• The author has a lot of issues that go way beyond race.  I mean, who says,

  The first step toward self-reform is to admit your deficiencies. Though my early adulthood has been a protracted education in them, I do not admit mine. I’m fine. It’s the rest of you who have a problem. Fuck all y’all.

  Can you imagine a world where this guy would be happy with the state of things?  I didn’t think so.

• People tend to blame things on the most obvious reason.  Often, the most obvious reason is racial or cultural.  Remember, plenty of non-Asian people are shy, and plenty of non-Asian people are not natural leaders.  On the other hand, plenty of non-Asian people study hard and plenty of non-Asian people are drilled to take tests.  There is clearly a correlation, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call it causality.

  This has become more evident after living abroad. I notice that often-times I see people behave in a way that I’m not used to and I’ll think to myself “why do French people do that”?  Usually on second thought, the fact that they were doing something weird had nothing to do with being French, it was just that that person did something weird.  People do weird things in America all the time too.  Now clearly French people do things in a different way than Americans, but by and large the range of variation is the same: you have shy French people, you have loud obnoxious French people, you have studious bookworm French people, and everything in between.  Again there is some correlation, but no causality.

• When one does this stereotyping to oneself (e.g. “I’m not a good leader because my parents raised me with Asian values”), it’s a red herring to try to overcome that obstacle by distancing oneself from those values.  To be sure, “Asian values” do exist, although somewhat nebulously… I would personally put valuing education, being humble, cherishing family, and a strong work ethic under that umbrella.  Others might choose a different combination, or might include less flattering qualities such as being self-effacing.  But at least for the values that I hold, I see no incompatibility between them and being a strong leader.

  Certainly, if one looks at actual Asian societies, there is no lack of initiative and strong leaders.  Especially in China, one sees examples of bold leadership in the private sector and, I would argue, also in the government.  And not just men, but women as well; there are more self-made female billionaires in China than in any other country in the world (including America).

• Following up on the previous point, last I checked, things like humility, hard work, and perseverance are still considered qualities.  There’s no guarantee that they will take you to the top, but, in the right proportions, I don’t think these qualities hold you back either.  You can be humble, hard-working, and persevering and simultaneously be charismatic and a good networker.  I think most people would agree that there’s nothing more annoying than someone who climbs to the top by virtue of politics and ass-kissing alone.  Playing the political game is unavoidable, but (perhaps this is naive of me) in most cases someone who is actually talented and a hard worker and reasonably charismatic will get ahead of a brown-noser who offers nothing else.  I’m pretty annoyed by articles like this that present the false alternative, either you can be a leader or you can hold onto “Asian values”, but not both.

• I think he’s right about the Bamboo Ceiling, there are definitely external factors that limit the rise of Asians in America.  What I wrote in the first few points is mostly about how Asians stereotype themselves, but it is undoubtedly true that the wider world stereotypes Asians in a similar way.  I think that fortunately he’s also right that a lot of people in our generation are bypassing the Bamboo Ceiling by working outside the box, starting their own businesses and stuff.  Changing the external perceptions of Asians is just as important as changing the self-perception.

• The word Asians is still annoying.  Does he mean to include South Asians?  It’s unclear; he mentions them in the section about the Asian Playboy, but then nowhere else.  Does he mean Asians everywhere, or just in America?  Probably the latter.  And what do I mean when I say Asian?  I’m not sure.  Mostly Chinese actually, I think.  In any case, we need better-adapted vocabulary.

• I’m always annoyed when I read an article about race, and usually it just talks about black and white.  The more modern and up-to-date authors include Hispanics.  Rarely, if ever, anything about anyone else.  It turns out it’s just as annoying in an article about whites and Asians where it seems like no other races exist.

Unfortunately this scandal is emblematic of the entire go-go decade, as Paul Krugman so eloquently put it. We’ve been living in a fantasy world where unrealistic returns are viewed as normal and no questions are asked about just where all this magic money is coming from.  How exactly does the SEC, not to mention all the other regulatory authorities that Madoff evaded, miss such an incredibly ridiculously enormous fraud?

If Madoff is (almost certainly) convicted of the crimes he committed, what will be his punishment?  Should he go to a white-collar jail and live out the rest of his life in relative comfort?  How exactly does that work anyway?  What exactly is the “harshest” punishment that should be meted out in such situations?  We commonly hold the death penalty to be the harshest punishment available; does it fit in this situation?  Is it commensurate with the crime, or inappropriate because the crime wasn’t violent?

I’m still on the fence about whether the death penalty itself is humane or not.  I have my reservations about whether we as imperfect fallible people have the right to judge whether someone else lives or dies.  But I do believe that, assuming that the death penalty is acceptable, there should be no question that someone like Madoff, if proven guilty, should receive it.  He has caused almost incomprehensible harm to such a vast number of people that we will be picking up the pieces for years if not decades.  Maybe no one has died directly at his hands, but the number of lives that he’s ruined, the number of organizations that are now bankrupt because of his actions, the immeasurable wealth squandered because of his crimes has resulted in far greater harm to this country and to the world than any single act of violent crime could ever cause.  If this judicial system has any pretentions to justice, I hope that it lays down a punishment that’s comparable with the judgments it’s laid down for other crimes, and makes Madoff pay as dearly as anyone possibly can for his crimes against his investors and, more pertinently, for his crimes against humanity.

First, they told us our love was an abomination, that we didn’t deserve to live.

But we stood up, we joined hands, we came out of the closet, and we said, “Yes we do.”

Then, they told us our love is not natural, that we weren’t normal.

But we paid our taxes, we voted, we volunteered, we raised families, and we said, “Yes we are.”

Now, they tell us our love is unworthy and inferior, that we can’t marry.

But we will fight, we will not give up, we will not back down, and one fine day we will be able to say, “Yes we can.”

In fact, those bonds of family are our anchors in this age where everything moves increasingly faster, where our lives can change overnight with a layoff, a cancer diagnosis, or an order to go to Iraq, and we are helplessly swept along in the tide of vicissitudes and upheavals.  Those bonds of family are what keep us grounded, keep us sane, and provide us a bit of shelter in this cold, difficult world.

Family is all the more precious to those of who are gay because so many of us risk losing them simply because of who we are.  I dreaded my parents’ reaction when I came out to them… for a few days, a few weeks even I thought that I might have permanently damaged those bonds.  I can’t say that those bonds have fully healed, but at least the immediate danger of losing them completely is gone.  There’s nothing scarier in this world than to think your parents might abandon you simply for who you are, and it’s something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone else.

With very few exceptions, we are born with our family, we can’t choose them.  We can’t go down the street to the courthouse to get a new mom or dad, a new brother or sister.  We have to make the best of what we’re given at birth, come what may.

There is only one exception to this rule, one family member that we all have the right to choose.  Well, I should say that YOU have the right to choose since we don’t.  You have one choice, one chance in this life to share with someone the intimacy, shelter, love, and companionship of being married, of forming your own family.

That’s what marriage today is about.  Whether it’s just the two of you or you have kids, whatever your race or religion might be, whether you married your high-school sweetheart or found a new love in your golden years, however you choose to express your love and commitment to each other, your marriage is your choice to share your life with someone and to build one together.

Your husband or wife is the one family member that you get to pick.  That’s your choice, your chance.  Shouldn’t we get that chance too?

Calling marriage the most sacred and cherished of our social institutions is ok, but it needs to be qualified with all of the exceptions I mentioned above, as well as others.  Just because some aspect of marriage is traditional doesn’t make it right; certainly two men or two women marrying is not nearly as abominable as saying that one wife is worth two cows.

Whatever you think traditional marriage is, let’s say what marriage today definitely is not:

• It’s not about procreation because plenty of straight couples get married and choose not to have children, or choose to adopt children rather than give birth to children.
• It’s not about religion because we all have different gods (or none at all) and yet many people end up marrying someone of a different faith.
• It’s not about eternity because half of all marriages end in divorce.
• It’s not about tradition because many of the marriages performed today would have been illegal 50 years ago (inter-racial, inter-faith, etc.), and many of the marriages that would have happened 100 years go would not happen today (arranged marriages, etc.).
• It’s not (just) about legal rights, because civil unions are not and never will be equal to marriage.

One point that has been made already in news reports is the degree to which minorities voted for Proposition 8.  In particular, the LA Times cites that over 70% of blacks in California voted for Proposition 8, and already angry bloggers and commentators are throwing blame and “how-dare-yous” at black voters.  Of course there is a line from the civil rights movement for de-segregation and minority rights to the modern gay rights movement.  And of course they are not of the same magnitude, since the burden of slavery’s legacy is carried by blacks alone.  But clearly many black Californians did not see the connection between the two, and the question is why.

The knee-jerk (and highly self-defeating) reaction is that blacks cling too strongly to their religion and that they’ll vote for whatever their pastors say, and that to win them over is a hopeless task.  There is a kernel of truth to this; walk around Harlem a few blocks and you’ll be astounded by the number of churches dotting the neighborhood.

But that’s only a small part of the problem.  The greater part of the problem is with the gay rights movement itself.  When straights in minority communities (be it blacks, Latinos, Asians, or whatever else) think of gay rights and same-sex marriage, the image that pops into their mind is gay white men and women marrying each other.  How many of the pictures that you’ve seen of gay couples tying the knot are minorities?  The only one I can think of is George Takei and even there his husband is white.  The problem with convincing minority communities that gay rights matter is that they think it has nothing to do with them.  Gay men and women of color are invisible to them, and so gay rights becomes a white person’s problem.

This is symptomatic of gay culture in general; although things have improved in the last few years, in general gay culture is much more white-centric than mainstream culture.  At least in mainstream culture we have black and Latino media and sports icons (Asians still get the shaft here unfortunately), and thanks to Barack Obama even political icons.  In gay culture there are few if any minority icons, and the most famous ones are not even gay (think Tina Turner or Janet Jackson).

Thus it’s not surprising that the organizers of the No on 8 effort didn’t even bother to start campaigning in minority communities until the week of the election.  When they contacted ethnic newspapers, they discovered that the Yes on 8 campaign had been renting space for months already.  Then when No on 8 ran TV ads, instead of running ads showing gay couples (especially gay couples of color) they showed Ellen.  Clearly not the right tack for convincing minority demographics.

Until this attitude changes, until gay rights are viewed as everyone’s concern no matter their race, until the day when everyone cares about marriage equality, regardless of whether they’re black, white, Latino, Asian, or anything else, because it’s just as likely that their son or daughter, brother or sister will need it, until that moment there’s no way we’ll convince minority voters to vote against discrimination.  And until that day, there’s no way we’ll have the equality we as people all deserve.

I was originally a Hillary supporter and I still am; I think practically speaking she would have made a more experienced president and would have hit the ground running even faster.  But there’s no denying that Obama is more inspirational, and what he really brings to the presidency that Hillary could not is the ability to mobilize such a vast base to the country’s service, and that in itself is quite the accomplishment.  Let’s hope that the excitement he stirs up lasts past the election itself.

What’s even nicer is that the people here are so different from New York.  OK, fair enough Cambridge is a big bunch of nerds.  The people here are not as pretty to look at and we’re definitely closer to being in America (there are some scary waistlines here), but it’s the nerdy America.  Everywhere you turn here there are research institutes discovering the next treatment for cancer or building a better mouse trap.  And not every other person on the street has an iPhone, wears D&G, or dresses business-formal.  I miss that; I don’t meet enough nerdy people in New York and even though I appreciate it when people dress nice and walk fast, it’d be nice if they could also talk about how their work is helping to save lives or further science.  Of course you get that in Princeton, but there’s a much smaller community there and, let’s face it, living in Princeton sucks.  Living here, on the other hand, actually seems nice.

TNS had her doubts about living in Boston because of the lack of diversity.  But just walking around today I don’t think that’s a problem at all.  True the popular image of Boston is that of a very Irish-American, white-dominated city, but I think that’s very misleading.  Sure, South Boston is still very white and Irish, but the Back Bay, downtown, Brighton, Brookline, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, all these areas are very mixed.  A lot of it has to do with the large student population, and the universities here attract the best and brightest from all across the world.

And, to venture out on a limb and say something blatantly elitist and snobby, I think people like me benefit from the diversity in Boston more than they do from the diversity in New York.  Let’s face it, even though there are Hispanic, Greek, African, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, etc. neighborhoods in New York, how often do we interact with them except to go to their restaurants?  When was the last time I met a random Senegalese person outside the context of patronizing their store, even though I live in a neighborhood filled with Senegalese people?  Part of it’s my fault, that’s for sure, because I don’t go out looking to meet them; but part of it is also that we have basically nothing in common besides sharing the same neighborhood.

In contrast, I feel like the diversity in Boston is more accessible because we would share more things in common.  Maybe we do research in the same area, or they’re studying here and want to learn more about American culture, or they work in the same building as me in the next office over.  And I guess that’s my point: just there existing diversity isn’t enough, the diversity should somehow also actively influence my life, rather than just being background noise.

The first one pissed me off because as usual the journalist takes a very (falsely) negative view of things.  Of course the first half of the article focuses on what the government did to “clean up” the city before the games, e.g. removing beggars and increasing security.  And of course this was reported from the point of view that these are all infringing on human rights etc. etc.  But what would the media have reported if the government hadn’t done such things?  That China is a dirty ugly mess.  Moreover, the main point of the article, that the Olympic volunteers are overwhelmingly young, is false.  I’ve been walking around Beijing for the last few days and I see tons of volunteers who have thoroughly grey hair, and they are just as warm, helpful, and proud of the Olympics as the young people are.  Now maybe there is some truth in the article, because the older volunteers don’t appear at Olympic venues or the more thoroughly touristed areas; I’ve encountered them more in residential areas that don’t attract the Olympic crowds.  But maybe the reason isn’t some ulterior age-ist agenda, and maybe it’s just that the younger volunteers are more proficient in English and would be better suited to dealing with so many foreigners?

The second I found encouraging because Kristof hits the nail on the head.  Foreign policy (not just American, but also Chinese, Japanese, British, Russian, you name it) is horribly biased towards “defense” and not building friendly relations.  We wouldn’t need all those fancy guns and missiles if we didn’t fear each other, and the fact that we spend hundreds of times more on the guns and missiles than on simple programs to promote understanding between nations is more than just a shame, it’s liable to be the death of us all.  Someone should make Kristof’s article required reading in every high school classroom.  It might be too late to change the mind of this generation but maybe we can convince the next generation that talking to and learning from each other is more productive than lobbing bombs.

As a little background, Japan and China in the 20th century were mortal enemies.  Between its victory in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 and the end of World War II, Japan perpetrated endless incursions, invasions, and atrocities on China in its quest for Asian domination.  The most famous of these is the Rape of Nanjing (南京大屠杀), but there were also biological and chemical warfare and experimentation in Manchuria and the indiscriminate aerial bombing of Shanghai and other cities, among other things.  And that’s only in China; ask any Korean and they’ll tell you equally horrific tales of Japanese occupation.

After its defeat in WWII, Japan has been (forcibly) pacified by its American-written constitution, and since has established peaceful, though often uneasy, relations with its Asian neighbors.  But unlike Germany and France, which are now the best of friends and partners, Japan has never fully re-integrated into Asia.  Part of this is because Japan is far richer than the rest of Asia, but part of it also is that it has never fully apologized for its actions before 1945.

The two most cited examples of this lack of remorse are the white-washing of history in textbooks and the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by former prime ministers.  The first is probably more serious: some (though not all) Japanese textbooks gloss over its war crimes during its imperial age, and frame World War II as a necessary struggle for natural resources that was caused by the West’s monopoly on things like rubber and oil.  It’s a load of bullshit and frankly I’m not surprised that America isn’t more outraged by these lies.

The second thing is that former prime ministers used to pay their respects to Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine that honors Japan’s war dead, but includes in its list of honored dead the war criminals Hideki Tojo and others who were the masterminds behind Japan’s atrocities.  Imagine the furor that would be caused if Germany’s chancellor paid his respects at a monument that honored Adolph Hitler!  Fortunately the current prime minister has had more sense and has stopped this tradition; despite the fact that this only has symbolic value, this act has already caused a tangible thawing in relations between Japan and its neighbors (especially China and Korea).

So what have I seen so far here?  Yesterday in Shibuya where I ran into a demonstration that blocked off traffic for several blocks..  Although I didn’t understand most of what they said, I caught something about “boycott Olympics”.  I’ve posted some pictures showing the signs the marchers were carrying, and I’ve translated as much as I can… mostly they say things like “Sino-Japanese friendship is a fantasy” and “break relations between China and Japan”, as well as stronger statements like “Overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.  But the whole tone of the protest made it pretty clear that it was the “Chinese” part of CCP that they had a problem with, not the “Communist” part.

The sentiment in China is probably even harsher; if the government didn’t hold back protests then things would be much worse.  The West often criticizes the Chinese government for stamping out demonstrations, but I don’t think they realize how strong anti-Japanese feelings are in China… if the government didn’t intervene things could easily spiral out of control.  I’m not sure how strong the corresponding hatred is here, but at least on the surface it seems to be much more subdued; the protest today was probably only 100-people strong, and most of the people I’ve met so far have been very nice (although I have to admit I usually tell them I’m American and not Chinese-American).  But then again, it only takes a small vocal minority to take the country’s foreign policy in a dangerous, confrontational direction.  In fact this is the second such protest I saw; there was another on in Kyoto that I ran into, although that one was just a truck driving by broadcasting slogans.