Dale Minami 

  • Talks about how people “aren’t angry anymore’ about racism (in comparison to how things were in the 60s). (pg 11) He says that people today are more focused on empowerment and financial success. (pg 12)I agree that, especially in America, there is a big emphasis on empowerment of individuals and the collective community. However, judging by what I’ve seen and heard, I would argue that people are probably still angry, but are tired and disheartened by the fact that racism and other social issues are still happening after decades; even though America touts itself as this great place of freedom and individuality, there’s still a lot of stigma around being yourself rather than conforming to society, which includes appreciation of other cultures that is not from a pre-approved white male perspective.

  • Also talks about how great it is to live in America compared to other countries (pg 14), which I find interesting because I’ve heard a bunch of statistics about everything from healthcare quality, healthcare expense, gun related deaths, infant mortality rates, etc, and we’re doing really badly compared to many other so called 1st world countries. Since this book is about a decade old, I wonder how this particular interview might have gone if it was done today. Would he still feel this way, or would he perhaps feel more distant, closer the way he describes feeling towards his ancestral country?

 

Ark Chin

  • “I think the primary factor was World War II, when many Chinese went into service and many were wounded and killed.” (pg 18) I don’t remember hearing much about Chinese people serving in the military in World War II; people always talk about internment camps for Japanese people and how some of them joined the military, and how African Americans were segregated in the military, but I don’t remember hearing anything about Chinese people in that period and I’m wondering why that is. Also, based on current attitudes towards different ethnicities part of me is surprised that the government apparently didn’t treat other Asian ethnicities the same way they treated the Japanese Americans.

 

  • “Engineers are practical people. They’re results-oriented. What they want to see is results. They don’t care what color you are.” (pg 20) This made me think about how fields such as computer coding were originally female dominated jobs and would probably be less likely to be as prejudiced to other ethnicities as a result of already being devalued by (white) men. I imagine other math-oriented fields such as engineering were similar in this regard.

 

Hoan Dang

  • He mentions a French boarding school in Vietnam, and a French aunt and uncle (pg 24-25); does France have a lot of relations with Vietnam that I don’t know about? How intertwined is Vietnamese culture with French culture, and how would that influence Vietnamese American culture?

 

  • “Growing up in suburban Bethesda, I thought I was like everyone else.” (pg 28) Does Bethesda have a large Asian population? Does this mean that he didn’t experience much racism, or just that he didn’t notice any racism as a child?

 

Susim Chen

  • “My dad was already here in the United States; he was an American citizen when I was born, so I was an American citizen as well.” (pg 31) I keep noticing this kind of comment in these interviews, but my current understanding of citizenship is you have to be born in America or on an American military base in order to be considered a citizen. I’m assuming it used to be different and was just changed at some point. What was going on in the world that led to that kind of change?

 

  • “I was afraid to talk to others, first because my English was so poor, and second, I had the feeling that if I talked to them I might bother them. That’s how I felt, cultural inferior.” (pg 34) Even though she had classmates and other people being nice to her and helping to support her, she still felt like an outsider and not confident in her sense of belonging to the culture due to the racism she saw and experienced. It’s interesting seeing her accounts of the racism she noticed towards African Americans, as I feel like most people don’t often think about how, even if you’re not directing hate towards a certain group, they see it and it affects them too because they know they can’t trust you not to turn on them for being different too.

 

Qing Shan Liang

  • “I haven’t gone anywhere for leisure or vacation. First, you need the time, then you need to have some money. For immigrants like me, I need to earn money to support myself, and support my family in China. That’s the expectation. So I have to save what little money I make, and support my family and relatives in the village. It’s basically unheard of for me to think about taking a vacation or going somewhere for fun.” (pg 41) I thought this was interesting because at first glance, it seems really similar to how America currently tends to view low income people (ie; “You’re poor! You can’t have a cell phone!” or “You wouldn’t be so poor if you didn’t drink Starbucks every day”). This makes me think about how we place a lot of stigma around doing nice things for yourself and how we’ve basically created a culture where, even though we supposedly celebrate the individual, we’re not “supposed” to do anything for ourselves that isn’t working, eating, and sleeping, because otherwise we’re being lazy or not working hard enough and therefore being “poor” is our fault rather than the fault of the system and culture that we live in.

 

Frank Bai

  • I thought it was interesting that he was apparently wealthy enough to have maids and chauffeurs when he lived in China, but he became a delivery man for a dry cleaning business in America by his own choice, rather than because circumstances forced him to. (pg 45) This makes me wonder about what he says on page 46, “Today, I think there is little difference in terms of doing business in China. If you are capable, you can have a good life. It’s pretty much like the United States.” Would he think this way if he hadn’t had the job experience he had back in China? I feel like many Americans currently would disagree with the idea that you’ll have a good life as long as you’re capable, which is what I feel like he’s saying here.

 

Dale Minami

  • I thought it was really interesting seeing his thoughts on whether or not internment could happen again (pgs 56-58), especially since he’s absolutely right. This was from a decade ago and now we’re starting to see this happen again with the Trump administration targeting Hispanic peoples, just as he predicted. “So, politically, if there’s enough of a crisis or hysteria, absolutely it can happen again. I don’t have as much faith that the simple strength of people’s morality in this country is going to prevent this from happening.” (pg 57) Trump has created a hysteria and called it a crisis.

 

Gary Locke

  • “When I was governor, there were all these requests to go to these Asian American conferences and events all across the country. We were very selective. We did not want any publicity on being constantly out of state or focusing on Asian American communities around the country.” (pg 63) It kind of feels like he’s saying that in order to be successful as an Asian American in a prominent position, you can’t be “too Asian” or too focused on that aspect of your identity because white people will get mad about it. I would disagree if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve seen white people online complain about having more than one character who was a person of color or female and claim that “liberals” and “SJWs” (social justice warriors, used as a derogatory term) are ruining TV shows and video games.

 

Ruby Chow

  • “He already had a wife in China. But wives couldn’t be brought over, so he married my mother.” (pg 71) He married her despite already being married to another woman? Was there a legal precedent for this sort of thing? Did the first wife know about this? Did her mother know about this? Why did he need to have a wife in the US so badly that he had to be married to two women at the same time? I’m assuming this was a cultural thing???

 

Cheryl Chow

  • “When you’re not the smiling quiet Asian woman, then it breaks a number of stereotypes. It’s like a double-edged sword. … A woman, especially an Asian woman, taking a strong stance is a dragon lady.” (pgs 78-79) I thought what she was saying here was interesting, because women definitely are still often expected to be quiet, subservient, and not have strong opinions, so thinking about how being a minority would compound the issue is really awful. How can anyone break away from stereotypes if even breaking the stereotype is made into a different stereotype (ie; not being quiet and submissive means you’re a “dragon lady”)?

 

Shamita Das Dasgupta

  • “The wife would be given a conditional green card, which means they have to be married for two years to prove that it’s a bona fide marriage. Then both of them go back to an immigration official to have the temporary green card replaced, which means if the marriage is abusive within those first two years she’s at his mercy. He can do anything by holding this kind of life or ax over her head.” (pg 85) This is so insidious, it makes me sick. I’m sure this is still happening often, but I’ve never heard about it before, which is incredibly alarming but disappointingly not as surprising as it should be due to everything I know about racism, classism, and sexism.

 

Ark Chin

  • “The people that are coming into the association are the ones that are the new immigrants. They see an organization that they understand, that they can participate in and to some degree influence… We have lost in that it’s not making any progress in bringing in the American-born.” (pg 90-91) I think this sort of thing perfectly illustrates the disconnect between generations that occurs when the parents and grandparents have all this nostalgia for how things used to be and they focus on that a lot, but then the children don’t have the same kind of emotional connection and can’t relate in the same way because they have different needs and grew up in a different culture.

 

Hank Sasaki

  • “Country is really white people music, but music is a global language, so if you’re writing good songs they can touch everybody in the world.” (pg 97) I like how he says that music is a global language while still referring to country as “white people music”, because it’s true. Music is a product of our cultures, but since every culture has music we can find ways to identify with and understand each other through it. You can learn a lot about a culture by listening to the kind of music it produces, just like with food.

 

Jake Shimabukuro

  • “The ukelele is very, very popular but in a more novel sense -you know, like on television- so that’s why people are more knowledgeable about what a ukelele is, but as far as what it’s supposed to sound like and what it’s capable of, I think people are just not exposed to that.” (pg 102) To be honest, this part was kind of funny to me at first, because before this he was talking about how most ukeleles that people are familiar with are basically these cheap toy knock-off kinds. When he mentioned that, I remembered how in elementary school in the science classroom there was this really cheap, dinky toy ukelele and I remember wondering why it was there and who would play such a thing. Then in high school I kept seeing like three different random guys who all had a ukelele (or maybe it was the same one being passed around, who knows?). During lunch they would sometimes start playing in the cafeteria and it sounded like a regular instrument, so I can totally see where he’s coming from with this passage because I’ve seen both sides of what he’s talking about.

 

Joann Lee

  • “At that time, I believe they were going to give us 3 percent of any profits from the record, which I understand was the industry standard.” (pg 108) Was 3 percent actually the industry standard at the time, or was that just what they led her to believe? Either way that sounds really low, and I understand why the dad wanted to try and get them a better deal. I’m assuming that the dad was also assuming that they were giving them such a low rate because they were kids and non-white, which is another valid reason to be upset.

 

Steve Thao

  • “Originally we were in Laos, and after the fall of Laos all of the Hmong people who sided with the Americans had to escape to refugee camps in Thailand.” (pg 112) I had to look up the note in the back of the book for context for this, because I had no idea what happened in Laos because my history classes never mentioned anything of the sort. The notes in the back of the book left more questions than answers though, because basically all it said was that “Laos fell to the Pathet Lao in 1975 so America started evacuating Hmong military leaders and their families to Thailand” (pg 266). What is the Pathet Lao, and why were America and Thailand involved? What caused this?

 

Albert Lee

  • “Honestly, I’ve met only one other Korean American in my entire life who wasn’t Christian – which is kind of shocking to me when you think about Korea, because Christianity is a minority religion there.” (pg 116) This surprised me as much as it did for him! I have a coworker who is Korean American and she sometimes tells me stories about how her mother’s solutions for her problems was mostly “go to church, you’ll feel better, you need Jesus”, but I had no idea that that was a Thing, I just assumed that was a personal quirk of her mother’s. Why is that a thing for Korean Americans specifically? Like, is there an aspect of Korean culture that makes them more prone to that kind of assimilation compared to other ethnic groups who immigrate here?

 

Daniel Jung

  • On pages 122-124, his description of his relationship with his dad hit me kind of hard, because I have a very similar relationship with my father, who is of Italian descent, and it’s really hard dealing with someone like that. My dad wasn’t as extreme with the lecturing as he says his dad was, but not being allowed to “talk back” or speak your mind at all, being told that your father knows better than you just because he’s older; that’s all very familiar to me, and it wears on you a lot to have to deal with that constantly.

 

Jeff Andrada

  • “But growing up it was hard. First off, my parents did not want me to date in elementary school, or junior high school. Even my sophomore year of high school they wanted me to focus on school and graduating and going to college.” (pg 131) I can understand not wanting your kid to date in middle school, and maybe high school if you’re overprotective, but elementary school???? Is it common for kids to start dating in elementary school? That seems really young??

 

Jake Shimabukuro

  • “Neither of my parents speak Japanese. My grandma speaks just a little, real slight, but on my dad’s side no one spoke Japanese.” (pg 134) I thought that was interesting because at first I thought they had deemed it taboo or something for some reason. Then I reread and realized that he says his dad was second generation from Japan at first, but then mentions that his grandfather was adopted by a family in Hawaii. So no one on that side of the family speaks Japanese because they’re Hawaiian? I’m assuming he was probably adopted at a young age, so that makes more sense now.

 

David Tang

  • His interview seems to be really focused on feelings of disconnect, first with his identity as a Chinese American and then with his views on how his generation reacts to racism. “I think my generation is a lot more desensitized to it because we didn’t live through total outright racism. You read about outright segregation with whites and blacks and stuff, but that’s like a degree of separation because we didn’t live through it.” (pg 139) I’ve noticed that kind of desensitized attitude with people my age too, even on the internet, so it’s interesting to see that someone noticed that sort of thing at least a decade ago.

 

Laura Jung

  • “In high school it was, I need to get good grades so I can get into college. If I don’t get into college then I’m going to be a failure and I’m not going to get a job. Now I think if I don’t get good grades I’m not going to get into a good Ph.D. program. It just continues.” (pg 144) This paragraph slammed into me. My parents placed a huge importance on getting good grades when I was growing up, and her thoughts mirror my fears that I’ve had ever since almost exactly. She says that “In general I think Asians feel the need to succeed.” but I think part of it might just be the older generations have different ideas of what successful means and push that agenda onto their kids. They aren’t even thinking about the repercussions it might have on mental health because mental health was not a priority back then like it is becoming today, so their kids are way more likely to wind up with anxiety disorders.

 

Agnes Braga

  • “As far as working, that’s what I thought it would be – that I would be self-sufficient. But I had this idea that I would be on my own and have an apartment with just me. But then again it didn’t quite turn out that way, because Mom and Dad joined me.” (pg 150) I know that in most Asian cultures it’s common for the children to take care of their parents and live in the same household and stuff, but this honestly really irks me that she wants so much to be independent and then is stuck living with her parents anyway. Did they even want to come to America or did they just need her to take care of them for health reasons or something? She doesn’t really elaborate at all. Was she in a position where she could have said no without being pressured into feeling guilty, or did she feel like she have no choice in the matter?

 

Albert Lee

  • “I used to be a reporter and I would go to movie premieres and I would interview Nicole Kidman and ask her embarrassing questions about her sexual life and that sort of thing.” (pg 155) Wow, okay, so was that because his higher ups told him he had to, or was that a choice he made on his own? Was that just expected of him in general, or was there an event that prompted this? Did he do that to men too, or just women? (Or just Nicole Kidman?)

 

Corky Lee

  • “I actually testified a number of years ago (this is before 9/11) that you can’t convert the candidates’ names, even if they’re Chinese, into Chinese names on the ballots. They couldn’t do it. You can do it in English and you can do it in Spanish, but there’s no room for Chinese.” (pgs 160-161) Okay, I’m not sure I understand what he’s talking about here, probably because I’ve never seen a ballot before. Is he saying there’s not enough physical room on the ballot to convert the names, or that it’s impossible to convert the names into Chinese for some reason? What exactly is the obstacle here??

 

Dale Minami

  • “Being in a Japanese American community was not thought of as the optimal safety net for you in case this thing happened again. It made you feel that if you were associated with Japanese Americans too much, the same thing could happen again as did during the incarceration in World War II.” (pg 164) I never thought about that aspect of the Japanese internment camps, but that kind of response makes total sense even if it’s sad. I wonder if that kind of attitude has faded significantly now that time has passed, or if it’s still a bit common to spread out like that.

 

Steve Thao

  • “A lot of the Hmong celebrations are still very traditional, where a lot of the older people don’t want to relinquish leadership positions and they are still doing things very traditionally, very old-fashioned, and they don’t cater to young people, depending on where you live and how the community accepts you…” (pg 170) I feel like this idea of “catering” to young people and not being willing to adapt to change is part of why newer generations feel so much disconnect towards the older generations and are less willing to listen to their parents and so on. After all, why would somebody want to listen to some old person who keeps going on about how things “should” be done and how they’ve always done it that way when that person won’t listen to new ideas or change in response to the change that is happening in the world? I think no compromise or communication means that the younger generations are more likely to ignore traditions and rebel against societal “norms”, because those norms mean that they get ignored and silenced.

 

Hoan Dang

  • He keeps referring to “Amerasians” (starting on pg 179) and I’m assuming that it’s another term for Asian American, but I haven’t seen anyone else in this book use that term so I’m not completely sure. If it is another word for Asian American, how did that term come about and why isn’t it more widely used? If it isn’t another word for Asian American, is it a term for a specific ethnic group that I’m not familiar with?

 

Laura and Daniel Jung

  • “In L.A. there are a lot of Koreans that are superficial. They’ll care more about what they’re wearing and what they’re driving than about where they live. I know this guy, he had a Mercedes Benz but he lived in the projects.” (pg 185) I’m assuming that this ties into the idea that you have to be successful and to do that you have to make a lot of money, so they buy expensive things as status symbols. This makes me wonder if that also ties into the whole “assimilation” thing and wanting to appear more American to fit in.

 

Shamita Das Dasgupta

  • “I want to make sure that when I talk I do it in that language and that I look like them; that they recognize me as one of theirs and they don’t have the opportunity to dismiss me.” (pg 186) Dismissing somebody’s words just because their views don’t match yours is depressingly common, especially when the speaker is a woman, so this is an interesting tactic she’s chosen. I wonder if it does help her to get her voice heard and taken seriously in a significant way, or if they still dismiss her because she is a woman.

 

Veronica Leung

  • “Even now, things are not back to what they were. On Park Row, they’ve closed the municipal parking lot, which many people depended on to park. They say they will reopen it, but they never have.” (pg 193) Since it’s been a decade since this book came out, I wonder if they ever did reopen it. I don’t know anything about New York streets and areas, so I also don’t know why they closed things down in Chinatown. Was it close to the Twin Towers? I’ve never heard anybody mention that when talking about 9/11, and I was only 6 at the time so I don’t have a lot of context in the first place.

 

Corky Lee

  • “I said if people could get to a phone to call Beijing or Hong Kong and say, “Listen, we’re okay, we have hardships, there’s no phone service” or whatever, it would ease the mental anguish. Here the whole world knows what happened but they don’t know what happened to their friends and relatives and loved ones in New York.” (pg 196) This was really interesting to me because it never occurred to me. In the few times that 9/11 was talked about in school growing up, they never put any focus on the immigrants and how it would affect people in other countries; they always talked about how tragic it was, but only in terms of the USA. Of course the families of immigrants would be worried, just like Americans were, but it’s like because they weren’t in the country and they were foreign that they somehow didn’t count. That makes me mad now that I notice that.

 

Shamita Das Dasgupta

  • This entire interview made me furious. Not only because this kind of discrimination happened and as far as I know is still happening, but because most of the details of this discrimination are new to me. I didn’t know they were registering people like that, and I didn’t know they were deporting people, and it makes me sick. This reminds me of what the Nazis were doing to Jewish people. Also, I barely ever hear anybody mention discrimination against South Asians who isn’t one of the people affected by it. Even in online spaces, it’s not mentioned much.

 

Naomi McWatt

  • “Growing up, I had friends. I would do homework sometimes for girls because I wanted to be their friend. But now, as I look back, there were some people who really did like me.” (pg 205) This confused me, because she seems to imply either that these girls wanted her to do their homework for them or because she offered to do their homework for them so that they would like her. So were the people who “really did like” her some of the ones who was using her for homework, or were they people who were there for her and friendly to her and she didn’t realize until later? I’m not sure I’m understanding this part very well.

 

Gita Deane

  • Since same-sex marriage is now legal, I wonder how Gita and Lisa feel about it. Would they be more upset because their attempts failed in 2007 and it took years for it to be legalized? Or would they just be happy that it’s legal now?

 

Albert Lee

  • “That was an issue I had to tackle more, and where I had more resistance – being gay rather than being Asian. Being Asian was never really a problem. But being gay always was a bigger problem that I had to cope with – being gay, eclipsing being Asian, and sort of my mind space.” (pg 225) This is interesting to me because he places so much emphasis on how being gay was a bigger problem for him, but then in the next couple of sentences he mentions how growing up in Kentucky as a minority was a big obstacle and how he was completely in the closet up until high school. This seems like a contradiction at first, because if he was in the closet then how would being gay be an even bigger issue than being a minority in Kentucky? But then I realized that he probably meant internally, that being gay and unable to express that part of himself was probably more difficult and emotionally taxing than dealing with any racism he encountered, especially when combined with any antigay remarks that he heard.

 

Karl Ludwig

  • It’s interesting to see how racial tensions interact with being adopted, and how that affected him. I thought it was especially interesting to see his musings on whether or not the fact that his birth father’s occupation had any bearing on his decision to become a police officer, as if he was subconsciously looking for similarities between him and his birth father.

 

Kristen Houghten

  • This one made me really really emotional and to be honest I’m not sure why. I started crying when she says “It’s not like they won’t let go of me but I don’t know what part of me they want, because the part of me that they remember has long gone.” (pg 242), but I don’t even know why that hit me so hard. It obviously resonated with me somehow, but I’m not sure why.

 

Ark Chin

  • “But before I went he sent my mother a letter saying under no circumstance are you to allow your son to be married.” (pg 249) Judging by the way his grandmother immediately gangs up on him and his mother to try and get him to marry, I think his father should have sent a letter to both of them! Why was it so important for him to get married that she was willing to risk her own daughter’s health? I don’t understand that kind of attitude, why was that “the village culture”? How did that come about?

 

Candace Chin

  • “I found it really interesting because I lived in Chinese housing, among regular Chinese people. I didn’t live in the foreign housing which is where I should have been living.” (pg 255) I didn’t know that they had separate housing for foreigners in China, first of all. Second of all, why did they put her in the Chinese housing if she was considered American by them? Did she ask them to and they complied because she was of Chinese descent, or was it a mistake?

 

Susha Pratt

  • I know we talked about the term “hapa” in class a little bit, but I can’t remember if we talked about whether people who aren’t Hawaiian are allowed to use that term or not? Would this be cultural appropriation for her to use that term to describe herself? (pg 260)