Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
In the last three decades Logic has emerged from the ivory tower and started to address problems of human concern, like how we think, how we vote and how we act. We will give a sampling of some recent insights.
“Passing” as a thematic approach to literary analysis is a hot topic in today’s academia. In the the most general sense, it involves a person who belongs to one race, gender or group attempting to “pass” or be taken for a member of another. It also addresses, among other issues, Western literary and artistic renderings of Eastern motifs. Among the best-known popular examples are David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. In M. Butterfly, the Chinese opera diva Song Liling passes as a female who fascinates the French diplomat Rene Gallimard and successfully deceives him. Song’s success in their affair hinges on the Western mainstream stereotype of an Asian woman as the quintessentially meek, submissive, and loving animated object that the Western (male) society is so attracted to. Given this perception of Asian woman, many professional Asian women ironically play this role in order to live up to that identity so as to fit into a mold cast for them by western thinking. They do pass as such although many are fiercely independent, strong, and tough deep down. After all, these are the characteristics a female need to succeed in a male-dominated society. In this case, to pass is to survive–Asian women must hide that warrior inner soul to advance in a hemisphere where their counterparts are still struggling to combat similar stereotypes about women. However, Asian women are faced with a double whammy, when they struggle to fend off stereotypes from both western male and female.
Chinese modern education refers to one hundred and ten years of education in China from 1840 to 1949. Within this 110 years, under foreign influences and subjecting to the practical needs of China’s social transformation, there was a tremendous change in Chinese education. An orientation to look outward began to take shape in Chinese education, … Read more
More than twenty five people attended the talk by Prof. Sridhar, the largest showing in all of the lecture series. Dr. Sridhar, a distinguished linguist who has received grants from NEH and other foundations, was a captivating speaker. He showed a short video first, followed by a power point presentation about his experience in establishing … Read more
The lecture on Intergenerational Conflicts: Asian Immigrant Families in Transition drew a variety of audience from CUNY, including student representatives. Three Asian newspapers sent reporters to cover the event, as it marked an important step in bridge building between academia and the community. The seriousness of the problem was illustrated by the many newspaper headlines … Read more
Prof. James T. Lap, Director of Computer Applications at New York City Technical College, spoke at AAHEC’s Distinguished Speakers Forum on “Vietnam Today”. He took the audience on a grand tour of Vietnam, from its beautiful coastline to a history of wars of independence, and concluded with the economic opening of the recent visit by … Read more