Asian American / Asian Students: Aspects of Social Interaction – Summary of Conference Workshops by Presiders

Frank Shih: May I ask the presiders of all the past sessions to come up here and have a seat? In the interests of time, I’m going go try to go through this last session quickly.

Hi, I’m Frank Shih. I’m think we’re waiting for a couple of other people to come down. Uh, wait for Marie Ting? We should start, okay, she’ll join us and then come up.

This is what we’re going to do. I’m Frank Shih and you guys, this has really been a great conference, you have been here this early in the morning, Hiroko said that we’re looking for, we’re going to learn about issues, advice, and opportunities, and I hope you were able to gain a lot of those, learn about issues, and advice, and opportunities. But we’re going to try to sum it up, especially the afternoon session, by bringing together the six concurrent workshops, and try to bring some things together. So what I’m going to do here, at this session, is to ask the presiders of the six workshops to give a synopsis, in five minutes, of what went on, and then open it up for some questions, and then I’ll conclude with some remarks, and we hope you will stay for the [recession] afterwards.

Should we start? As long as people are here…let me make sure we grab some chairs so people will be free to come up here. I’m going to introduce them as I go along. Dorothy Kehl was at, was a Professor at Brooklyn College. She is going to tell us about the session, the session in workshop 2-B. There were two topics there, the language and content, two-way acceleration, and the other topic, [inaudible] racial disorder, implications for education. Dorothy?

Dorothy Kehl: Okay, I can only summarize the workshop that I was involved in, “Language and Content: Two-way Acceleration”. Today, in teaching ESL as well as non-ESL students how to create a more meaningful experience for freshmen, incoming freshmen, the keyword is “learning community”. The community that I was in, content is geology, which is a required course at Brooklyn College, and English as a second language. For my students, that’s also required. Right away, the students are motivated. They are taking something that they are required for graduation and they are getting help. When they know that they get help, that’s already a very comforting feeling. So, how do we function in the learning community? We collaborate in terms of content material as well as language skill. To give you an example, in geology, there is a topic called rocks and minerals, so I tell my counterpart, will you please talk about minerals that have economic value, like gold and silver? He said, “Sure”, because this way, I can supplement his content by having the students read about the California gold rush. Among ESL students, we have a lot of Asian students, Chinese students, who have grandfathers and great-grandfathers who came to America looking for gold. In fact, San Francisco in Chinese is called “ Gold Mountain”, so immediately the interest level is heightened.

Another area of minerals in the geology lecture is sedimentary rocks, so obviously, the formation of coal and oil. I tell my counterpart, please emphasize that part of the lecture. He said, “Sure”. So then what I do is, I tell the students to do some research on the internet on the formation of oil and coal, and then I assigned the biography of Andrew Carnegie (he became a very rich man, using coal, steel) and then also we read the biography of Rockefeller, that’s oil. So then the students are able to take ESL and geology, to the bigger world, and see how events are connected. You don’t just study oil and coal, that’s sources of energy and how does that impact the economic development, social development, and political development in the United States, so.

Obviously, besides content, we have to do a lot of work on language skills, because that’s the area that our students have the greatest need in. So as an ESL teacher, I typically teach the different reading skills, how you preview, how you look for the main idea, how you make notation. Then, my geology counterpart also takes the skill and applies it in his class. One very obvious place where he can do that is, every time he does a lecture, he doesn’t just stand there and talk, and then he writes all over the blackboard. I said, “Your notes has to be systematic. You must provide the outline of your lecture of the day so that the students can follow you as they listen and they can take notes!” And, he does that.

Then, the other area is the writing skills. When geology assigns a writing assignment, he doesn’t just give a topic, he has to give an outline. What do you write in the first paragraph? Introduction and thesis. And then the bottom paragraphs, the kind of information that he wants. And finally, the conclusions and the references. Then I support his writing assignment by teaching those skills, by planning the essay, the geology essay with the students, and I read the first draft, and I’m responsible for all the language work in the paper. And after I finish reading, the students look at my comment and write a second draft, and then the paper is submitted to the geology professor, whose main job is to look for the content, the science.

We are doing it for the fifth semester. My counterpart is the chair of the department, I am the director of the ESL program. So we have continuity. And we are able to constantly refine our collaboration. Unfortunately, CUNY relies on many, many part-time teachers, so this kind of learning community breaks down if the other person in the community is not re-hired the following semester. Otherwise, this pedagogy has been proven to be very successful.

Frank Shih: Next one is Dave Bryan, he is the acting Special Assistant to the Dean of Student Life at Brooklyn College, he was in the workshop entitled, “Leadership 101: Beyond the Classroom, from Student to Asian American Professional”.

Dave Bryan: Ms. Jane Hyun effectively took us through a journey of reflection and self-awareness and showed insights on how to become an Asian American professional. Participants were asked to identify, on a scale of one to ten, how strongly they identified themselves as being Asian. Asian, ten being the strongest. Most of the participants in the room strongly identified themselves as being Asian. Participants were from many generations, first generation, one and a half, two, third generation.

Ms. Hyun advised that Asians should create affinity groups in the workplace and that working groups, which are pretty important, and should emphasize on becoming more cohesive. Companies should also realize that more diversity in the workplace is a company that has more of an advantage in branching off into new markets that are also diverse. We also touched on perceptions of Asians. We have some interesting perceptions. For example, one, the immediate one is Asians being smart, good at math, being pretty frugal, good at computers, very family-centered, ethnocentric, hard working, model minority, passive, non-confrontational, and the last one I’m not sure, are bad drivers.

She also compared the Western culture to the Eastern culture by showing us a couple images from both cultures. For example, from the Eastern culture, she showed us a duck in the water, asked us what that meant, and a hammer with nails. Now, the duck in the water meant, and this is something I learned today, one thing I should mention, the images also reflect how we behave, how people from different cultures behave and why. So, while growing up, the duck in the water, the hint was that the loudest duck got shot, so the duck in the water quiet, so that’s why he was still around. Please correct me, Ms. Hyun, if I have this incorrect. She showed us a second image with hammer and nails, and the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. So as a result of that, I think that was an explanation as to why most Asians in the workplace will not speak up immediately, or answer questions or address [inaudible] immediately.

In the Western culture she showed us two images. One with wheels turning, where the squeaky wheels, of course, get the grease, and a young man blowing on a horn, shows that you have to toot your own horn at times. So it sort of highlighted Western behaviors versus Eastern behaviors, and both of the behaviors, of course, are reflected in the workplace today.

Advice. She advised that Asians should market themselves, learn how to deal with diversity, be resilient, become a level-five leader, which I hope she would explain more, become mentors, and of course pass the torch to develop future Asian leaders.

Frank Shih: Thank you Mr. Bryan. The next one is Dr. Thomas Tam, he needs no introduction. He was in the workshop with the topic “Community Academia Bridge Project, High Tech Demonstration”.

Thomas Tam: It basically, basically it was a demonstration by three of our very capable, very able and capable assistants, Anthony Wong, Phillip Li, and James Huang. Basically this is, we’re doing this because of a grant that we received from Verizon Foundation, and that is to set up training workshops to train college student clubs and to train, also, Asian community agencies, who would like to make use of the internet to get their presence known. For the Asian community, sometimes they are looking for volunteers, and for students they are also looking for experience to work in the community, and so, the idea of setting up a high-tech bridge between these two, normally they may not interact, groups, was submitted to Verizon and fortunately we got the grant.

And so, in the summer, starting June, for, every session will be two weeks. It will be four hours per week for two weeks and from June until September. We’re going to have a series of those workshops, and people will learn how to create a simple webpage, create text, create pictures, and how to manipulate some of those pictures and text. In addition to that, you also learn some simple tasks of audio-visual recording, sounds, how to use the video, how to use web casts, something that seems so complicated and how to reach is actually very, very easy.

And, what AAARI will do is to provide a forum for such a gathering so that you will be able to put up your website, web pages, on our web, and where you can announce yourself to the community about what you do, what your needs are, etc. So, in addition to the training, we also provide updating services and maintenance of your webpages, so after the training, you can always come back to us as long as you set up an appointment, and we will help you to develop your webpages.

So, that was basically what was done. And, we were able to take pictures of people, actually, participants were able to take pictures of one another and actually also participate in something called, “Movie Magic”; in other words, you act as if you are a TV announcer, and you talk about your organization. And so, in fact, you can actually get to see a glimpse of it this evening, if you go to our website, www.aaari.info, and you go to a particular webpage. Now, what webpage is that, I don’t know, but I’m sure that you will find out about it if you go to the website, and take a look at some of the participants who have done a little bit of that. Thank you.

Frank Shih: Thank you, and those of you who want more information, there’s a flier about it outside. Thank you Dr. Tam. And now, Dr. Sambhavi Lakshminarayanan, Assistant Professor, School of Business, Medgar Evers College.

Sambhavi Lakshminarayanan: Hello, I was the presider for the session, workshop 3-A. One of the speakers didn’t come, so we had Dr. Suh speaking about “Divided Loyalties: The Psychological Cost of Adhering to the Image of the Model Minority”. There was a technical problem with her disk, so while we were waiting we had some of the audience speak also, and one of the audience members spoke about issues of identity, so that was what we did [inaudible], and I thought that this was a particularly important issue to talk about, especially after hearing Dr. Cheng in the morning talk about matters and issues of Asian students.

So the talk was about what created identity problems, and especially the traditional conflicts and the pressures that are placed on children growing up in the American culture and of Asian origin. So, we learned about how typical immigrant parents from Asia have problems navigating the mainstream culture. A lot of it might have to do with language issues, but even with language not being an issue, there might be other [inaudible] issues, and how did this pressure placed on children to become a kind of bridge.

These children have expectations of being not only kind of [inaudible] language, but also to navigate the mainstream culture. At the same time, the emphasis on the need to honor and obey parents, which is common to almost all the Asian cultures, kind of makes for this conflict within children. So on the one hand, they are expected to be able to be part of the mainstream, and to have all the influences, which they get pretty quickly because they are expected to become [inaudible]. On top of that, they also have to conform to the traditional values, and how this causes problems. So, we learned about how, within Asian families, the psychological boundaries between parents and children are much more [inaudible] than in the American families, and it’s not unusual to find adult children living together with parents.

So, Asian culture is, typically there is a sense of this collective identity which is very, very strong, and that leads children to make choices which are more competing with family and social implications, and [inaudible], the American culture is more of individual [inaudible]. And the speaker also mentioned that these problems come up not only during the adolescent period, which is quite expected, but also during when the children grow up to become young adults. So the generational conflict, also the sense of sadness and loss on both sides in both generations, so the younger generation understands that the parents have sacrificed a lot for them, and have placed a lot of emphasis on education because education is looked on as the way to kind of become successful, and the average Asian does feel that they have to succeed, but they also feel that the parents have no idea the price that has to be paid to become successful and also that the parents themselves are not good models of how to succeed within the mainstream.

And the speaker mentioned how many of the immigrant parents set up businesses which are family business where every person in the family is expected to pull their weight, and family businesses sometimes tend to become quite isolated. And, in intergenerational conflict, the older generation, either the children have many advantages and many choices which they themselves didn’t have, but they also feel that in the process of the younger generation becoming successful, which the parents do want, but they have also these children.

And, also, the particular emphasis in Asian cultures to obey parents, and kind of devotion to parents, creates a conflict within the children that, they want to succeed but they also feel that in the process of succeeding beyond their parents, in some ways, they are abandoning them, and the speaker also wondered to the differences between Eastern and Western culture, which [inaudible] presenter to talk about, that how the central [inaudible] is different in the Eastern and Western cultures, and how, again, this creates confusion while people are trying to create their identity, and then I think we had to stop because we ran out of time, but I think the talk was very interesting to all of us.

Frank Shih: Okay, thank you. And now, we have Ms. Loretta Chin, who is the Special Projects Coordinator at Brooklyn College, who was in the session with the topic, “Managing Conflicts with Asian American Bicultural Lenses”.

Loretta Chin: Thank you. [inaudible] My session was with Dr. Maria Volpe, and she is the Director of the Dispute Resolution Program at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She actually was working together with Marion Yuen over a project that they had just started to talk about. Marion Yuen is the only mediator for the U.S. Postal Redress Program, and she said, “I can’t believe I’m the only one here!” Dr. Volpe decided to write up a proposal and introduce it to get funding for a diversity project. She and Marion Yuen had come here with a project, which would involve mediation training for Asian American students.

They plan to have a conflict awareness and management training through bicultural lenses of Asian American students on June 1 st, 2004. They’re looking for about 15 students. The reason why they’re looking for those 15 students is the whole subject of conflict resolution and how, what conflict is. We started with introductions, and talked about each of us, what it was that we liked about being Asian American, what it was that was, the most annoying experiences of being Asian American, and it was an interactive experience and we went around the room. And some of the things, I won’t list all of them, but we came up with, the things we liked were certain values like self-acceptance, sometimes we’re perceived as smart and respectful of family, we like our food, we like our culture, history. And then Dr. Volpe brought it up when she said, the Italian Americans have the very same things that we like, also. And then when we got to what was annoying, sometimes that it was a segregated life, the perception of being a foreigner, you know, things that can lead to the family choices can also lead to conflict. Because sometimes those commitments to family leave the wrong choices, and sometimes that causes depression and negative actions and then the subject of conflict does come up. So, anyway, from what we’ve discovered from that exercise, we learned that what’s passed down from generations can consciously or unconsciously exhibit in ways that may cause us to bump up against people or other groups or among ourselves.

So, this is where we see conflict emerge, and we looked at what annoys us, and when we look at conflict, we had an exercise where we said, what associations do you associate with conflict? Okay, so we went around the room, we came out with some adjectives like distress, argument, volume, hate, anger, killing, humiliation. And she brought up something very interesting, she said the Chinese symbol for conflict is danger and opportunity together. So most of these images that we came out with were very, very negative, and that’s what she’s trying to bring out, and the Chinese symbol is showing that something that can be positive as well. We also looked at the cultural aspect of how the cultural ways of being Asian can conflict against, I guess, things that are descriptive as conflict. For instance, we say volume, yet Asians can be very quiet and passive, so it goes against that. Non-confrontational, you know, those are things that are not typical of conflict. So this can also cause a conflict in itself

Then, she did an exercise because she wanted us to see how we saw conflict as well. She had a picture and she said, well, what do you see here? I’m used to looking at these pictures, so I saw those things already, but most of the room picked either one thing or another, and in one view of the picture you saw the word lion, it was just going down diagonally, but when you look closely, also, it looked also like the picture of a man’s face, nothing wrong with that. So you can see two things with the same picture depending on who you are, and it’s your outlook, how you look at things sometimes. And she was trying to bring out the point that conflict is like that, you also have to look very carefully at a situation or an issue or the people that you deal with. You have to take the time to try to investigate what others are trying to say, so when you’re looking at the picture and you say, yeah, now I see that other side of the picture, the same thing happens with people when you take the time to investigate what they’re trying to say and you go, ah, now I understand what they’re saying.

And she, they ended it off by saying that, you know this quandary that you’re in…how do you teach optimism to people, how do you teach them to look at conflict and say, “Wait a minute, this can be worked out!” How do you, how do you teach that paradigm shift to students, or to anyone, actually. So it’s a transformation of thinking, and so, that’s why she came to us with this project that she would like to propose, I think it would be a very useful tool for our students and for administration, anybody who needs to learn about conflict. Thank you.

Frank Shih: Thank you Loretta. We have one more workshop on Asian/Asian-American students at CUNY. Dr. Marie Ting, who was the presider, had to leave on emergency, so I ask students and maybe other students who were involved, I ask Victoria Ortegas, who was a student there, to come and give us a synopsis of it. Come up, Victoria, and then I’ll have you sit up here.

Victoria Ortegas: Basically, we just had an open forum discussion between myself, Ms. Ting, and Ms. Lauren Lee, who attends Baruch College. I myself [inaudible]. We talked about a number of different things, basically first off, our clubs, we’re both student leaders. Ms. Lauren Lee is part of a sorority, and myself, I have my own club at my college called Asian cultural exchange. We discussed our clubs and what they do and their outreach to the Asian community at our colleges. We also specifically discussed about international students and recruitment and the barriers, language barriers, how do you recruit them, how do you make them feel welcome.

We also talked about the modern stereotypes, how, you’re an Asian student, good at math, and you don’t need any help or any assistance whatsoever, and how that’s completely untrue. Everyone needs assistance in some way. Both Laura and I, we both said that math is okay but we would also like some assistance. I myself would also like tutoring programs available to students for ESL, if you’re international, might as well use it [inaudible]. Also, [inaudible] talked about the Asian community as a whole because we do have such a melting pot of a community at each college, and we need to make a kind of a notice so that the other groups and clubs can get a little bit of information about the Asian community, because there are a lot of misled facts, so we’re both striving to correct them and get the word out there.

Also, campus life. Basically, going to school, some of us work, some of us don’t work, but we do have our priorities and whatnot and how we balance those on top of keeping our clubs or sororities and our lives there too. We also spoke about race relations on campus and outside. We both had various experiences living in small towns, so I myself lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Ms. Lauren Lee lived in Long Island, so they are pretty much two areas where the Asian community was fairly small, and both talked about difficulties in being there, how the difference from when we came into the city, because there was a larger Asian population.

We also spoke about cultural [inaudible], and how, for myself, I thought it was a great idea to be here in New York so I could get in touch with my Asian side, and it was really fun. It was hard at first, but as you can see, I’m here and I’m enjoying it. Also, just the general aspect of growing up as part of the Asian community, it is hard for certain people to adjust [inaudible], I’m used to a certain culture, so Lauren had mentioned, when she was younger, she really had to face that stereotype. Because, when you’re four, three years old, it really doesn’t hit you until you’re a little bit older, and she had mentioned when she turned about five years old, that’s when the picking, and the children started noticing the differences, and had kind of, a similar experience to what, so far, you already grow out of it and you deal with it.

Also, [inaudible], and there was a question about inner self. A gentleman asked, how when you wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing we view ourselves as, whether its, you see yourself as woman first, or part of your ethnic group first, or as an American. And, it struck me as a really interesting question and I myself, I had stated that I wake in the morning, I see myself first as a woman, because, well, no matter what ethnicity you are, you’re going to be faced with those same typical stereotypes, and secondly, because of my connection with my father, I view myself more as Mongol, so I guess [inaudible]. And then, Lauren had said that she has her general view of herself as well.

And then, well, Ms. Ting was pretty happy with both of us being here because we had two different experiences from both extremes. For me, my college was okay, but I would like improvement, and for Lauren, she loves her college, and I’m glad she has a good experience. I know that I have some things, still some things to work out at my college. So yeah.

Frank Shih: Thank you. I want to thank all the presiders for being so brief, so we have some time for questions. Anyone who were in the sessions want to add something or have a question, this is your time to speak up…You don’t have any questions? Presiders? We’re okay?

Before the, I want to make sure, so let me conclude by saying that, by asking this question, what have we learned today, and where do we go from here? I made some notes I thought I’d share with you.

And it looks like everyone is looking at us, Asian Americans. We’re conspicuous, from SATs to the media, everyone wants us to be something or like someone or be something else. Our parents want us to have careers they can understand, something stable and profitable, other members of our family want us to remain close to them, to be with them, enjoying [inaudible] our friends, and our friends want something else. Teachers expect us to be smarter in sciences but assume we are weak in the humanities. The law doesn’t see us, except when they tie us to other groups or single us out for some political reasons, especially since 9/11. And the media wants to use us. Like the law, they call us model minorities, they want to tie us with minorities when they want to single us out for other reasons. We’ve become scapegoats when they want to view immigrants and immigration as scapegoats, even when we’re not immigrants, when some of us are not immigrants. They tie us to U.S. foreign policy; whenever U.S. has a little tension with China, someone gets, some Asian American group gets picked on as in the case when [Wen-Ho Li] was arrested right after an American plane was shot down on the coast of China.

But who are we? We speak different languages, we come from different regions of Asia, and that’s a huge continent. We have different lengths of residency in the United States. We are part of every economic class. Asian Americans have the highest family incomes on average, but many work in sweatshops, restaurants, and laundries, not your usual high-income industries. We have backgrounds in different nationalities and claim different national origins. We hold different political views, even those with the same nationalities. Though we’re changing, because most of us are transnationals, we go to Taiwan to vote in the national elections, we call home and businesses in Indonesia as well as in New Jersey, in Korea as well as in L.A., in New Delhi as well as in Queens, in Hong Kong as well as in Seattle.

And we’re not alone. We share racial experiences and racial histories with others, and we stand on the shoulders of other groups, and most important, we share the history of slavery and discrimination of African Americans, and we stand on civil rights [inaudible]. And since it’s common of our social interaction, what is it about social interaction? Interaction is not easy, it involves the meeting of many styles, many values, many generations, many cultures, many family backgrounds, interaction about the meeting of many categories of incomes, objectives, levels of SAT scores, many communication skill levels. Interaction involves the meeting of many social histories, many degrees of mental health, many languages, many linguistic contexts, many psycho-linguistic contexts, many social psycho-linguistic contexts.

But where do we go from here? I just want to suggest something, especially since this is a conference on Asian American students. I want to suggest that we expand our life experiences. Actually I’ve heard today, we need to meet new people, we need to use curiosity as the key. We need to interact in more classes, take more classes that are different and interesting, research new topics, go to new places. In addition to curiosity, we need to use our passion as the compass. We need to volunteer for community service. We need to write that essay. We need to apply for that job. We need to use our passion to talk to that group of individuals whom you have never talked to before. To learn that skill, we need that passion, we need that leader, to join that club, to start the new club, to help someone, and to be a friend. And, finally, we need to be prepared. The mainstream is changing, and it is starting to look more like you and me, and that’s an opportunity for Asian Americans. And as Asian Americans must take advantage of that opportunity, and that’s why we came to the United States in the first place.

So I want to thank all of you for coming and make sure we stay for the raffle. Thank you again.