Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

From Kimchi to Infinity

Chi-Hoon Kim — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:06:58 +0000

It all st arted with the kimchi dispute of 1996. Distressed by the increasing popularity of Japanese-made kimchi, the Korean government launched a protectionist campaign to create an international standard for authentic kimchi. Since then, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak has waged an international campaign of “gastrodiplomacy,” with the aim of propelling Korean cuisine to epicurean heights around the world.

The prized tool in his administration’s effort to globalize Korean food is kimchi, that spicy, sour and crunchy fermented cabbage that is a staple of the Korean diet but has yet to reach international ubiquity. Lee hopes that love of kimchi will lead to a love of all Korean food and has declared a mission to quadruple the number of Korean restaurants abroad and increase food exports, from $4.4 billion in 2009 to $10 billion by 2012.

European haute cuisine was the first site of the kimchi invasion. In an effort to rebrand Korean food as sophisticated and vibrant, the Korean government’s food ministry and national tourism organization partnered with the Seoul outpost of the legendary French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu in 2004 to publish a cookbook of Korean- French fusion dishes, featuring dishes like Camembert kimchi fritters and light kimchi-infused pastry cream mille-feuille.

Chefs in Korea were repulsed. As Remo Berdux, head of the Les Toques Blanches Korea, an association for food and hospitality professionals, said, “If I had a wheel of gorgeous Camembert and a jar of delicious kimchi, why would I even think to wrap one with the other in the first place, but then to put it in a deep fryer. You are just ruining two wonderful products.”

Undeterred, the Korean government has set its sights even beyond this planet. In 2008, kimchi was launched into space along with the first Korean astronaut. (She took space-friendly kimchi, which was engineered to maintain its look and flavor upon exposure to radiation and to be less pungent to avoid offending fellow astronauts.)

Back on Earth, the Korean government has been researching ways to systematize and regulate recipes, spice levels and quality standards to help guide consumers and appeal to a wider audience. A gradient system is in the works to categorize the level of kimchi spiciness based a five-level scale measuring Gochujang (red pepper paste) Hot Taste Units, or GHU.

South Korea’s first lady Kim Yoon-Ok has had a heavy hand in the campaign to make Korean food palatable to foreigners. In 2011, Kim was granted $4.5 million USD by the Korean government to open a flagship restaurant in the middle of Manhattan, NY ’s already booming Koreatown. However, political opposition in Korea to the high-priced project has stalled its execution.

Kimchi may yet succeed in infiltrating international markets, but it looks to be through routes other than Camembert and outer space. The most effective gastrodiplomats so far are enterprising Korean Americans who believe the answer lays in local ingredients, small or homemade batches and fusion with favorite American dishes. They advocate for flavorful, robust kimchi, instead of a bland homogenization of Korean cuisine. They may just be the key to helping the dish overcome its historical and cultural baggage and be reinvented as a global food.

Onilne exclusive: read a review of PBS’s Kimchi Chronicles by American-born kimchi maker Kheedim Oh.

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

From Panthers to Patients at Asian Health Services

Dharushana Muthulingam — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:52:10 +0000

Introducing Hyphen's New Health Section

“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.” — Albert Schweitzer

Litter-box protozoa that overtake your brain. A sweeping revamp of the health system of the world’s richest nation. A DNA-based dating service. Welcome to the wide world of health. Hyphen has long been ready to sashay up to the compelling institutions that shape the day-to-day, and look close. Really close. Now we take on the tumorous swell of health and society. For the debut of the Health section, we dissect the intersection of democracy, revolution and a functioning medical records system embodied at Asian Health Services in Oakland, CA. We take the personal history of a longtime physician activist. We prod into the hidden world of hepatitis B. We invite you to submit suggestions for health and society topics. There will be hand sanitizer for all. — Dharushana Muthulingam, Health editor

By Dharushana Muthulingam

The waiting room is dense with activity: young pregnant women, grandfathers, scurrying children. Through a light-flooded atrium window, I can see bustling Oakland Chinatown. A sign in the bathroom says to not flush paper towels in the toilet. It is written in six languages.

Asian Health Services (AHS) bills itself as a primary care clinic providing affordable health care to the low-income, largely immigrant and non-English speaking population of Alameda County. Started in 1973, it now serves more than 21,000 patients a year and clocks 100,000 visits annually. In response to the health care-reforming Affordable Care Act (ACA), it opened a new clinic in June 2011, expanded its mental health services and won a contract to rebuild the health services infrastructure of five local community colleges.

The story of Asian Health Services and other community health centers are, on one hand, the unglamorous tale of the obscure and mundane: access to diabetic foot checks, close tracking of blood pressure, reliable language interpreters, navigating byzantine Medicare paper work. Yet, beneath the neatly kept clinic rooms and meticulously organized files are a vibrant history of revolution, social justice and dreams of youth.

“Once I learned what the community health center was and what it meant, that was really powerful for me,” Community Service Director Jen Lee said. She came to AH S 11 years ago and has since coordinated HIV outreach among vulnerable Asian and Pacific Islander women, especially those doing massage parlor work. “AH S is about not being afraid of looking at issues head on — trusting what comes up from the base and keeping the organization accountable to the community.”

Although all nations, rich and poor, struggle with the health care beast — it is, after all, a complex and dynamic industry, requiring enormous amounts of human resources, complex technology and grappling with mortality — the US health care system can be particularly baffling. We outspend the next richest country by more than twofold and yet fall behind on multiple measures of population health — such as ranking 50th in life expectancy.

Even as despair rings from across the political spectrum, there is a deep well of American history that models what equitable, accessible and comprehensive health care can look like, for example: the Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC). This is a fairly unromantic string of words. But it is one of the fruits of social justice dreams from the 1960s. It’s a model that has received new attention as a potential ideal as health care reform prepares to make its uncertain debut in 2014, when the ACA will provide over $11 billion to support and expand these centers to meet gaps in prevention and primary care.

The community clinic has deep roots in collective organization of resources at the turn of the century in neighborhoods in New York City. It began with infant milk stations opening in Brooklyn to feed malnourished infants while their young mothers worked long factory hours. Historian John Duffy has described the district health centers that subsequently opened throughout the city in 1914, serving thousands and developing the first known systematic medical record collection. The centers atrophied with the onset of wars and depression, and health care centers were subsumed into either private clinics or church-based charities.

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

Your Persistence Will Be Rewarded

Jennifer 8. Lee — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:26:33 +0000

The curvature of a fortune cookie may bring to mind China and Chineseness, but in reality it’s an iconic shape largely for Americans who can’t seem to get enough of them.

There are wedding fortune cookies, Valentine’s Day fortune cookies, chocolate-dipped fortune cookies, fortune cookie baby booties, fortune cookie vanity soaps, fortune cookie diamond jewelry — even dog fortune cookies.

Americans are often surprised to learn that the cookies are relatively unknown in China, where as an experiment, I handed out fortune cookies to passers-by to get their reactions.

Instinctively, they put the cookies whole in their mouths (you almost want to stop them). Once they crunch into them, they’re puzzled to discover the paper fortune sometimes lodged in their teeth. “Americans are so strange,” they say. “Why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”

Their reactions are no surprise since fortune cookies actually originate from Japan, where there are still small family-run bakeries in Kyoto that make the cookies by hand. Flavored with sesame and miso, they are bigger and browner than their American cousins. Fortune cookies were brought over to America by Japanese immigrants. They became popular shortly after World War II as they spread in Chinese restaurants.

Fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese and digested by Americans.

Jennifer 8. Lee is the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (2008) and a former reporter for The New Times.

This is a preview of The Generation Issue. For an inside look at San Francisco's Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

Dreams Deferred

Momo Chang — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:14:32 +0000

Interactive Map by Catherine A Traywick, videos by R.J. Lozada

Of all things, it was an episode of the ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that tipped Catherine off. In it, the British butler, Geoffrey, made a joke about not having a green card. Innocently, the then-9-year-old asked her mother whether she had one.

“My mom was so distraught and flustered and said, ‘Don’t ask that,’ ” said Catherine, now a sweet-faced 23-year-old, who preferred that her last name not be published. “I didn’t even know what a green card was. I equated being an immigrant with being suspicious.”

Slowly, Catherine began to understand what it meant to be undocumented. One evening in high school, while eating doughnuts with her friends in a parked car, a police car rolled by. Heart pounding, Catherine’s thoughts ran to the extreme: The officers would discover she was undocumented, her mother (a legal immigrant) would lose her job and Catherine, her brother and father would be deported to the Philippines. She nearly broke down, but the officers let them go home after checking her friends’ licenses and Catherine’s student ID.

When she turned 16, she couldn’t get a driver’s license like all her friends. She declined admission to the University of California, San Diego, because her family could not afford the tuition, and she was ineligible for financial aid. She enrolled at a community college near the San Francisco Bay Area suburb where she grew up.

Undocumented college students like Catherine, who were brought here as children, are doing everything right on the path toward the American Dream. Even as some of the most privileged among the undocumented, their lives are tightly constrained: They cannot get a driver’s license, travel outside the country, vote or obtain student loans. And even after making it to graduation, they cannot legally work in the US.

“They’re doing everything that our society has asked them to do; they’re working hard, studying hard and they’ve been treated horrendously by our society,” said Kent Wong, a UCLA professor who teaches a course on undocumented students.

But perhaps the biggest barrier that Catherine and other undocumented Asian youth face is the pervasive silence: from a lack of visibility within the larger immigration movement to too few outlets to share their fears and frustrations with others, as well as stigma within their own families and communities. Combined with immense financial and academic pressures and little prospect of finding a good job without a legal status, many students face an overwhelming, voiceless struggle that often results in depression and anxiety.

However, Catherine is part of a group of undocumented Asian and Pacific Islander students who in recent years have become more outspoken about their plight. The API voice has been slowly growing in the debate around the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a proposed federal law that would give college students a chance to become legal residents, under stringent guidelines.

Although the DREAM Act has seen fits and starts for over a decade, these students believe the time has come to step into the spotlight and advocate for themselves with urgency, due partly to the momentum in the past two years around the DREAM Act and to a widely read 2011 New York Times story in which Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jose Antonio Vargas revealed himself as an undocumented Filipino immigrant. As Wong said, “The greater risk is to not speak out, to remain silent, to remain in the shadows.”

A Space of Their Own
National coalitions for the undocumented population like United We Dream and dreamactivist.org are predominantly Latino, in part because the vast majority of these immigrants are from Latin America. Of the country’s estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants, only 11 percent, or 1.2 million, are from Asia; an estimated 2 million are undocumented minors or young adults under 30 like Catherine, and about 10 percent of those are Asian.

Catherine, 23, is a leader in Asian Students Promoting Immigrant Rights through Education (ASPIRE), an undocumented Asian student group based in San Francisco. The group recently started a Los Angeles chapter. Photo courtesy of Dreamers Adrift.

Although their numbers in the broader undocumented population are small, undocumented Asian students form a significant population in California universities. California is one of the most progressive states when it comes to the issue of undocumented students, and the University of California system in particular has paid close attention to supporting them. Perhaps this is because California has the largest number of DREAM Act-eligible youth: One out of four undocumented youth in the country lives there.

In the University of California system, approximately 500 – 600 undocumented students are enrolled, according to the University of California’s Office of the President, and an estimated 45 percent are of Asian descent, almost equal to the number of Latinos at 49 percent. But few Asians join undocumented student groups on those campuses.

Kevin Escudero, a graduate student at UC Berkeley who is writing his dissertation on Asian and Latino undocumented students, said that Asians may find it difficult to participate in groups that are heavily Latino. References are made in Spanish or to Latino culture. In one writing workshop for undocumented students, Escudero heard a poem read in Spanish; everyone laughed, but no further explanation was offered for anyone who didn’t understand. “In certain ways, those spaces are super Latino,” Escudero said about the undocumented student gatherings at UC Berkeley.

While undocumented Latino and Asian students face similar challenges, subtle differences in their experiences exist, experts say. Latinos face the stereotype of dropping out, while Asians are expected to succeed. Being undocumented is a more taboo subject among Asian students compared with Latinos, which can cause shame and anxiety. Yet Asian American students have fewer outlets to discuss their situation.

Catherine is part of a group called Asian Students Promoting Immigrant Rights through Education (ASPIRE), formed out of the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus in 2008 to support Asian undocumented students. According to the group’s former community advocate Lisa Chen, it is the only undocumented student group in the US that is pan-Asian, with people from the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Mongolia, China and Hong Kong, as well as ethnic Chinese from South American countries.

While ASPIRE is a relatively new group, organizing undocumented Asian and Pacific Islander youth dates back to at least 2002, when a group of 30 undocumented API students from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York traveled to Washington, DC, to speak to legislators about their situations, according to Jane Yoo of the progressive advocacy group National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (one in seven Koreans in the US are estimated to be undocumented). It was perhaps the first national effort to give undocumented Asian youth a voice.

Compared with Latinos, fewer Asians have organized around this issue, and some immigrant advocates note with frustration that the majority of Asian Americans seem unaware of the undocumented people within their own communities. “I know many Asian Americans that work very hard and seriously on Asian immigration rights,” said Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco. “I just don’t think that the typical Asian American understands [the issues]. I think they are very much concerned with their own middle-class values and concerns. Unless something hits close to home, I don’t think most Asian Americans know there’s a serious immigration problem.”

An Asian Spokesman for Undocumented Students
While some students seek Asian-specific support, others have enthusiastically joined the broader, majority-Latino movement as well. Ju Hong, 22, is a senior at UC Berkeley and the university’s first undocumented student senator. Brought to the US from Korea at age 11 by his mother soon after his parents separated, Hong learned he was undocumented in high school when he didn’t have a Social Security number to put on his college applications.

As one of the few prominent Asian faces of the cause, he admits he’s come a long way, confidence-wise. “I was very embarrassed and ashamed of who I was,” he said, referring to his teenage years spent in Alameda, CA. “I thought I was the only undocumented student.”

Now at Berkeley, Hong is active in the campus’ predominantly Latino undocumented student groups, and he has learned to adapt. “Ju’s very in touch with Latino culture, like dancing and even speaking some Spanish,” Escudero, a friend of Hong, said. “He’s become very comfortable with hanging out with that community.”

Other Asian youth are also advocating for this cause alongside Latinos. In Los Angeles, more than a dozen undocumented students affiliated with the Korean Resource Center marched in solidarity with the 2010 Trail of DREAMs, when four undocumented Latino students walked from Miami to Washington, DC, to promote the issue. RISE (Rising Immigrant Scholars through Education), the heavily Latino undocumented student group at UC Berkeley, also just elected its first Asian co-chair.

To bring more attention to the cause, Hong has gone beyond student meetings to more direct actions. As part of a “coming out” immigration rally last summer to shed light on undocumented communities, Hong was arrested after he and six others blocked freeway traffic in San Bernardino, CA. “This is the right thing to do, because it will help my community and my family,” Hong said of his high-profile activism. “I shouldn’t be ashamed.”

Ju Hong, 22, an undocumented senior at UC Berkeley, is one of the more vocal API voices supporting the DREAM Act. He joins in a demonstration in Southern California and is arrested. Photo courtesy William Perez.

A House of Cards
Like Hong, many undocumented students feel alone and isolated, forced to keep a shameful secret.

“As you’re growing up in high school and everyone’s talking about getting a driver’s license, and you’re not able to participate in those conversations, it begins to take a toll, especially at that age,” said Morna Ha, executive director of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (NAKASEC). “You begin to shy away from some types of conversations.”

Lisa Kim, 22, was brought to the US from Korea at 11 months old. It was meant to be temporary, but her father felt called to become a pastor for the burgeoning Korean American population, and their visas expired. Since then, all of them have been without legal status.

Kim admits to feeling depressed for her first two years of college. “It’s trying to juggle three jobs and trying to do college level courses, and I had to commute because I couldn’t pay for dorms. I couldn’t meet any friends.”

The myth that all Asians are successful only exacerbates the problem. “You have to live up to this standard of being perfect,” Catherine said. “As a result, there are voices being silenced.”

“The model minority stereotype can hurt API students, emotionally, mentally and support-wise,” said Katharine Gin, founder of the San Francisco-based nonprofit Educators for Fair Consideration, which gives scholarships to undocumented students and serves as a support network. “If you’re Asian, [teachers] don’t realize you’re undocumented. This can be an advantage, but it can also be hard not having anyone to talk to or anyone who understands your situation. And you don’t necessarily feel welcome in a Latino student group, where they are generally more comfortable talking about these issues.”

The silence extends to their families as well. Catherine felt like she could never talk to her parents about their status; each time she mentioned it, the conversation would be clipped short. Fabrizio Mejia, director of Student Life Advising Services and the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) at UC Berkeley, has worked with many undocumented students, and he said some stressed students consciously hide how they are doing financially and academically from their parents for fear of worrying them. “Their parents are so proud [because they are attending UC Berkeley],” Mejia said. “What the families don’t know about is the full struggle. [The students] want to have the image that they are okay.”

Anxiety, trouble sleeping and the inability to be vulnerable and establish trusting long-term relationships with people are common afflictions of undocumented students, according to Gin and others. “There are Asian students who think they are the only one who is undocumented,” Gin said. “That leads to quite a lot of anxiety, stress, feelings of being unwanted, of being less than human, that all of your relationships have the potential to be shattered if people find out something about you. You’re living in a house of cards. When people have to hide or have a big secret, everything feels unstable.”

And the constant instability can have dangerous consequences: Gin has found some students to turn to self-harm or become suicidal. Last year, 18-year-old Joaquin Luna Jr. of Texas committed suicide, and family members believe that his hopes of being an engineer were dashed because he was undocumented. Prior to his suicide, he had received letters from universities asking for proof of citizenship, according to news reports.

Part of the anxiety is the fear of being found out by immigration officials. Since 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the arm of the government that enforces deportations, has publicly stated that they will not pursue deportation of DREAM Act-eligible students, in part because of a mandate from President Obama. Yet cases of deportation proceedings of undocumented students still regularly arise.

But students who have “come out” — whether through direct public action, online campaigns or interviews with the media — seem to have mostly benefited from the exposure, with many temporarily saved from deportation. According to United We Dream, a national coalition group advocating for the DREAM Act, none of the more than a dozen students who have come out through their network have been deported, and all have had their deportation halted due to their public campaigns.

One such student who benefited from publicity is Steve Li, a Chinese Peruvian student at City College of San Francisco. His case came to light in late 2010, when he was taken into custody and shipped to an Arizona detention center to await deportation to Peru. He received local and national media attention after his supporters wrote letters, called politicians and held rallies. During the month he was detained, Congress was considering the DREAM Act; he would have been one to benefit from the legislation. Li was given a stay of one year after Sen. Dianne Feinstein intervened.

Illustration by Jon Stich

Dropping Out
While some undocumented students are on their way to earning a degree, many find it too difficult to afford without financial aid. Kim attended Loyola University in Chicago for three years but recently put her dream of becoming a doctor on hold, dropping out last fall to work in order to pay off the $17,000 that she owes the university. “It’s been a constant struggle with finances and paying down tuition,” Kim said.

It’s a common reality for many undocumented students. Since they don’t qualify for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) loans, they can barely afford to pay the minimum tuition fees. Many of their parents are also undocumented and low income, working at places like dry cleaners or restaurants, if they are able to find work at all. Kim got a private bank loan during her first year of college, but the second year, she held three part-time jobs as a nanny, tutor and waitress — all under the table — while attending school.

Even at public universities, tuition hikes have left students struggling and taking a piecemeal approach to enrollment. “There’s a pattern of being in school for a semester and taking a semester off,” Mejia, the counselor at Berkeley, said. When they can no longer afford payments, they drop out to work.

In the past five years, tuition at University of California schools has skyrocketed, more than tripling from approximately $2,300 a semester for California residents in 2001 to $7,500 in 2011. In order to be officially registered, UC students must pay 20 percent of tuition, or $1,500 a semester. For some, that is simply too much to scrounge up. Catherine, for example, dropped out a semester because she couldn’t afford tuition. She was able to return after receiving three private scholarships for undocumented students.

Many undocumented students also commute from home or live in co-ops, and others are homeless or couch-surf, according to Mejia. He’s seen students doing all sorts of odd jobs: guinea pigs in studies, donating blood, waitressing and working at a chicken farm on the weekends.

In this respect, undocumented students might not sound much different from other low-income students, yet the former don’t qualify for federal loans and work study, and even if they excel academically, they have been barred from university scholarships. The result is that undocumented students take longer to graduate, if they are ever able to.

The biggest conundrum after graduating is finding a job without papers, and an odd byproduct of this problem is a desire by some undocumented students to stay in school forever. Mario is a 23-year-old Chinese Peruvian graduate student in engineering at California State University, East Bay, who will graduate in 2013. But, he said, “If the DREAM Act has not passed then, I plan to get another master’s.”

“A lot of us don’t want to leave school, because if we leave school, there isn’t anything we can do with our degrees,” said Mario, who did not want to his last name published. “I know a lot of people who have delayed their graduation because they are scared of that day coming. I feel like a lot of DREAM Act students are just stuck being educated, and we’re just waiting for the day we can give back to the community.”

A New Hope and a New DREAM
The DREAM Act is far from a panacea: Only roughly one in three undocumented youth would become a permanent resident if it passed, according to projections. They would first have to graduate from high school, then receive two years of college education or serve in the military for two years. But it’s the best chance for the nearly 2 million undocumented children and students in the US who remain in the shadows.

Once a bipartisan bill that was first introduced in 2001, many of the early Republican supporters have backed off because of wide anti-immigrant sentiment. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is against any path toward legalization for the undocumented, though Republican candidate Newt Gingrich has said he's in favor of the DREAM Act on very limited terms. President Obama made a campaign promise to Latinos that he would pass immigration reform, but that has not yet happened.

Groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a conservative nonprofit, have dedicated millions in the last decade to lobbying against immigration, with the DREAM Act their biggest target.

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s not about people’s ethnicity,” FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re Hispanic or Asian or white or black. America shouldn’t have to provide a solution to the problem that these people created.”

The bill again failed to pass in December 2010 by a narrow margin. Activists hope it will pass in coming years, but the bill will likely not be touched unless the Democrats sweep the White House and Congress in 2012. Then, the law could be reintroduced in Congress in 2013 at the earliest.

At the state level, undocumented students in California and about a dozen other states have it slightly better. Since California’s Assembly Bill 540 in 2002, undocumented students can pay in-state tuition — at a UC, that’s the difference between $15,000 and $38,000 a year. Undocumented students in most other states must pay out-of-state tuition. Since the federal DREAM Act is in hiatus, activists have been working on passing statewide legislation. In the past year, at least eight more states introduced bills that would allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. Conservatives have also been waging their legislative war, by passing statewide anti-immigration laws.

Last fall, the biggest glimmer of hope came with the passage of the California DREAM Act, which allows undocumented students to receive state loans and qualify for a host of scholarships that they were previously barred from — up to an estimated $14.5 million. California is the first state to pass such a law, and an estimated 2,500 students would benefit from it, according to the California Department of Finance, including the 140 undocumented students at Berkeley who had their tuition covered by private scholarships for the first time this spring. However, undocumented students still do not qualify for federal loans or work study.

Catherine was one of at least dozens of students who wrote about their personal journeys to state senators, advocating for the law the pass. "I believe our stories made a difference," she said. Catherine was not able to personally benefit from the law's passage — she graduated with a degree in political science in December, just before the law went into effect. She recently took a volunteer leadership role with ASPIRE.

She's still not comfortable talking with her parents about her advocacy work, fearing their disapproval. "I would have hoped that my mom would feel proud," Catherine said of what she hopes her mother's reaction would be, if she were to learn of all of her political activism. Catherine is unsure how she will be able to use her education to find legal, meaningful work. For now, one thing is clear: she'll continue to advocate for the cause closest to her.

Momo Chang is a writer living in Oakland, CA. This story was funded by a grant for immigration stories from the Rosenberg Foundation and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Undocumented” — An Imperfect Term

Why “undocumented” versus “illegal?” Being undocumented in the US is a civil, not criminal, violation, but the term “illegal” can be conflated with “criminal.” Immigrant rights advocates also say it dehumanizes people.

“The term ‘illegal’ feels not accurate to students because it seems to imply that their entire being is illegal, rather than something about how they entered, or a decision their family made that they had no control over,” said Katharine Gin, founder of Educators for Fair Consideration.

“Undocumented” is also inaccurate to describe everyone: it implies that people never had documents, which is untrue, especially of people who came to the U.S. on a short-term visa.

The Applied Research Center and Colorlines.com began a Drop the I-Word campaign in September 2010 as part of a way to humanize a large and diverse group of people. The campaign has other suggested terms, such as “unauthorized.” For now, the DREAM Act movement has embraced the “undocumented” term as part of its identity.

Do Undocumented APIs Have More Options Than Latinos?

Perhaps part of the reason why Asians have been slower to embrace their identity as undocumented is because they didn’t associate with the movement in its early days. “They felt like the term ‘undocumented’ only referred to Mexicans,” said Katharine Gin, founder of Educators for Fair Consideration. Many Asians who are here without legal status originally came over on a visa, and overstayed their visas, versus crossing a border. In Korean and Chinese language media, for example, these are called “overstayers.”

There is also a stigma about talking about family issues, and one’s status could be cause for shame. Some families became undocumented also because of marital status and economic woes, such as Ju Hong’s mother. Their family business went bankrupt around the same time she and her husband separated. Hong’s mother moved to the US, bringing her two children, to start a new life.

Another theory as to why some Asians may be less outspoken is due to the fact that APIs may actually have one more way to change their status: through marriage. Unlike those who come to the US illegally — through crossing a border, for example — those who are here on an expired visa can adjust their status to a green card holder (i.e., permanent resident) more easily by marrying a citizen. People who were never authorized to be in the US cannot marry a citizen and become “legal” without first leaving the country.

“There are a lot of people in the Asian community that are legalized that way and never talk about the fact that they were not here legally at some point,” Gin said. Visa overstayers may also not identify with being “undocumented” because technically, they have documentation, albeit expired.

Regardless of their differences, University of San Francisco law professor Bill Ong Hing points out that while Latinos are the focus of anti-immigrant sentiment today, not too long ago Asian immigrants were the victims of similar vilification. He compares the anti-Asian hysteria from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement (limiting Japanese immigrants, in the face of wide anti-Japanese sentiment in California) to the current anti-Latino and -immigrant climate. “When you read what was written and said about Asians at the time, it’s very hateful,” he said. “Racial and economic competition-wise, it’s exactly the same language as the anti-immigrant rhetoric that happens today.”

To read poetry and prose by undocumented API students, go here.

Who Cares?

Nicole Wong — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:35:38 +0000

In the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, a group of about 15 Filipino caregivers are seated in a bright yellow room at the Filipino Community Center, chatting animatedly in Tagalog.

This training is part of the Caregiver Research (CARE) Project, a grassroots effort that supports caregivers, who assist the elderly, adults with mental or physical disabilities and those suffering from other chronic conditions. The project aims to empower the caregivers to find viable solutions for a work force that is often ignored and highly unregulated, which leads to gross violations of these workers’ rights, safety and health.

The next item on the agenda is to share testimonials from their experiences as caregivers. At first, there is only the sound of weight being shifted in fold-up chairs. Tentatively and softly, one woman speaks up in Tagalog. “When I lived in the Philippines, we had maids, so I didn’t really know how to clean a bathroom, or how powerful bleach was. I hurt my hands. My bosses asked, ’Don’t you have to do this back at home?’ And the truth was, I didn’t. I thought America was supposed to be so good. But everything is so hard.”

People nod in agreement. One man speaks of the bodily injuries endured and the life-threatening skin disease he contracted from a patient. Another, Florentino Atangan, reports that even though he successfully sued his employer for wage theft — having worked 14- to 16-hour days, seven days a week, for several years without overtime pay — the employer still has not paid the $40,000 settlement. The group discusses rallying outside the employer’s building downtown. (The CARE Project prefers its members be anonymous in this article for the protection of their current employment, except for Atangan, whose case is public.)

Over a 4-month period, sociology professors Robyn Rodriguez and Valerie Francisco, who both have backgrounds in activism and organizing, will train the group to conduct research by interviewing other caregivers, in hopes of obtaining a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how caregivers are treated by their employers. They also hope to better understand their work conditions, hours and wages. The group will then identify common problems and issues to focus their search for solutions.

The project is a form of participatory action research, in which typically powerless groups do research for their own benefit, while serving a dual purpose of boosting personal confidence and building a sense of community in the process. “If we’re the ones experiencing this work, then we’re the experts, and we must know the best solutions,” one man in the group says. “We can’t wait for the grace of God, our employers or the professors to find them.”

The Help

The need for caregivers and domestic workers (which includes nannies and housekeepers) is on the rise, with one American turning 65 years old every eight seconds and the elderly population projected to reach 71 million in 2030. But these industries lack an infrastructure of rights and regulations, and attract many undocumented workers as a result.

Unlike other low-wage jobs, care work is excluded from federal labor laws and domestic protections. The Occupational Safety and Health Act does not cover unsafe or hazardous work conditions for domestic workers, and they are denied collective bargaining and labor rights. While some caregivers are hired by third-party staffing agencies to work in elder homes or centers, others work and sometimes live in private homes. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act that guarantees overtime pay and a minimum wage does not apply for domestic service and caregivers who work for private employers.

“The classifications of workers are understood differently at different levels,” Rodriguez says. “The workers industry is so broad, and laws do not define every type.” Caregivers who work in one-on-one situations in private homes are technically classified by the law as “companions” and remain unprotected by the law. “They’re not just sitting with them and playing cards,” Rodriguez says, objecting to the term “companion.” “In reality they are feeding, bathing and dressing them and giving them medicine. It is a real job.”

There are over 2 million domestic workers in the United States without legal protections, with the exception of New York, the only place where a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights exists. Care work can be very physically demanding, but businesses are not mandated to provide worker benefits or workers’ compensation. Just 21 states have policies guaranteeing a minimum wage for these workers, but it is widely unenforced. Caregivers are also unlikely to protest abuses, Rodriguez says, given the troubled economy or their immigrant status.

“It’s not even under-the-table payment because there’s no law against it,” CARE Project facilitator Mario de Mira says. “The way the system is set up encourages taking advantage of these workers.”

“There’s a deep lack of respect for this work force,” says Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), based in New York City. “It’s embedded in our culture. It’s associated with women, and women of color, all the way back to African American slave women.” Poo believes it is important to shed this severely outdated view of domestic work and care, and to “bring the work force into the 21st century. This work makes it possible for everyone else to go to work.”

Though many perceive domestic work and caregiving to consist mostly of Latina and black women, increasing numbers of Asian American and Pacific Islander women are entering this service sector. Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, the number of Asians and Asian Americans in care work is probably undercounted, according to the NDWA.

Workers come in large numbers from the Philippines (where many were trained as nurses but find limited opportunities here), Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Tibet and other South Asian countries. More Chinese workers are also becoming caregivers, due in part to the widespread decline of the domestic garment industry that employed many of them previously. Many Filipinos in California shifted into caregiving after mass layoffs followed the federalization of airport screening jobs.

With movies like The Help bringing attention to domestic work, organizations like the NDWA and the Filipino Community Center are hoping to get the public thinking about how we treat “the help” today in order to increase awareness and heighten the value of domestic work and caregiving.

“We want to make this work visible,” Poo says. “Despite being one of the fastest-growing work forces, the work is undervalued, and it is one of the most vulnerable to poor conditions.”

The Never-Ending Workday

Caregivers and domestic workers face a wide variety of on-the-job abuses, ranging from daily indignities like verbal insults, intimidation and wage theft to extreme cases of domestic slavery, where workers are trafficked, have their mobility and freedoms restricted and passports confiscated. Other examples of more subtle abuses include talking down, late payments and working longer than eight-hour shifts with no breaks.

“There is a lack of respect and understanding that this is a ’real job,’ ” Poo says. “Often, the workers must choose between taking the abuses in a disrespectable job or not being able to support themselves and families.”

Especially for those who work in home-based settings, employers can often fail to delineate what is and is not work; the workday potentially never ends for live-in caregivers. “They may be asked to do work beyond care like housecleaning or home maintenance, which should be done by other kinds of workers,” Rodriguez says.

Sexual abuse is also an issue. Up to 90 percent of the domestic work force is female, according to Poo, and they are vulnerable to violence by aggressive and abusive bosses.

Work with Dignity

Advocates are currently fighting for the passage of a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in California, similar to the one in New York, which sets out basic standards including the right to a minimum wage and support for injuries on the job for domestic workers and in-home caregivers. The hope is to build a framework for federal legislation in home care and for 2 million new, regulated jobs to be created, “dignified and quality jobs people can support their families on, with a path to citizenship,” Poo says.

It is a multipronged approach — working toward both state and national policy change in hopes that each will influence the other. “The elderly, those with disabilities, no one is getting a fair deal,” Poo says. “We are trying to bring people together to create a country that cares and recognizes all work with dignity.” Poo’s work with the Caring Across Generations campaign is convening local dialogues across the country on these issues, bridging conversations between those in need of care and those who give it.

At a meeting of the CARE Project two months later, the caregiver group is generating potential interview questions by examining topics that came up in their own stories, and figuring out the most fluid order of questions to coax their subjects to share personal stories.

“This is so different from my PhD students,” Rodriguez says. “This is truly anchored in experience, so they know what questions to ask. And it’s peer research.” The meeting involves performing skits of common miscommunications between bosses and workers, and improvising resolutions. Already the workers carry more confidence and are eager to share their experiences. The hope is to develop a plan of action once the training is over, perhaps bring in a new cohort, and even start their own organization.

At the end of the meeting, a caregiver is surprised with a birthday cake from the group, and a karaoke machine is set up. With many of these caregivers isolated from their families back in the Philippines and living alone, the scene changes from training to family party. Filipino songs play through the speakers, and the caregivers, after working long hours, now have a space to sing.

Nicole Wong is a contributing editor for Hyphen. She last wrote about the Hollaback movement against street harassment.

Bodies and Borders

Michele Carlson — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:12:14 +0000

Wafaa Yasin literally turned her body into a boat and set sail across the San Francisco Bay. Yasin expected to fail in sailing anywhere, but she also hoped not to drown. Born in Palestine, the San Francisco-based performance and multimedia artist often puts herself at risk to ask questions about the histories and people who negotiate the boundaries of global politics.

Using her own body, Yasin’s performances evoke visceral and painfulto- watch reactions. One gutturally feels her struggle in Aesh (Livelihood) (2008), where Yasin pushed a piece of bread along a busy street with her nose for 45 minutes until she reached the ocean. She crawled with her hands behind her back, in partial reference to an account by an Iraqi prisoner who used this action to transfer bread thrown on the floor to his mouth while he was bound. In other projects, she has had wet concrete poured through her hair or had to perilously duck whipping fishing lines being cast at her while wading through the casting ponds in Golden Gate Park. Yasin’s safety is often uncertain.

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

Camp in the Camps

Lacey Jane Roberts — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:06:32 +0000

Looking for Jiro is a short video by San Francisco-based performance artist and writer Tina Takemoto. Takemoto combines historic footage of military propaganda and men’s bodybuilding with her own campy performance in the role of Jiro Onuma, a queer Japanese American man who was imprisoned in a World War II Japanese internment camp in Utah.

Following his death, Takemoto began a project about Onuma for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Archives when she came across a small box of Onuma’s possessions. Although she is a scholar who works in both queer and Asian American studies, this was the first time Takemoto had come across an account of a queer experience in the internment camps; accounts of LGBT people living in the camps were generally unheard of. Takemoto saw Onuma’s narrative as a way to bring this experience to light.

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

Willful Creature

Priscilla Totiyapungprasert — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:58:41 +0000

Writer Priscilla Totiyapungprasert

On stage, Yuki Chikudate’s energy threatens to overwhelm her petite frame. She tosses her head in a trancelike rapture, hands dancing on the keyboard. In another moment, Chikudate takes over the drums to bang away in a frantic fury.

Chikudate is the sprightly front woman and lead vocalist of Asobi Seksu, a New York noise-pop duo that also consists of guitarist and backup vocalist James Hanna. The band likes to play with contrasts, stacking Chikudate’s dreamy, bright vocals on textured instruments and synthetic sounds.

Currently signed to Polyvinyl Records, Asobi Seksu has come a long way since its early days in 2002 when the band, going by the name Sportfuck, hustled on the New York club circuit. In 2011, Asobi Seksu released its fourth studio album, Fluorescence, performed at South by Southwest and toured with Boris, a Japanese metal band.

As with the band’s previous albums, Chikudate sings in both Japanese and English on Fluorescence, creating a lyrical blend that fits the band’s style of mixing differences. This latest release carries Asobi Seksu’s trademark melodic hooks and distorted layers, but also pushes further with a blurring of sounds, offering something both noisier and edgier than the sweetness of the band’s earlier albums.

Asobi Seksu is currently taking a break from touring while Chikudate experiments with other projects. Hyphen had the opportunity to talk to Chikudate about her music style, influential concerts and her teenage days.

How did you come up with the name Asobi Seksu? What happened to Sportfuck?
We thought Sportfuck was really funny, but we were much younger then. We wanted to be tongue-in-cheek and push the envelope, but clubs told us, “You’ll never play with that name!”

So you switched to Japanese?
Asobi seksu roughly translates to playful, casual sex. Sex for fun. For some Japanese people, it’s too much and makes them uncomfortable. My mom wasn’t happy at first, but she’s learned to accept it.

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

The Power of Two

Anabel Mariko Stenzel — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:19:15 +0000

Writer Anabel Mariko Stenzel

I love Japan. As a child, I loved its scenery, food and the cute toys. As an English teacher there after college, I loved its clean streets, work ethic and its generous people. My Japanese mother and grandmother taught me to speak the language and to incorporate being Japanese into my identity.

But one thing I struggled to understand was the resistance to one of modern medicine’s greatest miracles: organ transplantation. As an industrialized nation, Japan has the lowest rate of organ donation in the world.

In 1972, shortly after my twin sister, Isabel Yuriko, and I were born in Los Angeles, we were diagnosed with a genetic disease called cystic fibrosis (CF), which creates an abundance of thick mucus in the lungs and pancreas, leading to malnutrition, pneumonia and lung damage.

Our Japanese mother and German father were both unknowing carriers of the CF gene. One in 25 people of white background is a silent carrier of the CF gene, but it is very rare in Asians. My parents were told that we would be lucky to live 10 years. They were trained to give us daily medications to aid digestion and to administer nebulizer treatments — mist through a breathing machine — several times a day so we could breathe easier. Most challenging was the physical therapy they had to provide three times daily: My sister and I would lie over their laps, and they would pound our chests with their hands to help loosen the thick mucus in our lungs.

These treatments took an enormous toll on our family’s time and my parents’ marriage. But our family persevered. We attended regular school, participated in swim team and Girl Scouts, did chores and brought our breathing machines to our friends’ homes for sleepovers. We even attended Japanese school on Saturdays. I learned to say, “Watashi no seki wa densenbyo janai desu,” or “My cough is not contagious.”

At first, we were shameful and secretive about our illness. But as our disease progressed, we were hospitalized frequently, and the CF became difficult to hide. We found a school system that assisted us when we were hospitalized, and, most significantly, we found compassionate friends who saw beyond our illness. We knew our disease was progressive and carried a high likelihood that we would die young, but we lived with hope and gaman, the Japanese word for perseverance.

Before we knew it, we graduated from high school as valedictorians, moved away to attend Stanford University and pursued graduated degrees at University of California, Berkeley, in the health care field — all with a lung capacity below 40 percent of normal. Thanks to advancements in medical care for CF, we made it to adulthood and witnessed the average life expectancy for CF increase into the late 30s.

In my 20s, my lung damage progressed so severely that I needed oxygen to breathe and required more hospitalizations for aggressive care. I could barely walk and was fatigued and gasping for air constantly. Living away from our parents, Isabel and I spent up to four hours daily doing treatments on each other, pounding each other’s backs morning and night to keep each other alive. At the age of 24, I was offered a lung transplant as a last effort to survive. Four years later, after a rigorous evaluation process and 16 months on the national waiting list, I received a double lung transplant. Isabel, whose disease progressed a bit slower, received her lung transplant at the age of 32. We were finally free from CF.

See the official theatrical trailer of The Power Of Two:

Read the full text of this story in Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

The Language of Seeds and Tents

Weston Teruya — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:08:20 +0000

It began with papaya seedlings covertly planted on a narrow strip of grass between a roadway and a chain-link fence.

Gaye Chan and her partner, Nandita Sharma, deliberately placed the plants on public land without permission or regret. For a few months in late 2003, the young plants flourished there in the shadow of green, creased cliffs on the windward side of Oahu, HI. A small hand-painted placard declared them for public benefit and use.

A few months later, the sign became the site of a written exchange between the planters and the public works employee sent to remove the intruding plants. The worker’s apologetic, “Sorry, I’ve been instructed to remove papaya plants ... please transplant,” was countered with, “Thanks for the notice but we can’t think of any other place better than here where everyone has easy access to the free papayas.” Shortly afterward, the government worker uprooted the plants, leaving only a note recommending the services of a mediator.

“Where is the public in public land?” Chan and Sharma asked. “Who decides how space is used?” These are some questions posed in their decade-long artistic project, Eating in Public, a loose web of projects ranging from unpermitted gardens to strident agitprop publications.

Considerations of public space and the ability of everyday citizens to engage with or provide for one another are issues that have echoed throughout history, resounding most recently in the tense dialogues between civic leaders and defiant 2011 Occupy protests across the United States. The goals of the Occupy movement have been economic equality, but the visual language of tents and other activist vernacular created in the public squares, parks and streets has been where these demands have been articulated, or forcibly squashed.

Even elected officials acknowledge the importance of this connection between the visual language and interventions into public space in both their support and resistance: The City Council of Irvine, CA, declared tents an extension of protected free speech while New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dismissed the same as preposterous. Thousands of marching bodies filling avenues and the hodgepodge, utilitarian mix of makeshift homes and gathering spaces inserted into public space have reset the terms for understanding and discussing unwieldy and broad concepts like civics, government and corporations.

This is a preview of Issue 25: The Generation Issue, available now. Subscribe to Hyphen or pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.