The first Asian-American Vice President?

There is a reason that Kamala Harris is referred to as an Indian-American and a Black, but not as an Asian-American.

It will confuse the life out of most of my fellow Americans when they look at Kamala Harris and search for the "Asian" in her.  Because ... in this country, Asian-American has come to mean people with roots in countries in the far east and southeast Asia.

Perhaps you are thinking that I am being picky.  No, I am not.

This has been an issue that I have been fighting ever since my graduate school days when I reminded many white Americans that I too am an Asian.

One of my favorite encounters on this topic was after graduate school, when I was working as a transportation planner.

An Anglophile colleague walked over to my work space during a coffee break to ask me a question.  She was reading a novel set in London, and was confused that the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi characters were being referred to as Asians.

I calmly explained to her that Asia is a continent, and it includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh too.  I added that people from Asia are Asians, as much as the French and the Czech are Europeans!

Her mind was blown!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a letter to The New Yorker, on this very topic.

In the essay on how television made Trump's presidency possible, Emily Nussbaum writes that “The Apprentice” attracted diverse contestants and audience.  Nussbaum notes: "It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants."  In that sentence, Nussbaum makes the same mistake that is often made here in the US--she identifies "Asian" as being separate from "Indian, and Middle Eastern," even though India and the Middle East are very much part of Asia.
In America, "Asians" has come to mean only those from from the far eastern edges of Asia--like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam.  Perhaps this resulted from our military entanglements with those countries.  But then given our military expeditions elsewhere, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one would think that by now we would have figured out that the people of those countries too are Asians!

I didn't care whether that would be published (it was not) but I had to get that off my chest!

I wonder what might have been the story if Kamala Harris' mother was not from Chennai, but from, say, Sikkim and, as a result, if her facial features were a tad different.  That would have been one heck of a lesson in world geography ;)

Crazy rich failure

Fun fact first: Asia is home to about 60% of the world's population.  About 4.5 billion people.

Fun question: Can you generalize 4.5 billion with a word "Asian"?

Fun answer: Yes, but only here in the US!

Here in the US, one can easily shock most people by referring to, say, Iranians or Bangladeshis as Asians.  It will shock them because most Americans think only of Chinese and other Far East Asians as Asians.  The rest?  We are from shitholes, of course!

The box-office champ Crazy Rich Asians has done a lot to further reinforce this screwed up understanding.  (Nope, I haven't seen the movie, nor do I have any plans to watch it.)

The film has been "heralded as a milestone for Hollywood"

Not a single central or even auxiliary character is played by a white actor. On the few occasions when white people do feature, they flash across the screen as extras: as plane passengers or, on a giant container ship chartered for an over-the-top bachelor party, as bikini-clad beauty queens for hire.
Asian-Americans, including among the cast, hail this as a breakthrough moment in American cinema.

Well, ok.  But, that is the American perspective.  What is the reaction from Singapore, which is the locale for the movie? The film "ignores all Asians other than the Chinese kind."

One-quarter of Singapore’s population is not ethnic-Chinese, but of Malay or Indian descent. Yet when Malays feature, it is as valet-parking attendants. Indonesians are masseuses. As for the pair of Sikh guards at the Young family mansion, their buffoonish performance is as excruciating as Mickey Rooney’s as the Japanese photographer living above Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Brown bodies, writes one anonymous film-goer, were disembodied “footnotes”: mere openers of doors or cleaners of homes. “Crazy Rich Asians” is not just “money porn”, she goes on, it is also, to many South-East Asians, “othering porn”. What passes as a victory in Hollywood can look like a glaring failure in Singapore.

And, how about in China?  You know, the "Asia" that most Americans think about?

Well, the movie "may not even be released there":

Under China’s strict quota system, a limited number of foreign films are approved for import every year and some experts are skeptical about the movie’s chances. The depictions of profligate spending and vast wealth inequality in “Crazy Rich Asians,” they say, might not sit well with Chinese officials amid the country’s growing push for positive “core socialist values.”

How about the content of the movie?

Dong Ming, a Shanghai film critic, said: “Maybe the content of the film wouldn’t get censored but it’s a question of whether the film would even be popular in China.”
“Chinese people really dislike this kind of westernized Chinese culture,” he added, comparing the movie to American Chinese food staples like General Tso’s chicken and fortune cookies. “The flavor is not authentic.”

We are a crazy rich people!

Asian Immigrants should "Americanize" names? WTF?

As the LA Times correspondent notes, speechless we are:

Republican Betty Brown said this week she thinks Americans of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent should change their names to make it easier for poll workers to identify them.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the comment came late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting because they may have a legal trans-literated name and then a common English name used on driver’s licenses or school registrations.

Brown, who with her husband Ron operates a ranch near Terrell on land that has been in her family for four generations, suggested that Asian Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible. She said:

Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here? ... Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?

No word on how Ko responded. Perhaps, like us, he was speechless.