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 Challenges and Perspectives  Confucius, the model educator of Ancient Asia
Workshop 1A: 2003 AAARI/AAHEC Research Awardees Transcript
25 West 43rd Street, Room 1858 New York, NY 10036 T: (212) 869-0182 F: (212) 869-0181 info@aaari.info
Ngee Pong Chang:
Good afternoon! Thank you for your patience. This is one way you have to pay for the price of high-technology, therefore you have to boot up the high technology. Took a while. But any way, welcome to this workshop 1A.
This is a very special workshop. Even though the general theme of the conference is on Asian American education conference, this is a workshop where we want to feature a program of the Asian American Asian Research Institute and Asian American High Education Council. Because the mission of AAARI is to promote interdisciplinary research on issues that are of concern to Asian Americans and Asians.
CUNY has a big faculty research award program. They fund each year—I don’t know what the budget is, but probably two or three million dollars per year—but they fund research that are well defined. Like I am in physics, if I were to propose a research grant on the role of Asians in Physics, they would look at me and say “Why? You should be doing physics research on what is the latest theory in high energy physics.”
What we want to promote is not research within the box where this is sociology, this is history, this is physics or this is chemistry. What we want to promote is interdisciplinary things that go beyond the box that are of cross-disciplinary or of areas that has been neglected by the traditional disciplines of research.
Our AAARI budget per year is no where close to CUNY budget. It is very, very small. But even though it is very, very small, the AAARI board decided after much soul searching to nonetheless with the help of AAAHEC (Asian American High Education Council) to set aside something like a part of $15,000 to 20,000 dollars to fund, like a seed grant, proposals that have impact on Asian and Asian American concerns.
And I am very happy to report that this year, this being the first inaugural year, we had many, many proposals that came in, and it was not easy to decide on the funding. But after much soul searching we have given the award to the six recipients whom you already met at the luncheon, but it was thought that it would be good if at this annual AAARI conference that we give these six recipients the chance to present an outline of what it is they try to do.
Don't forget, we just started this award program and so they just received the notification, maybe two or three months ago. I don’t know if they have actually received the money yet. But it is promised already that they will receive the check or whatever. They certainly have not yet done the work for which they had proposed. So do not hold them to account and say today you are supposed to have presented the result of your proposal.
However, this is a preview, and hopefully by presenting the six recipients what their projects are, it gives an idea of what the future goal of AAARI would be. Perhaps, through these recipients, through their work, there can be other seed funding and grants that, based upon the research they may have done, they can go out to the outside foundations and get bigger sums of research that are needed for the projects that they are talking about.
So without further a due, I will then go according to the program here and I will ask professor Pyong Gap Min, Professor of Sociology from Queens College, whose Topic is "Religion, Host Hostility and Identity Formation: The Experiences of 1.5 and 2nd Generation South Asian Muslim Students". Professor Pyong Gap Min…
Pyong Gap Min:
Well, actually, we got money, we have access to the account... I finished the ten interviews. My study has two main objectives:
One, I want to examine the extent to which South Asian Muslims college students had experience prejudiced discrimination and physical violence, particularly after 9/11. Also I asked whether they know, their parents or other friends have experienced, and so on. The study is very short. The extent is Muslims have had problems particularly after September 11 and that is practically an important issue.
Number two, my study intends to examine South Asian Muslim students ethnic and pan-ethnic identity formation. Earlier they teach the religion as a cultural variable, so they can maintain elements of ethnic religious culture. So they can maintain their ethnic identity through perpetration of religion. But religion can be a structural variable like [inaudible], because some religious groups are subject to lot of prejudiced discrimination, and I think most of the [inaudible] some typical case of religious group that, like racial minority, subject to a lot of discrimination, and how that will have an influence on identity formation.
Not only because of their religious aspect, but also because of their extensive discrimination, they can have a different kind of identity formation. Indian Muslim they came to identify more as an Indian Muslim and Muslim, not Indian, as a religious minority. But Pakistan is a heavily Muslim country. There is a high association between national origin and religion. So, I want to see whether they identify as a national origin around religion or maybe a pan-ethnic South Asian. So I have a questionnaire here that has five components.
Number one, extensive prejudiced discrimination, physical violence. I have a lot of question about that, and I also asked about their view about US government policy to counter terrorism and actually they have a lot to say about that. Then another section covers their practice of religious value, norms and ritual, whether they pray five times a day, whether they participate in mosque on Friday regularly, whether they fast in the months of Ramadan, things like that. I have a lot of questions to check whether they read the Koran in Arabic.
Another section covers their ethnic culture: their mother tongue, how good, what is their mother tongue, how often they eat ethnic food for dinner, whether they celebrate Indian, Pakistani and Bangladesh holidays at home, participate in ethnic festival, how often they watch TV program, if they have, how many times they have visited their home country.
Then another section covers friendship dating pattern of ethnic religious South Asians, and their identity. They are not supposed to date, Muslim students are not supposed to date. I talked with the students, some students secretly date, and so on. I did the student interviews, so we can get information about that. If they interview [inaudible] Muslims or South-Asian Muslim or non-Muslim [inaudible]? We will see.
And, I finished 10 to 15 interviews. With the money given by this organization, I can interview only 50. It is tape recorded personal interviews, 50. But I got some money from CUNY, so put together I can finish 100 interviews and this is a good study.
I am pursuing to get some money for comparative study in England. There are many thousands of Muslims, particularly Pakistani Muslim in England. So whether government policy and race, religion in each country has particular influence on their identity formation, or the extent to which they experienced prejudice and discrimination. I finished.
Ngee Pong Chang:
A quick questions?
Audience Member:
I have a quick question. How do you ensure that privacy of the questions you are asking, especially with the dating part? How do you ensure that the people that you are interviewing, that their names won’t be disclosed. Are you worried about that… confidentiality?
Pyong Gap Min:
That could be a problem. Students are contacted through personal channel, so their friends tell them to go to interview. I tried to focus on South Asian and Muslim students at Queens College, but now already the interviews are not enough, so I may have to use other schools like Hunter College.
Audience Member:
I only raised the question because anyone who teaches at CUNY would never divulge their information… It a violation of the privacy of Muslim students…
Pyong Gap Min:
I got permission, it’s very complicated. I spent a lot of time for human subject permission, they approved.
Ngee Pong Chang:
One more question.
Audience Member:
I am sorry, I came in too late, so I missed the beginning of your presentation. I was wondering, did you notice any difference between Muslims from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladesh in terms of their response. You are putting them together as South Asian, but did you notice any difference…
Pyong Gap Min:
I cannot say, I interviewed only a small number right now. I cannot say whether they have different experiences. Later when I finish I can say something about that.
Audience Member:
As an extension of that, have you done a study before 9/11, then post 9/11, and saw any differences?
Pyong Gap Min:
I don’t think so. There are many studies about American Muslims, but they focus on immigrants, more historical studies; also they focus on community formation. My study focuses on 1.5 and 2nd generation Muslim. I have done lot of research on second generation identity issues. I don’t think there is [inaudible] for study before 9/11. In my questionnaire, I asked whether they encountered more problems after 9/11. It will show.
Ngee Pong Chang:
You don’t think that some of the people you interviewed… since you are not Muslim, did that affect their response to you because you are not Muslim?
Pyong Gap Min:
I am not interviewing, Muslim students are interviewing. But I have trouble getting money, I am not Muslim, so they don’t think I can do it.
Audience Member:
After 9/11, so many Muslims [inaudible], how they change their lives, did they [inaudible].
Pyong Gap Min:
Maybe Muslim immigrants’ parents have more problems after 9/11. We asked the question about what happened to their parents. I gave the contacts in terms of the school, neighborhood, workplace or other contacts too, and then the person and their parent, their friend and relative. It should give an idea of how much they have struggled.
Ngee Pong Chang:
Let’s thank Professor Pyong Gap Min. Our next speaker is Moustafa Bayoumi, Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and his topic is “Racing Religion.”
Moustafa Bayoumi:
I wanted to be on MTV but I don’t know what happened! I don't know!
Well, thank you for the invitation to come to speak to you today about my preliminary, very preliminary report on my topic. Actually it dovetails very well with the previous topic I think. In some significant manner it is different, because mine is not an empirical study at all, in the sense mine is more historical and also I guess you would call theoretical. It’s a question that I have long concerned about. And that is, for me, what I would consider a question of modernity itself. And that’s the relationship between race and religion.
That seems to me an important question for the development of the western tradition as it were. One of those elements is the idea that religion moves into the private sphere, that religion is something that is individual and close and it is your own. As you get that political idea, which is very much a political idea about how to form a society. Later, shortly thereafter inside of the western tradition, you get the development of race as a great marker of division between people.
But it seems to me that if you look at it just in that kind of narrative fashion that you might miss something. Maybe religion never really became something private. Maybe it’s private for only some people and not for others, and that some others have to always perform their religion publicly, namely minority religions. If that religion is public then maybe it is not such a great difference that you can see between the idea of race, which is in a sort of scientific, in a typical way race is something that's public because you can see it. It is not something that's private. But in fact maybe religion itself is in some ways, carries a lot of racial characteristics at any given time in any particular moment, which actually reveals a lot about the constructions of both religion and race as they relate to political exigencies at any given moment, which also has a lot to do with greater issues of modernity and questions of public and private social organizations in many other ways. But I’ll leave it at that for now.
So, understanding that then, I wanted to consider the notion of religions, particularly Islam in the West, particularly post 9/11 and this idea of Muslims. Because there was all this talk about people who looked Muslim. Just the other day I got a flier I suppose from AALDF, the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, a great organization. On the flier it say, “Are you Pakistani, Bangladeshi… Have you been discriminated because you look Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Muslim.” Something like this. I can't remember exactly how it said it. But the idea that Muslim became some kind of category that you can see. When you think about it that’s in someway ludicrous. Muslims who look the full range of any kind of human being that you find on earth.
So what does it mean? I wanted to ask. And what does that mean for this nascent category of the Muslim as a kind of individual inside of the society of American Society particularly at this moment. But also what does it mean for the category of Arab, which is an overlapping category with Muslims, they’re not the same things but they overlap in significant manner. And what does that also mean inside of the history of the United States? And what drew me further along was connecting the notion of Arab and Muslims to the history of the Asian Exclusion Act in the United States from the late 19th century up to World War II basically.
I found that there are some very interesting case law that talks about whether the Arabs in particular are white. It became the big question whether Arabs are white or not white. Like with Indians and Afghans and other groups too, Japanese at some point too. There is a great flip-flop between whether they are white and not white and not white is not white. Same thing for Arabs. So I wanted to look at that history and it is related to the contemporary moment. Understand this also in the contemporary moment, which is why I am hoping to do.
So one of the things that I have done as well is consider the special registration, which is now underway for some 20 tribes of Muslim countries and North Korea. I don’t know how many North Koreans are actually inside the United States. North Korean non-immigrant visitors. It’s the same for everybody, non-immigrant visitor, not peoples who are of North Korean descend. If you are a citizen then it is a different thing. So, I don’t know how many North Korean non-immigrant visitors there are in the United States right now, but I suspect that it is a much smaller number than say Egyptians, or Yemenis
But also I have to think about Special Registration, I am not sure but a few people in the audience here are aware of Special Registration. On April 18, just couple of weeks ago—which was actually my birthday, but that’s besides the point—that was the deadline for special registration for the last call-in category. So for special registration involves the registration of boys or men, 16 years of age or over but the male. All boys and men 16 years of age or older but there is no upper limits either. So if my father was to come to visit—my father is actually in Canada—he will be subjected to Special Registration. Non-immigrant males, who are visiting the country or who are already in the country must register. Now there are about 25 countries in this extraordinary and highly selective procedure.
Special Registration entails that the Department of Homeland Security, which used to be the INS, the INS no longer exists. It has now moved into the Department of Home and Security. In coordination with the FBI, checks the immigration status, you must be fingerprinted and photographed. You are asked a series of questions regarding your activities and your work in United States. You must provide proof of your status, your address, you must provide proof of your address, such as an electricity bill or something like that. You give the Government all of your credit card information as well. You provide and you must also provide references of at least two U.S. citizens who can vouch for you.
Not only do you do this, if you do not satisfy the interview at the time that you are legitimately inside of the country, then you can be detained at that moment until they are satisfied that you are legitimately in the country. If they are not satisfied then they will begin deportation proceedings and they can often keep you that moment. Not only that, men must be registered every year. It is yearly thing now; it does not just happen once. Any time you enter or leave the country, you must go through the whole registration system again. You must go through the whole registration system again.
At any rate, it seems to me that special registration has some relationship to previous notions of political and social control that are related to categories of race and the construction of race even if religion is used as a racial construction. Let me give you a couple of examples, or at least one example since I am running out of time. Inside a case law about that. This is an example when the Asian Exclusion Law was still around since 1942. It was a case whether a man named Amed Hussian should be considered white or not white to be admitted to the United States.
Most of the Arabs who had come through prior to Amed Hussian had been Syrian Christians. Amed Hussian is one of a small number of Muslims who had been coming through the port of entry at this point. Their determinations are being made. I just want to read you some of the case law so that you can see precisely how it seems to me religion is actually used as a racial category. Religion is being use to make race inside this decision.
For example, the district judge writes in this decision, well, this guy has dark skin, we can’t always use ocular proof. Because this is late in the history of this. Before they had arguments as to whether they should use science or they should use common understanding. Now they are saying, let’s use some other way. They can’t use ocular proof because if you used ocular proof, then you have very dark Europeans from southern Europe who looked like they might be non-White. So there must be some other way that we can determine if someone is white or not.
He says here, “Apart from the dark skin of the Arabs, it is well-known that they are part of the Mohammadian world (namely the Muslim world). And that a wide gulf separates their culture from that of the predominantly Christian people of Europe. It cannot be expected that as a class, they will readily intermarry with our population and be assimilated into our civilizations. The small amount of immigration of these people to the United States is in itself evident of the fact.” You can forget the whole notion of the Asian Exclusion Law playing a role in the small number.
At the end, he makes a comparison with an Armenian Christian in the same decision. He says, “It is recognized that in another district court decision, the district court held that an Armenian from Asian Minor should be eligible for citizenship as a white person. The court there found, however, that the Armenians are a Christian people living in an area close to the European border, who have intermingled with the Europeans over a period of centuries. Evidence was also presented in that case of a considerable amount of intermarriage of Armenian immigrants to the U.S. with other racial strands of our populations. These facts serve to distinguish the case of the Armenians from that of the Arabians.”
Seems to me that race and religion play a very complicated role, one that we have to think much more completely about, rather than just assuming that religion is something that is private and that people hold self-evidently.
Audience Member (Joyce Gelb):
First of all, I wonder what year that decision was?
Moustafa Bayoumi:
1942.
Audience Member (Joyce Gelb):
I think your area of inquiry is extremely interesting, but it strikes me as being huge. You are intermingling so many categories that I wrote down here. I don’t know if you have plans to go about deconstructing all these terms and interconnections. The final comment I want to make is that the relationship between this external registration—which is a public registration system, if you like—and self-identity, is an interesting way of thinking about how that affects formation of identity. I don’t know if that requires a comment or whatever.
Audience Member:
A quick comment. If I’m not mistaken, I think there is a book out called something like When the Irish Became White. That title says much about the issue of race. My question is, what sort of data are you going to use other than what you cited as court documents? What would be the stuff that you will be mining?
Moustafa Bayoumi:
In the beginning the impetus for this article began as... I have written a lot on different aspects about 9/11 here or there. The Law Journal asked if I would write an article for them. And Law Journal articles tend to be 100 pages or so, so they are extremely long. I sort of have written half of it. In some way it’s my attempt consciously to work inside that paradigm to some degree. You mean in terms of history, research, in that regard? Or the theoretical side?
Audience Member:
Either one, I guess mainly the history and research. Will you be using case law mostly?
Moustafa Bayoumi:
Mostly case law, I think you can gleam a lot from case laws, particularly about this notion of how race and religion are operating through the courts. I have also downloaded from the INS website—or what used to be the INS—some very interesting arguments, because they have to present arguments to Congress when they issue these executive orders. They have them up there too. They are actually arguing for their position. Their position for Special Registration, it seems to be on its face to be discriminatory. Why is it that you can be forced to register while others can’t? Well, their argument for Special Registration not being discriminatory is that eventually all non-immigrants who are visitors will have be special registered. We will see if the British are asked to provide their references. I think in large part it is going to be limited to case files. Did you find something problematic with that?
Audience Member:
Of course, no. Since you are working for the Law Journal, so I guess that is appropriate.
Ngee Pong Chang:
In view of time, I think I will have to cut this short. Next I will invite my colleague from City College, Professor Joyce Gelb, who will be talking about “New Developments in Gender Related Policymaking in Japan: Exploring Cross Party Advocacy by Diet Women.” Explain to me what “diet” means.
Dr. Joyce Gelb:
Right, that should be okay. We don’t mean anything about death . Just to clarify, the Diet is the Japanese Parliament. So that is what this is about. Some people totally misunderstood when the Chancellor announced this. Basically what I am looking at is a cross-party sponsorship of legislation in Japan. Actually it is an outgrowth of a book I have recently completed. I have in fact done a little bit of research. I too am a recipient of a PSC-CUNY grant, which will enable me to enhance the research that this support has helped me to begin to think about. So I think that is the nice synergy that some of us have been able to put together.
Just for your information in terms of the Diet, the Japanese Parliament, women comprise 7% of the more powerful Lower House and 15.4% of the Upper House, which is higher, by the way, than the Congress of the United States, for those people who say the Japanese women have no political role at all. What I discovered when I was doing research for my book was that there has been several examples of cross- or super-partisan sponsorship primarily on issues related to what we might call “victimization,” although that is only one way to look at them. Anti-child prostitution and pornography, anti-stalking legislation; all within the last few years but I won't go into the numbers.
The one that I have been most interested in is the domestic violence law, the Prevention of Spousal Violence and Protection of Victims law, which was passed in 2001. Most recently Dietwomen have proposed a civil code revision effort in 2002 and 2001, which would permit married women to retain their single marital name prior to marriage. That one by the way has gotten nowhere. Apparently what is required is the support of the dominant party in Japan. I am a political scientist; my interest is politics and policymaking and policy outcomes.
Essentially one really interesting question is “What kinds of issues are amenable to this very interesting development?”, which has some parallel, for example, in United States and I am interested in comparative issues. What can we learn, for example, from the Japanese case, which might be instructive for us here, or other countries, other cultures? And what are the limits to this cross-party sponsorship? Again this one, domestic violence, which has to do with—I don’t like the term so much—patriarchy. But unfortunately it seems to sum up what this is about in large measure: that the male-dominated culture does not like the idea that somehow women would retain their maiden names. It has really been fought very vigorously.
A second instance, which has been problematic again with regard to cross-party sponsorship, has been the equal employment concept at the core of the Japanese labor system, even as it is in the process of transition. So again that issue has not been so amenable to cross-party sponsorship. I don't want to talk too long, but I will make two points that I think are important, and I hope will contribute to this research that I hope to undertake, probably not this summer but in the coming year.
One factor that seems to contribute to the ability of Diet women to be able to work together is the existence of what I call “kansetsu gaiatsu”, which means indirect, external pressure. By this I am referring to international venues, international treaties—Beijing Meeting 95, Beijing +5 2000 in New York, International Directives on Violence against Women, for example—which have been used as a resource by Japanese women to embarrass the Japanese government into complying with what is now seen as a kind of new international standard.
In the case, for example, of domestic violence, we have numerous examples of women from Japan leaving and saying that the government has been unwilling, ineffective, and really calling it on the carpet. Also, the fact that Taiwan and Korea passed domestic violence legislation prior to the one in Japan, I think it’s a kind of pressure to say “why aren’t we doing as well as our other Asian neighbors?” In fact, their other Asian neighbors did better with regards perhaps to the actual provision of the legislature, but that’s another story. So this external pressure functions as a resource and I believe very strongly, that there is a right discourse in Japan and that it’s been reinforced through these international mechanisms. I think it’s very important to look at that connection also with regard to the activity of the women in government.
Second is the connection between NGOs: civil society, activist women, and—just to use again domestic violence, the movement to get domestic violence all goes back to the beginning of the 1990s—the Domestic Violence Research Group. There was in Kobe, Japan an information center, numerous other centers in places like Hokkaido and elsewhere, which were trying to raise consciousness around this issue. I think one of the interesting things that seems to have developed is that one of the components of this new effort by the women in the parliament, in the government, to do the cross-party sponsorship, was also in conjunction with these nongovernmental organizations who for the first time seemed to have perhaps more of a role in the policy process in advancing democratization in this regard.
So these are essentially the major issues I am looking at. As I have done in the past, I’ve planned to do interviews with advocates, policy makers, members of the Diet, journalists, bureaucrats, and others who have had some kind of a role in this policymaking process. What I have not done as well as I might have in the past, which this money will help me to do, is interview men in politics. I’ve interviewed women a lot. I haven’t done enough to interview male bureaucrats, male parliamentarians. That I think will be an important dimension of examining the significance of this kind of phenomenon. Thank you.
Audience Member:
I enjoyed the presentation. I am [inaudable] from Chicago. As I understand, many political issues are about the geisha houses in Japan. How do the Diet women see the geisha houses…?
Joyce Gelb:
I don’t think there are many geisha houses left in Japan. I would have to tell you that there are lots of bar hostesses and a whole underside of society. I can’t speak to that, I don’t research those issues. I research what is visible and there may be things that are happening in this country or others that I can’t speak to. And there’s certainly corruption, bribery, and sexual shenanigans everywhere, as we well know the United States. That’s not really particularly part of my area of inquiry, so I can’t help you.
But I think there are very few geishas left in Japan, so I think that image despite the popularity of Golden’s book or other knockoffs of it… I think that most are really in Kyoto where I have the privilege of spending a semester teaching several years ago. We were hard-pressed to find more than a few in the Gion area except those who were there for commercial photography purposes.
Audience Member:
The percentages of women in the Diet versus the U.S.… is that for Asian countries in general?
Joyce Gelb:
No I don’t look at Asian countries in general, I look at Japan. I can’t answer that question. I can’t be a specialist in everything. I have to credit City College actually, our home campus, with giving me the opportunity 15 years ago to go to Japan. I had done comparative research, but I had never been there. I have become a devotee of the study of Japanese politics, but I don’t know anything about Chinese. I have done a research on Korea and Japan, but I did not do the Korean part of it. Korean representation, I do know, is far lower. Japanese women are also well represented in the bureaucracy in the Koizumi government. So what does it mean? Who knows? There’s been at least numerical progress, which is significant.
Ngee Pong Chang:
Let’s thank Professor Gelb. Now I have the privilege to present Professor Margaret Chin from Hunter College, who’s going to talk about “Chinatown After 9/11: Immigrant Adaptation and Ethnic Enclaves.”
Margaret M. Chin:
Thanks. Actually the title when I applied was “Chinatown in Transition” and I didn’t have the part of the “Immigrant Adaptation and Ethic Enclaves”, but I guess the more work that I do and the more work that I see, I will be doing during this summer it seems appropriate for that to be added on. But let me give you a preface. First, thank you for the award. As this is actually part two of a study that I had already started. I actually have a little data to present and some findings. Then I will tell you the study I will do this summer and the coming year.
I was given a basic research award from the [Russell Sage Foundation] to do a study of the Chinese garment workers and what happened to them after September 11th. So last summer I spent interviewing 61 workers. At that time, I focused on basically two levels. The first was what happened to them in just their everyday lives, practical everyday concerns. Did they have a safety net, and how were they making ends meet?
The second thing that I was looking at was how Chinatown was transforming because so many of these women lost their jobs. You could see clearly just walking through the streets, even last summer, six to nine months afterwards that the economy has definitely changed. Without these workers earning so much money, they couldn’t afford to buy things in the grocery stores. You could see that the grocery stores had less stock. It was pretty clear that everything was affected along with the restaurants.
Let me backtrack a little bit to talk to you about what Chinatown was like before September 11th and then move forward. Chinatown, before September 11th, had 56,000 Asian residents. But it also had 14,000 garment workers. These 14,000 workers, I’d say, over half of them didn’t live in the Chinatown area. Probably two-thirds of them didn’t live in Chinatown. They actually came in from Brooklyn, Queens, other areas in Manhattan, or even the Bronx to come into Chinatown to work.
While they were there, they’d earn their money and they used all of the services inside Chinatown. So they were tied in myriad ways to the local Chinatown economy—they shopped, they banked, they did their hair, they went to travel agencies. Everything that you can imagine, they did there. If these factories closed, I thought that there would be a huge impact on Chinatown. So that was the basis of this study and that is the longer term study.
Initially what we had thought and what many people had hoped was that some of these workers would be able to find jobs continuously in Chinatown to be able to support the economy. But at the time of writing this proposal, which is I guess was this past fall, a year and three months after September 11th, you could tell that there are many shops that were going to close, and many of these workers were desperate in terms of finding jobs. So that’s how this project came to be as part two.
I gave you a basis of what Chinatown was like. But what happened to these workers first and what makes me concerned about them is that it’s not only just what’s going to happen to them, but their families as well. As I said, I interviewed these 61 workers and I found them through ESL classes. I interviewed 61 workers, they were all 90 or 120-minute interviews and they were all paid $10 to be interviewed. Many of them were really willing to talk at that point because they really wanted to tell somebody what happened to them, so it was actually easy to interview.
We interviewed them actually in Cantonese. I was prepared to interview in Mandarin, Fukkienese, English, and Cantonese, but they all spoke Cantonese. So which was a little bit surprising to me, all but five of them were citizens of the U.S. and those five had Green Cards. So contrary to what people normally think about the women in Chinatown, these were all documented and they are all working. As a result I found out that many of them, even though they were all documented, all had papers and everything, they had very little relief. We know from last year’s conference that one of the reasons why was because of the way the government had structured and put an artificial line in dividing Chinatown, Canal Street. So that was one of the reasons why very few of them got relief money in the very beginning.
The second reason was because some of them were actually working on September 11th informally. Because garment work is a seasonal occupation, many of them weren’t working over the summer and they just started returning to work. So on September 11th there might have been only like a day’s worth of work, so they might have been coming in to work that day, but weren’t officially on the payroll. They were going to get paid cash and then not work the rest of the week or just work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Because it wasn’t documented, they couldn’t receive unemployment insurance.
So because of these two reasons, most of them couldn’t get any aid. Unbeknownst to me at that time, even though they couldn’t get aid immediately, it ended up that eventually some of them went and got aid, and were very successful. However, many of them were actually turned off by the whole process. Even though there were people who could translate for them, they never went back after the rules changed to actually get aid.
The second part of it was what I learned that was a little bit surprising was that very few of them had ever looked for any other kinds of jobs before, so this was the first realization that they actually would have to leave the industry and they would actually have to go out and seek another job. Many of them had the false image that English was a cure-all for them, and they actually didn’t know how to apply for a job or go look for a job.
Very few of them had friends who actually worked elsewhere outside of the garment industry that could actually help them find jobs. If you looked into the families and how they’re tied together, and I actually asked them for their family trees, kind of, or all their family members and list them. I asked them where all their families worked. I found that most of them and their closest family members all worked in Chinese communities in the New York City area. Very few of them had connections elsewhere.
I thought that not only will this whole thing affect the Chinatown in Manhattan, but it will also affect the communities out in Sunset Park, and in Queens and everywhere else. That’s how this project started. What I’m going to do this summer is hopefully re-interview these workers again, all 61 of them. I also informally was notified that I have a PSC-CUNY award. I also will dovetail it with Professor Min and interview the children of these workers.
Many of these children, I found out, actually helped out with their families. Even though their parents didn’t say they did, but they actually did. They bought groceries home. They couldn’t quantify how much money they were contributing, but these children brought home groceries, they offered to help pay mortgages if they had older children, offered to pay rent, and some of the CUNY students who were there, I suspect, actually took fewer courses and actually did more work.
The second part was I’m going to look to see if I can find CUNY students whose parents were actually garment workers and see if this whole thing had actually impacted their education. And the last part of it which goes to look at what’s going on in Chinatown is to actually talk to some of the building owners, to find out what’s happening to these spaces where garment shops used to be located.
The reason why that’s interesting is because we can either see juxtaposition in Chinatown, or see other groups come in, or maybe there would be new kinds of businesses that Chinese ethnic groups can develop. Maybe we’ll keep seeing the ethnic enclave. Those of you who are sociologists know that the ethnic enclave theories where co-ethnics help each other in the community, but we won’t know if that’s really going to happen in the future.
Audience Member:
I am curious, how did you recruit the interviewees and what kinds of difficulties did you come across?
Margaret M. Chin:
We found them all through basically two ESL and job training classes that were offered last summer. There were many job training classes and ESL classes in Chinatown last summer. There are many of these women that were basically out of work and they had money from the government actually to have these classes. We had initially located two classes and one which you’d probably heard about, the nail salon business, the nail salon retraining that was in an article in the Wall Street Journal. We actually spoke to some of their workers as well, the people enrolled in that program. So it’s two and a few from the nail salon training program.
Audience Member:
In terms of the garment industry, my understanding is that it has been declining over many, many years. So when 9/11 happens, we get a big drop off. Do you know what that curve looks like or those percentages are, and what the implications are in the garment industry in New York?
Margaret M. Chain:
In 1996 through 99 when I did my dissertation on the garment industry, at that point inside Chinatown there were like 400 to 500 garment shops. Probably in the five years they were losing about 50 shops per year until 2001, where they started off with 240 shops, maybe 250. So the decline was 50 per year, which sounds about right because that’s 50 times 30 to 40 workers who would leave the industry. That counts people who are retiring, and then it counts for some people who aren’t joining in the industry, which would make sense. It would make sense locally too because of the industry in New York and how many people are actually moving out, if you talk to the sales people and the marketing people in the garment industry.
Over the course of just that one year after 9/11, there were 75 to 125 estimated closures. They closed double the rate from before. What does it mean in the future? Right now it’s unclear as to what’s going to happen in Chinatown. Many of these workers are either moving outside looking for work, and many of these owners aren’t quite sure what to do with their shops because they can’t make as much. Because of what happened after September 11th, the long-term jobs moved elsewhere out of the country. When they couldn’t sew in Chinatown anymore, these orders went and were sewed in the Philippines or Malaysia and we don’t know if they’re going to come back.
Audience Member:
A two-part questions. Because these shops are closing down, what are these shops converting to now, the space? The second part is now that the garment industry has plummeted over the past decade, what are some of the industries that will substitute for this industry?
Margaret M. Chin:
I’ll do the second part first. The industries that these women want to go to, it’s difficult to locate. What I know what people have done in the government was try to look at economic indicators to see what industries were growing. So they looked at the health industry, which is home health aid for these women, and they also looked at food service, which normally are two growing industries in New York City.
However, we’re in an economic recession, so there are very few jobs actually available for these women now. These are the kinds of jobs that some of these women are actually being retrained for now. Not totally retrained for, but they’re getting on-the-job language, English for those kinds of jobs. Now the first part was about the replacement. This is what this summer I’m going to look at. I haven’t done that yet to find out exactly what’s replacing those spaces.
Audience Member:
A very quick questions. You mentioned informal work; you’ve looked at those that are declared. How about the sweatshops? We have no idea how many there are and where they are operating. This phenomenon is a very real one.
Margaret M. Chin:
It is a very real phenomenon. When I went to these English classes, I had thought that there would be more of them, but I don’t know where they are. They might have, as soon as September 12th came—they are really on the margin—totally folded. We may actually see fewer sweatshops and fewer undocumented going to Chinatown. In fact, where they’re going is… to Mohegan Sun. No, I’m serious about this, because at the reservations and at the casinos, there are actually jobs there. And on reservations, the INS, Homeland Security, doesn’t look there. As of this past fall, the registration of Chinese children in Connecticut schools has increased, so that’s a new topic that anybody who wants to study should study.
Ngee Pong Chang:
Next we’ll have Professor Akiba from Queens College, and his topic is “Family School and Community Partnerships: Identifying the Leadership Roles of Asian Americans in Larger Communities.”
Dais Akiba:
I thought I had another person before me, so I need another minute. But, OK, do we have any teachers, not college teachers, but real teachers? So nobody, that’s fine. Yeah, I just finished graduate school, and for the first time I’m teaching in college. One of my classes I teach teachers. It’s a teacher’s training program, so it’s a bunch of beginning teachers. I asked in the beginning of the semester, I made the mistake of asking “What is your biggest concern?” I address the class, ““What is your biggest concern?” Nine out of ten students said parental involvement. Hence the topic, parental involvement. It was that easy.
Anyway, actually I had done some work prior to that. I was in Providence, Rhode Island where I was studying parental involvement among parents from immigrant backgrounds. I identified several different basis of parental involvement such as attending parent-teacher conferences, attending bake sales, to school based activities. Also I had some home-based activities such as supervising homework and ensuring access to books and computers. Also we had other aspects such as having a network of siblings and relatives who would be able to support the educational efforts of these kids.
Aside from that, these teachers are not seeing much of parental involvement among most of the immigrant populations, including some Asian subgroups. I wanted to know, why don’t they get involved? There are a lot of empirical works on why parents don’t get involved, such as parents have other things to worry about. For example, they have to think about putting food on the table. So they don’t have time to think about having bake sales. Some parents are intimidated by the whole institution of school. They don’t have the social capital. They weren’t educated themselves especially in this country and they’re not familiar with how things work here, and they don’t know the ropes.
So there are many factors stopping these parents from getting involved. Also, the big thing, my favorite is, my Cambodian parents show absolutely no involvement whatsoever. Do they not care? When I asked, their answer is they do care. They do want their kids to go to college. They want their kids to be successful as we define success in the west. They want their kids to become doctors and lawyers, but they would do absolutely nothing to get themselves involved with the kid’s education. We are asking, “Why?”
Well it’s the respect issue. They expectations are such that they think teachers have the absolute authority on kid’s education, so they would be disrespectful if they got involved. So those subtle cultural issues are there. I was also thinking as a researcher, how can we, I don’t want to say help, but how can we increase the parental involvement, which many of us would think would be crucial factor in ensuring these kids’ success in school and beyond. But there’s pretty much no empirical research on how to increase parental involvement, especially among communities of color and immigrant background.
I have the gift of having a student in my class Ms. Incha Kim, who is sitting in the back, modestly as usual. But she is the best student ever for getting information and she gave me this information. She’s actually also on the school board of District 26 in Bayside, Queens. She was telling me that something might be working in District 26. Parents who are mostly immigrants—you said something like what, 70 percent of the parents are from an immigrant background—yet they seem to be doing something to encourage the parents to attend the parent-teacher conferences, many different school functions and all that.
Informally, I have been getting information through my personal connections that there appears to be some systematic, some community-based efforts toward improving the educational experiences for these children and this is where my research comes in. So I’m first trying to identify what it is that people, that community members of District 26 is doing. What they’re doing right, because in the past, the researchers have followed the deficit model. We want to find out what people are doing wrong, why aren’t these people doing what they’re supposed to be doing? But here we’re trying to take the positive approach and finding out what they’re doing right at this District 26. That’s number one.
Number two, I would like to then think of a way to apply what’s happening with the Korean Americans in District 26 to other members of the global community of New York City. I would like to find out what can be done to enhance the educational experience of not only Koreans and other high-achieving Asian Americans, but other members of the City of New York and beyond. Based on the funding through this great organization AAARI and AAHEC, I would like to take the initial step to finding out what can be done to enhance this education. That’s pretty much it.
Audience Member:
I am just curious, how are you going to look at class because District 26 seems to be an unusually wealthy community?
Dais Akiba:
Yes, somebody said it was upper class. I think the distribution is interesting. I found out there was actually working/middle class on average. Of course you know there’s a range, but the class definitely is a factor. It’s a luxury to be able to say “Take a day off, accompany the kids to their field trips.” It’s a luxury, it’s not something that everyone can do. But I would like to look at layers of different factors and identify a set of factors that other members of the community maybe able to follow or copy or whatever. That’s a factor definitely, class is a factor, but not as extreme as we think.
Audience Member:
Did you find differences in parental involvement, depending on how recently they have immigrated, or which immigrant groups they were?
Dais Akiba:
Definitely. Yes, all that. More recent arrivals actually did not know the ropes, so they really wanted to get involved, but they didn’t know how to do it. They didn’t know how to get involved. So definitely, timing was an issue. Also, even with the Asian category, Hmong and especially the Cambodians, they have this religious factor as well, their focus on fate. So they didn’t want to deal with their kid’s fate by, for example, creating environments which would stimulate their intellectual…they didn’t want to interfere. That came up a lot with interviewing parents. So even within the Asian-American communities, that is huge variability along these dimensions.
Ngee Pong Chang:
Let’s thank Professor Akiba. Now we end our workshop with a star presentation, Charles Riley II, who teaches English at Baruch College. And he is going to talk about “The Chinese Virtuoso: Celebrating the Aesthetic of Extremes.”
Charles Riley II:
It’s my fate to be last. It is also my fate to be completely trivial after all these serious and practical research projects. I admire all of them. It is my privilege though to have this grant and I just before we start, I want to editorialize just for a second, I want to say something. This will be my twelfth book. After twelve books, sitting and thinking, Baruch has never given me an offer or a dime to do any of these books. When I came up with this one, they looked at me like this; Chinese and esthetic, get out! Get out of here! That’s one of the reasons why I really appreciate and I’m going to pick up on what you said right from the beginning: to appreciate what AAARI does and AAHEC does. I have been involved since the beginning.
It’s especially also because I know what Chinese students are going through and Asian students are going through at CUNY right now, which is deplorable, and what Asian faculty members have gone through in CUNY recently because my wife is one and she’s… the backsliding at CUNY when it comes to Asian and Asian American issues. I think it’s great to have AAARI because it keeps them honest, which is Tom Tam always did when he was a board member, and Wellington Chen… Tom is not here, so this is not [inaudible]. This is not to praise the people that gave me the grant, this is to thank. Thank goodness for AAARI because nobody else would step up to the plate to fund this impractical thing that I’m about to do.
I’m going to talk to you about virtuoso. Virtuosity in music, you’d probably conjure an image immediately of a name like [Pagonini, Litz] You and I were talking in lunch about Midori and Yo-Yo Ma. I’m going to get to Yo-Yo Ma in a second. But in the 19th century, and I should say even back before that in the 18th century, and even in the 16th century when [Pagonini] participated in the arts, who could do this. [Pagonini] could practically do anything with the violin; Litz sitting down at the counter and needed more keys. They literally built keyboards that were largest. And as soon as they built them, he could go up and down that. Because he can do marvelous things, because he can reach the eleventh rather than the [octave] with his hands, he created a different type of music, for instance, track number 5, which is going to be the famous [inaudible] waltz played by the violin. [music plays in background]
The point of the beginning of this is that a virtuoso can create new art by breaking rules and being able to do things at the extremes of technique that nobody else can do, such as that. If you’ve ever watched violinists do it. It’s sort of the “ooh’s” and “ahh’s” effects in the concert hall. Another type of virtuoso is more familiar perhaps to some of the people in the audience especially on an Asian basis. One of the points that I’m doing with the grants and the funding that I received is to talk about what it means to be a virtuoso in China. Track 13, good. It’s great having an assistant.
I recognize, for instance, a Litz or a [Pagonini]: Western, big ego, big dramatic presence and that kind of romantic individualist is very, very different from say, the marvel of a Chinese intellectual, or an Asian intellectual, very modest, all these stereotypes. There is also a great tradition of the virtuoso in Chinese music. This is the er hu. If you’re not familiar with this instrument, it’s fiendishly difficult to play. It’s my secret theory: the reason why there are so many great string players of Asian descent at Juliard is because of the er hu. If you can play an er hu you can play any string instrument. It’s two strings, and its right out there. If you listen to this, you can hear the hoarse ding, you can hear the rapid passages. It’s a marvelous instrument. To me, it’s just in many ways the equivalent of that wonderful [Pagonini] moment was in 19th century music.
So here I am, I want to talk about virtuoso and how a virtuoso, not just forms but makes new art. What is a virtuoso in art? Well here’s a virtuoso in art, Picaso. Fast with a pencil, fast with a brush, able to do almost anything. [Showing slide] Well it’s another virtuoso in art, well there’s another Picaso actually, a very beautiful one. I’m able to conjure that picture just in the ways that no other art can do it. Well it’s another virtuoso artist in [De Cunine]. Sorry that it is upside down. Don’t worry that it’s upside down [De Cunine] did paint them upside down and that was pretty exciting too. [De Cunine] had the ability to do for instance, brush strokes that had so many colors in them, that other artists such as Jackson Pollack, or [inaudible] said, “I wish I could do what [De Cunine] could do.”
Or the medieval tapestry weavers. This one I like because it’s anonymous; they were anonymous virtuosi of a craft. But what I’m getting toward is, this is [Gaphard -- ] who could paint almost photorealistic paintings. Now for virtuosity that has to do with the physical performance almost like a musical performance as you probably know, Jackson Pollack would put the canvas on the floor and almost dance along it. And Pollack was the envy of the other painters because he had this sort of wrist action which to me is just exactly like, say somebody that plays the violin really, really well.
I promise to you I will get to the point I am here to talk about, something we always love, which is calligraphy. In fact, to the Pollacks, the [Kleins] and the [De Cunines] the masters of the brush were in many ways Chinese calligraphers. To give you just a few beautiful slides to look at and end with the calligrapher I loved the most, the famous [Ni Pu]. Way back in 1986 when I first went to China, I spent what had to be the most exciting afternoon I’ve ever spent in any museum in Xi’an. A wonderful museum with the stones and the calligraphic inscription.
What I like to do though is to explore calligraphy from my limited perspective, from the perspective of what does a virtuoso do and how did Chinese intellectuals especially of his era end up doing something that was in a way so wild and extreme and sometimes extravagant. I went to grad school in the 80s, so all the professors were virtuosi in a sense that we all quoted [Dari Doll], who was a great virtuoso in the literary or the philosophical sense. You never knew what the heck he was saying that it sounded great. One of the aspects of calligraphy by the way that [Dari Doll] would love, I think, is the so-called disappearing text in calligraphy. Doesn’t really matter what he is writing or to whomever it is he was addressing, it was the way in which he wrote it. The fact that he used, as Pollack used, as Leonardo de Vinci used with his pencil, technique to mediate this knowledge.
The other side of this that I rather love and I don’t have a slide of this work. In addition to [Ni Pu], I find fascinating and who was a bit of a rascal, the other artist, the other calligrapher I’m very, very interested in pursuing using the money that AAARI has given me is a man named [Zhang Ga Chan]. Fabulous forger, amazing calligrapher, a rascal. The interesting about [Zhang Ga Chan] to me is that all those stereotypes I was talking about of the marvelous retiring intellectual who doesn’t break the rules, [Zhang Ga Chan] broke the rules flagrantly. He was just like Litz and [Pagonini] were also in their time. Litz and [Pagonini], the rumor was they signed a contract with the devil. I brought with me all the rest of what I’d like to write about. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun with this. It won’t be anything near as practical as anything else we’ve heard today.
You’ve talked to me about Yo-Yo Ma and I know Yo-Yo Ma a little bit. I know a man by the name of Tan Dun who writes for Yo-Yo Ma, who by the way I think is a virtuoso as well. Just a quick comment on Yo-Yo Ma, though he is a star, and though he is a technical master, even in Chinese you can use the phrase “da shi” of the cello. One of the very interesting things about Ma is that he doesn’t sort of boom his sound out the way a [Pagonini] or even a Midori would. He is the virtuoso without being a virtuoso.
For instance when he did a [Baroch] album, he did a very beautiful [Baroch] involving [inaudible] with the man named [Tom Kaufman], and [Kaufman] who was the conductor, who said it was amazing how Ma [inaudible] …team player rather than the individualist. I found it very interesting when he did that recording, for instance, that instead of using the violin he uses for a huge hall like Avery Fisher Hall, he used a [Baroch] instrument with gut strings and a smaller sound. So he didn’t make the big virtuoso sound. Ma is a very interesting example of an Asian virtuoso who is against, in a way, the virtuoso tradition.
So that sounds completely frivolous compared to all the rest. If you have any suggestions, I am absolutely open for questions.
Joyce Gelb:
I think you’re being modest when you’re saying it isn’t practical, because I think it will be very, very interesting. But I want to answer the thinking that somebody like [inaudible] or [inaudible], or even [inaudible] or [inaudible], so I think we should be a little bit careful about maybe generalizing from A or B to C. That’s my comments, having recently seen them.
Audience Member:
In your research, I suggest putting a small piece of Chinese opera.
Charles Riley II:
Certainly Chinese opera as with western opera, the start, that moment when the [inaudible] begins. Have you ever watched the moment when the [inaudible] begins or when the credenza begins and the concerto, and the orchestra are just sitting there, sometimes they look very jealous and mad. And of course that’s when the virtuoso will take to the stage.
Audience Member:
I am very happy that you bring this up. I just came form a very good conference, very well founded, richly run, the Committee of 100, composed of very rich, very well-connected Chinese Americans. They practically covered everything of Chinese life, from Chinese culture, economy, sociology, but they left out music. Maybe you should be the spokesperson for Chinese music in America.
Audience:
[inaudible] …sport…Yao Ming…
Charles Riley II:
If I can just tell one anecdote. When I was a little kid, I played team sports. I played hockey, and I played soccer. And when we were little soccer players on Long Island, we were taken one night to watch Santos of Brazil came to play against a local team, and of course, Pele, which was a great Brazilian player. Halfway through the game, at half time, only Pele came out onto the field with a ball and brought it up and started to juggle like this. And the rest of the Santos team was watching like that.
I thought to myself, you know, it’s amazing that soccer is a team sport, and every once in awhile one brilliant player, Yao Ming in this case, can just revolutionize the sport. In my game of course it was Wayne Gretzky. But it was amazing because it was a virtuoso thing. And then 100 times up in the air, puts the ball down, walks away and his own teammates went like that (applauding).
Ngee Pong Chang:
And with that, I declare this workshop successful.
Copyright © Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), 2002. All rights reserved. No part of this transcript may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without explicit permission of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute.
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