Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Welcome to Workshop 4B titled “Asian Americans in the Aftermath of 9/11.” We have four distinguished panelists today. I will introduce each of them first and then ask them to each person to speak from five to ten minutes and then we have kind of an interactive session.
Our first speaker is Dr. Lung Chi Chen. Dr. Chen is an Associate Professor at Department of Environmental Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and Director of Core Services NYU-EPA PM Center, in Tuxedo, New York. Dr. Chen is here to speak about the “Environmental Health Impact Related to the World Trade Center Disaster.”
The second speaker is Ms. Renata Huang who is an independent video journalist who has produced programs for Channel Thirteen: “Harmony & Spirit: Chinese Americans in New York;” and “Running: The Race for City Council.” Ms. Huang is an alumna of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She will speak about “Asian Americans in Flux: Forgotten Stories After 9/11.”
Our third speaker is Mr. Joseph Wei. But Mr. Wei was not able to come so Wendy Chung is here to present. Mr. Wei was the City Editor from the Chinese Newspaper World Journal. Are you from the World Journal?
Wendy Chung:
Yes, I’m from the World Journal.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Ok. Very good. Originally he said he was going to speak about “The Role of Chinese Press after 9/11.”
Forth (but not least) is Mr. Edward A. Watkins who is Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Federal Programs. He is going to speak about “Housing Opportunities for Asian Americans.” Those are our four speakers. I’ll ask Dr. Chen to start.
Lung Chi Chen:
Actually I had prepared a more formal presentation. I have a PowerPoint, but I don’t know if you have a projector. It might be easier to explain what we’re doing here. I don’t know if anybody can see it. Let’s just go over really quickly. We were one of the first scientists to go to the World Trade Center area to collect samples and do an impact assessment, and look at what were the consequences of the disaster. This is a large team involving a lot of people with many of our technicians, researchers and scientists who looked into what’s going on with the collapse. As you can see from this photograph, this is right after the first tower collapsed, you can see that there is a huge among of debris being spilled out.
What we like to do is look at what was the impact. A lot of people were affected, inhaling that dust, as you probably heard from newspapers, people complaining about is this toxic or not. Also the fire after the collapse lasted until sometime in December. Some people complained about smell and worried about health. What we did is that we focused our investigation in the particular matter – the particles in the air, the dust you can see, and the small pieces you cannot see. So we’re focusing on that aspect of the investigation because from our experience from previous studies, we know that particle exposure can have an impact on health and increase the incidence of death. Recently, one of our departments published a paper about the increase in urban particular concentration was associated with increasing cancer deaths. So we’re focusing on that, and also a lot of people already found out that an increase in particles also increases the amount of asthma attacks. We focused on that aspect of the research. You can see this is a map of Lower Manhattan.
The second and third day, we had a team of technicians from the NYU Downtown Hospital, who went around the World Trade Center area just collecting bags so that our laboratory could do further analysis. We collected two sets of samples. The first day we only went to Ground Zero and then stopped. The second day we were a little bit more extensive. We went around the area and collected surrounding the whole Ground Zero. We wanted to see if there was any difference in distribution and what was the concentration of the toxic materials that we could find. Here are the findings of a photograph that my technicians took. This is September 12th. You can see that everything’s covered. It’s very eerie. You can see that nobody’s around and everything’s covered in dust. It’s almost a snow effect. Here is a student that went to collect the particles. Then the Friday after that day, we collected the air sample, because that’s what you and I are going to breathe.
In the NYU Downtown Hospital, which is about three blocks away from Ground Zero, we set up an array of instruments to collect…Actually this hospital was set up in the turn of the century just in case there was a terrorist attack. At that time, the turn of the century they set up this hospital. With all of these financial institutions, what if something happens? We need a hospital. It was very good foresight. It helped us a lot to set up the sampling on the second floor of the hospital. We put in some of the instruments to collect different samples and to get an index of what the health effects were going to be.
Then in November we tried to get into different apartments also to try to see what the indoor particles looked like. But there were a lot of obstacles in terms of the bureaucracy and all that. We didn’t get in until around November 19th, and we went into two locations – one at Liberty Street and one at Trinity Place. The location was just right South of Ground Zero. You can see we took some photographs. At that time, Ground Zero was pretty much cleaned up and the debris is being removed, but the apartment is very devastated. All of the windows are blown open. In the inside, even some of the cabinets have been blown up. Everything is covered with dust and what we did is we went around and tried to collect the particles using a scientific method. Here is one of the examples of collecting samples.
Also, a couple blocks from here, at Hunter College, we had another station that was operating before September 11th, so it’s a very good reference site, so we can compare the difference between downtown and uptown and use it as a reference point. If downtown is very high, then we know there is danger. We looked at a variety of substances that I’m not going to go into the details of. One of the first things we looked at was asbestos, because people worry about, what is asbestos? How much is it? And is it going to have any long term consequences on us?
Actually, it’s very lucky that for some reason whatever insulation they used (asbestos they use in insulation), it did not really get suspended in the air. This is one of the tables that showed the composition of that. As you can see, in every sample that we had, the asbestos is present only in very, very small amounts. It was a very great relief to us that we don’t have to worry about the asbestos impact.
The other thing that we found out was this was an example of one of the particles we looked at under the microscope. You can see that these are very big particles. Your human heads are probably around that diameter, and here are some of the examples. If you look at this part, those are glass beads that got heated up to very, very high temperatures and burst. It’s very interesting. That indicates the fires going on. They got heated to very high temperatures. They heated up and melted and some of them burst open. That’s what happens. There were a lot of minerals. Those are fiberglass insulation.
Audience Member:
You mean you found the particles of glass beads from the building materials themselves?
Lung Chi Chen:
We just collected it from the site itself, so it’s there. The other thing we found out that relieved us was that the majority of the particles on the ground are very big particles. Ninety-five percent of the particles are larger than ten micrometers in diameter. Your hair is probably ten micrometers in diameter, so that is one tenth of your hair. But it is still very big, and because it is very big, it cannot be inhaled. So you are protected against this exposure. That is very good.
The other thing we found out is the pH, the acidity of the particles. We put a certain amount of particles in the water and used a pH measure. What we found out is that the pH is around 11 or 12. Your body has a pH of about 7, which is neutral. When you have a pH of 11 or 12, it’s very alkaline. It’s very irritating because it’s coming from the building material – the chips of cement that are in that. And that’s why people are complaining about their irritations in their upper airways. But they should not worry about the long term consequence because the particles are very big and they cannot get deep into your lungs. So you won’t have long term consequences, just irritation. You will feel it when you go down there. You can smell it almost.
Also, people worry about the toxic materials – the metals. Some of the trace metals are very toxic. Chromium, nickel…these are all associated with toxic material. Also, some of the computer parts were burned. They’re worrying about some of the material being released from that. To our comfort, none of that is very high. We can measure it. It’s higher than your backyard dirt. But it is still very small. So we should not worry about it. Now people worry about lead. Did they have lead pipes all that? And what we found out is that the lead concentration is there and it’s about 300 ppm. The EPA says that if you have over 400 ppm lead in your playground sand, then you have to remove that. So this is not to the point that you should really worry about it. But at the same time, this is toxic material and you should treat it as toxic material, because some of the alkaline toxic material is there.
We also have real-time monitoring of the airborne particles around the World Trade Center area. As you can see, compared to the concentrations here at Hunter College, we can see that in November and October it’s very high downtown. Compared to lower Manhattan, downtown is 3-10 times higher in airborne concentration. But after November and late October, the concentration is very similar. Also, we had a very warm fall last year, so there was a lot pollution at that time. You can se that the concentrations go up and down.
Usually at night, the area is still so they do not move around that much so the pollution would accumulate. A lot of people open their window at night which is not very good because then all the pollution is coming into your house. Close your window, close the air conditioning vent. Don’t let outside air come into your house. Also, we looked at the size of the particles and you can see that something happened between late October and November. So either the practice of the cleanup effort or whatever, there was something going on during that period of time. Before that we know that pollution is dominating by the World Trade Center area. But after that it is not. So it’s pretty good. I think that’s pretty much what I have.
On May 1st, we just got a grant from New York National Institute of Environmental Health Science to look into this issue further. The funding is one of the largest in the country. We’re going to look into firemen and we’re going to recruit about 300 firemen that we’ll classify to high and low exposure level. We’re going to look at their lungs and see if they have any differences from the exposure during that period of time. We probably will survey around 6,000 residents in the area of lower Manhattan to see if there’s an increase in asthma-like symptoms. We’re also going to look at the animal response to the exposure of this pollution. It is a very large effort. They gave us 4.6 million dollars.
Audience Member:
Is that a private study?
Lung Chi Chen:
The one I described – these first two – were private. NYU has two big centers a particular matter health center, where we supported that particular type of research right there. Around mid-December they gave us $50,000 to cover some of the supplies. Then we got a $1.3 million grant for that.
Audience Member:
Are you going to publish it?
Lung Chi Chen:
Two of my colleagues already sent in two papers. One is American Daily Perspective. The other one was just sent in. I’m preparing my report. And if you’d like to give me your email address, I’d like to send you a preliminary report. We have one registered and the last few days, for a class project, we went to other parts of the city to do another set of sampling just to see what is the current level now? We’d like to know the indoor vs. outdoor pollution and also the third floor vs. 30th floor. We want to see with the height if there is any difference?
Audience Member:
How come we haven’t heard of this study yet?
Lung Chi Chen:
One of the toxicology studies that we have is actually in cooperation with ETA and we send the samples down to them to do toxicology testing, and they have to analyze the responses. The problem with ETA is this quote/end quote “high level one” research or something like that. They have very stringent quarantine control, so even though they finished the study in January, they haven’t published it yet and they will not release the result. I have the result, but they will not let me publicly say that yet.
Audience Member:
What has been going on with the research?
Lung Chi Chen:
We pretty much follow what the government does. We’re a highly respected institute, so what we do is follow the NIH (National Institute of Health) guidelines so we’re pretty confident about what we’re doing here. We’re going to initiate another study about the effect on animals. The EPA did not set up a similar type of exposure monitoring until, I think, October. There’s some other company that is OSA (Occupational Safety Association). They have some samples.
But the problem is that particular time is that nobody was talking to each other. We tried to say we could help. We have these stations set up that could help people. We can help interpret some of the data. But the problem is that nobody gave me any sense that they wanted to cooperate or extend themselves. So it was very frustrating.
Audience Member:
How about the city of New York?
Lung Chi Chen:
We did not have that much cooperation from the city or the state either. We kind of…I don’t blame them. There were a lot of points that we wanted to go into different areas to collect but because of security reasons, they would not have that.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Thank you very much. We would like to have more conversation, but three other presenters have to go. Dr. Chen has to leave a little earlier, so I allowed the audience to ask questions. But from now on, I think I’ll ask all presenters to go and then people will interact with the audience. The next speaker is Ms. Renata Huang and she will speak about “Asian Americans in Flux: Forgotten Stories after 9/11.”
Ms. Renata Huang:
Obviously I won’t have all the forgotten stories, but I’ll have some of them to share with you. Right now I’m working on several different videos about Asian Americans after 9/11, one of them being a big picture about Chinatown, the fact that it was in the frozen zone and what happened to the economy, the fact that because the infrastructure was cut so much, a lot of people lost jobs and tourism went down.
Then another one that I’m working on are individual stories about displaced workers. I’m looking at a lot of garment workers who are now finished taking job training courses who were laid off after 9/11 and I’m following them to see if they’re actually going to find jobs. So far it doesn’t look good for them.
The third one I’m looking at is South Asians after 9/11. As we all know South Asians have been separated on a different level. The fact that we have 1200 Muslims who are both Arab and South Asian who’ve been picked up, arrested and detained by the INS for violations, and their entire families have to be deported back to their homelands. We have the situation of taxi drivers who are not considered direct victims of 9/11 despite the fact that they lost a lot of money for at least five or six months after 9/11. They’re not getting any compensation. They’re also not getting any compensation from Red Cross, despite the fact that Red Cross is not supposed to be looking at your legal status and should help you anyway. Of course hate crimes is a huge problem with South Asians.
The forth documentary, I’m looking at is Asian American philanthropy, the fact that so many organizations did so much. A lot of times people in the mainstream don’t look at these stories. We have organizations that did a lot of great work. They had soup in these little containers and they brought it down to Ground Zero. They went down to Pier 94 and literally wrote checks out to people who were grieving and because they lost their families. They gave out I think about 2.5 million dollars.
Then a fifth one I’m working on is about grieving families and I’m interviewing families with lost loved ones and just looking at how they get up every day.
Audience Member:
Are they available?
Ms. Renata Huang:
The ones I’m doing right now?
Audience Member:
Right now and also before.
Ms. Renata Huang:
Yeah, definitely they’re available. The one I worked on “Harmony & Spirit: Chinese Americans in New York City” you can buy on Channel 13. In fact, I think on the 14th of March, they’re going to be replaying that and probably selling it on TV again. Then there’s the City Council elections which is recent.
I happened to be running for my life that day from the World Trade Center, because it was Primary day and the area that I was filming was lower Manhattan and I was about four blocks away and like an idiot I went closer to the building and then had to run back like everybody else. That’s kind of what led me with conversations with the federation to do this since I had some footage already. Why not tell some stories.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Thank you. Ms. Wendy Chung.
First of all, I would like to talk about the Journal a little bit as some of you might not be familiar with this. The World Journal is the biggest Asian American Newspaper in North America. I brought four copies, so if you’re interested, feel free to take a copy after this. Our separation in North America is almost 400,000 and almost 100,000 in New York and the New York area. Our readers are mainly Chinese Americans that speak and read Chinese. Some of them are immigrants. Some of them are garment workers, restaurant workers, or housewives, students. It has been a major information source for a lot of Chinese Americans that don’t speak English in America.
After September 11th, we have dedicated a large part of our coverage to either September 11th issues or related issues. Also, we have looked at the assistance from the government, like FEMA assistance, SBA loans, and also assistance from Red Cross, Safe Horizon and World Mission and so forth. I still remember at one point we put out a story that Safe Horizon is accepting applications from displaced workers. Right after we put out the story, the next day, there are long lines in Chinatown, hundreds of thousands of people lined up outside CCBA and all over Canal Street and the police had to set up roadblocks to keep order.
I actually brought some newspapers because I wanted to show you what we did after September 11th. We mainly focused on stories that the mainstream may not touch on or that they’re not interested in. Like this one. This September 14th, three days after the disaster, and this woman…this is taken in the Armory on 25th Street where the Family Assistance Center was located. Outside there are a lot of families looking for their loved ones. They’re holding pictures and also the description of their lost family members. This woman is a teacher and her husband was lost in one of the buildings of the World Trade Center.
We did a lot of stories about the families of Chinese heritage. This is only one of them. This one I was just mentioning briefly. We took a lot of snapshots in Chinatown because Chinatown actually is very, very close to the immediate disaster area. But it is cluttered by a lot of mainstream media. Still now Chinatown is fighting for government money, loans, grants and business people have been suffering, and even now after eight months, they’re still not recovering at all. This is about people giving their own money to the World Trade Center victims. This is about the vigils in Chinatown. Chinese people have actually been very generous about giving money and donations to the World Trade Center victims. Also, they have expressed a lot in different activities – vigils, or like we mentioned earlier, a lot of organizations wrote checks to people and the victim’s families. This one is just another of the vigils. This is a series of articles that we did one month after the disaster.
We did a series of stories about how business hurt in the Chinatown area. The first one is about the restaurant business. At that time Chinatown was almost closed – all the streets were blocked and it was almost closed for two weeks. Business suffered a loss. This is a very good example. This business is on Mott St. and they have four stars from the New York Times and they have a good reputation, but they still have no business. Also, we interviewed a lot of different restaurant owners about how they’re doing, and they all expressed that they’re having a very hard time. Even two months ago, I think it was six months after the disaster, we rebuilt again. We went to the restaurants.
We went to garment factories. We talked to workers, and still they’re expressing the same thing – we are still either dislocated and out of business and a lot of people just don’t get assistance at all, particularly people north of Canal St. because the government has drawn their assistance line on Canal St. According to the Asian American Federation’s Survey Findings, most of the garment factories in Chinatown are located north of Canal St. So a lot of those are garment factory workers who lost their job after September 11th and they couldn’t find any assistance at all from the government.
I still remember one of the groups called World Mission. They were the first group to give grants to dislocated workers north of Canal St. After that news was printed, the next day at least 1,500 workers flooded to where the application forms could be taken. Then it got some attention from television and some other mainstream papers. We also did personal stories about volunteers who give a lot of their time and love in order to help.
We also printed a lot of pictures of Chinatown of when it was closed and when it was heavily guarded by National Guards, State Troopers, and NYPD. At that time, a lot of residents or business people in Chinatown found it difficult to go back to their homes or go back to their businesses, because they had to show different forms of id. And there are some stories about illegal immigrants who don’t have proper identification so they couldn’t go home for the whole week or even two weeks because they could not show an id. So this one is about entrance. This one is about the Disaster Assistance Center at 141 Worth Street. This is one of the stories that I just told – people lining up on Mott St. outside the CCPA where they had a lot of conferences. They even closed the street because so many people are there.
There were actually a lot of concerned citizens, community groups and organizations that have been putting a lot of effort in getting the government to give some attention to Chinatown, to include Chinatown as far as grants, loans, and now it’s about rebuilding. Now it is still difficult for Chinatown to get their fair share when it comes to the funding in rebuilding.
This is about unemployed restaurant workers getting unemployment from the Department of Labor. There are a lot of workers – some have completely lost their jobs, but a lot of them (like garment workers) only work three or four days the most and they have to support a family of four or six or even more. So it is really difficult for them.
This is about the mother of a victim. This is a very touching story. That victim could have escaped but he stayed there just to assist others and help out others. She found that out because his mother just coincidently watched TV and saw a shot of her son and what she saw was her son running here and there helping out people, but her son never came back. So it’s a very touching story. This is a story that we tell. The mainstream media would not pick it up.
This is some of the efforts they’ve been making to get politicians to come to Chinatown. They wanted to ask them to come back to Chinatown to revitalize Chinatown, to spend money, and tell people in the rest of the city and the rest of the country that Chinatown is reopened and come back, we need you. These are some of the papers that I have with me today. We have a lot more but that’s all I brought.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Thank you very much. I think in fact the study of the environment and then documenting it and the publication, particularly for those who do not have English capabilities, then this is the main source of information. And now we’ll have housing availability, which is another important issue.
Edward Watkins:
Well I think I have the difficult one because our Agency of Human Rights is probably one of the oldest human/civil rights agencies in the country. It’s over 55 years old. As a law enforcement agency, it’s enforcing human rights laws and civil rights laws of the state as well as in contract with Equal Opportunities Commission, as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My interest is that on September 11th I happened to have been on my way down to 7 World Trade Plaza. I had just recently retired after 33 years with the EOC. I am the liaison for the EOC and federal government and federal programs where we take in federal funds to do enforcement of civil rights.
That particular day I happened to be on the phone with Buffalo at 7:30 in the morning. I had an appointment at 11:00 to be at the World Trade Plaza, so I was going to be at EOC at 7 World Trade Center at around 9:30 or 10:00. Instead of leaving my house at my normal time, where I would have been down there around 9:00, I left an hour later because I was waiting for a report to come in. I was on my way out when the first plane hit. Most of my colleagues at the EOC escaped unharmed from 7 World Trade Center as the building collapsed. But the interesting part about it is that all the government documents on the investigations that we were doing on civil rights were destroyed. So you can imagine all your case files being destroyed that were active.
The fortunate part about it obviously is that the computers are back up and information was stored in Washington. But at the division of human rights, where cases are filed, we had the actual copies of the complaints. I guess there’s an irony in there that the state ended up with all the records. We were able to either duplicate records and have them available for the Equal Opportunities Commission to be able to do anything that they needed to do or to have any document that they might have needed.
Last year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued one of four partnership grants in the country for $250,000 with AAFE (Asian American for Equality) to do outreach and education in the Asian and immigrant community. So we had just gotten started when September 11th hit and delayed us to some degree from reaching out to the Asian community to deal with housing issues in terms of discrimination. Ironic again. As I had a report here coming in the next couple days, I checked with our Information Technology Unit (it used to be Management Information, and now it’s IT) and I said, well since September 11th, how many cases have actually come in from Asian community or Muslims or other Southern Asian countries to see what the impact might have been on the number of complaints. We’ve been reading in the paper (obviously your paper) talking about bias incidents, talking about increase of discrimination, whether it be employment or housing. And I can only find one case. One case. And it was an employer.
Now my job is to go out under this particular grant to the Asian community and to educate on the rights under the civil rights laws, as well as the state’s human rights laws so that they will be better informed on how to protect themselves in terms of housing discrimination, predatory loans, or on the other side, the employment areas of discrimination. So AAFE and my shop have been – we’ve done a press conference in Queens. We did another one in Chinatown. Just recently, one of the good things the governor did do was I think we were one of the few agencies that got an increase for investigators to be hired, especially in the housing side of the fence, which I oversee, where we have two investigators here right now, who just came on within the last month. They’re going through their training phases now on how to handle discrimination investigation incidents and also doing the outreach education portion of that contract. Their contract runs for about two years.
You will be seeing our unit going out into the Asian community to give out literature materials and education on the law, what people’s rights are, because there’s a tendency I guess in the Asian community not to report violations of human rights and civil rights. That may be for many other reasons, cultural or whatever, but my [goal] is to break that stereotype to get you the information. I’ll be able to get it to any organizations are out there to share with their constituencies and to assure that their rights are enforced. Now I know in dealing with law enforcement, whether it be immigration or other things, there’s a shyness. But here is the one area where Asians should not be shy in any manner, shape or form, to have their rights enforced. We don’t go into immigration laws or anything. If you have a valid complaint, we investigate, we look at the data, we look at the evidence, we make a decision and we issue it.
You can have anything from your salary, housing, we can put a stop on a lease if someone is found to be discriminatory against someone where they will be held and a subpoenaed and ordered by to court to stop them from renting that apartment. Or if it’s a sale of a house. We’ve had predatory loans cases where people prayed on either the elderly or people because of their inability to speak English or read or know what they’re getting themselves into. We’ve had people’s homes restored to them. We’ve had interest rates reduced. We’ve had contracts changed to correct whatever was being done wrong to them.
This is a service. It’s what you pay for in your taxes. As citizens, you’re entitled to it. My job is to see that the federal law and the state law are being complied with in terms of discrimination – whether it be on the employment or the housing side – and to ensure that an individual who is complaining gets a fair hearing at a fair date.
Normal procedures are that a person will come to one of our regional offices. They would see someone like Helen or Iris to file a complaint. Helen’s bilingual so that assists and helps when we deal with the Asian community. Iris is bilingual to deal with the Hispanic type issues. We’re also going to be bringing on a director of the Asian project who hopefully will be of Asian heritage and hopefully bilingual as well. I understand you always have to get through the civil service commission. But we’re fortunate that we were able to get Helen through the system and bring them onboard so you can interact with someone who hopefully can speak the language. If now, AAFE is also available to give us translators so that we are able to serve you in the community.
I think the difficult part has been trying to get the message out to your constituency. We have been using the Asian and South Asian press. I know your newspaper has covered us as well in what we’re trying to do out there in the community. On the 17th I know we’re doing one out in Long Island City. It’s one of the affiliates of AAFE. We’re doing one Bengali; we’re doing Indian, Bangladesh, Pakistani. We’re also taking out materials, and I hope you’ll take this stuff (I don’t want to bring it back to the office) and share it with your colleagues and constituents. We doing Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Bengali (I think), translating housing documents into those particular languages, so that again it will be of assistance in terms of advising people what their rights and what the law protects them from. I would hope that if any of you…I believe our phone numbers are mixed in there.
If you need to discuss something about housing or employment discrimination, we’re open and free to provide you that assistance. We will be able to take complaints on site whenever we go to a particular conference or educational seminar so that we can meet our requirements under the contract to educate, to bring in complaints where there are valid complaints to bring into the system and to adjudicate them in whatever form. I think one of the things you need to understand as well, under our housing contract with HUD is one of the reason we’re getting federal money is because our state law is considered to be substantially equivalent to the federal law. One of the goodies that is in the federal law, so that you know, is that when there is a hiring discrimination, what we call probable cause, the complainer has the option to elect to go into court or into our administrative proceedings and have a lawyer provided to them free, so that the individual does not have to extend any cost in terms of a probable cause finding if they want to take it into state court or our administrative law proceedings where we have an administrative law judge who has a hearing.
We do have a housing person who handles those particular cases as they come out and there’s an election or an option to proceed in whichever legal forum the individual person chooses to go to. So there you have it. That’s the case that’s conducted free of charge. If a probable cause hiring has been found, you have a free option to go into state court with a lawyer being provided by the state to prosecute that particular case. I don’t think you can get any better than that.
We know there’s discrimination out there, yes we know it. But I can’t go out and solicit and bring it in. People have to be aware of it. They have to go to any one of our eleven regional offices – we have one in lower Manhattan, upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, all around the state – Rochester, Buffalo… We have a sexual harassment unit in Brooklyn. We have an AIDS unit in Brooklyn. They’re all there to provide services to the residents of New York. We’re there. You should utilize us. This will hopefully get that barrier of a law enforcement agency that might be interested in other things, but I’m not. I’m interested in protecting your human or your civil rights under the law.
That is what I need in terms of your organizations or the press passing the word out that we’re user friendly, we’re available to serve the citizens of New York and that hopefully we will do a decent job. I can tell you on the housing cases, we pretty much wrap those cases up within 100 days from they’re filed. This keeps our feet to the fire to try to eliminate those cases in terms of investigation within 100 days, otherwise I have to write you a letter and explain why I didn’t do it in 100 days and you would know why. Normally that is bankruptcy or some other reason that keeps that case from moving forward, but we like to get them out in 100 days.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Thank you very much. That was very informative.
Edward Watkins:
Well I’d be glad to bring people in to discuss it. If it’s a big enough conference, I can get the commissioner to come in and address the group as well. We’re appointees of the governor so our goal is to make everybody look good, but my [goal] is to uphold the law, and I’ve been doing it for 44 years, or longer I think now. I may not look like it, but I’ve done it.
Audience Member:
Do you have any Chinese/English bilingual investigators?
Edward Watkins:
In terms of investigators, we may have one, a director from the Philippines who is the director of the office. We have MIS, the Information Technology Field. We have a big computer system there where we have four or five people there. In terms of the housing unit, she is the first one we have hired. I’m looking for a director that I’m waiting for the governor’s office to send me because it’s above a certain level so it’s political appointment. I’m waiting to clear that and then I will have in my own unit – out of seven people, two of them will be of Asian backgrounds. I’m trying to do my profile to make sure it looks good one way or another to make sure that we have good, qualified people who can go out and represent and take care of enforcement.
Audience Member:
Are you finding that a lot of the complaints are a problem for Chinese people or is it a problem for South Asians? I mean Asian is a huge umbrella and they’re so different. It’s not like they really get together.
Edward Watkins:
Well I think part of what my problem is, mainly through AAFE because that’s our partner. Like I said, it’s unique that we got a grant that allows us to partner with another group and AAFE being a recognized group, they received a grant of $250,000. We received a grant of $250,000 and then we collaborated together to do whatever we need to do to get the word out. Right now, I can tell you based on the experience of what we started with – When we first started on substantial equivalency; we took very little housing cases in. There were housing cases, but not to the significant number that I’m taking in within the last two years where I’m up to over four hundred something cases that we’ve actually processed through the system each year now.
Out of that, I can tell you honestly, very few, if none have come from the Asian community, which is why when we go the grant we targeted specifically the Asian community to bring out and educate and say it’s okay to come to us to file a complaint. We know about the under the table money that you have to give to get an apartment. It’s illegal and it shouldn’t be done but then again people are obviously desperate to get good housing or to find employment or whatever the method might be and we’re just saying, it’s illegal. It’s wrong. You don’t have to do that. And that you have rights and we will protect those rights when you come to us with the information and we’re able to substantiate it during the course of an investigation.
Audience Member:
When you say Asian, it’s either East or West Asian?
Edward Watkins:
I use it sort of broadly, but yes, I mean everybody from Bangladesh to…
Audience Member:
So in other words, out of the 400 cases that you have, what ethnicity are they mostly?
Edward Watkins:
Probably you will find more Hispanic, black, you’ll find older people. They’ve especially been targeted on the predatory loans. Scenarios where they have homes and where people actually go after them to inflate their loans to where they’re unable to pay it and then they try to take their house away from them.
There’s a borderline. We cover civil rights cases where either they may target you for race, age, or sex versus criminal which would then go to Justice or to the Attorney General because you have other criminal type activity. We don’t do the criminal, we do the civil rights. And if we come across the criminal, we’ll turn it over.
Audience Member:
I have a case about a Chinese elderly who speaks English. He lives in a HUD funded building. And the manager says that he has too much stuff. He’s a pack rat. But he has been moving stuff away, but management and lawyers are coming and now he’s facing…he has to go to court again. So he’s always asking is that an issue of human rights?
Edward Watkins:
Well that depends on what the motive of what the landlord is actually doing to the individual, whether he’s basing his decision on ethnicity or their age, their sex, their race. Those become violations. In a landlord/tenet housing court scenario, it’s a little bit different because that takes in different laws and statutes and it may not by a violation of human rights or civil rights.
Most housing courts do not get into human rights/civil rights issues. They’ll get into the lease, the tenet, if they owe, violations or whatever, so that you don’t really end up with the civil rights part of it, unless it’s raised somehow by the attorney representative or whatever. Then you still have to have a trial of facts, probably by the judge.
They would still have the right at the termination of that proceeding to come to us and raise the human rights/civil rights aspect of that particular case. But again, we would then have to see what’s the basis for why the landlord is doing what they’re doing. And if it’s a HUD program that’s even better at enforcing their federal rights.
Audience Member:
I think he’s not sure.
Edward Watkins:
He should come in, because that’s the purpose of sitting down in an interview. The interview will either bring out the facts about what the violation may or may not be. If it’s not a violation, then we immediately tell them, no this does not appear to be a violation of law, but we may know what other agencies may have jurisdiction that we can refer them too. We often do referrals.
Audience Member:
I just have one question for you. In terms of your workload, how are you going about recruiting them? And then for you, you had mentioned the unfair funding to Chinatown. If you could talk a little bit more about that. I know the thing about the borders of Canal, but are there other things? And I know the comparison of Wall St. and Chinatown, but in particular are you talking about a specific fund or a district?
Renata Huang:
I had a really tough time, thinking where am I going to find them. So I went first to the unemployment lines. Eventually, because the Department of Labor came in and gave a million dollars to Chinatown, specifically for job training. So the answer to the Chinatown Manpower Project as well as the Chinese American Planning Council. So the Planning Council had for 14 years created a new way – a new avenue for garment workers, which is a home care attending. So I covered a class, and from that class, I got to know some students, and I’ve been following a couple students there.
In the Manpower Project, there’s a nails class, where every day the students take the subway up to the Bronx to take a class in doing nails. It’s mostly Hispanic and African American people. They both graduated from the classes. The classes ended a couple of weeks ago and so far it’s been tough. It’s been really hard. They’ve been faced with…June 15th is the last day they can get their unemployment checks.
So as far as following families and again really focusing on community based organizations, I definitely tried to get away from just focusing on Chinese people because we’re Asian American and we really can’t forget that. I think due to sheer population and the number of Chinese people I think it’s very easy to go and cover stories about Chinese people, especially because of the socioeconomic so diverse, versus say Koreans or Japanese. But anyway, I found a Korean family and I found a Pilipino family through various different MBOs.
Wendy Chung:
Actually there have been a lot of issues that have focused on Chinatown as far as government money is concerned. I talked about one of them – FEMA. FEMA drew the arbitrary line on Canal St. South of Canal St. you can get some of the money. Above Canal St., no. So as I said earlier, Chinatown’s been split up now. A lot of the factories are north of Canal St., and also a lot Chinese people work in factories and they don’t have their fair share as far as the government is concerned.
Recently there was an example of Chinatown being treated unfairly. I don’t know if you know LMDC? Recently they gave out money for repaving the streets and roads in Lower Manhattan. And they ignored the Chinatown area. Other parts of Lower Manhattan they put in a lot of money into repaving the streets, but Chinatown doesn’t get any money at all.
Some of the issues, like the testing of air, Chinatown just doesn’t touch the radius. I have been to a seminar given by the Department of Health, and I asked them how many times they tested the air in Chinatown. They only did once and they said that they only chose one location. They didn’t even specify what location. But that’s the only location that they took a sample of air to test.
This is another example. A lot of those community boards, they have been attending a lot of hearings – town hall meetings and meetings in City Hall. Let your voices out. Ask them to increase Chinatown’s money. Because more federal money is coming, so now is the time that they draw plans for how the money will be used. At this stage, if people cannot get them to make the addition to include Chinatown, the rebuilding of Chinatown will be very difficult.
Audience Member:
I think that’s where I’m a little confused. Because looking at Chinatown and everyone’s talking about rebuilding Chinatown and I don’t necessarily see – and this is probably a very politically incorrect statement to make – but I don’t see how it was broken. I see that definitely the fact that the frozen zone was south of Canal and traffic was really awful, and we have maybe forty garment factories that closed down. But even to this day, I’m visiting a lot of factories and the last couple of months, the season has come back and a lot of people are getting jobs.
Of course a lot of people are not. The displaced workers say they don’t want to go back to a situation where they’re working three days a week. They say forget about it. But I’ve been asking that question: Of the forty factories that closed down, are they above Canal or are they below canal, and I cant get an answer from anybody in Chinatown. So it seems to me as if there seems to be…Chinatown has always been having problems due to its immigration and congestion.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, you’re dealing with a situation where you have a giant hole at Ground Zero, and it’s really a situation, I think, about what needs to be rebuilt as far as infrastructure at Ground Zero and Chinatown. So it’s very difficult then to even have an idea of how to rebuild Chinatown because it was not broken in that sense.
Wendy Chung:
I don’t know if you have read the research paper of Asian American Federation? They have a big book about how Chinatown is hurt after September 11th, in terms of the different industries – garment industry, restaurant industry, jewelry, tourism and even health issues. I think that was a very important document.
Audience Member:
But we have to remember that the document was done and surveys were taken at a certain time. It was right after 9/11. They also admit in the report, that’s why it’s an interim report, they’re coming out with another one. It’s been how many months now since 9/11 and for a time frame, that was awful. There’s no doubt about it that after 9/11 for three months that was awful. And there’s probably no doubt that it’s not 100% normal. I go to shops and restaurants and I see Chinatown for a lot of Caucasians that live around there, they don’t understand what you’re talking about. And when I speak to people in restaurants, they tell me it’s about 80% and they still complain because they want it to be 100%, but they understand.
Another thing I want to add is that Paul at 32 Mott St. is a real spokesperson for Chinatown and he told me that there was a little delegation of businesspeople who went to D.C. to complain about what was happening. He said he was all ready to tell the people over there how awful his situation was and the fact that he was down 50%, and he said, I was with people who basically had their entire business schlep completely. They can’t even enter their stores anymore. And I had absolutely nothing to say. I kept my mouth shut the whole time because nothing was hurt. Not even one little knickknack in my shop was hurt.
So again, I think it’s easy to have the knee-jerk reaction of you’ve got to help Chinatown, but at the same time, if we’re ever going to get out of our ethnic mentality, we’ve really got to step up and become American and say let’s be responsible for ourselves.
Audience Member:
Actually also education. In the area of the grants, there’s the same thing. It used to be that there were some minority oriented grants. He says no longer do we have to give an outcome based on what you get. What is your outcome?
I think we have to have a certain data or something that you can go with it and tell people, this is happening, therefore we have to get something. And I think that’s also a process of education. We have to learn the procedure and protocol and we have to play with that kind of protocol. I think the leadership here, we can ask them to go to educate the people on how to maneuver the political situation and financial situation in this country.
Edward Watkins:
I just have to say one thing. For the purposes of funding or grants or money coming into a particular community, from what I’ve heard just being around in the workshops, for whatever agencies that grants funds and monies, there is an office of Civil Rights. Education, Health and Human Services, whether it’s the Department of Education – all of them have offices of civil rights in their agencies. And where you feel that either your community – and based on what I see with these vast amounts of reports and researches, it sounds to me that they haven’t read any reports.
Based on the presentations, you have ample information or data, and you might need some more to absolutely make a case that your community is being denied funds, to make a civil rights case out of it. I’m not saying, why don’t you just go out and frivolously do anything, but whether it’s air quality to health to mental…
If you’re not getting a piece of that apple pie to help your constituency or to help your citizens who have been effected by 9/11 – whether it’s health, employment, civil rights, housing, you have to stand up to the plate, research your rights, document it…you’ve got enough scientists running around here doing reports and documentation on the facts of 9/11 on Chinatown and your community that you should have ample information to make a case to any government agency as to why you’ve been denied due process of federal funds, or state or city funds, to bring it in. But not to just go out and take a shotgun approach to it and hope it lands somewhere. Because, again, we’re here and we’re playing by the rules of whatever the game is and we have to master those particular if it’s going to benefit one’s community, whether it’s black, white, Asian, whatever. That’s all I have to say.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
One more question.
Audience Member:
I thought I had a question for Renata, but now after hearing you speak maybe I don’t have a question. Maybe we have a difference of correction. I’m Robert Lee. I’m with the Asian American Arts Center. I think there’s one thing missing in this conference and other ones that have been held about 9/11, and it was pointed to by Alex Chu this morning, when he said that what this whole event has shown is that Chinatown is unplugged. It’s not plugged in. We can’t get our story across. That’s the biggest thing. He didn’t have a story for that. But I believe that the time has come for culture and the arts in Chinatown.
This is the biggest asset that we have, that we have over looked. Other institutions, like the Guggenheim utilize the Chinese culture and other Asian cultures to make a big change in the economic well being of Soho or other places, yet we ignore it. If we’re going to pull our community together, we have to focus on the arts. I just want to let you know.
We’re doing this big thing with NYU. We’re having a conference to talk about these things with the political leaders of Washington D.C., the Borough President and other political leaders. It’s a big expedition of what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years. I’m showing 80 artists out of the 1,000 Asian artists that we have shown. I do want you to know about that.
I’m bringing this up because culture has been missing from conferences like this. What the arts can do for our community has been missing from conferences like this. The closest this conference has gotten to this, I thought, was to invite Renata here. However, I think that in your bringing stories in English, to the American public and to Asian Americans, and the way you do is different from the way…I didn’t get your name? Wendy, how you bring stories, because you’re bringing them in Chinese. But what Alex was saying was we’re unplugged, we’re not connected. And to get connected, we need to be able to tell our stories across our ethnic borders.
Now you’re saying that we have to get our of our ethnic borders, but I’m thinking that I have to get into my ethnicity and therefore share it with the larger community that hasn’t got an idea about what that is. When you bring out those human nature stories about victims, about people who get can’t get a job, Americans might listen to the films that you make and then hear the humanity in our Asianess. But then they also take note of those different characteristics – those Asian, and they think oh they’re Chinese. But deeper than that are the differences between their Jewish humanity or Protestant humanity, and our Chinese humanity and that to me is the biggest question that we present to the United States.
To me, the presence of Asians in the United States presents this question. They’re all freaked out about it and they don’t know what to do about it in the same way that they don’t know what to do about Islamic people, people from the Middle East, and that’s why we have all these conflicts in the world. My feeling is that we need to address these conflicts of the world, face up to them and apply them not only to the well being of our community, but to the well being of ourselves. That’s how culture works. I would hope that when you do those stories, or when you do your stories that you would realize that we’re unplugged largely – not because we don’t stand up for our rights that are there for us – but largely because we’re not getting our story out to people who don’t hear it in their terms, in the terms of their humanity to be able to understand our humanity. So I just wanted to get this out because we as an organization have been there for 27 years (30 years if you count the basement).
We are going to make a push because if there is any time that Chinatown is going to get united, maybe it’s now. We’re going to make a push starting with this conference and afterwards we’re going to see the role of the arts in changing the economy of Chinatown, in changing the way we perceive ourselves and how we should be in the United States, what we should be concerned about – not just how much money we earn, not just how whether we’re getting the rights we deserve, but whether we’re being understood as human beings, and being accepted as human beings, and being able to share with human beings who are different from us and who then understand who we are.
Dr. Hiroko Karan:
Thank you for your comments. And thank you to all the presenters.
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