yet another round of public consultations. But the only senior executive hired so far abruptly quit after three months citing personal reasons. The post remains vacant.
Mr. Tang says he expects a chief executive to be appointed in early 2010, and to be close to choosing the main architect. Nevertheless, even if it all goes as planned, the first phase won't be open until 2016.
The West Kowloon project has been “frustrating and painful,” says Asia Art Archive's Ms. Hsu, who is also on the advisory panel for the museum at the new West Kowloon development. “For the public it has looked like the government is stalling, but it gives me a lot of hope. The government is very concerned about getting it right.”
Among the missteps so far was an announcement in 2001 that a design by Norman Foster had won an international contest for the iconic structure. Mr. Foster proposed a giant glass canopy to cover the whole 40-hectare site. The idea was to award the project to a single entity that would not only commit to running museums but also to building the canopy. Bidders lined up all-star casts of possible museum partners and consultants: the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou. In exchange, the entity could make and sell commercial and residential buildings in the area. By 2004, that approach got the kibosh “because of public opposition to the project related to political developments of the time and memories of Cyberport,” says Ms. Hsu. (The US$2 billion Cyberport project was to be a focal point for a master plan to turn Hong Kong into a technology hub. The right to develop a large tract of government land was awarded in 1999 to Hong Kong businessman Richard Li without a public bid and is now mainly a residential project.)
The current concept for West Kowloon was hatched in June 2007. It calls for about 750,000 square feet of museum space and a 100,000-square-foot exhibition center -- and 15 performance venues with seating for 15,000, more than triple the capacity of Singapore's Esplanade complex. About US$1 billion, or a third of the overall West Kowloon budget, is earmarked for acquisitions for an as-yet-undefined but quirky “Museum Plus.” The museum, though, isn't expected to be completed before 2031.
Yet, just having West Kowloon back in the headlines has spurred the staging of more ambitious projects like this year's Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in December, which will feature a pavilion by noted Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
Meantime, critics say more needs to be done to further Hong Kong's art-hub ambitions lest it lose out to Singapore. Plus, Hong Kong needs to stave off a longer-term threat from the likes of Shanghai and Beijing, both of which have burgeoning international arts scenes.
“West Kowloon is a catalyst to cultural development though we also need more policies in place,” says Ada Wong, a founder and chair of the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture and a former adviser on culture to the Hong Kong government. “We need better art education for the public and to engage” the art-starved housing developments, mostly in Hong Kong's New Territories area.
Undaunted, Singapore is diligently pushing ahead and has opened several museums and other arts venues while Hong Kong has dithered on the construction of West Kowloon. Christie's also recently picked Singapore to be the site of a global fine-arts storage facility to open in a duty-free zone in January.
Calling the process of developing an arts scene “never-ending,” Edmund Cheng, who chairs Singapore's arts council, said in a recent report outlining the city's plans through 2012 that “while there is cause for us to celebrate our achievements, we must set our sights farther afield at the same time.”
—Alexandra A. Seno is a Hong Kong-based writer.
Hong Kong vs. Singapore
By ALEXANDRA A. SENO
Wall Street Journal, OCTOBER 30, 2009
HONG KONG -- These are the trophies of a war between Singapore and Hong Kong: whimsical oils by Indonesian boy-wonder artist I Nyoman Masriadi; an abstract painting by Zao Wou-ki; and an ancient Chinese imperial throne worth US$11 million. All of these artworks turned up for sale in Hong Kong in recent months -- and set auction records.
Longtime rivals in trade and finance, Hong Kong and Singapore are vying to become Asia's regional arts hub, part of a strategy to be crowned Asia's top city. Already the third-largest art-auction market in the world, Hong Kong has picked up the pace by setting aside nearly US$3 billion for a massive development known as West Kowloon Cultural District, a move some people think will ultimately catapult Hong Kong to victory.
Both cities understand that “to build a super-competitive, super-productive society” that “can attract the world's best and brightest” professionals from an array of industries they need a world-class arts and culture scene, says Richard Florida, who studies global competitiveness and urban development at the University of Toronto. “What makes New York and London so robust, even at times of economic crisis, is that anyone in the world wants to go there (to work) and that's what Hong Kong and Singapore are trying to be.” Right now, Mr. Florida adds, “Hong Kong has the edge.”
On one side of the battle is the island-state of Singapore, with a total population of about five million. In the mid-1980s, during a recession, the country looked with envy at Hong Kong's cultural offerings and decided it could do better. Specifically it eyed Hong Kong's annual month-long arts festival that showcases local and international talent from jazz greats like Ornette Coleman to the English National Ballet to performers of Cantonese opera.
A 1989 Singapore government report cited the “importance of culture and the arts” not only as tools for nation-building and to generate revenue for the tourism and entertainment industries, but to “enhance our quality of life.”
A decade later, Singapore launched the first phase of its ambitious “Renaissance City” plan aimed at creating a “Distinctive Global City of Culture and the Arts.” It invested more than US$1 billion in infrastructure, including several museums and a 4,000-seat complex of theaters, studios and concert halls called the Esplanade, which opened in 2002, and spiced up its arts programming with diversity and a regional flavor.
New entities were founded, such as the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, one of the region's most dynamic arts organizations, which is housed in more than 40,000 square feet of converted warehouse space on the city's riverfront. The printmaking specialist quickly established a profile in the international culture world, collaborating early on projects with the likes of the established American artist Donald Sultan, and lately with Asia's cultural who's who, including Indonesian contemporary painter Agus Suwage and edgy Japanese installation artist Tabaimo.
And Singapore has been cleverly retrofitting colonial-era structures as arts venues. Following a renovation, the circa 1880s National Museum of Singapore reopened in 2006. A school and its chapel built in the 1850s was turned in 1996 into the Singapore Art Museum, a charming cultural space with exhibition galleries of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art that are on par with the best museums in the world. Down the street in another former school building, an extension called SAM at 8Q, specifically housing contemporary art, opened in August 2008. The National Art Gallery is set to throw open its doors in 2013 at the former Supreme Court and City Hall complexes.
The government launched a biennale in 2006 and over the past decade has enhanced its own annual arts festival. According to Singapore's National Arts Council, between 1997 and 2007, the “vibrancy” of the local arts scene, measured by the number of performances and exhibition days, quadruped to more than 26,000. The government has taken steps to attract world-class theater productions to Singapore, and it has loosened contraints on local productions. Today, mainstream theaters increasingly are allowed to take on political as well as social themes, such as homosexuality, the practice of which is illegal in Singapore.
To groom local talent, the National Arts Council sponsors a program for the performing, visual and literary arts that helps fund Singapore residents to do in-residency stints abroad.
But there's a key ingredient that Singapore so far hasn't been able to create: a big art-auction market. Some smaller art-auction houses hold sales in Singapore, but the big ones -- Christie's and Sotheby's -- have pulled out and moved their Southeast Asian art auctions to Hong Kong, the former British colony that is home to seven million people and became a Chinese territory in 1997.
For a city, having the ingredients for a thriving art market creates a virtuous circle. The powerful marketing machines of the big auction houses, including public previews of coming sales, raises awareness and appreciation of art in the community. All this encourages local artists to create more art. And that momentum, in turn, contributes to the development of a city's broader cultural scene, including music, theater and design.
“We are a financial city, so people understand money but don't always understand art,” says Claire Hsu, executive director of Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based regional culture think tank. “People pay attention to prices, thinking in terms of investment,” she adds, so “people have become interested in art.”
In 2007, Hong Kong became the world's third-largest auction market after New York and London, partly because of its proximity to mainland China and the emergence of China's deep-pocketed collectors. That put Hong Kong firmly on the global art-commerce map.
The point is “about attracting the people who make it matter -- artists, critics, curators and collectors,” says Eugene Tan, formerly head of Singapore's Institute of Contemporary Arts and a high-profile personality on the Singapore arts scene who recently relocated to Hong Kong. “Hong Kong has that advantage” of a collector base that “Singapore has always lacked.”
He and others contend that Hong Kong also has another advantage: a livelier local artists scene.
“Singapore is very planned,” Mr. Tan says, and in the long run, that can mean missing something that “can happen if things are allowed to grow organically.”
Christie's and Sotheby's, the world's two main auction houses, have carefully nurtured their businesses in Hong Kong for decades. Last year, Sotheby's consolidated its sales in Asia by moving its auctions of Southeast Asian contemporary art to Hong Kong from Singapore. That followed a similar move by Christie's in 2002.
Today, the bulk of both their revenues in Asia comes from Hong Kong sales of Chinese antiques and art, categories that have seen prices soar along with China's economic growth. At Sotheby's autumn sales this month in Hong Kong, for instance, an imperial carved throne from the Qianlong period (1736-95) sold for more than US$11 million, including the buyer's premium, a world record for any piece of Chinese furniture sold at auction. The buyer was a Chinese collector in Shanghai.
And at Christie's spring Hong Kong sales in late May, an Asian buyer paid the equivalent of US$4.6 million, including buyer's premium, for the 1957 painting “Nous Deux,” by Zao Wou-ki, the second-highest price ever paid at auction for his work. Harvard University's art-museum fund consigned the piece to Christie's Hong Kong salesroom expecting it to bring a higher price than in the U.S, partly because many collectors in this region consider Mr. Zao to be China's most important living artist. (By comparison, at the same Christie's sales, the entire 72-lot array of Southeast Asian art, which was 90% sold by value, raised just US$2.6 million.)
Relocating the Southeast Asian auctions to Hong Kong buoyed other categories as, for instance, collectors of Chinese contemporary works started to also buy Southeast Asian paintings. More South Korean and Indonesian collectors are turning up at the Hong Kong sales, too. “Since moving to Hong Kong, we saw a three-fold, four-fold increase in clients who participated in our sales of Southeast Asian art,” says Andrew Foster, Christie's Asia president. “Average values go higher as you have more bidders, that's just how auctions work.” He credits the move to Hong Kong with boosting the prices of some lots by as much as 1,000% from what the auction house estimates they would have brought in Singapore.
Several world records for Indonesian art have been established at Hong Kong sales. Right after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008, just as prices of contemporary Chinese paintings were cooling, Jogjakarta painter I Nyoman Masriadi's satirical triptych “The Man From Bantul (The Final Round),” dating from 2000, netted more than US$1 million at Sotheby's, a first for a contemporary piece from Southeast Asia.
What's more, the move to Hong Kong by the major two houses prompted some smaller ones to follow. “We will go where we feel there is a demand for Asian contemporary art, which right now is Hong Kong,” says Daniel Komala, chief executive of Indonesia's high profile Larasati Auctioneers, which still also holds auctions in Indonesia, Singapore and the Netherlands. Mr. Komala is spokesman for a group of four Asian auction houses, his own plus ones from South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, that staged an inaugural Hong Kong Asian Auction Week in May, selling a respectable 77% of the 146 lots on offer. The group plans another sale in November.
Galleries, too, are following the money. Among them is London's Ben Brown Fine Arts, which plans to formally open in Hong Kong in late November. Ben Brown represents such contemporary art marquee names as conceptual artist Jeff Koons and the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographer Andreas Gursky and sculptors Claude Lalanne and the late François-Xavier Lalanne. Tamsin Roberts, who will head the Hong Kong branch, says that the gallery has a number of clients in Hong Kong and now will have access to a new market, China. “Everyone is looking at the mainland,” she adds.
Besides geography, Hong Kong's tax system works in its favor. The import and export of artworks is duty-free and there is no sales tax. By comparison, Singapore has a consumption tax of 7%, while China levies a 34% import tax on artworks.
Still, Hong Kong has relatively high overhead costs. John Andreas, CEO of Southeast Asian art specialist Borobudur Auction in Singapore is impressed with Hong Kong's position in the art business but declares: “The cost in Hong Kong -- for hotels, venues, labor -- is at minimum four times of Singapore, but it doesn't mean that selling prices will be four times more.” Mr. Andreas, a collector himself who made his fortune in shipping, has no immediate plans to hold sales in Hong Kong. His five-year-old company conducts auctions in Jakarta and Singapore.
As for art infrastructure, Hong Kong does have some performing-arts venues as well as museums such as for heritage and science. But many of the spaces aren't inviting; there hasn't been a significant art museum built in about 20 years. And while Hong Kong's overall arts scene has improved in recent times and draws such international attractions as the Chanel Mobile Art show, much of the focus, unlike Singapore's more diverse regional offerings, is on Chinese-oriented art and antiques displays.
The Hong Kong government first hit upon the idea in 1998 of building an integrated arts and culture neighborhood on 40 hectares of reclaimed land in the West Kowloon district. After many fits and starts, planning for the project recently picked up some momentum. Earlier this year, at a time when funding to museums and the arts in some countries was being trimmed, the Hong Kong government approved a HK$21.6 billion ($2.8 billion) cash endowment for the project. Then it named Henry Tang, heir to a textile fortune and a collector of Chinese paintings who is also the No. 2 official in the Hong Kong government, to oversee the project, which is currently undergoing yet another round of public consultations. But the only senior executive hired so far abruptly quit after three months citing personal reasons. The post remains vacant.
Mr. Tang says he expects a chief executive to be appointed in early 2010, and to be close to choosing the main architect. Nevertheless, even if it all goes as planned, the first phase won't be open until 2016.
The West Kowloon project has been “frustrating and painful,” says Asia Art Archive's Ms. Hsu, who is also on the advisory panel for the museum at the new West Kowloon development. “For the public it has looked like the government is stalling, but it gives me a lot of hope. The government is very concerned about getting it right.”
Among the missteps so far was an announcement in 2001 that a design by Norman Foster had won an international contest for the iconic structure. Mr. Foster proposed a giant glass canopy to cover the whole 40-hectare site. The idea was to award the project to a single entity that would not only commit to running museums but also to building the canopy. Bidders lined up all-star casts of possible museum partners and consultants: the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou. In exchange, the entity could make and sell commercial and residential buildings in the area. By 2004, that approach got the kibosh “because of public opposition to the project related to political developments of the time and memories of Cyberport,” says Ms. Hsu. (The US$2 billion Cyberport project was to be a focal point for a master plan to turn Hong Kong into a technology hub. The right to develop a large tract of government land was awarded in 1999 to Hong Kong businessman Richard Li without a public bid and is now mainly a residential project.)
The current concept for West Kowloon was hatched in June 2007. It calls for about 750,000 square feet of museum space and a 100,000-square-foot exhibition center -- and 15 performance venues with seating for 15,000, more than triple the capacity of Singapore's Esplanade complex. About US$1 billion, or a third of the overall West Kowloon budget, is earmarked for acquisitions for an as-yet-undefined but quirky “Museum Plus.” The museum, though, isn't expected to be completed before 2031.
Yet, just having West Kowloon back in the headlines has spurred the staging of more ambitious projects like this year's Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in December, which will feature a pavilion by noted Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
Meantime, critics say more needs to be done to further Hong Kong's art-hub ambitions lest it lose out to Singapore. Plus, Hong Kong needs to stave off a longer-term threat from the likes of Shanghai and Beijing, both of which have burgeoning international arts scenes.
“West Kowloon is a catalyst to cultural development though we also need more policies in place,” says Ada Wong, a founder and chair of the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture and a former adviser on culture to the Hong Kong government. “We need better art education for the public and to engage” the art-starved housing developments, mostly in Hong Kong's New Territories area.
Undaunted, Singapore is diligently pushing ahead and has opened several museums and other arts venues while Hong Kong has dithered on the construction of West Kowloon. Christie's also recently picked Singapore to be the site of a global fine-arts storage facility to open in a duty-free zone in January.
Calling the process of developing an arts scene “never-ending,” Edmund Cheng, who chairs Singapore's arts council, said in a recent report outlining the city's plans through 2012 that “while there is cause for us to celebrate our achievements, we must set our sights farther afield at the same time.”
—Alexandra A. Seno is a Hong Kong-based writer.
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