Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I've written before about how Asians tend to overassimilate, since their ancestral cultures emphasize conformity. But of all the Asian ethnic groups in the United States, Japanese Americans are the ones who have assimilated the most. They have the greatest percentage of outmarriage of all the Asian American ethnic groups, and this is true for both men and women. Japanese Americans have married primarily white and Chinese Americans.

There are a number of reasons why their community is disappearing. Although the JA community has been in the US for a hundred years, it hasn't had a constant influx of immigrants, like the Chinese American or Filipino American communities. As a result, most Japanese Americans are third, fourth and fifth generation.

But a big factor in the assimilation of the JA community was, of course, World War II and the internment camps. Being marked as an enemy based on your eye shape had profound effects on the psyches of many Japanese Americans that have lasted generations later.

Prior to World War II, there was a huge Japanese American community on the West Coast. The relocation had removed this community, and when the war was over, the JA community dissipated across the United States. Very few returned to the West Coast.

In an effort to mitigate post-war animosity that would result when Japanese Americans were reintroduced back into mainstream society, the War Relocation Authority told the JA community three things:

1) Don't go back to the West Coast to live.
2) Don't cluster together.
3) Assimilate as much as possible and don't call attention to your Japanese heritage.

The trauma of internment had stripped the JA community of cultural pride and knowledge. When you don't have a proud cultural heritage to give you strength and perspective, then you're more prone to being influenced by the greater society, who may not have your needs in mind.

Read More

Reader Mail: Yuk! Don't Train When You're Sick

"Hi James,

"I recently purchased the second volume of your book and have been following the Density/Decompression program, and thus far I've seen some great results. A few days ago however I caught the flu and have been unable to get to the gym to complete the second week of the decompression phase. I figure I will have been out of commission for an entire week once I get over this sickness.

"I was wondering how you suggest I work back into the rhythm of the program? Should I carry on with a second week of decompression as though nothing had happened, or should I begin a new density phase?

"Thanks for your time! I really appreciate your blog as a resource. I would also add that as a person of Asian descent, I appreciate your contribution (whether conscious or not) towards breaking down stereotypes of the typical Asian male."

-Philippe


My Answer: If you're sick, then don't workout. If you are sick or injured, then your primary concern is recovery. When you do recover, simply resume the decompression phase. This will serve as a nice break-in period to get you re-acclimated to working out again.

It is not uncommon for people to get sick from training, especially if the training stimulus is new. If you train longer than an hour and you do this repeatedly on a poor diet, then yes, your immunity will be compromised. The other reason exercise sometimes gets you sick is that a lot of toxins are located in your fat stores, so when those fat stores are broken down, the toxins get released into your bloodstream.

By the way Philippe, thanks for the kind words. Part of the reason I wrote Strength and Physique Volumes One and Two was to share with my readers solid information on how to crack the hypertrophy code. If you've done your homework in the gym and with your diet, and you want to take your physique to the next level, then my books will show you how. All lifters who love bodybuilding, Asian or not, should have this knowledge.

When I started my Strength and Physique Blog and wrote my magazine and online articles, I wasn't looking to break stereotypes about the weak Asian male. I just had a love for bodybuilding and strength training.

But I've gotten so many comments, similar to yours, about how it's great to see an athletic-looking Asian male. I'm quite honored and quite humbled that my peers would see me as somewhat of a role model. All Asian males, however, have the potential to be the best at something and to represent our tribe in a good light. By sharing what I know with you guys, you can all reach your physique potential, as long you workout consistently and intelligently.

Strength training is my expertise. Do your Asian brothers a favor and share your expertise. This way we can all be role models for our community.

Read More

A trip into Angel Island's past

SOURCE: Mercury News

Don Lee was 11 years old and recovering from seasickness when the SS President Coolidge anchored in San Francisco Bay in the summer of 1939. He had spent weeks in the luxury liner's steerage on the voyage from Hong Kong, struggling to sleep beside the rumbling of the ship's engine.

His journey would soon take a frightening detour.

Immigration officials boarded the Coolidge, separated Lee from his grandfather and ferried the boy and several dozen other immigrants to Angel Island. Here, he was detained in a bunk room behind barbed wire, with frequent interruptions for interrogations about his family lineage and his tiny village in southern China.

"They asked me where did I live, and then they have a diagram of the house. Who's the closest neighbor? Who are your relatives?" recalled Lee, now 81, on a tour of the newly renovated Angel Island Immigration Station, a multimillion-dollar project. "It's designed to trip you up. The whole aim of the immigration system there was to reject. Instead of Ellis Island, which was to welcome you, it was really designed to discourage you."

Now, for the first time in more than three years, the public can catch a glimpse of what life was like for Lee and tens of thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other immigrants from Asia who passed through the Angel Island station from 1910 through the early 1940s.

Much has been lost: The administration building is gone, burned down along with most of its records in a 1940 fire. A row of staff cottages designed by architect Julia Morgan was destroyed long ago in a training exercise for Marin County firefighters. One of the four original palm trees died, and the old pier can't accept new boats.

But after this major renovation on the surviving detention barracks, park officials say they hope they have created a new and improved window into California's immigration history.

Oakland-based museum designer Daniel Quan helped chart the years-long project to turn the immigration station into a more effective and accessible learning tool.

"You start to paint a picture, much in the same way you might put a film together," Quan said. "You're trying to tell a story."

Like many Chinese immigrants who passed through Angel Island, Quan's father never told his children about his time there as a 13-year-old. After his death, Quan found his father's name, and records of his three-week detention, in government rolls.

The father never looked back at an experience seen as a stigma, spending a short time in school before going to work as a butcher's apprentice and beginning a new life.

Lee, who now lives in Concord, told a similar story.

On Angel Island, he would spend nights in a room full of bunks that was tucked into the slope of a wooded hill and surrounded by barbed wire. In the daytime, he said, the bright ceiling lights shone a harsh glow on the gloom that surrounded him, while illuminating the remnants of poems inscribed on the walls decades earlier.

He played with wooden blocks he brought with him on the voyage, or he took rare opportunities to breathe fresh air in a tiny, fenced-in outdoor recreation spot.

His detention lasted about three weeks, and then he settled into American life — so different from his tiny village in southern China. He would grow to enjoy the United States, learning English in its public schools, obtaining an engineering degree from the University of California-Berkeley, serving in the Army and raising a family here.

In the years after the Gold Rush and a demand for railroad labor sparked a huge wave of mid-19th-century Chinese immigration, race-tinged fears about job competition and assimilation fueled a growing anti-Chinese movement in state and federal politics and newspapers. Congress passed a law in 1882 to prohibit any more Chinese laborers.

That same year, a record 40,000 Chinese immigrants entered the United States as part of a rush to beat the ban before it took effect. By the late 1880s, the number of Chinese immigrants entering the country each year dropped to the double and triple digits. It would be another century, in the early 1980s, before annual Chinese immigration came close to and eventually surpassed the numbers reached before 1883.

Angel Island was not the first Bay Area facility designed to restrict Asian immigration, according to Robert Barde, the author of "Immigration at the Golden Gate" and deputy director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at UC-Berkeley. But it has become a vivid symbol of a 60-year era of exclusion because it is the only place where the buildings have survived.

Immigrants from Europe and elsewhere traveled through the island in smaller numbers, but their visits were typically much shorter and they slept and ate in separate sections.

Before the station's 1910 opening, detained immigrants were held in a cramped facility along the city's wharf, or sometimes in a floating prison of available merchant ships docked at the shore. The new island facility was at first seen as a major improvement, but was soon found to be a fire trap, with poor ventilation, terrible bathrooms, a lack of fresh water and intractable problems of bureaucratic graft.

Bard said that for today's Angel Island visitor, soaking in the bay views, "it doesn't seem like such a bad place. But you know that in the afternoon, you're going to leave. For a lot of people, they had no idea how long they were going to be there. I think that's what really weighed on people."

Despite significant hurdles, most of those who landed on Angel Island were able to stay in the country, Quan said. Those ordered deported appealed the rulings, and many appeals were eventually accepted. Government documents researched by Bard document how one Chinese woman, whose "alleged husband" was a legal immigrant, was detained for more than 600 days before the government finally let her free in San Francisco.

"There was no great calamity that happened as a result of these people immigrating," Quan said. "There was no real reason to go to those extremes."

State park officials say they hope the improved museum, when it becomes ready to again accommodate school, self-guided and group trips this spring, sparks interest from Bay Area residents, including descendants of the many immigrants who passed through the "Guardian of the Golden Gate."

Berkeley resident Buck Gee, a retired engineer, said that after his father's death, his family discovered a "cheat book" the immigrant had brought with him on the voyage to San Francisco. It was a sign that the father was most likely a "paper son," one who memorized invented details about his heritage so he could circumvent exclusionary laws. Like the Quan family, the Gees never discussed the island.

"There was shame, I think, some fear," Gee said. "The Chinese who came through Angel Island, they just wanted to bury it."

Gee helped lead a private tour of the state park last month for fellow members of the Silicon Valley-based Asia America MultiTechnology Association. Elizabeth Xu, making her first visit to the island with her husband and two young sons, was struck by the sorrow, but also by the literary skill reflected in the poems she read on the walls.

"He says it looks very pretty here but it's a cage for him," Xu said, interpreting one Chinese detainee's poem. "He felt that even though he's a very capable person, he couldn't do anything about the situation. He felt hopeless."

For most of her American life, Xu said she did not think twice about the Chinese immigrants who arrived decades ago. With few complications, she arrived from Beijing as an immigrant in 1990.

"It makes me really appreciate the generations before us," she said.

Read More

Young at Heart, Mature in Mind

I've been faking adulthood for 20 years. Seriously, I can't believe some of the adult stuff that I'm doing right now: owning a house, having a career, marrying my beautiful and loving wife, attending department meetings, etc. Sometimes I'm sitting in those meetings in the office, and I think to myself, "Damn, these old guys want MY opinion? Don't they know I just graduated college 16 years ago?"

The best way to be happy and wise is to be young at heart, mature in mind. This means you got to have a childlike attitude, where you're flexible, full of imagination and creativity. But you've also got to develop the skills of your mind. To do this, you have to accumulate more varied experiences, to develop your talents and your mental resiliency.

Dream like a child, focus like an adult. Some people have it the other way around: they've got the mental skills of a high school freshman who hates school, but the attitude of a crochety 74 year old man sitting on his porch with a shotgun.

On the other hand, there's a couple of guys that I work with who seem to be in a state of arrested emotional development. They have a passion for simple things in life: food, strong coffee and good conversation with friendly company. And they constantly long for the 1980's.

And yet, they seem rather happy, despite their lack of planning. One guy lives in a studio apartment in a shady part of town with hardly anything saved up in his bank account, but he doesn't seem to care. He lives his life outside, in the hustle and bustle. He has coffee and lunch with friends, he loves many women and he plans a trip or 2 every year. He sees and experiences the world, everywhere from Mongolia, Japan and the Philippines to London and Amsterdam.

Times are tough right now, no doubt. But if you're in-between jobs, then see it as an opportunity to get in touch with your inner child and to develop your mind. When I graduated college, it was in the middle of a horrible recession. I had no job prospects and a lot of time on my hands.

So what did I do? I developed myself. I went to the library and devoured a book every week on every topic that interested me. I started working out for the first time and became so engrossed with bodybuilding, that I read everything I could about diet and training. I started writing, fiction and non-fiction. I taught myself HTML to start a website. I traveled and went to Hong Kong and China to see my grandparents for the first time, and I got a better sense of my family history.

All things that happen in life are opportunities to develop yourself, but so are all things that YOU make happen. Be young at heart, mature in mind.

Read More

Sibling Dynamics on the Amazing Race

So last Sunday's Amazing Race episode was interesting. Yeah, it showed the usual breakdown of relationships under extreme duress. But this episode was interesting, because it showcased more of Tammy and Victor Jih and their slightly dysfunctional sibling dynamic. Here's a brief recap from Entertainment Weekly:

"On paper, Tammy and Victor are one of the smartest teams we've had on the race, and yet they made a huge blunder by aimlessly climbing a mountain while following the wrong markers. Victor simply refused to listen to Tammy. He'll have to change his approach pretty quickly if they want to stay in this race."

Victor was adamant that they were following the right path, while Tammy felt it was the wrong path, but just went along anyway with her brother's stupid and costly decision. They fell from a commanding first place lead to second to last place, which is really last place (since the team that comes in last place gets eliminated).

I hate to say this, but I think a lot of Asians are like Tammy: they aren't confident enough in their beliefs or decisions to intervene when they need to. What good is being smart if you don't act on that intelligence? Tammy knew she was right and her brother was wrong, and yet they trekked nearly half the episode up the wrong path.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh with Tammy, because many people (not just Asians) just go with flow and don't stand up for what they believe to be right. Like the saying goes, "Bad things happen when good people do nothing."

Racism happens, because "good people" do nothing. If a racist act was perpetrated against Black people, then most people would denounce it, because they were taught to do so. If a racist act was perpetrated against Asian people, however, then most "good people" (white, black and Asian) would not say anything or do anything. They simply were not taught how to react to such a situation. They may know it was wrong, but they just weren't confident enough to articulate that it was wrong.

So Tammy's lesson is a lesson for all of us: go with your convictions. If you recognize that you or someone else is going down the wrong path, then nip it in the bud. Don't wait until it's too late, and you've paid a hefty price.

Read More