Carl Bell was waiting his turn to check in at his hotel. A well-regarded psychiatrist and academic, he was traveling for a television appearance. The TV station had flown him first-class and sent a chauffeur-driven car to pick him up at the airport. But just before he stepped up to speak with the hotel clerk, a white man marched in and cut him off. Bell, who is black, was indignant.
“Do you think I’m waiting for a bus?” He demanded. “I’m standing right here!”
I’m sorry this is all rather upsetting for the New Year, but you gotta hear it to believe it. The scary part is, I can hear those Fox-News-watching Rednecks cheering already.
I went to Saturn, an electronics chain store to buy a power plug adapter for my trip to London. As I was explaining to a staff what I was looking for, someone walked on by behind me and muttered, “just go back to Asia!” When I turned around to thank him for his travel recommendation, all I could see was the back of a middle-aged man disappearing into the crowd. “What a friendly travel agent,” I withdrew my gaze and wanted to be clever. The staff just looked at me, silent and expressionless, waiting for me to finish my unfinished inquiry.
I just finished reading the wonderful American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. The graphic novel opens with Monkey King attending a dinner party in heaven with the gods. Monkey King is a fictional character from the Chinese Classic novel Journey to the West written in the 1590s. The wildly imaginative fantasy story chronicles a monk’s journey to India to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China. The monk has recruited three disciples before his treacherous odyssey: a flamboyant monkey, a deferential fish, and a lascivious pig. These creatures, appearing in human form, all know their Kong Fu and have magic powers, for their task is to protect the monk from all sorts of monsters along the way, who want to eat the monk in order to gain eternal life. In Yang’s book, the story of how the handsome Monkey King, who once defied all the gods, succumbs to the Monk and becomes his faithful apostle is beautifully captured and succinctly adapted into the first of three interweaving tales.
The phrase “fresh off the boat” has been around for years. If you forget for a minute the derogatory way in which it’s used and focus on the words literally, the expression actually conjures up vivid imagery of undaunted immigrants who left everything behind, venturing to a new world looking for a better life at a time when ship was the only transportation between their homeland and the land of milk and honey. It was not easy to get onto that ship. People spent months on the sea. Some never made it. Imagine the joy and relief when they first spotted the land. Picture their excitement and hopefulness when they finally set foot on the solid soil, promising themselves that life would never be the same again. What greater consolation could it bring in a strange land full of strangers than bumping into a familiar face from the old neighborhood that shots out gleefully,”What a coincidence! I just got off the boat myself!”
Jian Li immigrated from China to the United States at the age of four. Now a freshman at Yale, he is taking legal action against Princeton university for rejecting his application last summer, claiming the elite university favors other minority groups and discriminates against Asian-Americans in admissions.
Is Li racializing his individual setback for personal gain or do Asian-Americans indeed face a higher hurdle in the fierce academic competition? A lot of worthy discussions emerged. Things heated up quickly though when on January 17th Daily Princetonian, the campus newspaper, published a parody of Li on their annual joke issue. The op-ed, bylined “Lian Ji”, opens with:
“Hi Princeton! Remember me? I so good at math and science. Perfect 2400 SAT score. Ring bells?