Why Are So Many Asian Americans Democrats?

While perusing through my sample California election ballot I couldn't help but notice that every Asian American who is running for office is a Democrat. Maybe it's because I'm living in a state where virtually every elected office is held by a Democrat. The AA's just happen to know who is on the winning side here and declare themselves a liberal to get elected. Is that too cynical? Or are left winged liberals really the political philosphy amongst AA's?

I would think that most Asian Americans would belong on the conservative Republican party. After all, most Asians hold pretty conservative, family oriented, business friendly views of society. We still believe in a nuclear family. Illegitimate births are still frowned upon. We hold strong views about crime. If we had our way, Singapore would be the model the U.S. should emulate when it comes to punishing criminals.

AA's have the highest income of any racial group in America. Many of us are entrepreneurial, owning small businesses. We want less business regulations that will impede our ability to make a good income. And don't even get me started on Asians and their attitudes towards taxes. To state it simply, the less taxes the better. In Asia, avoiding paying taxes is elevated to an art. My father's entire retirement and estate plans revolve around giving as little money to the government as possible.

Yet many AA's identify themselves as Democrats. Perhaps we have become too successful and comfortable in America that now we can focus on societal issues. Yes we are all for a cleaner environment, especially true for Asians who come from the grossly polluted cities in China. Many of us also believe in the right to have an abortion as that is considered a mainstay of birth control over there and people don't have any moral qualms about it. We don't understand why Americans have to have so many guns. Seems like having fewer guns around would make for a more peaceful society.

Is it a generational divide? The younger Asians have been raised so comfortably by their hard working parents that they now have time to indulge in comfortable issues like global warming. Many haven't had to scramble desperately for their next dollar like the past generations have had to do. And since most of the older AA's don't or can't vote while their children and grandchildren do, this will skew the politics of AA's towards liberalism.

Too bad the two party political system in the U.S. forces people to choose the lesser of two evils. I think most Asian Americans are really libertarians. But since people won't vote for a candidate that's unlikely to win, the young AA's vote with their hearts while the older AA's watch in benign amusement at the naivete of their offsprings.

I Hate Chinese Drivers.

Sometimes the stereotypes are true--Chinese people are the worst drivers. As a Chinese-American I've seen many near accidents and rude behavior committed by Chinese drivers through the streets of Southern California, particularly the San Gabriel Valley. It is not uncommon for you to be waiting for a car to pull out of a parking spot while you have your turn signal on to indicate that slot is yours when at the last second a Chinese driver pulls into it. All the horn honking and dirty glares won't do anything. I've seen fistblows right there in the parking lot because of such incidents.

Then there was the time I saw a fire engine, with sirens blazing, come up to a four way intersection. The truck was facing a red light and was slowly inching its way through the intersection. A Chinese driver, facing the green light, decided he had the right of way and drove through, cutting off the fire truck. You should have seen the nasty stares the firemen gave him. But he was on the other side and on his merry way.

Then over Labor Day Weekend, I nearly got into a physical fight with a Chinese driver. We were driving out of the underground parking garage at the 99 Ranch Market in Alhambra. Just as we were almost out, the car in front of me suddenly stops. He gestures for me to back up. I was thinking, did he change his mind and want to go back down into the garage? I motioned for him to go forward as he needed to go out and come back in through the entrance ramp. He honks his horn at me. I honked back.

The Chinese man then gets out of his car and starts yelling at me in Chinese through my car window. I yelled back at him in English. He starts pointing at his car. I'm thinking maybe he was having car trouble. I point to all the cars behind me and that I can't back up. More yelling and pointing continue. Finally he sees the futility of the situation then proceeds down the line and tells everybody to back up, which is not easy since the ramp is curving and very narrow with high walls on both sides.

When we had all backed up a few feet, he gets back into his car. He rolls down the ramp a couple of feet then suddenly, starts his car. He then takes off out of the garage. I was dumbstruck. What the hell was that all about? I thought he was having car problems. I thought he wanted to get back into the garage. Without even an acknowledgement of gratitude, he drives off leaving a line of drivers fuming in the garage. I hate Chinese drivers.

Wondering About White People--Hirsutism

Continuing my random train of thoughts about caucasian folks. I wonder what it's like to be so hairy. White people are probably more hirsute than anybody else on earth. Many black and hispanic populations aren't nearly as hairy as whites. In fact, many are nearly as hairless as Asians. When I say hairless, I don't mean lack of axillary or groin hair which everybody has once they develop puberty. I'm talking about the thick mat of hair white people have on their chests, back, arms, and legs, but who surprisingly also seem to bald quite early and often.

Take a look at this picture of my forearm. No, I didn't shave or wax it. It's au naturel, with not a visible hair on the skin. If you look really closely, like with a magnifying glass, you can see very fine and short strands of hair there but nothing like the thick hair you see on many white people.

What is it like to be living in a house full of hairy people? Are there strands of people hair all over the house like pet hair on the furniture of owners of cats and dogs? My shower drain clogs up pretty easily with hair from my head if I don't put a filter over it. Do white people's drains clog that much faster from all the hair that falls off their bodies when they bathe?

And what is it like to shave your body? I can understand shaving facial hair as I've done that for decades. But to shave your chest and back? Or worse to wax them like the "40 Year Old Virgin"? How do you reach all the different curves and crevices of the body to shave all that surface area. Don't the blades wear down pretty quickly doing that? Since white people seem to grow their facial hair faster than most Asians (I only need to shave my face once every two days while many white people I know have to shave twice a day) doesn't it get tedious to do this all the time? Seems like a pretty laborious task to me.

Isn't it funny how white people spend money to get rid of the hair on their torsos then spend even more money to plant hair on the top of their heads? Why can't they be happy with the hair distribution that God gave them? I don't see too many Asians getting hair transplants. I don't think Asians are nearly that vain. Balding is just a natural part of aging and we understand that and don't try to hide that fact. Except my father who decided to do a combover once he started going bald. That is something no men should ever do. Go proud and go bald. At least we don't ever have to waste money getting a painful wax job on our chests.

Wondering About White People--Visual Fields

I was reading with some bemusement, and annoyance, a recent post in 8Asians. It highlighted what I suppose is a common question among white folks--do Asians have poor peripheral vision, or more specifically vertical peripheral vision. With our smaller eyes, we must not be able to see as much up and down as people with round eyes, right? One ignoramous even had the audacity to ask if Asians see in widescreen, you know, with letterbox blackouts at the top and bottom of our vision.

While I can irrefutably answer that, no, Asians don't see in widescreen, I have to admit I've always wondered about what white people see out of their eyes. With their deep inset eye sockets and prominent supraorbital ridge, do they ever feel like they are peeking out from under a hat all the time? It's a wonder so many white men wear baseball caps since they seem to have a natural sun shade over their eyes everywhere they go. By contrast when I'm out in the sun, I have to squint pretty badly, accentuating my "small" eyes since the sun has easy access to my optic nerves.

The large brow also seems to helpful during exercise or while taking a shower. While my sweat just naturally rolls down my forehead directly onto my eyelids, white people's perspiration seem to dangle off their brows then drip off without ever contacting and irritating their corneas. It's like having a large roof eaves that keep rain from splashing on windows.

Then what about that huge schnoz at the center of the face. I can barely see my own nose without a mirror if I do an extreme cross eye. Then I just barely catch a glimpse of the tip. But what do white people see? With their eyes set way back and a huge protruberence between them, does the nose ever get in the way of their sight? I mean, when driving a car and you pass by another car, does the car disappear from view behind the nose?

Finally, we have all seen sports players rub blackout on their cheeks. I assume that is to reduce glare from the sun as it reflects off their cheekbones and into their eyes. Since most Asians eyes are almost perfectly even with their cheeks, that has never been a problem for me. Of course that also led to relentless taunts of "flatface" in high school. But that is besides the point.

So while white people may have questions about Asians' eyes, we too have many questions about how caucasians can possibly see well out of those deeply embedded eyeballs. I personally would rather have my eyes front and center without anything obstructing their function.

NBC's Eurocentric Coverage Of The Opening Ceremony Makes Me Mad.

I've been sitting in front of the TV for nearly three hours. It is now almost midnight. I'm eagerly awaiting the entrance of the Taiwanese (Chinese Taipei) team into Olympic Stadium. In the meantime I've had to suffer through the seemingly endless list of nations I've never heard of march past my screen. Comoros?

As we wind down the S's, I can see on the convenient little ticker at the bottom of the screen that Taiwan is coming up. I just need to get past Syria and we're there. After the commentators make some useless observations about the civil war in that country, the Taiwanese team starts entering the left side of my TV. Then..we cut to a commercial. What the hell?

Taiwan doesn't have a small team. They are entering 44 athletes at the Olympics. Yet they are not given the live face time awarded much smaller countries like Liechtenstein and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Now that I think about it, I think virtually every Western European country was shown live while most of the countries given snippets of video were non-Western. Some Eastern countries are too big for NBC to ignore. Of course they had to show China and India. With a combined population of over 2 billion people they don't want to piss off a third of the world's population.

Though Taiwan is small country, it is one of the United States' largest trading partners. The little island is so important to us that we actually have a law that mandates our protection of Taiwan from its larger neighbor, even by war if necessary. Yet NBC made us sit through images of the beautiful people from tiny countries like Monaco and Luxembourg while ignoring Taiwan, a small country with a real chance of winning medals in multiple sports, okay badminton and table tennis.

So NBC, since you have a monopoly on airing the Olympics in the U.S., it is your duty to show all the diversity of countries that participate at this illustrious event. Even though most of your directors and cameramen are Caucasian, please give smaller non-Western countries some more screen time. Who knows? You might actually attract more viewers to your expensive programming.

Ted And The Paranoia Of Reading Asian American Blogs

Asian American blogs are great. They are wonderful resources that I wish I had when I was growing up. Being raised in the Midwest, I had no clue about the events affecting AA's around the country. There was a distinct feeling of isolation, as if I was the only person going through this Asian American reality. Now there is a whole universe of websites and blogs posted by other AA's who I can relate to and gain insight into my own experience.

However be careful what you wish for. Blogs like Angry Asian Man publicize the wonderful achievements of AA's but they also frequently write about the ugly side of discrimination in America. Whether the discrimination is overt or intentional, this steady torrent of racist acts against AA's soon started making me paranoid. Did somebody just make a racist remark to me at work? Was I passed up for a promotion because I'm Asian? Did somebody just cut me off on the road because I'm not white? Or are all these feelings just in my head and I'm overthinking situations?

I recently saw the movie Ted. I loved that movie. I hadn't laughed so hard in the theater in a long time. There is a scene in the movie though that made me feel uncomfortable. During the party scene, Flash Gordon punches a hole in the apartment wall clear through to the adjacent apartment. Who is on the other side? An Asian dude holding a live duck. He starts screaming at the partiers in thick Chinglish claiming he was about to cook the duck for dinner. Mayhem ensues. Granted Seth MacFarlane's claim to fame is his offensive humor directed at all races, religions, and sexual orientation. See his TV show "Family Guy" for an example. But during "Ted" I couldn't help but laugh self-consciously and uncomfortably at the chaos on screen. Isn't this a little too racist for the 2010's. Would the audience laugh as hard if they showed a black person getting ready to eat fried chicken?

I used to laugh at Asian characters in other movies that are now considered racist. Remember the infamous Long Duk Dong in "Sixteen Candles"? The play on Asian sounding names as well as his foreignness are clearly there to get cheap laughs from a Western audience. Another famous Asian movie person was the Japanese guy Takashi in "Revenge of the Nerds." Again, his obvious foreign accent and cluelessness about Americans is played for laughs.

Funny I never felt funny about laughing at those characters, along with the audience, at that time. I never realized how racist movie parts can be hurtful. It was not until I watched "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" that I first saw how racist Hollywood could be. Bruce was sitting in the theater with his white girlfriend watching "Breakfast at Tiffany" when one of the most racist movie roles ever put on screen appeared, Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi. With his pulled back eyelids, buck teeth, and thick accent, this was the equivalent of wearing blackface in its horrible depiction of another race. While the white movegoers laughed, Bruce Lee sat cold silent. His girlfriend was laughing too until she looked over at him and realized how terrible this Mr. Yunioshi made somebody feel about themselves. That's the first time I can remember understanding racism in popular media.

Now with Asian American blogs documenting racism all over the place, I feel like I'm always on the lookout for racism. Is it better that we are now more sensitive about hurting the sensibilities of other races? Yes. Does it make my life better knowing that racism is all around us and otherwise intelligent people still make racist acts, whether intentional or not? No. I just get inflamed over something that sometimes maybe I should just forget instead of allowing it to mentally fester in my head for hours or days afterwards. Can't somebody write happy Asian blogs?

Yellow Peril In Olympic Uniforms

I'm not sure what to make of the current controversy over the U.S. Olympic uniforms. When it was discovered that the uniforms were made in China, even though they were designed by American Ralph Lauren, the political class went into a frenzy. Trying to emphasize their patriotic credentials during an election year, some members have Congress have even called for burning the uniforms instead of allowing our players to wear them in London.

While I too wished that the uniforms were manufactured in America, I can't help feeling there is more than a bit of xenophobia and racism in this debate. This is an increasingly global economy. We wear clothes made in Vietnam and drive cars from Mexico. Our wine comes from Italy and our fruit ships from Argentina. Would the politicians be in such a furious state if the uniforms were designed by Armani and made in Italy? I don't think so. But as Americans increasingly see themselves as being on the decline and China on the ascendency, these racist attitudes are bound to become more common.

The Olympics is supposed to be a world stage where the entire planet comes to compete in a peaceful and friendly atmosphere. Let's not mar the occasion with these racist feelings.