Chinatown in the 21st Century – Youth and Education: Dawn of a New Chinatown

Thomas Tam: On the topic of youth and education, what are the most important issues that we should be talking about? Maybe I should ask principal Woo to talk about the high achievements of students in your school. Would you like to give us some comments about why that is so?

Lily Woo: Family values play a big part. Many parents want a better life for their children, so they place a higher value on education, and work closely with the school whenever they can.

As far as achievement is concerned, we have to work literally 4 times as hard as schools that don’t have second language learners. I am lucky to have a number of teachers in my school who can write and at least speak Chinese. They can help out in the translation for parents and colleagues. We are losing a little bit of ground in terms of communication to parents, but I think we have to stay focused in looking at the needs. Their needs are constantly changing. The families are not there for the children because they are so busy trying to make ends meet, and put food on the table. The children are left in after school programs, and weekend tutorial programs. They really don’t know how to support the children academically. They’ll make sure the kids are clean and fed, but they can’t support them academically. In school, we try to provide them with as many experiences as possible. It doesn’t only focus on academics, it includes the entire childhood experience. We’re talking about music, dance, art, and plays; all kinds of things that make the child a whole.

Thomas Tam: Despite the difficulties that you have, and the livelihood issues, the Chinese students have done very well indeed. The Coalition of Asian American Children and Families, nevertheless, says that is actually a myth of the model minority, that there are some other issues involved. Do you want to talk about that, Vanessa?

Vanessa Leung: The model minority myth persevered when media described Chinese and Asian American students as successful and well behaved children. What transpires is that those students who are struggling and who need extra support are overlooked. The overall development of the child includes informal education that they receive, and that could be in terms of how they develop their sense of ethnic identity. A school can play a huge role in whether or not a child values his/her heritage, simply by whether or not they talk about Asians in America, and the impact that Asians have on American society.

Harassment has always been an issue for Asian American students. They’ve always been targeted because they aren’t seen as individuals. They’re seen as a member of this group that people don’t understand. Whether it is self-segregation or segregation by class schedules. Many Chinese students lack interaction with other ethnic groups, individuals with different backgrounds. What happens is that Chinese students will stick to themselves and miss an opportunity to appreciate other cultures. There are some schools which do a great job at that, and other schools are so worried about the academics and the performance rates, that the whole development of a child is neglected.

Thomas Tam: We have done research among college students, and found that social interaction is important in the development of Asian American students. I want to ask Hong Shing, what his agency is doing in terms of such development.

Hong Shing Lee: From the YMCA perspective, we look at the development of a full person, instead of one area over the other. The YMCA logo mentions the development of spirit, mind, and body. Spirit is the person’s character; mind is the intellectual knowledge; and body is his physical well-being. At the Chinatown YMCA, in addition to spirit, mind and body, socialization, culture and arts are also emphasized.

We want to address the self-segregation issue of Chinese youth. We bring them together with other ethnic groups, so they get a chance to interact and develop socially with each other. This prevents racial misunderstanding; enhances harmony and tolerance among ethnic groups. What we’ve been trying to do is develop youth that recognize their roots in the community as we prepare them to enter the social mainstream. We bring them to Albany for a statewide conference; we bring them to camps; we even bring them across the globe through our international exchange programs, so they have a wide exposure and understand different cultures.

Thomas Tam: It is very exciting to hear what you talked about. I want to go further, and I would like to address this question to Mr. Edward Ma. As we develop the Asian students, their identity formation is an important issue. What is your comment to the kind of programs for student development?

Edward Ma: This is very important; it’s an invisible but everyday routine. My niece is 18 year old. She’s a student at Bronx Science High School. One day, I talked with her about what’s going on at Bronx science high. I asked if there are any Asian clubs. She said no. Chinese get together with Chinese, Korean get together with Korean, Indian get together with Indian. I said, why don’t you talk with a counselor to start an Asian club? She said nobody’s interested.

There are many problems, but I am happy that at least there are some American professionals addressing the issue.

Thomas Tam: We have talked about issues of self-segregation for Chinese students. It has been reported that Asian students are often the target of teasing in school. How serious a problem is that and what can be done about that?

Lily Woo: It’s a matter of perspective. Any minority group immersed in a majority is going to feel some sort of intimidation. If you have someone who’s unfamiliar to that majority, they’re going to make assumptions based on the behavior of a few. I remember growing up as a child in Chinatown, where we had a busload of tourists walking by, and they made the assumption that no child in Chinatown spoke English. They would walk by us, talk about us, and make fun of us. It is not starting now. It’s been a long standing problem.

In my school, some child would have a problem with another child. When I say, “so who did it to you?” They would say, “the boy with the red shirt,” or the “kid in the corner”. When I bring the kid in, I can see the child is clear as day different from him. The children are really blind to color. They are very fair to each other in terms of ethnicity. It is the adults that put the idea into their children. I think the most important thing is cultural awareness. We have to get the word out that everybody’s the same. Often times what I do when we have situations of prejudice, I would get all the children together, and I get different colored eggs, white eggs, brown eggs, speckled eggs, and we talk about the eggs and what they look like on the outside. Then we break them open, and we see from the inside that all the eggs are the same. For the children, they understand that. It’s harder to do with adults.

Thomas Tam: You said that better cultural awareness would alleviate racial animosity. Would it work amongst high school students? We have heard reports about Asian high school students being beaten up. It’s further down the road in terms of aggressive behavior.

Hong Shing Lee: It is not just awareness. It’s through different projects, working together on the same photography project, or community service project, or playing a basketball game. What we do is during basketball tournaments, we register teams not by groups, but by names as individuals, and we assign the teams. They may come with 10 friends, but they may spread out into different teams. They have to learn to work with their new teammates. We try to break them up, so that they work with different teammates. If a Chinese kid has a Hispanic or black, or Caucasian kid working as a teammate, even though they may not understand the social or cultural exchange, by working together they understand that this is a good person, someone he can work with. This kind of interaction is equally important, if not more important than understanding the other’s culture, because culture takes a long time to understand.

Thomas Tam: Working together is a more practical way.

Hong Shing Lee: It will break the barrier more quickly than understanding. It could take a lifetime to understand a culture.

Vanessa Leung: When they interact with each other, they see each other as individuals, not a member of this group, or that group. At Seward Park High School, they have an organization called Council for Unity that actually brings together youths to discuss issues of harassment. Some students from that school were approaching outside agencies saying that they were feeling intimidated in that school. When one of the students on the council was approached, he said, “I don’t really see it, I don’t see any real issue,” and he himself was Chinese American. The other students were Chinese American as well, but they were recent immigrants, and they were not included in that council. Later on, the council approached them, brought them into the fold and tried to understand what their issues were. It became definitely more beneficial to the whole student population.

Lily Woo: I speak from the perspective of the elementary school. With the elementary school, it needs a more personal touch to get children to interact with others. We have made an effort to build up that self-esteem. Sometimes the children carry themselves in such a way that they set themselves up as a target. For example, there are ways of asking for things, but if he is not familiar with the language, a well-intentioned boy can come across as very arrogant. When he asks somebody to sit somewhere, he says: “I’m asking you to sit down”, instead of saying, “please would you mind taking a seat” because he does not have that mastery of language. The person on the receiving end may think, “what’s wrong with this guy talking to me like that? He is not respecting me.” And so, the misunderstanding happens in that way. I think more effort need to be put in helping kids understand how to deal with each other, how to speak, how to present themselves, and not set themselves up to be targets. Many of the Chinatown schools have worked very hard in handing Chinese students to the next level, to the middle schools, and high schools, in a way that they’re more developed, more American, Asian American, and acculturated in this society.

The problem comes when older children come in, and there is no mechanism to support that change over. Schools are strapped. Almost all the resources are put into the academic support so that they can finish high school with a diploma. The money has to come from somewhere, so the guidance counselors, the people with emotional support, work less with the kids.

Thomas Tam: In terms of communication enhancement, techniques and skills for students, who is able to take up that role?

Edward Ma: You talked about perspective from the schools. Let me state my qualifications. I worked 27 years in Coney Island Hospital, with the community in Sheepshead Bay. The Chinese work hard to get money. They buy house, and move to Sheepshead Bay. The problem with Chinese when they moved there was that they didn’t care about their grass. All their neighbors hated that. The Chinese moved there and didn’t contribute. They only complained about discrimination. They didn’t join the PTA meetings. The solution that I talk about is parent education; help the parents to understand the school system and to lobby.

Thomas Tam: Basically, you’re saying that Chinese families should work with their neighbors more, and be part of the community. In that aspect, perhaps the media plays an incredible role in terms of educating the community. A couple of days ago I read an article about a Chinese woman who left her child in the car and was arrested by the police. Normally, something like this doesn’t come up as news, but it did. By spreading the news that this kind of behavior, locking your kid in a car, is not acceptable, that is community education. That kind of education is much better than some PTA announcement. That’s really where the media plays an extremely important role in terms of education.

Hong Shing Lee: I have to agree on that. As immigrant parents when they come to this country, everything is totally foreign to them. They rely on the local ethnic media for a lot of information. In the immigrant community, word of mouth is one way to spread information. If you work in the restaurant, or in the garment factory, the radio is on all the time. That is a powerful delivery medium. That is more so than your network TV or your major newspaper. I agree that the media plays an important role educating the immigrant community.

Vanessa Leung: One of the important things is to educate immigrant parents to get involve in their child’s school. A lot of immigrants coming from China leave the responsibility of educating their children to the teacher and the principal. The newspapers can do a series on how parents can monitor their children’s homework. For example, make sure that they get a letter from the school and answer it. Simple things like that would help a lot of parents to share in the school’s responsibility to educate their children.

Hong Shing Lee: We all say that immigrant parents work long hours and don’t have time to participate, but I think the mentality “that the school knows best, so lets leave it to them” is a more prevailing attitude.

The Center for Disease Control had issued a report about adolescent obesity. That’s the epidemic for the entire country. They identified Asian American adolescents as a high risk group, not because of the eating habits, but because of their inactive lifestyles. Parents should encourage their kids to do a lot of recreational, social, and cultural activities in addition to academics, because academics does not make a person complete.

Lily Woo: I totally agree, I believe in parent education. By the way, every school that is a title I school is required to set aside a certain percentage, at least 1% of their budget for parent involvement. That’s mandatory. How they organize it and what they do is left up to the schools. When I have parent meetings, I have anywhere from 100 to 200 people show up, not because of me, but because of how we do outreach. We have the consistent message that the parents have to work as part of the school to ensure their children’s success. Since I’ve been in the school, I’ve started the parent ESL program. Every year, I look for something to provide education for the parents, not just survival English, but within the ESL classes, talk about how they can communicate with the teachers and the kind of questions to ask. We teach them to read their young children’s books, rather than the adult ESL books, so that they can sit down and read with their children and have that quality time, that interaction. Being physically there does not make you a parent; you need to have some kind of communication with the children. That’s why children are what they are. Many children, by the time they are ready to enter middle school, can’t communicate with their parents, because they can’t speak Chinese and the parents can’t speak English. They need an interpreter between the two. It’s really a sad commentary. Parents need to understand that in order for their children to respect them, they’ve got to make an investment of 15 minutes or half hour a day for quality time with their children. I can’t tell you how many parents come to me, “could you tell him to take a bath at a certain time?” “could you tell him that’s he’s got to go to bed at 9 o’clock?” They ask me how come he listens to me and not to them. I say because I take time out no matter how busy my paperwork is. I take time out to comfort him. I take time out to spend some time with him, so he has that connection with an adult that he feels he can share his feelings and worries. Because he has that connection, he’s ready to listen to my advice.

The media have been wonderful in getting the message out. It is almost like subliminal message in the factories when they’re sewing, or in the kitchen when they are cooking, when all of this is repeated hourly, until it sinks in. We do have parents saying: “I need help. Can you get someone to teach me how to be a better mother?” We have built in social workers in the school, and guidance counselors to help parents do that. We also hold parent workshops for that purpose.

Edward Ma: My clinical experiences concur perfectly with your findings. I always advise parents to engage in communication with children. The best time is after school, because the parents have been separated from the children and they miss each other. After school, let the child speak about what is going on in the school, so the mother can learn about the school’s environment. This is also the time when the child learns to verbalize and express his feelings. Doing homework is a must. Parents must have the discipline to set limits. When parents tell story at bedtime, they fulfill their role as good mommy and good daddy. At the same time, the child also feels comforted and reassured, and he goes to sleep soundly. This is mentally very healthy. The quality family time for parent and child is the foundation of a happy family. It is not just making money. I know some families where nobody wants to come home, because of the problems.

Dawn An: I work as a tutor at Queens College. I had a younger Chinese woman who’s a graduating senior, and she really needed help. I don’t know why she got passed along; her writing skills were very poor. How do you address problems with reading or writing before they get to that stage? Maybe she’s a new immigrant. She doesn’t know how to write a thesis. We need thesis workshops. We need to help students with their writing skills. If she graduates from Queens College with that kind of skills, she can’t communicate with mainstream society.

Lily Woo: What you said is not just for Asians, it’s across the board. This is why it’s important that as soon as they come in, regardless of what level they are, there has got to be a mechanism to help them along. It is important to have schools that can give that support system, and not pass them along. This whole push about keeping 4th graders behind, because that was the Gate’s program, now it’s keeping the 3rd graders behind. I think 3rd grade’s too late! If they need to be held back in first grade, let’s hold them back in first grade. If they need to be held back in second grade, let’s hold them back in second grade. Why wait until a testing year?

Betty Lee Sung: This panel is one of the best we’ve had. I’m glad its being webcasted, so that other people will tune in and watch the program. I hope the radio would talk about some of the issues so the parents can listen while they’re working and learn from that. I want to ask a question of Lily, you were brought up in this country. I was brought up in this country. Did your parents help you with your homework? Because my parents weren’t qualified….

Lily Woo: My parents weren’t qualified, but they were there for me. My mother owned a dry cleaner shop on Bayard Street. Everyday after school I would sit next to her, and she would ask questions: “what did you learn today? what did you do? what did your teachers say?” You can’t just leave them alone and find out three weeks later when the teachers called you to say that he hasn’t handed in any homework at all. When I call the parents in, they say: “well, I asked if he did his homework” and I say, did you ask to see it? Show me part one, then show me part two, then show me part three, and sign after each one, because they’re very slick, they’ll show you the same homework over and over again.

Hong Shing Lee: What we try to do at the Chinatown YMCA is this experimentation. We encourage some parents to spend time with kids, even though they are not qualified to help their children with homework. What we told the parents is this: “ask your children to teach you. If you can understand what they teach you, then you can understand what the homework is all about.” They can also use that as social interaction time, as Lily has said earlier. We did an informal survey of our existing group of parents, “do you have any social interaction with your children?” “Yes, that’s my TV time.” Watching TV is not interaction, so we say, “If you really care about your children’s homework, ask them to teach you, to show you how to do their homework, and maybe then, you can pick up something too.” It’s an experiment. It may not be feasible, but with some parents we hope it proves to be helpful.

Kat Lee: I grew up in Chinatown and I went to PS 65. When I was there it was the early 60’s, when there was the beginning of gangster activities. Many of my classmates became gangsters. Quite a few of them died before finishing high school. Some went to jail, and two even killed someone. That was more than 40 years ago. Are similar occurrences happening around PS 130 now?

Lily Woo: I can guarantee you it does not happen in my school. We had a book fair this week, and one of the little boys decided he wanted to shoplift and put something in his jacket. I called his mother, and said, “You need to come see me, your child stole something from the book fair. “Well, did he return it?” I said, “we took it back.” “Well, I’m busy now. I can’t come to see you.” “Well, when can you come see me?” “After CPC, I can pick him up at 6 o’clock” I waited for her at 6 o’clock yesterday.

Part of it is really what each school principal does to change the expectant behavior. We have a very close relationship with the 5th precinct. I’ve gone as far as calling them in. I talk it over with the parents, sometimes the kids don’t listen to the parents. The parents say, “I don’t know what to do with him.” I say, “Well, we can fix this, if you will allow me.” So we call the 5th precinct in. The community youth officers are apprised of the situation, and they do a scare tough, scare straight segment with these kids. Then the word is out that you can’t get away with it. Again, it’s very different from before. We have community officers that work with the middle schools, especially at dismissal time. The problem is not the community that’s inside the school. It’s the external environment. We teach our children from PS 130: “When you see trouble, you go the other way. If you become involved with them, if someone steals something and you’re holding it, you’ll go to jail too.” We teach them the values at the elementary school. The middle school principal keeps that up by enlisting the external help of police officers. If the gang sees police officers they’re not going to recruit. Gangs have reduced quite a bit, but outside of school hours, we don’t have control over children who are left at home unsupervised, so the gang situation can precipitate outside of school. Is there a gang problem? Sure, there are gangs in Stuyvesant and in every good school. We have smart gangsters too! The children join gangs because they want a sense of belonging. If they don’t have a place to go where somebody values them as people, they’re going to turn to external influences such as the gangs. The YMCA is a wonderful organization; the drum corp at the Chinese school is a wonderful organization. These offer external activities where they have supervised social interaction, where in the process of having fun, they’re learning values that will keep them straight. I grew up in the same era as you. In fact, my brother had gotten jumped a number of times when he was going home. He ended going to a school in Chicago so that he would not be involved. Part of it is that they force their values on you, but you have to make that conscious choice: “I want to be a part of them” or “I don’t want to be a part of them.”

Hong Shing Lee: It’s funny that you mentioned IS 131, because this is where Chinatown YMCA is located. We operate from 3 o’clock to 9 o’clock at night. Everyday during dismissal, community police officers are there. They are in the building, at the front entrance, or at the security desk. It’s not a scheduled appearance. They come at random times. We worked together with the school staff, and supplement each other’s effort to make the student’s life, and after school life a safe one. Lily had said earlier, joining gang is about having a strong identity, a feeling of belonging, and to accomplish something. We try to substitute that with our group activities. We teach dance classes, and all sorts of programs, so kids feel that they are in control of themselves. They can feel that they have accomplished something.

Identity and accomplishment are something that we can offer the kids as an alternative. We hope we can get them before they get involve in gangs.

Vanessa Leung: It is important that community organization and schools work collaboratively. It is dependent on the school culture, and it’s very individual. Chinatown is a unique community, because there are a lot of community agencies that schools can tap into. In the outer boroughs, those organizations are more spread out, which makes it a lot more difficult for the schools to tap into, but it goes to show what collaboration can do in the development of the child.

Edward Ma: I just want to say one thing: alternative education is very important. I benefited myself by joining summer camp, in Taiwan; I grew up very quickly with better knowledge. Summer camp is very important. During the school year, you have to go to school, but in summer time, going to camp is to have fun. Chinese education did not focus on spontaneity, independence, and social skill learning. Summer camp offers an opportunity to interact with other adults, other than parents and teachers, to build trust of society.

Thomas Tam: We’ve covered a lot of grounds. The focus was on community collaborative efforts with the schools, and parental education within Chinatown. On the outer boroughs where fewer Chinese live, it might be different in terms of their needs. It may be useful to educate teachers and administrators about the cultural background, and special needs of Asian students. Probably we don’t need that in Chinatown. In some place like Sunset Park, where the Chinese is still a minority, maybe there’s a need for that.

Hong Shing Lee: I definitely agree. I was hoping this workshop would become sensitivity training for many non-Chinese educators, whether in the CUNY system, in high school, or in elementary school. If we could expand to include non-Chinese educators, that would be very helpful.

Lily Woo: I totally agree. If a workshop can be set up where you know where the pockets of population are, maybe a mailing list of all the school principals of those areas, or the community agencies that service that area, we can then send out an invitation to say, here’s a workshop on cultural sensitivity. Again, it really depends on the children you serve, and whether or not it is recognized as a problem. You might put this together as cultural sensitivity across the board, because if you are too focused on one ethnic group, others might not want to do this. If you draw a group of people, and then as one of the focal point, use the Chinese population as a springboard, take for instance the situation at Lafayette High School. You now have a broader base audience, and you can start some thought process in their heads. Within our own Chinatown community, we’re getting an influx of children who have never gone to school before, who don’t speak a dialect that we have translators for. The Fujianese dialect is certainly a dialect that we’re having difficulty getting someone to translate for us orally when you want to have a conference. The new kids we’re getting don’t seem to have the same kind of values that the old time Chinese had. They’re not coming in as quiet kids. They’re coming in very rambunctious. Parents are demanding their rights, expecting everything will be done for them. We have to learn to deal with it. We aren’t clearing the forest by any stretch of the imagination. We need to constantly look at what our services are, and whether they still fit the population they serve. You can’t have one formula of teaching and expect it to stay the same year after year. You need to look at who’s coming in, and what are the questions coming out of the classrooms, from the teachers and from the people who interact with these children. We’re having a growing number of children with attention problems. The parents are saying, “oh, he’s still young; he’ll grow out of it.” No, in some cases they’re never going to grow out of it. They need medical attention. We need to have children counseled. We need a behavioral modification plan for these children to control their impulsive behavior, or to focus more. In some cases, it might mean medication; we don’t advocate medication, but in some cases medication is the only way to go; and you have to get a medical evaluation to determine if that’s what you need. We are working with Charles Wang health center to identify kids with ADD or ADHD, and to inform parents about what can be done.

Basically, you need to look at what you’re working with. If we can help outer borough Chinese communities do the same thing we have started to do, we’ll gladly share the information we have.

Thomas Tam: If we were to hold such a sensitivity training workshop, what’s the best time to hold it so that practitioners, teachers, and administrators, would be most accessible?

Lily Woo: Not at the end of the school year like today. Probably after the school year started in October, when everything has settled, but early enough so that they can go back and start planning for things to happen.

Thomas Tam: But on a Friday afternoon, after 5, what is a good time for such a…

Hong Shing Lee: If our target audience is public school teachers, there are school training days for them. Can we talk to DOE?

Lily Woo: If you offer these kinds of workshops that are approved by them, they’ll broadcast it, and they’ll be willing to send their teachers most certainly as professional development. If you have people who are qualified as second language instructors, all classroom teachers need 7 hours of ESL training when they are working with ESL students. It certainly can work into that new teacher/credit arrangement.

Vanessa Leung: It is important to hook up with the DOE, because it would force teachers to think about the issues, especially for those who really need it, and who haven’t thought about it at all.

Edward Ma: Tom, I think that you and Lily should be working together. She’s now in charge of bilingual; perhaps through her you can get more resources from DOE. This is an important bridge between community and DOE.

Thomas Tam: I want to thank all the panelists for joining us today at the beginning of a long weekend. Please give them a big hand.

Transcription by Antony Wong