Hufflepuff pride, son.
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
Floyd Mayweather is not going all Lin.
The outspoken boxer who once told rival Manny Pacquiao, a Filipino, to “make some sushi rolls and cook some rice” has retained the title of heavyweight champion of insensitivity by claiming New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin is getting national attention for his race rather than his game.
“Jeremy Lin is a good player,” Mayweather tweeted Monday, “but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.”
Black players outscore Kobe Bryant every night? Black players who went undrafted rack up at least 20 points and seven assists in each of their first four career starts? Black players go from D-League DNPs to leading the Knicks to five straight wins?
Yes, Lin being Asian is a big part of the story. He’s the first American-born player of Taiwanese or Chinese descent to play in the NBA. That’s different, and therefore newsworthy. There would probably also be a lot of hype if, say, a black golfer came out of Stanford and started winning golf majors. Or if, just hypothetically, two black sisters from Compton dominated the world of tennis.
But “Money” probably never thought of that.
Mayweather’s comments are ignorant, but what’s also disturbing is that there really aren’t too many Asian voices to shout bigotry down. Jason Whitlock should have been fired for his awful joke about Lin’s anatomy, but don’t look for that to happen. What Floyd said isn’t nearly as bad, but clearly the half-baked theories that demean Asian-Americans in this country are not as curtailed or chided as they should be. That’s in part because there haven’t been too many Asian voices in sports media. There haven’t been too many respected Asian coaches in the major sports. And let’s face it, there haven’t been too many outspoken Asian superstars anywhere in American pop culture. Pacquiao, ironically, is one of the most celebrated Asian athletes of our time.
Maybe at some point he’ll have a chance to reply to Floyd with his fists.
I’ve had a very emotional week, but every night this week, I’ve come home, sat down, turned on YouTube, and watched Jeremy Lin play basketball.I’m not a basketball fan. I was team captain of a coed team in middle school gym class, but that’s about it. I have, however; tracked J-Lin’s career for a long time now, on AngryAsianMan.com. I first heard about him because during a Harvard game, students from the other school started yelling “chink” at him. They chanted things like “go back to China” at him.
Today, he is the first Taiwanese-American to play for the NBA. Kicked to the curb by three teams before being picked up by the New York Knicks, the system doubted he could play and put him on the court as a last resort.
After his four straight wins and asskicking to the Lakers, people no longer want him to go back to China. In just a few days, he has managed to overshadow victimized nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee to be the most famous Taiwanese-American in the United States of America. Not everyone knows the names of the Taiwanese-American founders of YouTube, Yahoo!, or Zappos. Now they know Lin.
My boyfriend, who is not Taiwanese-American, but white American, doesn’t know why I am excited about this. He isn’t at all interested in basketball. It isn’t about basketball for me.
Sometimes I wonder if I would be happier dating a woman of color, if I didn’t have to navigate internalized racism or sexism or power imbalances. My boyfriend is a descendant of the Pilgrims of the Mayflower and the Revolutionary War. The brunt of the racism he experiences are circumstances such as when I doubt his ability to understand the part of me that is Taiwanese. The brunt of racialized sexism that he faces is scorn for the privilege he has as a white male. He is an ally, he has empathy, he tries. I try, too—but I couldn’t share my excitement about JLin with him, and it reminded me of how different we are.
I said I wished I could be at home sharing this trivial basketball victory with my father. My boyfriend asked me why I said “home” when speaking about my slightly estranged family. Wasn’t my home with him? This home, where the language of my family of origin has slowly eroded…
My father, who is older, gradually becoming shorter than me, who can’t stand to be in America for more than a few months at a time anymore. He is fragile. He couldn’t handle the racism here, being taunted for his broken English, his competency being tested and taunted, the eye rolls he got when he tried to speak American.
There is a novel about this now, you know. It is called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. It is written by a Taiwanese-American named Charles Yu. In the book, the main character, also a Taiwanese-American named Charles Yu, watches his Taiwanese immigrant father struggle, broken English, trapped in the past, recursive loops. The book has been made into a play, which has been optioned for a movie. The play stars a white actor. I think I may have to exhaust myself again, fighting against yet another movie.
My father used to love playing basketball. I wish Jeremy Lin could have barged in 25 years ago, shattering stereotypes. Maybe if he had, the clients I worked with at the public works office yesterday would not have called me and people like me “those Orientals.” This is wishful thinking. I stood there, with a vacant, tolerate smile, suffocating the part of my spirit that wanted to scream back.
To me, so much about being an Asian-American woman of color, particularly one of Taiwanese extraction, is about sharpening my dragon lady claws and clawing back. This week, I had to fight to cut off a white female professor in my critical race theory class who tried to play an expert on Asian-American demography. When I tried to explain, the professor cut me off by snapping, “No, no it’s not.” As if she knew better. I had to counter a narrative proposed by a white female student who spoke about whitening creams and eyelid surgery, Asians abroad wanting to be white, glorifying whiteness, make it all about that, all about white people, never looking at other cultural contexts, write the story for us.
I’ve been thinking lot lately about what it means to be Taiwanese-American.Do I even know what I am talking about, since it has been fifteen years since I have even stepped foot on the island?
Yesterday I met some classmates who were also of Taiwanese descent. One of them, who is half white, half Taiwanese, said. ”I am Chinese, though don’t let my mom hear that, she would want me to say that I am Taiwanese but I really don’t care.”
This week, I have seen video of people setting themselves on fire in Tibet. Last month, I stayed up until 4am trying to track Taiwanese election returns. ”How can you not care?” I exploded, trying to keep a smile on my face, trying to stay benign. ”How can you not fucking care? If you’re Taiwanese, you are fucking Taiwanese.”
I wish I could have added, “There are billions of people in this world, in China, in Taiwan, in the United States, who would gladly strip that identity from you. They would tear it away from you in a fucking heartbeat! Don’t just give it away like that.”
I started telling my classmates about my grandparents, telling me about the way they suffered and the people who died and how fiercely they care about being Taiwanese and being allowed to say things that are considered seditious. (Is speaking out against imperialism “seditious” when you are the ones threatened?)“Are you sure that really happened…that the communists did that?” my classmate asked, when I told them about how much my grandparents wanted to tell me about their past. ”No, no, my grandparents said the nationalists did that, during the White Terror,” I said. That drew blank looks.Speaking to this classmate, who is only half Taiwanese, and has never been to Taiwan, was really eye opening. It confronted me with the reality that my kids, no matter whom I have them with, probably won’t care.
My kids won’t care. They won’t even know.
They won’t know what it is like. Communicating with my grandparents with our shared broken Mandarin. Understanding Taiwanese but unable to respond, to speak with them in the language of their choice. Always standing silent, reverent smile, those guttural syllables loaded on my tongue, tiny outbursts of fake Taiwanese staccato, unable to speak a language people from China have tried to kill off, weighed down by an American accent.
Realizing that my kids will never know Taiwanese at all, that they will be lucky if they even know Taiwanese Mandarin, but that they will be perfectly fluent in English like me. Maybe they will even be “English majors” like me. They will read hundreds of books written by white British and American men. Perhaps How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe will be the first book they ever read written by a Taiwanese-American.
If I stay with my white boyfriend of five years, they will be hapa and grow up in America surrounded in a culture of white supremacy—not the colloquial definition, but the academic one. The one that taught me to hate my dark haired dolls and glorify the blonde ones. Always wishing my skin was lighter, practicing standing in front of the mirror to make my eyes rounder. The culture that has exhausted me with constant questions about where I am “really” from, assumptions about my ability to speak English without an accent, assumptions about my patriotism. The dominant culture that taught me that I am either a submissive doll or a dominant dragon bitch, that I need to have a skinny tinny voice, a cute attitude, a tight sideways vagina, war trophy, otaku trophy, Madonna whore.I wish I had kept a running lifetime tally of all the times white people and Chinese people and American people have told me that I don’t get to identify as Taiwanese.
Without their parents having to do anything, my children will learn from osmosis from their surrounding cultural environment that their white side is better. They will identify with predominantly white television characters, they will learn nothing about Taiwan in school. People will tell them Taiwan isn’t real, just as they told me. Their textbooks will treat Taiwan—the strongest democracy in East Asia—like the United Nations treats Taiwan, like the World Health Organization treats Taiwan, like China treats Taiwan. Maybe even like how China treats Tibet.
Their wealthy white grandparents will be warm and speak English to them, buy them gifts and take them to Disney World. Their middling Taiwanese grandparents will feed them strange food and speak a strange language with their mother, smother them and awkwardly communicate with them through hand gestures and broken English.
I will be their brown mother, the one with the baggage about a tiny island across an ocean, miles and miles away, words in my throat fighting to come out. People will think I am their nanny. I will defer to their own self identification; identity diffusion only breeds dysfunction. But if you are a person of color living in the United States, that gun has already been loaded for you.
Walking up to the Taiwanese-American club on campus and getting blank stares, not finding kinship, buying boba and Vietnamese sandwiches from them. ”We try and keep our club neutral; we don’t take a political stance,” without realizing that being neutral means being subsumed.
I considered myself lucky to find one other Taiwanese-American friend who was willing to sit up late with me on Skype watching the elections, hoping for the first woman democrat to be elected president of Taiwan—not the Republic of China, but Taiwan.
It didn’t happen. I watched as America subtly pushed and pressured and played the election, all while claiming neutrality. Realized that President Obama will never host a special White House dinner for Taiwanese diplomats, that Jeremy Lin will never be seated at a banquet table with Lucy Liu, Michelle Obama, Steven Chen, Jason Wu, Jay Chen. Unlike my Chinese-American, Korean-American, and Indian-American friends this presidential term, I will never peruse leaked seating arrangements or pour White House publicity photos and see people who identify like me smiling back.
It hurts, barely knowing anyone who cares, barely knowing anyone Taiwanese who cares. Am I the only one who feels like this aspect of my identity is being suffocated?This lack of interest in our heritage concerns me too…It’s sad that many Asian-Americans lose their language, their ties to their rich heritage, and their pride in it, especially those who also have white heritage, those who are born into later generations, and those who have hardly ever traveled to their ancestral home. I try not to blame them; it’s hard to maintain a language, remain proud of your background despite (usually) subtle pressures to act/look more “white”, and stay interested in your cultural heritage when your immediate life in the States seems so much more relevant. It’s difficult to maintain one’s pride and identity in one’s cultural heritage, and if you honestly consider yourself just white then that’s fine - not I nor anyone else can tell you what race you can identify with. It’s just sad to me that some people just don’t care.
This is even true of Asians. There is this obsession with white people and Westerners in Asia; they flock around white tourists to practice their English, take creeper pictures of them, and incorporate mostly English but sometimes French or Spanish into their pop songs and T-shirts and stationary, among other things. I just find it really sad that there’s so much disinterest in our own culture, one that has 2000+ years of history behind it.
I’m not sure of my stance on the role of stereotypes or jokes about race…I don’t think stereotypes will ever disappear completely; it’s a part of human nature to categorize, and stereotypes by themselves don’t harm anyone - as long as you don’t assume someone of race x automatically fits the stereotype for said race before you even get to know them. (My mother is guilty of this and it frustrates me to no end.) But every person has their own tolerance level for this kind of thing, and what is and is not okay also depends on your relationship with that person. I generally try to be understanding if people have a genuine question about Asian or Asian-American culture, but last quarter when I was shopping for a gift for my secret santa, I was looking at some candy in Hello Kitty boxes and a boy who looked about middle-school-aged came up and asked me if they came from the same country as me. I was sort of offended and just replied, “No…” (Sorry, the country I come from is The United States of America.) But if this kid were one of my friends who I knew just honestly didn’t know that Hello Kitty is Japanese and that I am Taiwanese-American, I wouldn’t have taken offense to it…So it’s certainly complicated, and I can understand why some people get frustrated by what is and isn’t considered politically correct.
And there are differences between being Taiwanese, American, Taiwanese-American, and Chinese…While Taiwan’s culture and history is very, very close to China’s, it’s not exactly the same…And politically, it’s obviously very different. In Taiwan, a lot of my relatives just see me as American, and in the U.S., a lot of people just see me as Chinese. (And I’m only Taiwanese to the Americans who are actually aware of Taiwan, know it is not Thailand, and actually consider its people different from the Chinese.) It doesn’t really occur to anyone that I can consider myself both Taiwanese and American, and that at the same time I can consider myself racially Han Chinese.
I don’t agree with all of the commentary in the previous post, but the author brings up a lot of good points. I sometimes feel like if I ever have kids - a bizarre concept, but if I do - I want to raise them for at least part of their lives in Taiwan just so they gain that appreciation for their heritage, no matter who I have these kids with/if I adopt them from some other place. While I’m proud Jeremy Lin has come to symbolize progress in Taiwanese-Americans’ presence in mainstream American society, clearly, there is much work to be done before we have a fully color-conscious populace.
#innerramblings@5am
I know not that many people, if any at all will see this as a result of my reblogging. But I think this is just something that needs to get out there. It’s a tough issue I think for anyone, not just Asian-Americans, who are living lives caught in between their culture, heritages, environments and identities.
Sean “Day [9]” Plott, CEO and Funsmith, Day [9] TV, 25
Professional gamer turned broadcaster, now one of the biggest names in the world of e-sports.
Two weeks ago, thousands of computer game enthusiasts descended on a convention center in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, to observe some of these exceptions in action. They were attending the championships of one of the world’s hottest computer games, StarCraft 2. Hands fluttered over keyboards like hummingbirds mid-hover at about fifty computers set up in a dimly lit open hall. Players, many of whom flew in from South Korea to compete, vied to advance through their brackets to the finals. This game is no joke, with the prize money to prove it—$50,000 went to the winner, a 16-year-old Korean who goes by the name Leenock. The agility on display in Providence —as seen in the players’ multitasking, their nonstop decision-making, and the stunning speed of their fingers—has not gone unnoticed by cognitive scientists.
For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us. StarCraft 2, however, might be emerging as the rhesus macaque: its added complexity may confound researchers initially, but the answers could ultimately be more telling.
