All the love

Been travelling, so I haven't been on top of blogging as much as I would like to be. Went to a family event, and it was great to have a roomfull of people who were happy, and the air was buzzing with warmth and appreciation. A room full of history and words, memories and stories.

It was so good to be wrapped up in that, and to sing along with everyone else.

The other night I had a dream about one of my childhood friends who I fell out of contact with. I dreamt I saw her on the street or at a gallery showing, and she looked just the same, but older, wiser, sharper, and so much more sophisticated. In my dream she had fulfilled her desire to be a model and her cheekbones could cut glass. She was wearing some devastating black dress but she still had the blonde and brown streaks in her bob. I was chasing after her, hoping that she would forgive me for letting our friendship wane. Abby, I cried, Abby! I tried to hold her aquamarine eyes, cold as glaciers. And she did a precise pirouette away, sauntering with the catlike grace that she lacked when we were eight.

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So Norman Hsu has decided to plead guilty and to go serve his time. It is one act by one individual, please don't tar and feather the rest of the community. It's like the case of Cha Vang, aka the "Hmong hunter." The worry in northwestern Wisconsin/Minnesota was that all Hmongs were hunters and would seek retribution against the white man. I remember my friend told me he saw a "Save a deer, shoot a Hmong" bumper sticker and that tensions ran really high in both communities. A lot of that could have been avoided if people did not over-generalize.

It seems like a pretty simple, even elementary lesson, but here is it for the media, loud and clear: Asian American donations are not suspect. Please don't heap all this on our community now - there is a hell of a lot of China-bashing going on nowadays, because of trade, because of monetary exchange rates, because China holds a lot of the US's debt, and because of some faulty products. The economy is on the downturn, and I know that historically, the decision-makers of the US like to find a scrapegoat, a convenient narrative to pin the blame on.

Don't play into the xenophobia - it's too easy. Find a real story, talk to Asian Americans who are affected. Talk to the Chinese over there who are just as afraid of losing their jobs as the steelworker here. Make the human connection. Don't just turn us into the Other, or into some scary statistic.

Or conversely, look at how far we've come since 96 - celebrate our achievements. There's more than one way to tell a story, so don't choose the cheap shot.

Immigration: Strange bedfellows

Secretly, I was counting on the xenophobes across America to bring down this crappy immigration bill. And it worked!

I know it's a bad thing to want that, despite the bill being worse than the current untenable situation. Because the danger of this is that when we do try to pass some more proactive, beneficial legislation after the 08 elections, we will encounter a stronger, more unified anti-immigrant voice. I blame Lou Dobbs for harnessing and riding this sentiment to higher ratings, and amplifying it, but I suspect that the next immigrant rights rally I go to will have more than a few straggling haters (despite the implosion of the press-whoring anti-immigrant group the Minutemen' over inflated egos and embezzlement. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of fellows, really.)

If the Sensenbrenner bill served to unify the immigrant rights movement across America, this year served as a galvanizing force for our opponents. Some of these people may actually support legal immigration versus undocumented immigration, but too often it's a throwaway line, a talking point, to conceal their real desire to drive all us people out as discussed in the NYTimes' article Grassroots Roared and Immigration Plan Collapsed:

“These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.

One of these days, that headline is going to be "Grassroots Roared and Immigration is Finally Just." The NYTimes poll showed that a majority of Americans do support immigration reform and a path to citizenship, so I have faith that one day we will overcome. One day as well, we'll get an article about Asian American clout nationally and politicians hounding us not just for our money but our votes, but meanwhile I'm glad for my Latino companions in the movement.

And the NYTimes confirms my earlier suspicions that Reid was skillfully driving a wedge in the GOP's base.

The office of Mr. Reid, who had emphatically sought to hold Republicans accountable for sabotaging a presidential priority, distributed a document titled “Republicans Brought Down the Immigration Bill.”

It listed news reports and Republican statements that put the onus on the president’s party. “Last night, Republicans torpedoed comprehensive immigration reform,” the statement said.

Republicans fired back, saying Mr. Reid never embraced the bill and had, rather skillfully in some people’s opinion, set up Republicans to take the fall.

Howdya like Dem apples? Yums!