Following up on my earlier post about how the proposed immigration reforms would significantly hurt Asian Americans and their families by sharply reducing the number of visas given to family members and relatives, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus has issued the following statement on ways to amend the current proposals that would ensure fairness to Asian Americans:

This week, as the Senate continues the debate on the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Reform Act, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) urges the Senate to take special notice of several amendments that will critically affect the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. . . . CAPAC supports the Clinton-Hagel-Menendez amendment, the Menendez-Hagel amendment, the Dodd amendment, and the Obama-Menendez amendment.

• The Clinton-Hagel-Menendez amendment would amend the “immediate relative” category for family-visa petitions to include minor children and spouses of legal permanent residents (LPRs). This amendment would promote family reunification among LPRs who have played by the rules and are waiting patiently in line to reunite with their loved ones.
• The Menendez-Hagel amendment would ensure fairness for U.S. citizens and their families. The current Senate immigration bill contains a provision that would address the current family backlog for green card applications, but only for those who applied before May 1, 2005. Applications filed by U.S. citizens to sponsor their family members after this cut-off date – an estimated 833,000 – would be nullified. The amendment would change this “cut off” date from May 1, 2005 to January 1, 2007. It would also add 110,000 green cards a year to ensure a meaningful backlog reduction.
• The Dodd amendment would honor the bond between U.S. citizens and their parents by increasing the green card cap to 90,000 for parents, extending the duration of the parent visa, and ensuring that penalties imposed on overstays are not unfairly applied. Without this amendment, the proposed legislation would remove parents from the “immediate relatives” category, subjects them to an annual cap of 40,000 green cards, and creates a new parent visitor visa category that would allow them to stay in the United States for only 30 days.
• The Obama-Menendez amendment would sunset the merit-based point system after five years. The point system as it stands is a substantial departure from the guiding principles of current immigration law. Particularly, the point system disproportionately favors those with higher education, and fails to adequately account for one of the touchstones of American immigration policy: family reunification. This amendment would provide Congress the opportunity to reevaluate the point system in five years.

Among the amendments that CAPAC opposes are the Cornyn amendments, the Inhofe amendment, and the Coleman-Bond amendment.

• The Cornyn amendments would gut the immigration bill by making millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for legalization. These amendments would undercut our nation’s principles of fairness and due process, and critically undermine the already scant due process protections available to immigrants, in an atmosphere that is already anti-immigrant.
• The Inhofe amendment would declare English the national language and restrict the ability of the government to communicate effectively with American citizens, immigrants, and visitors.
• The Coleman-Bond would task city and county officials, public health providers, and police and public safety personnel with the responsibility of enforcing federal immigration laws. This amendment would keep cities, public health officials, and police departments from deciding how to best protect and serve their communities.

I recently received an email from a White police officer from Michigan. He said that as a reflection of how Asian Americans now comprise close to 10% of his city’s population, he asked me for tips on how to attract more Asian American candidates to join his department. I commended him and his department on their efforts to try to make their membership more diverse, inclusive, and reflective of the communities they serve. I also have hope that Asian Americans will be more open to law enforcement as a career option.

But I also told him that in terms of trying to attract more Asian American applicants, the practical reality is that many police departments have a negative image problem to overcome. The sad truth is that many Asian Americans do not see police departments to be a welcoming environment. They are see that in many cases, there continues to be an “insider vs. outside” mentality within many police departments that result in non-White officers feeling discriminated against, marginalized, and unwelcomed.

It also does not help that there continues to be publicized incidents in which predominantly White law enforcement officers allegedly commit brutality and racial profiling against members of the Asian American community. As New American Media reports, the latest example involves alleged police brutality committed in San Jose, CA, ironically one of the most prosperous and culturally diverse cities in the U.S.:

Supporters allege that during a routine traffic stop, Marlo Custodio, age 18, was dragged from his car and tackled by eight San Jose police officers while two others stood by and watched. They say Custodio managed to place a call to his mother on his cell phone, asking for help, before being repeatedly tasered by officers.

When she arrived, Marilou Alvarado Custodio, age 50, accompanied by Marlo’s two brothers, was violently restrained, her head repeatedly slammed against the side of a police car. Though cooperative, Romel Custodio, 25, was subdued, tasered and kneed in the face. All three were then arrested and booked into San Jose county jail. . . .

Many who attended [a subsequent protest rally] saw the incident as part of a bigger problem of police violence in San Jose. Speakers cited the case of Cau Tran, a young Vietnamese woman shot to death by San Jose police in 2003 when her vegetable peeler was mistaken for a weapon. They also cited the case of Rudy Cardenas, a San Jose man shot in the back and killed by a state narcotics agent in 2004. Unarmed, Cardenas was mistaken by the agent for another man.

Both cases ended with officers cleared of any misconduct. “Police brutality does not have a color, or a personality or even an age. It happens to Asians as well as blacks and Latinos,” said Mark Serrano, program director for the Filipino Youth Coalition. “It’s a power trip,” he added.

Unfortunately, this incident in San Jose is another in a continuous line of similar incidents of police brutality and racial profiling committed against Asian Americans through the years. It is indeed sad and ironic that on the one hand, we apparently see efforts like that in Michigan to recruit more Asian American police officers, but at the same time, we also continuing incidents of brutality against such Asian Americans.

As I’ve always said, if anything, the U.S. is increasingly the Land of Contradictions.

As I’ve written about before, assimilation can come in many different forms these days. In the past, assimilation usually meant the immigrant or “newcomer” group had to conform to virtually all aspects of the majority culture in order to be accepted. However, as American society and the world in general becomes increasingly globalized and transnational, the rules have changed. And as the New York Times reports, at the forefront of these changes are Asian Americans such as those in the Queens borough of New York City:

Pitched battles have been fought over language in Flushing, whose white ethnic population has receded as Korean and Chinese immigrants have arrived. In the late 1980s, when City Councilwoman Julia Harrison proposed a bill requiring businesses to post signs in English, a public divide seemed to open: On one side were the waves of Asian newcomers; on the other, longtime residents who felt displaced and alienated. . . .

So on a rainy Wednesday evening, she was back in the basement room of the Queens housing project where two dozen adults gather every week to learn Mandarin. The free classes at the James A. Bland Houses draw a motley assortment of students; the current session includes an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, a black woman who grew up in the housing project and the practical-minded daughter of Hungarian immigrants.

They have in common these two attributes: They have lived in Flushing since before it was Asian, and they have decided that the time has come to adapt. “Kind of like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’ ” said Ms. Farren, whose Italian-American relatives cannot fathom why she hasn’t left for New Jersey.

As the article describes, there are still several obstacles on the road to full acceptance of how “Asian American” Queens has become. There are many residents — new and longtime, and of all races and ethnicities — who are still resistant to the demographic and cultural realities surrounding them. Nonetheless, it is gratifying to see that increasing, there seem to be many more residents who are embracing these trends and realize that Asian Americans add to Queens’ vibrant culture, rather than detracting from it.

Like I keep saying, assimilation comes in many forms these days.

I’ve posted before about the huge pressure on Asian Americans — particularly young people — to achieve material success in American society. Too often, those pressures to live up the “model minority” image lead Asian Americans to commit suicide or harm others. But as the Contra Costa Times reports, such pressures may have led an 18 year old Korean American to pretend that she was a Stanford freshman:

An 18-year-old Fullerton woman spent the past eight months posing as a freshman biology major at Stanford, buying textbooks, sneaking into meals and even moving into a dorm with an unsuspecting roommate. Because she never had a Stanford ID or a school-issued dorm key, she got in and out of her dorm by climbing through the first-floor window.

Her story started unraveling this month, and now the university — and her stunned circle of friends and dormmates — are looking back on how a woman described as a sweet student could have pulled off such a ruse. . . . Her story has set off a storm of reaction on campus, with some students disturbed by an apparent security lapse and others wondering whether the high pressure of academic achievement was a factor in why Kim sneaked into the elite university.

Although the article does not specifically note it, I am going to guess that the student, Azia Kim, was rejected by Stanford but was too ashamed to tell her parents, who undoubtedly had huge plans for her going to such an elite school like Stanford. Therefore, she went ahead and pretended to be just another regular Stanford student in order to not disappoint her parents.

If this is indeed her story, I can’t help but to feel very sad for her. Yes she made the wrong decision and deceived a lot of people who trusted her, but she obviously felt desperate under the weight of all the pressure and expectations foisted upon her by her parents and by American society’s image of Asian Americans as the super-smart, high-achieving “model minority.”

I hope her story is a lesson to all young Asian Americans out there — be realistic and be honest, with yourself and with your parents.

As reflected in the numerous discussion threads across various message boards on the Internet, the topic of interracial relationships and marriages is a very popular and hotly debated topic among Asian Americans. As printed in Nha Magazine and New American Media, commentator Paulette Chu Miniter encapsulates many of the sentiments on both sides:

91 percent of Generation Y-ers say interracial dating is perfectly normal, according to a study by the Pew Research Center in March 2006. By far the most common interracial marriage in America today is one like that of my own—a white husband married to an Asian wife, making up 14 percent of all mixed unions. Interestingly, in 75 percent of Asian-white marriages, the husband is white.

Just about every Asian woman my age I know is dating or married to a white guy. And no matter how different their personalities or backgrounds, they all say the same thing—nothing against Vietnamese guys, but culturally they feel very American and therefore naturally end up dating “American” men, ie, Caucasians. “I have never dated an Asian guy, and will probably never date an Asian guy,” says my cousin Michelle Phi, a student at Texas A&M University. . . .

“I’m a very Americanized Asian girl who needs a very Americanized male,” Phi says. Also, “I fear the potential acquisition of another Asian family.” Another Vietnamese woman I know, a marketing professional in her early 30s, echoed those thoughts: “I think it is an issue of cultural assimilation. Overall, I have found Asian men too ‘Eastern’ in their thinking about women.”

Ouch.

As I noted, interracial relationships is often a very touchy subject for both Asian American men and women. Many readers to this site have cited my article and statistics to support both sides of the argument. As someone who has been interviewed a few times times by reporters doing articles and stories about this subject, I try to interject some objectivity and a sociological framework into the discussion as best as I can.

My position on interracial marriage has always been the same — it’s hard enough to find a person with whom you are completely compatible. When you find that person, his/her race may be one consideration but in the end, I think love, mutual respect based on a genuine appreciation of one’s racial/cultural identity, and interpersonal equality are the most important factors.

Upon reading Paulette’s article, I think she does a very good job at laying out the emotions and sentiments on both sides. It is very true that many Asian American men still have rather traditional and patriarchal attitudes about Asian American women and that is a large factor that leads many Asian American women away from Asian American men, and rightfully so.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel sad that at least among some of the Asian American women interviewees in the article, they also seem to be caught up in the exact same stereotypes about Asian American men that I presume they would cry bloody murder about if such stereotypes were applied to them. That is, they seem to be categorically rejecting any Asian American man available based on their belief that because he’s Asian, that automatically means that he’s not as Americanized or culturally “liberated” as them.

For example, the student at Texas A&M sadly states that she will probably never date an Asian guy — she’s not even willing to give any Asian guy a chance and would rather use the blanket generalization that since he’s Asian, that must mean that he’s patriarchal and sexist. End of story.

Ultimately, since this is America, that means that people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe and date whoever they want to date. However, that freedom also gives me the opportunity to say that using broad generalizations and stereotypes like the ones expressed against Asian American men in the article unfortunately only reinforce the larger societal stereotype that all Asians are foreigners and therefore, not real Americans.

While I believe that not all Asian American women have these stereotypical opinions, ultimately, it’s doubly tragic when such stereotypes are perpetuated by members of our own community.

Last month, officials at the Duke University Fuqua Business School announced that dozens of students were caught cheating on a take-home final exam and have received various degrees of punishment, ranging from expulsion, suspension, and/or a falling grade in the class. However, as Diverse Education reports, attorneys for some of the students claim that Asian students are being punished more severely than non-Asians:

Many of the students involved in the case at the Fuqua School of Business had been in the United States for less than a year and didn’t fully understand the honor code or judicial proceedings, says Durham attorney Robert Ekstrand. A faculty investigator pressured them to admit wrongdoing, so the students wrote confession letters, sometimes without understanding the specific accusations, he says. . . .

The students who were expelled from the university are all from Asian countries, Ekstrand says. If appeals fail, they’ll likely lose student visas and have to leave the country in the next couple of weeks. . . . Ekstrand also said honor code violations were mostly minor and unintentional. For example, some students shared a template in which data from the exam questions were typed into a spreadsheet, but no one shared the analysis or answers, he said.

The fact that the students from countries including China, Korea and Taiwan confessed instead of fighting the charges had to do with cultural norms, Ekstrand says. “Culturally, a confession or an admission of guilt can be a way to apologize.” Experts say students from other countries often arrive on U.S. campuses with different understandings about the boundaries on collaboration.

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings on this situation. On the one hand, as an educator, I take academic dishonesty very seriously and as such, I think those who cheated should be punished severely. As I’ve written about before on my other blog, many sociologists and other observers have noticed that cheating and other forms of dishonesty in society are increasingly commonplace, and even worse, being accepted as normal. In this case, the students involved also agreed to abide by the school’s honor code. With that in mind, I support full punishment for those who are guilty.

On the other hand, as an Asian American scholar, I also agree with the students’ attorney that there do seem to be cultural differences at play here. In most Asian countries, there has traditionally been an emphasis on the welfare of the group, rather than of the individual. As such, I can accept that many of the international Asian students felt that it was acceptable or normal to “collaborate” and share templates.

I also agree that there are varying degrees of cheating and academic dishonesty. For example, paraphrasing another source’s sentence without attribution is technically plagiarism but certainly would not be as severe as blatantly copying entire paragraphs verbatim from another source without proper attribution. In that sense, it seems to me that sharing a data template is different from sharing answers, which the students’ attorney argues did not occur.

In the end, I hope that Duke University will take all of these factors into consideration and punish those who are guilty in a fair manner — one that includes an understanding of any cultural differences that are involved.

You might remember that when pet food was found to be killing hundreds, if not thousands, of dogs and cats a few months ago, most analyses traced the contamination back to China. Since then, other poisoning episodes here and abroad have cast the spotlight upon Chinese food and household imports. As the Washington Post reports, tainted imports from China are much more common than most might think:

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught — many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

Now the confluence of two events — the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week’s resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China — has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.

Dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too.

The article basically explains that although the U.S. government considers tainted imports from China to be an important issue, they’re hesitant to crack down too hard on China because they don’t want to jeopardize the ability of American companies to access to the booming Chinese consumer market. In other words, capitalism and dollar signs are ultimately what’s driving how the U.S. government acts, or does not act.

As an Asian American, normally I would defend China and its efforts to become a legitimate international economic power. But the problem here is that the lack of quality controls in China is directly harming China’s attempts at becoming a legitimate power. In other words, if China wants to play on the big international economic stage, they need to make sure their products are up to standard, not second-rate, wrinky-dink knockoffs that cause illness and death. That’s not the way to become legitimate.

History has shown time and time again that in order for a company or an entire nation to earn international respect and be taken seriously, they need to have high quality products from the beginning. Witness how Hyundai is now producing some of the highest quality cars in the world, but is still struggling to overcome its lingering image for making cheap, unreliable subcompacts when it first entered the U.S. market in the 1980s.

While most Chinese imports might be fine and are up to industry standards, what most people focus on and remember are those products that do not. China has some work to do in this area, and the U.S. needs to rein in their profit motive for once and insist on decent quality products from China before more people and their pets get sick or even die.

As you may have heard by now, earlier this week, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced an immigration reform proposal that would significantly overhaul the current immigration guidelines. Much of the media’ attention on this proposal has focused on how the new guidelines would affect the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Unfortunately, much less attention has been given to how this proposal would impact Asian Americans.

As the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) argues, it turns out that the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 will, among many things, will no longer allow American citizens to sponsor any child over 21 years of age, terminate the ability of citizens to sponsor their siblings, and ultimately cut the immigration visa quota for parents by half. In other words, the proposed bill would radically shift the current preference system for family reunification toward one based on education and job skills. As Rep. Mike Honda, Chair of the CAPAC argues,

The proposal would undermine this nation’s long tradition of family-based immigration by eliminating several family-based categories. The proposed points system would fail to adequately account for the economic contributions made by family members, who rely on one another to start and run businesses, purchase homes, and send children to college. They provide care for young children, the sick, and elderly.

Rep. Honda’s assertions are consistently backed up by social science research that shows how the presence of family members and relatives have a significantly positive effect on socioeconomic mobility and structural assimilation for immigrants in general, but particularly for Asian immigrants.

Not only do they provide the psychological support network necessary to aid in the process of adjusting to American society, but family members and relatives also provide material support in terms of loaning money, sharing information on available jobs, housing, and social services, labor to help run small businesses, and providing childcare that allows parents to work and increase their education, to name just a few benefits.

In this context, proposals that would severely curtail the family reunification preferences are unfortunately short-sighted and ultimately disastrous in terms of promoting assimilation and socioeconomic integration into American society, which I presume is one of the goals of any legitimate immigration legislation.

While I applaud the Senate for their bipartisan efforts to compromise on this immigration reform proposal (something quite rare these days), in its current form, I cannot support this proposal. If you or your family have also benefited from the advise, assistance, or presence of family members or relatives, I urge you to also tell Congress that they can do better than this.

In my writings and my classes that I teach, however paradoxically it may sound, I’ve always felt that the more that we unite under the collective identity of “Asian Americans,” the more power and authority we will have in asserting the specific needs of unique subgroups within our community, whether they relate to different ethnic groups, or to those among us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). In that context, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has come out with its annual report on the state of LGBT Asian Americans. Some major findings are:

• Nearly every respondent (98 percent) had experienced at least one form of discrimination and/or harassment in their lives.
• Nearly all respondents (89 percent) agreed that homophobia and/or transphobia are problems within the broader API community.
• 78 percent of respondents agreed that API LGBT people experience racism within the predominantly white LGBT community.
• Only 50 percent of respondents said that English was their native language. Yet nearly all LGBT informational and advocacy materials are produced in English.

Thanks, Cynical Anti-Orientalist, for reminding me of the report. In my former life, I used to be the Director of Education for the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS in New York City, and can personally concur with many of the findings detailed in the report in regard to the continuing challenges that LGBT Asian Americans face from both the predominantly heterosexual mainstream Asian American community, and from the predominantly White mainstream LGBT community.

Like I also tell my students and readers, the social injustices that we face are all interrelated and in the words of the immortal Martin Luther King Jr., “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As Asian Americans, we cannot effectively address the racial inequalities we as a collective group face without also addressing the homophobia (or for that matter, the sexism, class inequality, xenophobia, etc.) that many of our brothers and sisters face as well.

I’ve written before about how pressures on young Asian Americans to conform to the “model minority” expectations of American society in general and their parents in particular, can become overwhelming and lead to suicide. As we commemorate May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, CNN has an article that reminds us that this is an issue that continues to be relevant in our community:

Moved by [her sister’s suicide], [Assistant professor of Asian-American Studies at California State University at Fullerton Eliza] Noh has spent much of her professional life studying depression and suicide among Asian-American women. Noh has read the sobering statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services: Asian-American women ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women in that age range.

Depression starts even younger than age 15. Noh says one study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they’ve contemplated suicide. As Noh and others have searched for the reasons, a complex answer has emerged. First and foremost, they say “model minority” pressure — the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally — helps explain the problem. . . .

But Noh says pressure from within the family doesn’t completely explain the shocking suicide statistics for young women like her sister. She says American culture has adopted the myth that Asians are smarter and harder-working than other minorities. “It’s become a U.S.-based ideology, popular from the 1960s onward, that Asian-Americans are smarter, and should be doing well whether at school or work.” Noh added that simply being a minority can also lead to depression.

The article makes two very important points. The first is that “model minority” expectations — on the part of Asian parents and American society in general — can produce expectations of success that can be overwhelming to many Asian Americans. As I’ve said before, the quest for material success has to have its limits — there’s nothing wrong with working hard, but pushing young Asian Americans so much that it leads them to want to kill themselves is obviously going too far.

Just as important, the second major point to keep in mind is that because the U.S. is such a race-conscious society, the very fact of being a person of color can also be stressful.

In very simple terms, being a person of color means that you are constantly aware that you are not part of the majority in this country, that those who control the social institutions that affect your daily lives do not look like you, and that you have to deal with the lingering legacies and continuing patterns of systematically being treated unfairly because your skin color and physical appearance are different from the White majority.

With those two factors in mind, it’s no wonder that Asian Americans can be prone to depression and mental illness. On top of that, Asian American women have the added challenges associated with gender inequality and discrimination as well.

The bottom line is, there are many, many risk factors for depression and mental illness for Asian Americans. We cannot assume that we are somehow immune to these issues, or that we can just fall back on cultural traditions of stoically suppressing them in silence, or even worse — taking out our frustrations onto others. If you find yourself with these kinds of emotions, please seek help before it’s too late.

Historically and continuing today, a popular issue among Asian Americans is assimilation, otherwise described as the process of combining their traditional Asian ancestry and heritage with their modern lives as young Americans. In fact, this process of negotiating new vs. old, traditional vs. contemporary happens all over the world. As the Christian Science Monitor reports, a very interesting example exists among young Egyptian women and their choices regarding wearing of the hijab:

When she’s not watching Egyptian fashion TV, Ms. Mohammed is checking out what other young Muslim women are wearing on the street or on the subway. “If I like any of their ways of putting [on the] hijab, I can ask them how to do it,” she says of other women she sees in Cairo’s Metro. Mohammed’s two head scarves – aquamarine blue peeking out from under a sea foam green – match her knee-length dress over the top of blue jeans. . . .

Mohammed is like a growing number of young Muslim women in Egypt who have taken to transforming the hijab, the Islamic head dress, from tradition to fashion statement. As head scarves have come to mean many things to Muslims and non-Muslims alike – a sign of piety, a declaration of identity, a center of controversy, a political statement – in Cairo today they sparkle. . . .

As more women began to wearing the scarf, they experimented with new ways to tie it, such as braiding the ends of the scarves or pinning them up to look like flowers. There is even a magazine called Hijab, one of several that feature tying techniques and scarf styles.

The article emphasizes that this growing popularity of the hijab comes at a time when Muslims in Egypt and all around the Arab world are becoming more religious. In other words, they are truly embracing both their traditional culture and their new contemporary sense of aesthetics and fashion and in the process, weaving together their own personal identity that combines elements from both worlds.

Nowadays, Asian Americans have the same opportunity. The reality is that these days, whether we like it or not and with the good and the bad, the world in general and American society in particular is becoming increasingly globalized and transnational — true international community. As nations such as China and India rise toward global superpower status, we as Asian Americans have the opportunity to capitalize on this situation and to leverage our knowledge and ties to our Asian roots, for our benefit and that of American society in general.

In other words, our expertise is increasingly in demand, here and abroad. In contrast to decades past where being “Asian” was a mark of inferiority, it now has the potential to represent progress into the future. With that in mind, we as Asian Americans have the chance to be at the forefront and lead American society into the 21st globalized and transnational century.

In commemoration of May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, CNN has an online special presentation about the Asian American community. They seem to do a good job at presenting basic demographic and historical data, along with contemporary pieces about what it means to be Asian America today, including personal reflections from several of their Asian American anchors and correspondents.