1977 Exam Opened Escape Route Into China’s Elite
By DAVID LAGUE
Published: New York Times, January 6, 2008
BEIJING — In the autumn of 1977, as relative calm returned to China after the decade-long chaos of the Cultural Revolution, An Ping was laboring in the countryside where she had been sent, like millions of other young people from the cities, to learn from the peasants.
For two years Ms. An, an army general’s daughter, fed pigs and chickens and tended crops on a commune outside Beijing, while living in unheated dormitories and going hungry.
Though Mao had died the year before, and the radical Gang of Four, who had directed the Cultural Revolution in his name, were in custody, there was little sign that Ms. An and other “sent down” urban youths would be allowed to return home.
“For the first time I felt life was not worth it,” said Ms. An, who was 19 then. “If you had asked me to go on living this kind of life, I would rather die.”
Then, in late October 1977, village authorities relayed the news that China would hold its first nationwide university entrance examination since 1965, shortly before academic pursuits were subordinated to political struggle. In acknowledgment of more than a decade of missed opportunity, candidates ranging in age from 13 to 37 were allowed to take the exam.
For Ms. An and a whole generation consigned to the countryside, it was the first chance to escape what seemed like a life sentence of tedium and hardship. A pent-up reservoir of talent and ambition was released as 5.7 million people took the two-day exam in November and December 1977, in what may have been the most competitive scholastic test in modern Chinese history.
The 4.7 percent of test-takers who won admission to universities — 273,000 people — became known as the class of ’77, widely regarded in China as the best and brightest of their time. By comparison, 58 percent of the nine million exam-takers in 2007 won admission to universities, as educational opportunities have greatly expanded.
Now, three decades later, the powerful combination of intellect and determination has taken many in this elite group to the top in politics, education, art and business. Last October, one successful applicant who had gone on to study law and economics at Peking University, Li Keqiang, was brought into the Chinese Communist Party’s decision-making Politburo Standing Committee, where he is being watched as a possible successor to President Hu Jintao or Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
“They were a very bright bunch, and they knew it,” said Robin Munro, research director for the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin, who was a British exchange student at Peking University in 1978, when those freshmen arrived.
“They were the first students in 10 years let into university on merit, and they were going places.”
But back in 1977, most had only a few desperate weeks to prepare for the examination that would change their lives. The timing was especially daunting for those who had been cut off from schooling for years. All over China, students found themselves scrambling to find textbooks, seeking out former tutors and straining to recall half-forgotten formulas.
Ms. An, who now works in New York as the director of public relations for Committee of 100, a Chinese-American advocacy group, exaggerated the seriousness of a back injury and took a month’s medical leave, which she devoted to studying.
“I had to succeed,” she said.
The examination tested not only academic subjects, but also political correctness.
Han Ximing, now 50 and a Chinese literature professor at Nanjing Audit University, said she felt she was already well prepared to handle political questions from careful study of the party line in official newspapers in rural Jiangsu Province.
For years, the papers had been filled with criticism of Deng Xiaoping. “That was a big topic,” she said. “Actually, I had no idea why Deng was supposed to be so bad.”
In reality, it was the return of Deng, the veteran Communist leader, to a position of power in Beijing after the fall of the Gang of Four that led to the reinstatement of the annual exam, and a return to the pragmatism that would soon ignite decades of explosive economic growth.
Among those who have assumed positions of power, aside from Mr. Li of the Politburo, are Zhou Qiang, the governor of Hunan Province; Wang Yi, party secretary of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and a former ambassador to Japan; and Jin Liqun, vice president of the Asian Development Bank.
Artistic talent to emerge from the class of ’77 includes the filmmakers Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern”) and Chen Kaige (“Farewell My Concubine”), and the writer Chen Cun.
“To be immodest, it was a phenomenal generation,” said Fan Haoyi, now 50, who earned a chance to study French at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (now the Beijing Foreign Studies University), a stepping stone to a business career in Africa and Europe. “We had a rage to learn.”
Many successful candidates said they felt they had been given a priceless opportunity, and they were determined to make the most of it. “We were not just gifted, we also worked really hard,” said Ms. Han, the literature professor.
Still, not everyone jumped at the chance to take the exam.
After years when privilege and opportunity were reserved for the offspring of senior officials or people with approved class backgrounds, many prospective candidates doubted that the test would be fair. Others were reluctant to give up the security of even menial jobs.
For Ms. An, the desire to escape her rural life was tempered by the conviction that taking the exam was risky. Relations between the farmers and students were complex; if she failed and was forced to return to the village, she worried that she would be given all the dirty jobs.
“They didn’t like us being there because they had to share their land,” she said. “But if we tried to leave, they would think we looked down on them.”
Li Xiyue was also part of a rural production team. The work was hard but he found it difficult to imagine any other future for himself. “By the time I was sent to the rural areas, this policy had been in place for 10 years,” said Mr. Li, 50, who won a seat at Guangxi University and went on to become a writer and university lecturer. Hard farm labor “was normal,” he said. “Going to college was not normal.”
Still, he found time to study in his spare time. “The problem was, it was difficult to find interesting material,” he said. “I would even read the literature that came with farming equipment.”
When the time came to take the university entrance exam, some found it difficult to break with the commune.
Ms. Han was allowed to return home to study for the exam, but she became alarmed when she heard that she had been criticized at a commune meeting for pursuing personal ambition at the expense of the revolution.
“I ran back to the team, but my father was very angry and brought me home,” she said. “He banned all further contact with them.”
Ms. An said she had taken some French in middle school, but classes were overlaid with politics and broken up by military training and factory work. Less than confident, she went to see a former teacher who assured her that the examiners would not ask overly complicated questions.
But the teacher predicted that she would be asked why she wanted to study French, advising her to say she was doing it to serve the revolution.
“They did ask me that,” said Ms. An, who qualified to study French at the Beijing Language Institute (now the Beijing Language and Culture University) and later at the Sorbonne in Paris.
When the academic year began in 1978, after the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution, it was an unusually mature freshman class that entered universities across the country. Ms. Han said that some of her fellow students at Nanjing Normal University were twice her age. “I had a classmate who was the father of four kids,” she said.
As they began their studies, many were fired by idealism and eagerness to achieve a fresh start for themselves and their country.
“It was a time full of dreams and hopes for the future,” Ms. Han said.
Thirty years later, many express mixed feelings about the direction events took. While acknowledging the benefits of China’s economic development, some voiced disappointment with the pace of political change. Others complained that rapid material progress had fostered greed and cynicism.
“A lot of things we could not even imagine have become reality,” Mr. Li, the writer and lecturer, said. “But it’s painful to see so much corruption, especially among high-ranking officials.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/world/asia/06china.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa
Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa
Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: New York Times, August 18, 2007
LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.
What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.
“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.
Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.
Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.
During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.
Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.
At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.
Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.
Chinese Expansion
You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”
Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.
His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.
Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”
The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.
Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.
One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.
On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.
Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.
“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”
In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.
“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”
Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.
Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”
Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.
In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.
“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.
African Ambivalence
Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.
“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”
When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.
After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”
One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.
“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”
Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: New York Times, August 18, 2007
LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.
What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.
“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.
Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.
Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.
During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.
Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.
At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.
Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.
Chinese Expansion
You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”
Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.
His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.
Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”
The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.
Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.
One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.
On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.
Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.
“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”
In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.
“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”
Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.
Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”
Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.
In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.
“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.
African Ambivalence
Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.
“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”
When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.
After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”
One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.
“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”
Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Report Details Student Contrast
Report details student contrast
Southeast Asians are less ready for college
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 8/6/2007
By Lisa M. Krieger Staff Writer
Asian-American students are often viewed as brainy, affluent and over-achieving. But a new government report concludes that several Asian groups are not well-prepared - either academically or financially - to succeed in college.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian students typically do well in school, fulfilling the "model minority" stereotype, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office, the research and investigative arm of Congress. Many of their families have saved money for college and do not depend on their children's help at home.
But others - Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai and Burmese descent - do not enroll in the rigorous math and reading classes needed to climb the ladder of collegiate success, the report found.
Moreover, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders who make it to college are more likely to need outside financial support, often living at home and working to help their families, according to the report.
For instance, 68 percent of Chinese college students reported they could afford college without working, compared with only 36 percent of Vietnamese. Almost half of all Vietnamese college students said they helped their families with tutoring, translating, transportation and household chores.
While 42 percent of Korean families saved $20,000 or more for college, only 8 percent of Southeast-Asian families had.
"The report confirms the need to avoid making national generalizations about Asian-American achievements in education and conflating all Asian-American subgroups as if all Asian Americans are homogeneous," said L. Ling-chi Wang, chairman of the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley. "We need to look at each subgroup separately."
Deborah Reed of the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California concurred.
"Asians and Pacific Islanders tend to have relatively high levels of education and income and relatively low poverty rates," she said.
"(But) when we look at Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - the refugee-sending countries - we find lower family income, lower education and higher poverty than for other Asian groups in California."
To be sure, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are, on average, better educated than the average American. Almost half have a four-year college degree, compared with one-third of whites, 17percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Latinos.
And the academic strength of even the most disadvantaged groups grows over time, Reed said.
"When we look at the second generation, we see increasing progress."
The study, conducted from July 2006 through July 2007, used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and two large national education databases. Researchers also visited eight colleges with high numbers of Asian students, and conducted discussion groups on these campuses.
Many of the differences were attributed to the number of years that an ethnic group had been in the United States - or whether immigrants had arrived to escape war and persecution or seek high-tech jobs.
The report, released July 27 before the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, found wide differences in:
An estimated 68 percent of Asian-Indian and 64 percent of Chinese adults had at least a college degree, compared with 25 percent of Vietnamese, 17 percent of Pacific Islanders and 13 percent of other Indochinese - Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong.
More than 90 percent of Filipino, Indians and Japanese identified themselves as fluent in English. That compares with 70percent of Koreans, 62 percent of Vietnamese and 60 percent of the other Indochinese groups.
About 80 percent of Vietnamese undergraduates reported their parents paid none of their tuition. High numbers of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders groups lived at home or attended schools within driving distance of home. In contrast, many Chinese, Indian and Korean undergraduates worked to gain job experience or earn spending money.
Simply put, poverty creates barriers to education, whether one is Asian American, Latino or African American, said Paul Fong, a political science professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose.
"There's an achievement gap among Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans and Vietnamese Americans - the haves and have-nots," Fong said.
Staff Writer Kim Vo contributed to this story.
http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_6552950
Southeast Asians are less ready for college
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 8/6/2007
By Lisa M. Krieger Staff Writer
Asian-American students are often viewed as brainy, affluent and over-achieving. But a new government report concludes that several Asian groups are not well-prepared - either academically or financially - to succeed in college.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian students typically do well in school, fulfilling the "model minority" stereotype, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office, the research and investigative arm of Congress. Many of their families have saved money for college and do not depend on their children's help at home.
But others - Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai and Burmese descent - do not enroll in the rigorous math and reading classes needed to climb the ladder of collegiate success, the report found.
Moreover, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders who make it to college are more likely to need outside financial support, often living at home and working to help their families, according to the report.
For instance, 68 percent of Chinese college students reported they could afford college without working, compared with only 36 percent of Vietnamese. Almost half of all Vietnamese college students said they helped their families with tutoring, translating, transportation and household chores.
While 42 percent of Korean families saved $20,000 or more for college, only 8 percent of Southeast-Asian families had.
"The report confirms the need to avoid making national generalizations about Asian-American achievements in education and conflating all Asian-American subgroups as if all Asian Americans are homogeneous," said L. Ling-chi Wang, chairman of the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley. "We need to look at each subgroup separately."
Deborah Reed of the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California concurred.
"Asians and Pacific Islanders tend to have relatively high levels of education and income and relatively low poverty rates," she said.
"(But) when we look at Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - the refugee-sending countries - we find lower family income, lower education and higher poverty than for other Asian groups in California."
To be sure, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are, on average, better educated than the average American. Almost half have a four-year college degree, compared with one-third of whites, 17percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Latinos.
And the academic strength of even the most disadvantaged groups grows over time, Reed said.
"When we look at the second generation, we see increasing progress."
The study, conducted from July 2006 through July 2007, used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and two large national education databases. Researchers also visited eight colleges with high numbers of Asian students, and conducted discussion groups on these campuses.
Many of the differences were attributed to the number of years that an ethnic group had been in the United States - or whether immigrants had arrived to escape war and persecution or seek high-tech jobs.
The report, released July 27 before the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, found wide differences in:
An estimated 68 percent of Asian-Indian and 64 percent of Chinese adults had at least a college degree, compared with 25 percent of Vietnamese, 17 percent of Pacific Islanders and 13 percent of other Indochinese - Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong.
More than 90 percent of Filipino, Indians and Japanese identified themselves as fluent in English. That compares with 70percent of Koreans, 62 percent of Vietnamese and 60 percent of the other Indochinese groups.
About 80 percent of Vietnamese undergraduates reported their parents paid none of their tuition. High numbers of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders groups lived at home or attended schools within driving distance of home. In contrast, many Chinese, Indian and Korean undergraduates worked to gain job experience or earn spending money.
Simply put, poverty creates barriers to education, whether one is Asian American, Latino or African American, said Paul Fong, a political science professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose.
"There's an achievement gap among Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans and Vietnamese Americans - the haves and have-nots," Fong said.
Staff Writer Kim Vo contributed to this story.
http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_6552950
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers
Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: New York Times, June 13, 2007
LAS VEGAS — Without the dreamy postcard views of the neon-pulsing Strip, visitors to the V.I.P. lounge at the top of the Venetian hotel and casino here might think they had taken an elevator to someplace in Hong Kong or Shanghai.
The televisions in this sanctuary reserved for the wealthiest high rollers are tuned to Chinese stations. The newspapers use Chinese characters. The plinking tones wafting through the sprawling lounge are distinctly Chinese and many of the lounge’s supremely solicitous, perpetually bowing staff members come from one Asian country or another. Its head chef is a dim sum master recently imported from Hong Kong.
Then there are the special accommodations offered to gamblers willing to wager several hundred thousand dollars or more: four 8,000-square-feet suites heavy on black lacquer furniture, bronze dragons, jade and appliances imported from China.
Casino operators have long recognized that a large number of Asians, especially Chinese and Chinese-Americans, are avid gamblers. For years, casinos have dispatched special buses to any Chinatown within a day’s drive.
Recently, though, casinos have become much more aggressive in wooing Asians both domestically and abroad. They are aiming not just at the newly wealthy from China, who in recent years have emerged as Las Vegas’s best customers, but also Asian-Americans and recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.
The vigor of their efforts is stirring the ire of some Asian activists and others. “If the casinos singled out African-Americans and marketed to them as heavily as they do Asians, I’d imagine there’d be this huge political outcry,” said Timothy W. Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The marketing has been so aggressive, and the penetration so deep, we’re starting to see alarming increases in the rates of problem gambling among Asians.”
These efforts include redesigning large portions of a casino floor to cater to the tastes of Asian guests; advertisements written in Asian dialects and placed in community newspapers in nearby cities; and mailers written in a recipient’s native language. The impact has been especially heavy among recent immigrants, Dr. Fong said.
One trend-setter has been Harrah’s Entertainment, which operates two dozen casinos across the United States, including the Caesars Palaces in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. At the start of 2006, Harrah’s opened a gambling and dining area inspired by the Ming- and Song-dynasty architectural elements at the Showboat in Atlantic City, in what Gary Loveman, its chief executive, described as “the country’s first authentic Asian gaming pit.”
The company imported carved woods from China to house a dozen baccarat tables — the preferred game among many Asian players — and several more for pai gow poker, which is based on an ancient Chinese dominoes game.
Over all, table game revenue at Showboat increased 35 percent last year, to $63 million, up from $46 million, and the casino more than doubled its business among Asian players. Table games include baccarat and pai gow but also craps, blackjack and roulette.
When the installation of an Asian gambling pit caused a similar increase in the table game winnings at Caesars Atlantic City, Mr. Loveman ordered similar changes at casinos across the country.
“There’s this interest in gambling among the Chinese that transcends anything you see in any other socioeconomic or ethnic group,” he said.
Experts are inclined to agree. “Ours is a culture that believes a lot in numbers and superstition and places a large focus on money,” said Dr. Fong, whose parents were born in mainland China. “So much revolves around fortune and fate and testing whether the ancestors have blessed you with a good life.”
Other casinos have followed Harrah’s lead, including the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which created its own Asian gambling pit last July, and the Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut, which is building an all-Asian gambling hall complete with a Hong Kong-style food court.
Las Vegas has been undergoing a similar makeover. Asian-themed baccarat salons and noodle bars are now as standard as scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and baccarat generates far more revenue than roulette or craps.
The spread of baccarat, said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian, is “entirely a function of its popularity among the Chinese.”
It is also a function, Mr. Weidner said, of a small group of high rollers sometimes called whales — or those Mr. Weidner dubbed the “V-V.I.P.s” — who are willing to wager $50,000 or more on a single hand or roll of the dice and risk several million dollars over a weekend.
About 80 percent of Las Vegas’s biggest whales are from Asia, he said, echoing the estimates of other casino executives. Most of them are baccarat players from China and Hong Kong.
“One difference between our domestic and Asian guests are that our Asian guests spend much more time gambling,” said Mike Zanolli, manager of the 50 butlers the Venetian places at the service of its high rollers. “We see our Asian guest mainly in the baccarat salon,” Mr. Zanolli said, adding that they even take all or most of their meals there.
“The Asian customer on average uses a significantly larger share of their disposable income to game with,” said Mr. Weidner, who so prizes these high rollers that several times he has traveled with an interpreter to Hong Kong to run his casino designs by a feng shui master.
Mark Juliano, the former president of Caesars Las Vegas, says Asians account for even more than 80 percent of the city’s gambling whales.
“The big change I started noticing in 2004, 2005, were the Asians coming from mainland China,” said Mr. Juliano, now the chief operating officer of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Customers from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong are “becoming more and more dominant.”
Casino companies are not just pulling out the stops to attract Asian high rollers to America, they are also going to where the customers are. Several years ago, the Sands and Wynn Resorts opened large Las Vegas-style casinos in Macao, the former Portuguese colony that is the only place in China where gambling is legal. The Sands is aggressively seeking to expand elsewhere in Asia.
Last year, Macao surpassed the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s largest gambling center.
“We view Asia as a critical growth area for our company,” Mr. Weidner said.
The wooing of newly rich high rollers from China is of little concern to critics but the broader focus on less-affluent Asian-Americans is a growing worry.
“Gambling has been a part of Asian culture going back thousands of years,” said Kent Woo, the executive director of the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in San Francisco. “People grew up with gambling in their households. It was part of celebrations, it was part of everyday life. But there’s also a feeling that the casinos are exploiting our culture.”
The reactions among Asian activists to the aggressive marketing by casino companies, Mr. Woo said, “range from concern, to upset, to extreme anger.”
Studies suggest higher rates of problem gambling among Asians than other groups. Several recent studies in New Zealand and Australia have found that Asians living there had higher rates of addiction than non-Asians. Studies of Southeast Asian refugees living in Connecticut and Chinese waiters working in Montreal reached similar findings.
One long-term study under way in California, Dr. Fong of U.C.L.A. said, suggests that Asians are three times as likely as other groups to develop a serious gambling problem. He cautions, though, that the study is based on only a small sample of gamblers in the Los Angeles area.
Still, the evidence in California has been alarming enough to get the state government in 2004 to create an Asian Pacific Islander Problem Gambling Task Force, which is focused on starting treatment and prevention programs catering to those who speak only Chinese and other Asian languages.
“If there’s this hidden problem of addiction that’s not being addressed, and that’s what we think is happening,” Dr. Fong said, “it will slowly eat away at the fabric of the community.”
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: New York Times, June 13, 2007
LAS VEGAS — Without the dreamy postcard views of the neon-pulsing Strip, visitors to the V.I.P. lounge at the top of the Venetian hotel and casino here might think they had taken an elevator to someplace in Hong Kong or Shanghai.
The televisions in this sanctuary reserved for the wealthiest high rollers are tuned to Chinese stations. The newspapers use Chinese characters. The plinking tones wafting through the sprawling lounge are distinctly Chinese and many of the lounge’s supremely solicitous, perpetually bowing staff members come from one Asian country or another. Its head chef is a dim sum master recently imported from Hong Kong.
Then there are the special accommodations offered to gamblers willing to wager several hundred thousand dollars or more: four 8,000-square-feet suites heavy on black lacquer furniture, bronze dragons, jade and appliances imported from China.
Casino operators have long recognized that a large number of Asians, especially Chinese and Chinese-Americans, are avid gamblers. For years, casinos have dispatched special buses to any Chinatown within a day’s drive.
Recently, though, casinos have become much more aggressive in wooing Asians both domestically and abroad. They are aiming not just at the newly wealthy from China, who in recent years have emerged as Las Vegas’s best customers, but also Asian-Americans and recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.
The vigor of their efforts is stirring the ire of some Asian activists and others. “If the casinos singled out African-Americans and marketed to them as heavily as they do Asians, I’d imagine there’d be this huge political outcry,” said Timothy W. Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The marketing has been so aggressive, and the penetration so deep, we’re starting to see alarming increases in the rates of problem gambling among Asians.”
These efforts include redesigning large portions of a casino floor to cater to the tastes of Asian guests; advertisements written in Asian dialects and placed in community newspapers in nearby cities; and mailers written in a recipient’s native language. The impact has been especially heavy among recent immigrants, Dr. Fong said.
One trend-setter has been Harrah’s Entertainment, which operates two dozen casinos across the United States, including the Caesars Palaces in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. At the start of 2006, Harrah’s opened a gambling and dining area inspired by the Ming- and Song-dynasty architectural elements at the Showboat in Atlantic City, in what Gary Loveman, its chief executive, described as “the country’s first authentic Asian gaming pit.”
The company imported carved woods from China to house a dozen baccarat tables — the preferred game among many Asian players — and several more for pai gow poker, which is based on an ancient Chinese dominoes game.
Over all, table game revenue at Showboat increased 35 percent last year, to $63 million, up from $46 million, and the casino more than doubled its business among Asian players. Table games include baccarat and pai gow but also craps, blackjack and roulette.
When the installation of an Asian gambling pit caused a similar increase in the table game winnings at Caesars Atlantic City, Mr. Loveman ordered similar changes at casinos across the country.
“There’s this interest in gambling among the Chinese that transcends anything you see in any other socioeconomic or ethnic group,” he said.
Experts are inclined to agree. “Ours is a culture that believes a lot in numbers and superstition and places a large focus on money,” said Dr. Fong, whose parents were born in mainland China. “So much revolves around fortune and fate and testing whether the ancestors have blessed you with a good life.”
Other casinos have followed Harrah’s lead, including the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which created its own Asian gambling pit last July, and the Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut, which is building an all-Asian gambling hall complete with a Hong Kong-style food court.
Las Vegas has been undergoing a similar makeover. Asian-themed baccarat salons and noodle bars are now as standard as scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and baccarat generates far more revenue than roulette or craps.
The spread of baccarat, said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian, is “entirely a function of its popularity among the Chinese.”
It is also a function, Mr. Weidner said, of a small group of high rollers sometimes called whales — or those Mr. Weidner dubbed the “V-V.I.P.s” — who are willing to wager $50,000 or more on a single hand or roll of the dice and risk several million dollars over a weekend.
About 80 percent of Las Vegas’s biggest whales are from Asia, he said, echoing the estimates of other casino executives. Most of them are baccarat players from China and Hong Kong.
“One difference between our domestic and Asian guests are that our Asian guests spend much more time gambling,” said Mike Zanolli, manager of the 50 butlers the Venetian places at the service of its high rollers. “We see our Asian guest mainly in the baccarat salon,” Mr. Zanolli said, adding that they even take all or most of their meals there.
“The Asian customer on average uses a significantly larger share of their disposable income to game with,” said Mr. Weidner, who so prizes these high rollers that several times he has traveled with an interpreter to Hong Kong to run his casino designs by a feng shui master.
Mark Juliano, the former president of Caesars Las Vegas, says Asians account for even more than 80 percent of the city’s gambling whales.
“The big change I started noticing in 2004, 2005, were the Asians coming from mainland China,” said Mr. Juliano, now the chief operating officer of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Customers from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong are “becoming more and more dominant.”
Casino companies are not just pulling out the stops to attract Asian high rollers to America, they are also going to where the customers are. Several years ago, the Sands and Wynn Resorts opened large Las Vegas-style casinos in Macao, the former Portuguese colony that is the only place in China where gambling is legal. The Sands is aggressively seeking to expand elsewhere in Asia.
Last year, Macao surpassed the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s largest gambling center.
“We view Asia as a critical growth area for our company,” Mr. Weidner said.
The wooing of newly rich high rollers from China is of little concern to critics but the broader focus on less-affluent Asian-Americans is a growing worry.
“Gambling has been a part of Asian culture going back thousands of years,” said Kent Woo, the executive director of the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in San Francisco. “People grew up with gambling in their households. It was part of celebrations, it was part of everyday life. But there’s also a feeling that the casinos are exploiting our culture.”
The reactions among Asian activists to the aggressive marketing by casino companies, Mr. Woo said, “range from concern, to upset, to extreme anger.”
Studies suggest higher rates of problem gambling among Asians than other groups. Several recent studies in New Zealand and Australia have found that Asians living there had higher rates of addiction than non-Asians. Studies of Southeast Asian refugees living in Connecticut and Chinese waiters working in Montreal reached similar findings.
One long-term study under way in California, Dr. Fong of U.C.L.A. said, suggests that Asians are three times as likely as other groups to develop a serious gambling problem. He cautions, though, that the study is based on only a small sample of gamblers in the Los Angeles area.
Still, the evidence in California has been alarming enough to get the state government in 2004 to create an Asian Pacific Islander Problem Gambling Task Force, which is focused on starting treatment and prevention programs catering to those who speak only Chinese and other Asian languages.
“If there’s this hidden problem of addiction that’s not being addressed, and that’s what we think is happening,” Dr. Fong said, “it will slowly eat away at the fabric of the community.”
Monday, May 21, 2007
Taishan's U.S. well runs dry
Taishan's U.S. well runs dry
By David Pierson, Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2007
Taishan, China — DOWN a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village.
Seventy years ago, young men in this desperately poor region a few hours west of Hong Kong's high-rises emptied out of Wo Hing to cross the Pacific and try their luck in America. Many would end up on Hill Street or Broadway as cooks and waiters or open their own restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Their children would become engineers and even city councilmen. Their decision to leave still dominates the lives of those who stayed behind, for better and for worse.
Wo Hing, like many villages in the encompassing city of Taishan, has survived through a combination of backbreaking farming and handouts from America. That dependency on wah kiu — overseas Chinese — has left the villagers vulnerable, however: In the same way the old remnants of L.A.'s Chinatown are fading away, so is the generation from Wo Hing that can be counted on to deliver cash, including donations to build roads and schools.
It clouds an already uncertain future for the 40 residents of this village where water is still fetched from wells and meals cooked over wood fires. They've spent recent years watching the urban centers creep closer to their fields and their children leave for factory jobs.
Farmers all over China are struggling to adapt to the nation's rapid industrialization, but it is especially hard for the inhabitants of many villages in Taishan, who have to learn to move on without the financial advantage they've long enjoyed from America.
"Every one here has some family overseas," said a 60-year-old retiree lounging on a bamboo recliner in the nearby village of Moy Family Garden, giving only his surname, Moy. "I have relatives in Chicago and New York. I'm still waiting for my turn. But I don't have to work here. If I go to America now, who knows? I may have to work hard."
Mei Weiqing, a native of Taishan and wah kiu scholar at Wuyi University in the neighboring city of Jiangmen, said the generosity of those who left has both benefited and hindered Taishan.
"The overseas Taishanese are much more hard-working," he said. "The locals have become lazy. It's a serious problem. In U.S. society, the Taishanese had to live in the lowest end of society. They took the worst jobs. In Taishan, the men won't even consider doing the washing or cooking. American Taishanese learned to do these things to survive."
TO villagers, the wah kiu are heroes. They are feted with whole roast pigs when they visit. On display in the village hall is a marble plaque that lists the amount of money each wah kiu has donated. Villagers help maintain the homes of those who left, bowing with incense twice a month before shrines to pay homage to their ancestors.
"I treat it like my own house," villager Jie Moi Cin said about caring for the home her recently deceased uncle in Los Angeles left behind in the 1940s. "Even if they never send money back again, we couldn't abandon it. But after the old ones pass away, the young ones may not know what to do. Maybe they'll forget about us."
She has reason to be concerned. The visits come at a trickle compared with the 1980s and '90s, when the wah kiu were comfortably retired and ready to share their wealth. Back then, minibuses would drop off dozens of the Americans to a throng of applauding villagers. Today, villagers get phone calls or letters every few months informing them that another aging relative has died. They know that the children and grandchildren of the wah kiu have little to no connection to Wo Hing.
This is how it has worked in Taishan since men started leaving more than 200 years ago. The city and its many villages have staked a part of their livelihood on the goodwill of their overseas countrymen, whose history is rooted deeply in the development of America. They were gold-rushers, they built America's Pacific railways, and they established the first Chinatowns from New York to San Francisco.
Until the 1980s — when Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese began to arrive en masse — Taishanese was the chief dialect heard in most Chinatowns. It was the culture that gave America egg foo young and chop suey.
Even today, Taishan proudly bills itself as the "No. 1 Home of Overseas Chinese."
There are 1 million residents in Taishan, but 1.3 million Taishanese in Hong Kong and abroad. An estimated half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent.
Along with those who fled Taishan for Hong Kong when it was administered by Britain, American Taishanese have led the charge here in helping pay for hospitals, colleges, senior centers, highways, bridges, towers and even the Overseas Taishanese Museum. "American building" is part of the everyday vernacular, and looking in any direction from the city center, it's impossible not to find one.
"In Taishan, almost everyone has a connection to North America," said Mei, the professor. "Every year, more than 8,000 Taishanese continue to leave, mostly to America and Canada. They will try any way to go abroad."
A history of civil strife and poor terrain for farming has always hobbled Taishan and tempted the poorest to leave. The nearby South China Sea beckoned daring men to take their chances elsewhere to feed their families.
This proved bountiful for Taishan for much of the 20th century. Before World War II, many sojourners would return with gold and build towering gothic-styled buildings in their home villages. They erected watch towers to fend off bandits that menaced the area. By Chinese standards of the day, Taishanese related to wah kiu were rich.
Signs of those days now litter the countryside. Not far from Wo Hing, Moy Family Garden rises out of the rice paddies and duck ponds like an ancient ruin. The 108 three-story European buildings with pillars and Venetian facades are squeezed together to form a rectangle with a courtyard in the center.
But in the village itself, three-quarters of the dirt-blackened buildings are now boarded up. Chinese characters above many storefronts have been worn away by time. In the remaining buildings, locals in flip-flops play mah-jongg while chickens as big as turkeys cluck at their feet.
Since national economic reforms began in 1978, the region around Wo Hing has been transformed. On the country road here, dozens of sprawling factories making furniture and pots and pans swallow space next to chicken farms and lumber yards. Wo Hing, on the other hand, has largely remained the same since it was built in 1902. The buildings aligned almost perfectly perpendicular to one another are separated by dirt path alleyways roamed by packs of ragged dogs.
Against the front wall of each home's living room are tall red- and gold-colored shrines on wooden platforms. It's a prime location where Americans might elect to place their flat-screen TVs, but for the villagers, it's where you honor your ancestors.
Paying respects to the place where past generations were born and spirits are still believed to be is what compels Arcadia resident William Wong to return to Wo Hing every other year.
Wong was 14 when he left Taishan in 1947. He now heads the region's overseas association in L.A.'s Chinatown. When the group formed decades ago, there were 2,000 members. Today, there are half that many.
"The younger guys don't join, and we keep losing the senior members," said Wong, 74, a retired Los Angeles County engineer who carries packets of red envelopes stuffed with $10 bills to give to villagers when he visits. "We're trying to bring some college and high school students out there this summer to show them their roots."
Wong returned to Wo Hing for the first time in 1994. The home he was raised in had partially collapsed. For $10,000, he had it rebuilt. It's now the only modern structure here, covered in white and green tiles and boasting a stainless-steel front door.
NOT everyone feels the tug. Ben Wong's parents grew up in the village, but he's only been there once for a brief visit in 1980. The former West Covina councilman, who is not related to William Wong, said he and his children were too immersed in their lives in America to contribute the way his parents did.
"The next generation came along and we didn't find ourselves in that same position as our parents," said Ben Wong, 56. "I got married and had kids and a career. There's still some connection, but it's always difficult for me. I never found time to bring my kids out there, and I regret that to an extent."
The villagers who remain in Wo Hing say they don't have close enough relatives in the United States who can sponsor them. Otherwise, many say, they'd be gone by now.
Some, like 88-year-old Wong Kong Chuan, had their chance to leave, but misfortune got in the way.
"I've been once," he said, explaining that he tried to go to the U.S. to meet relatives in Stockton.
"I tried, but they turned me away," he said of the border guards.
That was 1931. He had journeyed with his uncle, who made it through. That uncle would start a family in the U.S. Pictures of his children standing in front of Griffith Observatory hang on Wong's wall.
"He used to send me $200," he said, losing his breath from the effort of standing and talking. The uncle is dead now, and Wong is still here in Los Angeles village.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-taishan21may21,1,4560222.story
By David Pierson, Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2007
Taishan, China — DOWN a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village.
Seventy years ago, young men in this desperately poor region a few hours west of Hong Kong's high-rises emptied out of Wo Hing to cross the Pacific and try their luck in America. Many would end up on Hill Street or Broadway as cooks and waiters or open their own restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Their children would become engineers and even city councilmen. Their decision to leave still dominates the lives of those who stayed behind, for better and for worse.
Wo Hing, like many villages in the encompassing city of Taishan, has survived through a combination of backbreaking farming and handouts from America. That dependency on wah kiu — overseas Chinese — has left the villagers vulnerable, however: In the same way the old remnants of L.A.'s Chinatown are fading away, so is the generation from Wo Hing that can be counted on to deliver cash, including donations to build roads and schools.
It clouds an already uncertain future for the 40 residents of this village where water is still fetched from wells and meals cooked over wood fires. They've spent recent years watching the urban centers creep closer to their fields and their children leave for factory jobs.
Farmers all over China are struggling to adapt to the nation's rapid industrialization, but it is especially hard for the inhabitants of many villages in Taishan, who have to learn to move on without the financial advantage they've long enjoyed from America.
"Every one here has some family overseas," said a 60-year-old retiree lounging on a bamboo recliner in the nearby village of Moy Family Garden, giving only his surname, Moy. "I have relatives in Chicago and New York. I'm still waiting for my turn. But I don't have to work here. If I go to America now, who knows? I may have to work hard."
Mei Weiqing, a native of Taishan and wah kiu scholar at Wuyi University in the neighboring city of Jiangmen, said the generosity of those who left has both benefited and hindered Taishan.
"The overseas Taishanese are much more hard-working," he said. "The locals have become lazy. It's a serious problem. In U.S. society, the Taishanese had to live in the lowest end of society. They took the worst jobs. In Taishan, the men won't even consider doing the washing or cooking. American Taishanese learned to do these things to survive."
TO villagers, the wah kiu are heroes. They are feted with whole roast pigs when they visit. On display in the village hall is a marble plaque that lists the amount of money each wah kiu has donated. Villagers help maintain the homes of those who left, bowing with incense twice a month before shrines to pay homage to their ancestors.
"I treat it like my own house," villager Jie Moi Cin said about caring for the home her recently deceased uncle in Los Angeles left behind in the 1940s. "Even if they never send money back again, we couldn't abandon it. But after the old ones pass away, the young ones may not know what to do. Maybe they'll forget about us."
She has reason to be concerned. The visits come at a trickle compared with the 1980s and '90s, when the wah kiu were comfortably retired and ready to share their wealth. Back then, minibuses would drop off dozens of the Americans to a throng of applauding villagers. Today, villagers get phone calls or letters every few months informing them that another aging relative has died. They know that the children and grandchildren of the wah kiu have little to no connection to Wo Hing.
This is how it has worked in Taishan since men started leaving more than 200 years ago. The city and its many villages have staked a part of their livelihood on the goodwill of their overseas countrymen, whose history is rooted deeply in the development of America. They were gold-rushers, they built America's Pacific railways, and they established the first Chinatowns from New York to San Francisco.
Until the 1980s — when Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese began to arrive en masse — Taishanese was the chief dialect heard in most Chinatowns. It was the culture that gave America egg foo young and chop suey.
Even today, Taishan proudly bills itself as the "No. 1 Home of Overseas Chinese."
There are 1 million residents in Taishan, but 1.3 million Taishanese in Hong Kong and abroad. An estimated half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent.
Along with those who fled Taishan for Hong Kong when it was administered by Britain, American Taishanese have led the charge here in helping pay for hospitals, colleges, senior centers, highways, bridges, towers and even the Overseas Taishanese Museum. "American building" is part of the everyday vernacular, and looking in any direction from the city center, it's impossible not to find one.
"In Taishan, almost everyone has a connection to North America," said Mei, the professor. "Every year, more than 8,000 Taishanese continue to leave, mostly to America and Canada. They will try any way to go abroad."
A history of civil strife and poor terrain for farming has always hobbled Taishan and tempted the poorest to leave. The nearby South China Sea beckoned daring men to take their chances elsewhere to feed their families.
This proved bountiful for Taishan for much of the 20th century. Before World War II, many sojourners would return with gold and build towering gothic-styled buildings in their home villages. They erected watch towers to fend off bandits that menaced the area. By Chinese standards of the day, Taishanese related to wah kiu were rich.
Signs of those days now litter the countryside. Not far from Wo Hing, Moy Family Garden rises out of the rice paddies and duck ponds like an ancient ruin. The 108 three-story European buildings with pillars and Venetian facades are squeezed together to form a rectangle with a courtyard in the center.
But in the village itself, three-quarters of the dirt-blackened buildings are now boarded up. Chinese characters above many storefronts have been worn away by time. In the remaining buildings, locals in flip-flops play mah-jongg while chickens as big as turkeys cluck at their feet.
Since national economic reforms began in 1978, the region around Wo Hing has been transformed. On the country road here, dozens of sprawling factories making furniture and pots and pans swallow space next to chicken farms and lumber yards. Wo Hing, on the other hand, has largely remained the same since it was built in 1902. The buildings aligned almost perfectly perpendicular to one another are separated by dirt path alleyways roamed by packs of ragged dogs.
Against the front wall of each home's living room are tall red- and gold-colored shrines on wooden platforms. It's a prime location where Americans might elect to place their flat-screen TVs, but for the villagers, it's where you honor your ancestors.
Paying respects to the place where past generations were born and spirits are still believed to be is what compels Arcadia resident William Wong to return to Wo Hing every other year.
Wong was 14 when he left Taishan in 1947. He now heads the region's overseas association in L.A.'s Chinatown. When the group formed decades ago, there were 2,000 members. Today, there are half that many.
"The younger guys don't join, and we keep losing the senior members," said Wong, 74, a retired Los Angeles County engineer who carries packets of red envelopes stuffed with $10 bills to give to villagers when he visits. "We're trying to bring some college and high school students out there this summer to show them their roots."
Wong returned to Wo Hing for the first time in 1994. The home he was raised in had partially collapsed. For $10,000, he had it rebuilt. It's now the only modern structure here, covered in white and green tiles and boasting a stainless-steel front door.
NOT everyone feels the tug. Ben Wong's parents grew up in the village, but he's only been there once for a brief visit in 1980. The former West Covina councilman, who is not related to William Wong, said he and his children were too immersed in their lives in America to contribute the way his parents did.
"The next generation came along and we didn't find ourselves in that same position as our parents," said Ben Wong, 56. "I got married and had kids and a career. There's still some connection, but it's always difficult for me. I never found time to bring my kids out there, and I regret that to an extent."
The villagers who remain in Wo Hing say they don't have close enough relatives in the United States who can sponsor them. Otherwise, many say, they'd be gone by now.
Some, like 88-year-old Wong Kong Chuan, had their chance to leave, but misfortune got in the way.
"I've been once," he said, explaining that he tried to go to the U.S. to meet relatives in Stockton.
"I tried, but they turned me away," he said of the border guards.
That was 1931. He had journeyed with his uncle, who made it through. That uncle would start a family in the U.S. Pictures of his children standing in front of Griffith Observatory hang on Wong's wall.
"He used to send me $200," he said, losing his breath from the effort of standing and talking. The uncle is dead now, and Wong is still here in Los Angeles village.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-taishan21may21,1,4560222.story
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Some Had Made Their Marks, and Many Others Were Just Beginning
Some Had Made Their Marks, and Many Others Were Just Beginning
Published: April 18, 2007
Remembering some of the students and faculty members killed in the Virginia Tech shootings, in these biographical sketches.
Henry Lee, 20
A freshman majoring in computer engineering, he was in elementary school and unable to speak English when his family emigrated from China. When he became an American citizen in 1999, he changed his name from Henh Ly. That same year he graduated from William Fleming High School in Roanoke, Va., and was salutatorian of his class with a 4.47 grade point average. He worked part time at Sears in high school and was honored for his scholastic achievements by the local Burger King, which gave his class vouchers for free Whoppers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18portraits.html?pagewanted=2
Published: April 18, 2007
Remembering some of the students and faculty members killed in the Virginia Tech shootings, in these biographical sketches.
Henry Lee, 20
A freshman majoring in computer engineering, he was in elementary school and unable to speak English when his family emigrated from China. When he became an American citizen in 1999, he changed his name from Henh Ly. That same year he graduated from William Fleming High School in Roanoke, Va., and was salutatorian of his class with a 4.47 grade point average. He worked part time at Sears in high school and was honored for his scholastic achievements by the local Burger King, which gave his class vouchers for free Whoppers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18portraits.html?pagewanted=2
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Ethnic changes in store for Chino Hills
Ethnic changes in store for Chino Hills
Some residents protest, in vain, an Asian market in the upscale community. Others say it will serve their needs.
By Sara Lin, Times Staff Writer
April 12, 2007
An hour before Sunday services at a Lutheran church in Chino Hills, the Rev. Andy Wu joined his congregants in front of plates piled high with boiled Napa cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, stir fried tofu and rice.
Since Wu became an associate pastor in 2002, attendance at lunch and his worship services in Mandarin Chinese have doubled. So has Chino Hills' Asian population, which now makes up about 40% of city residents.
"Five years ago, if I walked into a Vons market and saw an Asian face, I would get very excited," Wu said. "Now, every day we see Asian faces."
But the demographic shift has proved unsettling for some in this upscale San Bernardino County town, and that tension surfaced when a major Asian grocery chain, 99 Ranch Market, announced plans for a Chino Hills store.
The Chino Hills City Council heard an outcry from a small group of residents, including one who wrote that he didn't want to see "little Chinatowns all over the Hills" filled with Asian signs he can't read.
The skirmish mirrors clashes in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s when Asian immigrants moved into the traditionally white and Latino suburbs. When a wave of Asian businesses followed, city officials in Monterey Park tried unsuccessfully to pass English-only ordinances, arguing that Chinese-language business signs would confuse firefighters and emergency workers.
Larry Blugrind of Chino Hills told the City Council in a letter that the store would "result in a run-down center that is the equivalent of a Chinese Pic 'N' Save less than a mile from the kind of high-quality shops our city has been trying to attract to this area."
Reached by telephone, Blugrind explained that he enjoyed having a diverse community — his daughter-in-law is Japanese.
"My worry is that 99 Ranch could be a steppingstone for it to become all Asian," he said. "I don't want another Hacienda Heights."
In Chino Hills, the City Council has no say in whether Tawa Supermarkets Inc. can open a 99 Ranch Market. The store is moving into a space formerly occupied by a Ralphs supermarket. It's a simple case of one grocery store taking over for another, said Mayor Gwenn Norton-Perry.
"It's an approved use, and we as a city have no purview over this. That's the bottom line," Norton-Perry said.
But that hasn't stopped angry residents from sounding off to the City Council.
The market's owners downplayed the controversy.
"We don't want to focus on that part," said Jennifer Tsao, a spokeswoman for Tawa, which operates 22 stores throughout California. Inside the store, Tsao said customers could expect clean aisles, signs in English and Chinese, as well as bilingual employees.
The 99 Ranch Market in Chino Hills may have struck a chord with residents because it "makes the Asian American community very visible and displaces businesses that people were comfortable with, in this case a Ralphs," said Linda Vo, an Asian American studies professor at UC Irvine.
From 2000 to 2005, the city of 81,000 saw its Asian population jump from 22% to 39%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent survey. Of those, 10,316 were Filipino and 7,752 were Chinese. Asian Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese constitute most of the remaining Asian Americans.
The Asian influx has already had an effect on some public services: The Chino Hills library stocks books written in Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Similarly, in Orange County, nearly one-third of Irvine residents are Asian Americans. But Irvine's transition was a slower one, with many immigrants moving into newly built neighborhoods, Vo said. There was some mild resentment from the community about the changing demographics but nothing overt, she said.
At the Mediterranean-style plaza in Chino Hills where workers are readying the 99 Ranch Market for a summer opening, a handful of the plaza's 20 shops already seem to reflect the city's changing face.
There's a karate studio, a Chinese buffet and Thai restaurants.
Every Tuesday, restaurant owner Chad Chantaracharat invites Thai monks wearing saffron robes to lunch at his Thai Original BBQ Restaurant. The monks live at a Buddhist temple a few miles away.
Chantaracharat said he had mixed feelings about the new market. The store could attract more business to his restaurant, but he wasn't sure if the market planned to have a small cafe inside serving cheaper meals.
He sympathized with some residents' concerns, saying he has noticed that 99 Ranch Markets in some areas are not that well kept, but said that once people saw the spread of Asian vegetables and fresh seafood — often still swimming in tanks until a customer orders it killed — they'd like the market.
"I think people are going to dig it," he said. "It's something new, and everyone here likes to be trendy."
At Loving Savior of the Hills Lutheran Church, Chinese congregants mostly welcomed the market, saying its unconventional wares would be a boon to the community. The market could also become a much-needed hub for older Asians to meet friends, chat and sip tea.
"I think the market is absolutely a good thing. We've been waiting a long time for this," said Cindy Fu, 40, who recently moved from Chino Hills to Chino. "Every culture has businesses; some are super clean, and some are not. But you can't use just one to judge an entire culture. I think this could be a good opportunity for us to earn a good reputation."
Still, others were afraid that the market could give well-heeled residents of this semirural community at the westernmost edge of San Bernardino County the wrong impression about Asians.
"We've tried very hard to build up ourselves and build up our image to Caucasian people here. I hope 99 Ranch will hold up to that high standard," said Wu.
The new grocery store wasn't the first controversy to arise from the changing faces in Chino Hills neighborhoods.
Three years ago, Hindu leaders proposed a grand temple on former farmland, in part to serve the 500 Indian families there.
But the plans drew protests from some residents who contended the project would turn Chino Hills into a "Third World city" and a haven for terrorists.
After a heated public hearing, the temple's supporters won approval to build, but it ultimately did not win permission to construct the temple's spires that exceeded the city's 43-foot height limit.
City leaders say the community isn't in danger of losing its rural feel: The Sheriff's Department station is surrounded by white post fencing and horse pastures. Forty percent of Chino Hills' 46 square miles is dedicated to open space, Norton-Perry said.
The 99 Ranch Market, as any other grocer, will undergo regular inspections by the county Health Department.
As for the sign, "We can tell them we prefer signs to be in English only, but we can't require it," Norton-Perry said.
Still, some say the spat is much ado about nothing.
"Last I remember, the words '99 Ranch' were in English," said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center. "You have El Pollo Loco," he said, referring to the popular Mexican restaurant chain. "Nobody's telling them to translate that."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinohills12apr12,0,7537913.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Some residents protest, in vain, an Asian market in the upscale community. Others say it will serve their needs.
By Sara Lin, Times Staff Writer
April 12, 2007
An hour before Sunday services at a Lutheran church in Chino Hills, the Rev. Andy Wu joined his congregants in front of plates piled high with boiled Napa cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, stir fried tofu and rice.
Since Wu became an associate pastor in 2002, attendance at lunch and his worship services in Mandarin Chinese have doubled. So has Chino Hills' Asian population, which now makes up about 40% of city residents.
"Five years ago, if I walked into a Vons market and saw an Asian face, I would get very excited," Wu said. "Now, every day we see Asian faces."
But the demographic shift has proved unsettling for some in this upscale San Bernardino County town, and that tension surfaced when a major Asian grocery chain, 99 Ranch Market, announced plans for a Chino Hills store.
The Chino Hills City Council heard an outcry from a small group of residents, including one who wrote that he didn't want to see "little Chinatowns all over the Hills" filled with Asian signs he can't read.
The skirmish mirrors clashes in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s when Asian immigrants moved into the traditionally white and Latino suburbs. When a wave of Asian businesses followed, city officials in Monterey Park tried unsuccessfully to pass English-only ordinances, arguing that Chinese-language business signs would confuse firefighters and emergency workers.
Larry Blugrind of Chino Hills told the City Council in a letter that the store would "result in a run-down center that is the equivalent of a Chinese Pic 'N' Save less than a mile from the kind of high-quality shops our city has been trying to attract to this area."
Reached by telephone, Blugrind explained that he enjoyed having a diverse community — his daughter-in-law is Japanese.
"My worry is that 99 Ranch could be a steppingstone for it to become all Asian," he said. "I don't want another Hacienda Heights."
In Chino Hills, the City Council has no say in whether Tawa Supermarkets Inc. can open a 99 Ranch Market. The store is moving into a space formerly occupied by a Ralphs supermarket. It's a simple case of one grocery store taking over for another, said Mayor Gwenn Norton-Perry.
"It's an approved use, and we as a city have no purview over this. That's the bottom line," Norton-Perry said.
But that hasn't stopped angry residents from sounding off to the City Council.
The market's owners downplayed the controversy.
"We don't want to focus on that part," said Jennifer Tsao, a spokeswoman for Tawa, which operates 22 stores throughout California. Inside the store, Tsao said customers could expect clean aisles, signs in English and Chinese, as well as bilingual employees.
The 99 Ranch Market in Chino Hills may have struck a chord with residents because it "makes the Asian American community very visible and displaces businesses that people were comfortable with, in this case a Ralphs," said Linda Vo, an Asian American studies professor at UC Irvine.
From 2000 to 2005, the city of 81,000 saw its Asian population jump from 22% to 39%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent survey. Of those, 10,316 were Filipino and 7,752 were Chinese. Asian Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese constitute most of the remaining Asian Americans.
The Asian influx has already had an effect on some public services: The Chino Hills library stocks books written in Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Similarly, in Orange County, nearly one-third of Irvine residents are Asian Americans. But Irvine's transition was a slower one, with many immigrants moving into newly built neighborhoods, Vo said. There was some mild resentment from the community about the changing demographics but nothing overt, she said.
At the Mediterranean-style plaza in Chino Hills where workers are readying the 99 Ranch Market for a summer opening, a handful of the plaza's 20 shops already seem to reflect the city's changing face.
There's a karate studio, a Chinese buffet and Thai restaurants.
Every Tuesday, restaurant owner Chad Chantaracharat invites Thai monks wearing saffron robes to lunch at his Thai Original BBQ Restaurant. The monks live at a Buddhist temple a few miles away.
Chantaracharat said he had mixed feelings about the new market. The store could attract more business to his restaurant, but he wasn't sure if the market planned to have a small cafe inside serving cheaper meals.
He sympathized with some residents' concerns, saying he has noticed that 99 Ranch Markets in some areas are not that well kept, but said that once people saw the spread of Asian vegetables and fresh seafood — often still swimming in tanks until a customer orders it killed — they'd like the market.
"I think people are going to dig it," he said. "It's something new, and everyone here likes to be trendy."
At Loving Savior of the Hills Lutheran Church, Chinese congregants mostly welcomed the market, saying its unconventional wares would be a boon to the community. The market could also become a much-needed hub for older Asians to meet friends, chat and sip tea.
"I think the market is absolutely a good thing. We've been waiting a long time for this," said Cindy Fu, 40, who recently moved from Chino Hills to Chino. "Every culture has businesses; some are super clean, and some are not. But you can't use just one to judge an entire culture. I think this could be a good opportunity for us to earn a good reputation."
Still, others were afraid that the market could give well-heeled residents of this semirural community at the westernmost edge of San Bernardino County the wrong impression about Asians.
"We've tried very hard to build up ourselves and build up our image to Caucasian people here. I hope 99 Ranch will hold up to that high standard," said Wu.
The new grocery store wasn't the first controversy to arise from the changing faces in Chino Hills neighborhoods.
Three years ago, Hindu leaders proposed a grand temple on former farmland, in part to serve the 500 Indian families there.
But the plans drew protests from some residents who contended the project would turn Chino Hills into a "Third World city" and a haven for terrorists.
After a heated public hearing, the temple's supporters won approval to build, but it ultimately did not win permission to construct the temple's spires that exceeded the city's 43-foot height limit.
City leaders say the community isn't in danger of losing its rural feel: The Sheriff's Department station is surrounded by white post fencing and horse pastures. Forty percent of Chino Hills' 46 square miles is dedicated to open space, Norton-Perry said.
The 99 Ranch Market, as any other grocer, will undergo regular inspections by the county Health Department.
As for the sign, "We can tell them we prefer signs to be in English only, but we can't require it," Norton-Perry said.
Still, some say the spat is much ado about nothing.
"Last I remember, the words '99 Ranch' were in English," said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center. "You have El Pollo Loco," he said, referring to the popular Mexican restaurant chain. "Nobody's telling them to translate that."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinohills12apr12,0,7537913.story?coll=la-home-headlines
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