Korea Getting Crushed Again…

Korean business feels the pinch between China and Japan

By Choe Sang-Hun

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

SEOUL: As South Korean and U.S. negotiators huddle in Seoul for make-or-break free-trade talks this week, corporate South Korea is grappling with a troubling question: How can the country avoid being crushed by competition from low-cost China and high-tech Japan?

South Korea’s fear of being caught in a nutcracker between its bigger neighbors is nothing new. Its history is largely defined by the struggle to maintain its political and cultural identity – and economic independence – from China and Japan.

But warnings over the country’s economic future have taken on an apocalyptic tone in recent months, as the jewels of South Korea’s export-driven economy – including Samsung, Hyundai and LG Electronics – all forecast declining earnings and growing competitive threats to their businesses.

“We are sandwiched,” said Lee Kun Hee, chairman of Samsung, which generates 20 percent of the country’s exports and is widely seen as the country’s most competitive conglomerate.

“China is catching up fast. Japan is racing ahead. But we are running in place. In five or six years, not only Samsung but the whole South Korea could plunge into chaos.”

In January, advisers to President Roh Moo Hyun warned that South Korean businesses were not investing aggressively enough in new facilities, even as China was enjoying an unprecedented surge of investment into new, high-tech factories making everything from cargo ships to computer chips.

By 2010, analysts say, South Korean companies will enjoy few technological advantages over China in the export sectors where they dominate today, including mobile handsets, flat-panel displays and high-end steel.

A key part of Roh’s strategy for injecting new life into the South Korean economy is simple: Achieve a free-trade agreement with the United States, something that neither Japan, with its politically powerful farmers, nor China, with its huge state-owned industries, can possibly do.

A deal with Washington would not only make South Korean exports more price-competitive in the world’s largest export market, but also enhance the country’s credibility in the eyes of foreign investors, proponents say.

A deal opening South Korea’s markets could lead to an injection of technological skills from all over the world, while weeding out moribund businesses by exposing them to direct competition at home.

But time is running out. Negotiators must clinch a deal by the end of March – Saturday – to give the U.S. Congress a mandatory 90-day review before President George W. Bush asks it to cast a straight yes-or-no vote without amendments.

Once Bush’s “fast-track” authority expires, he will find it far more difficult to push a deal through a Democratic-controlled Congress.

As the deadline looms, South Korea’s trade minister, Kim Hyun Chong, and his U.S. counterpart, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Karan Bhatia, must both step gingerly.

Missteps on the most sensitive issues – for South Korea, rice, and for the United States, beef – could kill the agreement either in South Korea’s National Assembly, whose members face elections next April, or in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress.

Viewed from abroad, it is perhaps difficult to see why South Korea is so apprehensive.

During the four years that Roh has been in office, the country’s main stock index, the Kospi, has doubled. The economy has grown at an average of 4.2 percent annually – which, although below the 9 percent annual growth rates posted during the 1990s, still compares favorably to the world’s seven largest industrialized economies, including Japan.

Exports expanded an average 19 percent annually over the period, to $326 billion last year. Per capita income is expected to pass the $20,000 milestone before Roh steps down in February 2008.

But South Koreans say their traditional strategy – a combination of quick imitation and selective innovation, enabling them to produce goods that China cannot make, at a lower cost than Japan – is failing them. The country’s “ppali ppali” – or “hurry hurry” – approach to business is losing steam, they say.

Meanwhile, Japan has emerged from a long stupor with fantastic research and development resources at its disposal, while China’s growing technological prowess is combined with labor costs that prevailed in South Korea three decades ago.

Earnings at Lee’s Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s biggest and most profitable company, slipped to 7.9 trillion won, or $8.4 billion, last year from 10.8 trillion won in 2004, as Chinese competitors gobbled up Asian market share. Net profit at LG Electronics profits plunged to 212 billion won last year from 1.5 trillion won in 2004. At Hyundai Motor, battered by labor strikes and a weak yen that made rival Japanese cars more appealing, earnings have fallen for four consecutive quarters.

South Korean corporate investment in 1996 was equal to 40 percent of gross domestic product. That ratio had plummeted to 28 percent by last year. South Korea’s trade surplus with China last year shrank by 10 percent to $21 billion, the first such fall in five years, while its trade deficit with Japan expanded by 4 percent to a record $25.3 billion.

The data, experts say, testify to the onset of obsolescence for South Korea’s role as technological middleman between China and Japan.

Corporate South Korea depends on exports of components and semifinished electronic goods to China for much of its earnings. But it still relies heavily on Japanese high-tech parts and manufacturing skill to produce those exports.

South Korea is the world’s biggest producer of computer memory chips and flat-panel displays. But Samsung, Hynix and LG.Philips factories all operate on Japanese machinery. Meanwhile, China is moving fast to build its manufacturing inputs at home – often at a cost South Korea cannot match.

“Many Korean companies are benefiting from strong demand from China,” said Tariq Hussain, the Seoul-based author of the book “Diamond Dilemma,” which assesses the economic challenges and opportunities facing South Korea. “However, as China-based capacity comes online and longer-term demand eases off, Korean manufacturers will be among the hardest hit.”

In January and February, Chinese shipyards won more orders than their South Korean counterparts for the first time, and China will soon overtake South Korea as the world’s largest shipbuilding country.

Chinese shipyards build mostly low-tech bulk vessels, while their South Korean shipbuilders focus on value-added vessels, such as mammoth container ships and liquefied natural gas carriers.

Still China’s rapid gain is “frightening,” said Kim Joon Ho, a spokesman for South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilder.

South Korea’s handicaps are not only cost-based or technological, analysts say.

“Japan has worked assiduously to reduce antagonism in the USA from industrial sectors,” said Usha Haley, professor of international business and director of the Global Business Center at the University of New Haven.

“For example, Toyota makes most of the cars it sells in the USA in this country – Korean car companies do not. Conversely, Korea has the most protected automotive market in the industrialized world, causing enormous resistance and umbrage in certain influential sectors.”

A free-trade deal with Washington could ultimately change that. But experts say South Korea needs more than open markets to rekindle innovation at home and lure new investment from abroad.

Tightened tax rules and other policy changes contributed to a 7 percent drop in foreign direct investment in South Korea to $7.2 billion in 2005, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

The free-trade agreement “is seen as a necessary evil by many Koreans, indicating the continued, deeply rooted skepticism toward opening up,” said Hussain. “It is not a panacea for Korea’s economic woes.”

Acceptance of Hapas in Asia

Since I will be the father of half Asian (specifically Japanese) children I try to keep up with how biracial/multiracial people are viewed in Asia, especially Japan. This article is pretty old but came out about the time I lived in Japan. I think it is still relevant today.

I would say that, from my experience in Asia, that Amerasians/Eurasians/AfroAsians are more accepted in the media, it is typically in the entertainment industry. Mixed race people in other segments of society, such as business or politics are very hard to come by in Asia, unless they are business people working for Western based corporations.

I will also say that Eurasians are favored over Afro-Asians because light skin is prized, especially in women…however Japan, being more progressive than most Asian countries have two Afro-Asian singers (Crystal Kay) being one that are doing quite well in the charts. Crystal Kay has been popular since 2000 or so, before that she was on a Japanese kids TV show, the only ‘hafu’ girl on there.

I would also say it helps if your dad is Asian and not your mom, because it is often assumed (especially by older Asians) if your mom is Asian she was a whore…from what I have observed with Koreans and Japanese, it goes along way to have a Asian father, to look fairly Asian, and to act very much Asian (of whatever nationality) acceptance is more likely. Many of the people above have Asian mothers, and the article talks about this, things have liberalized somewhat but I still believe that since “blood” is tracted through the father in many of these cultures it helps for the foreign ancestory to be from the mother.

---

Maggie Q (Vietnamese/British), Hong Kong ActressI love her

Sachio Kinugasa (Japanese mother/African American father), Japanese baseball player, retired.

Crystal Kay (Zainichi Korean/African American father), Japanese language singer

Willie McIntosh (Thai/Scot), Thai TV Star

Sirinya Winsiri (Thai/white), former Miss. Thailand

Asha Gill (Punjabi Indian/European), Malaysian TV Personality

Anna Umemiya (Japanese father/White American mother), Model and TV Personality

(guy on the left)Marc of Globe (Japanese father, French mother), member of defunct popular Japanese dance music group

Eiji Wentz (Japanese mother, American father), Japanese singer

Monday, Apr. 16, 2001
Eurasian Invasion
By HANNAH BEECH

We all know that fusion is hot, sizzling, more caliente than a salsa beat. It’s that multiculti urge that propels us to douse a hamburger with teriyaki sauce or buy an Armani jacket with a Nehru collar. Such marriages of East and West are a harmless intermingling of cultures: a war never started by adding a dollop of wasabi to potato chips or a bindhi to Madonna’s forehead.

But blending people is more dangerous. The world generally prefers its citizens in their own neat categories: Chinese, Japanese, Siamese. They represent the sanctity of our nation-states, our flags, our soccer teams. After all, if you’re not one or the other, what are you? If you’re, say, half Asian and half Western, where do you belong? Are you a banana: yellow on the outside and white inside? Or an egg: white on the outside and yellow inside? Or are you, as proclaimed by that most swirled of celebrities Tiger Woods, a “Cablinasian”�a Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian smattering of everything, a global progeny of an increasingly global world? And what is that, anyway?

Once, not so long ago, no one wanted to be Tiger Woods. Especially Tiger, with his cafE-au-lait complexion and American serviceman father. Today, Eurasians are the flavor du jour, not only in the U.S., where mixed-race citizens personify the American melting pot, but even more so in Asia, where race-conscious policies are often encoded in law. In Indonesia, where until recently ethnic Chinese were barred from writing in their own script, the hottest celebrities are indos, or mixed-race folks like actors Karina Suwandi and Ari Wibowo. In Bangkok, where the local skin trade has spawned a multitude of luk kreung, or half-children, the once-despised offspring now control an estimated 60% of the entertainment industry. And in Hong Kong, where the local movie business is in a slump, the one great hope isn’t white at all, but a mix of white and yellow. Fetching young Eurasian actors like Maggie Q and Karen Mok crowd the screen, and through the wonders of global distribution (and video piracy) appear everywhere from the deserts of Tunisia to the shores of the Solomon Islands. “Who better to personify the diversification of Hong Kong movies than a Eurasian actor,” says Bey Logan, a local film executive. “It’s a face that everyone can identify with and accept.”

Fusion is in, not only as an abstract fashion concept, but in that most grounded of realities: mixed-blood people who walk, talk, and produce even more multiracial progeny. Most strange of all, these hybrids are finding themselves hailed as role models for vast masses in Asia with no mixed blood at all. “When I think of Asia, I don’t necessarily think of people who look like me,” says Declan Wong, a Chinese-Dutch-American actor and producer, “But somehow we’ve become the face that sells the new Asia.”

So maybe Asia’s Eurasian craze is driven by the theories of that whitest of white men, economist Adam Smith. As the world gets smaller, we look for a global marketing mien, a one-size-fits-all face that helps us sell Nokia cell phones and Palmolive shampoo across the world. “For any business, you can’t think locally anymore,” says Paul Lau, general manager at Elite Model Management in Hong Kong, who has built up a stable of Eurasians for his internationally minded clients. “At the very least, you need to think regionally. Ideally, you should think globally.” A global image helps sell products, even if no one but Filipinos would ever want to buy duck-fetus eggs or Thais the most pungent variety of shrimp paste. Yanto Zainal, president of Macs909, a boutique ad agency in Jakarta, used all indos for a campaign for the local Matahari department store chain. “The store wanted to promote a more cosmopolitan image,” he says. “Indos have an international look but can still be accepted as Indonesian.”

Channel V, the Asia-wide music television channel, was one of the first to broadcast the message of homogenized hybridism. “We needed a messenger that would fit in from Tokyo to the Middle East,” says Jennifer Seeto, regional sales marketing manager for the channel, which began beaming its border-busting images in 1994. Star veejay Asha Gill personifies the global look. When asked what her ethnic heritage is, Gill, a Malaysian citizen, simply shrugs. “Oh, who knows,” she says. “I’m half Punjabi, mixed with some English, a little French and dribs and drabs of God knows what else.” The 29-year-old speaks crisp British English, fluent Malay, and a smidgen of Punjabi. She grew up in a Kuala Lumpur neighborhood that was mostly Chinese, attended an English-speaking school and was pals with Malay and Indian kids. Gill’s Channel V show, broadcast in English, has a strong following in Malaysia, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. “I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” she says. “My ethnicity and profession make me a global person who can’t be defined in just one category.”

Fashionistas love the new Eurasian world. Top Asian modeling agencies can’t stock enough mixed-blooded girls, and many have begun scouting for Eurasian models in Europe and the U.S. to bring back East. One of the top imports is 20-year-old Maggie Q, a Vietnamese-American who grew up in Hawaii. “When you look at Maggie, you see the whole world in her face,” says film executive Logan, who cast her in the hit flick Gen-Y Cops. “She sells because she appeals to everyone.” The publisher of Indonesia’s top-selling women’s magazine, Femina, says a cover with an indo on it sells two to three times more copies than one with a purely local model. “Indonesian women see these girls as exotic but not exactly threatening,” says Widarti Goenawan, publisher of the popular weekly. “It is an ideal to which they can aspire.” Certainly, an approachable exoticism fuels many Eurasian models’ careers. Devon Aoki, a half-Japanese and half-American concoction, has captivated London and New York catwalks with her woodblock-print features and long limbs. In Hong Kong, Ankie Lau, a half-German and half-Chinese model, wins clients because her Eastern features mix with a Western spontaneity. “The ability of Eurasian models to let go in front of the camera is very appealing to advertisers,” says Elite Model’s Paul Lau. “Asians tend to be more nervous expressing their emotions.”

Tata Young certainly knows how to let loose. Back in 1995, when she broke into Thailand’s entertainment industry at the age of 15, the pert half-Thai, half-American singer was on the forefront of the Eurasian trend. Today, the majority of top Thai entertainers are luk kreung. Now 20, Young is the first Thai to sign a contract with a major U.S. label, Warner Brothers Records (owned by AOL Time Warner, parent company of Time), which she hopes will elevate her into the Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera pantheon. Back at home, Young has to contend with a gaggle of luk kreung clones who mimic her brand of bubble-gum pop. The hottest act now is a septet called, less-than-imaginatively, Seven, and three out of seven are of mixed race.

The luk kreung crowd tend to hang tight, dining, drinking and dating together. “We understand each other,” says Nicole Terio, one of the group. “It comes from knowing what it means to grow up between two cultures.” But the luk kreung’s close-knit community and Western-stoked confidence sometimes elicits grumbles from other Thais, who also resent their stranglehold on the entertainment industry. The ultimate blow came a few years back when Thailand sent a blue-eyed woman to the Miss World competition. Sirinya Winsiri, also known as Cynthia Carmen Burbridge, beat out another half-Thai, half-American for the coveted Miss Thailand spot. “Luk kreung have made it very difficult for normal Thais to compete,” gripes a Bangkok music mogul. “We should put more emphasis on developing real Thai talent.” The Eurasians consider this unfair. “I was born in Bangkok,” says Young. “I speak fluent Thai and I sing in Thai. When I meet Westerners, they say I’m more Thai than American.” Channel V’s Asha Gill senses the frustration: “A lot of Asians despise us because we get all the jobs, but if I’ve bothered to learn several languages and understand several cultures, why shouldn’t I be employed for those skills?”

The jealous sniping angers many who suffered years of discrimination because of their mixed blood. Eurasian heritage once spoke not of a proud melding of two cultures but of a shameful confluence of colonizer and colonized, of marauding Western man and subjugated Eastern woman. Such was the case particularly in countries like the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, where American G.I.s left thousands of unwelcome offspring. In Vietnam, these children were dubbed bui doi, or the dust of life. “Being a bui doi means you are the child of a Vietnamese bar girl and an American soldier,” says Henry Phan, an Amerasian tour guide in Ho Chi Minh City. “Here, in Vietnam, it is not a glamorous thing to be mixed.” As a child in Bangkok during the early 1990s, Nicole Terio fended off rumors that her mother was a prostitute, even though her parents had met at a university in California. “I constantly have to defend them,” she says, “and explain exactly where I come from.”

Ever since Europe sailed to Asia in the 16th century, Eurasians have populated entrepots like Malacca, Macau and Goa. The white men who came in search of souls and spices left a generation of mixed-race offspring that, at the high point of empire building, was more than one-million strong. Today, in Malaysia’s Strait of Malacca, 1,000 Eurasian fishermen, descendants of intrepid Portuguese traders, still speak an archaic dialect of Portuguese, practice the Catholic faith and carry surnames like De Silva and Da Costa. In Macau, 10,000 mixed-race Macanese serve as the backbone of the former colony’s civil service and are known for their spicy fusion cuisine.

Despite their long traditions, though, Eurasians did not make the transition into the modern age easily. As colonies became nations, mixed-race children were inconvenient reminders of a Western-dominated past. So too were the next generation of Eurasians, the offspring of American soldiers in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, luk kreung were not allowed to become citizens until the early 1990s. In Hong Kong, many Eurasians have two names and shift their personalities to fit the color of the crowd in which they’re mixing. Singer and actress Karen Mok, for example, grew up Karen Morris but used her Chinese name when she broke into the Canto-pop scene. “My Eurasian ancestors carried a lot of shame because they weren’t one or the other,” says Chinese-English performance artist Veronica Needa, whose play Face explores interracial issues. “Much of my legacy is that shame.” Still, there’s no question that Eurasians enjoy a higher profile today. “Every time I turn on the TV or look at an advertisement, there’s a Eurasian,” says Needa. “It’s a validating experience to see people like me being celebrated.”

But behind the billboards and the leading movie roles lurks a disturbing subtext. For Eurasians, acceptance is certainly welcome and long overdue. But what does it mean if Asia’s role models actually look more Western than Eastern? How can the Orient emerge confident if what it glorifies is, in part, the Occident? “If you only looked at the media you would think we all looked indo except for the drivers, maids and comedians,” says Dede Oetomo, an Indonesian sociologist at Airlangga University in Surabaya. “The media has created a new beauty standard.”

Conforming to this new paradigm takes a lot of work. Lek, a pure Thai bar girl, charms the men at the Rainbow Bar in the sleaze quarters of Bangkok. Since arriving in the big city, she has methodically eradicated all connections to her rural Asian past. The first to go was her flat, northeastern nose. For $240, a doctor raised the bridge to give her a Western profile. Then, Lek laid out $1,200 for plumper, silicone-filled breasts. Now, the 22-year-old is saving to have her eyes made rounder. By the time she has finished her plastic surgery, Lek will have lost all traces of the classical Thai beauty that propelled her from a poor village to the brothels of Bangkok. But she is confident her new appearance will attract more customers. “I look more like a luk kreung, and that’s more beautiful,” she says.

A few blocks away from Rainbow Bar, a local pharmacy peddles eight brands of whitening cream, including Luk Kreung Snow White Skin. In Tokyo, where the Eurasian trend first kicked off more than three decades ago, loosening medical regulations have meant a proliferation of quick-fix surgery, like caucasian-style double eyelids and more pronounced noses. On Channel V and mtv, a whole host of veejays look ethnically mixed only because they’ve gone under the knife. “There’s a real pressure here to look mixed,” says one Asian veejay in Singapore. “Even though we’re Asians broadcasting in Asia, we somehow still think that Western is better.” That sentiment worries Asians and Eurasians. “More than anything, I’m proud to be Thai,” says Willy McIntosh, a 30-year-old Thai-Scottish TV personality, who spent six months as a monk contemplating his role in society. “When I hear that people are dyeing their hair or putting in contacts to look like me, it scares me. The Thai tradition that I’m most proud of is disappearing.”

In many Asian countries�Japan, Malaysia, Thailand�the Eurasian craze coincides with a resurgent nationalism. Those two seemingly contradictory trends are getting along just fine. “Face it, the West is never going to stop influencing Asia,” says performance artist Needa. “But at the same time, the East will never cease to influence the West, either.” In the 2000 U.S. census, nearly 7 million people identified themselves as multiracial, and 15% of births in California are of mixed heritage. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Oscar-winning kung fu flick, was more popular in Middle America than it was in the Middle Kingdom. In Hollywood, where Eurasian actors once were relegated to buck-toothed Oriental roles, the likes of Keanu Reeves, Dean Cain and Phoebe Cates play leading men and women, not just the token Asian. East and West have met, and the simple boxes we use for human compartmentalization are overflowing, mixing, blending. Not all of us can win four consecutive major golf titles, but we are, indeed, more like Tiger Woods with every passing generation.

With reporting by Simon Elegant/Kuala Lumpur, Robert Horn/Bangkok, Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

Talks With N.Korea Break Down AGAIN

North Korean nuclear talks break down abruptly   The Associated Press  

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

BEIJING: Talks on halting
North Korea’s nuclear program broke down abruptly on Thursday with the country’s chief nuclear envoy flying home after a dispute over money frozen in a Macau bank could not be resolved.Kim Kye Gwan flew out of
Beijing after refusing to take part in six-party talks to push forward a February agreement calling for
North Korea to begin winding down its nuclear programs in return for energy aid and political considerations.

Kim waved to reporters when he arrived at the airport but did not say anything.An official close to the negotiations, who could not be identified further due to the sensitivity of the talks, said officials from the six countries would meet later Thursday “where they were likely to declare a recess.”The breakdown raises doubts over whether it will be possible to meet a deadline set in the Feb. 13 denuclearization agreement that calls for U.N. inspectors to verify the closure of North Korea’s main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon by April 14.In
Tokyo, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticized North Korea for not being constructive.“It’s clear there is nothing for North Korea to gain from this kind of move,” Abe said. “This kind of attitude is meaningless.”
North Korea will only be accepted by the international society if it takes concrete steps toward complying with its commitment to dismantle its nuclear programs, Abe said.This round of talks has been dogged by troubles since it started on Monday, with Pyongyang refusing to take part for two days because of problems over the transfer of US$25 million in North Korean funds frozen since 2005 at the Banco Delta Asia in
Macau, a Chinese territory, under pressure from the U.S.

China had promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible by transferring the funds to a North Korean account at the Bank of China.Officials say is it up to the Monetary Authority of Macau to release the funds. So far, neither the monetary authority nor Banco Delta Asia have indicated when that would be, or said why the transfer has been delayed.But various reasons have been offered by other parties.Russian envoy Alexander Losyukov, who also left for home Thursday, was quoted by ITAR-Tass news agency as saying “the whole problem came from the American side.”He said the United States failed to assure the Chinese side that the Bank of China could receive the funds, which were linked to a counterfeiting and money laundering investigation, without fear of facing U.S. sanctions or a “negative attitude” from the banking community and the U.S. government.South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the money transfer was being delayed because Macau authorities were having difficulty confirming the ownership of 50 North Korean accounts, most of which are under the names of the heads of Zokwang Trading Co., a North Korean-run firm in Macau that U.S. officials have long suspected of being involved in money laundering.“The difficulty of this issue is beyond our expectations and due to some technical and procedural issues we had not expected completely before,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference.A woman from the publicity department at the Bank of China, who would not give her name, said she had no information on the issue.The six parties — the two Koreas, the United States,Russia, China and Japan — were in
Beijing to discuss how to push forward a landmark Feb. 13 deal in which Pyongyang agreed to start dismantling its nuclear facilities in exchange for energy and economic aid.Banco Delta Asia was blacklisted by Washington on suspicion the funds were connected to money-laundering or counterfeiting. The North boycotted the international nuclear talks for more than a year over the issue.Under the Feb. 13 deal, the North is to receive energy and economic aid and a start toward normalizing relations with the
U.S. and Japan, in return for beginning the disarmament process. The regime would ultimately receive assistance equivalent to 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil if it fully discloses and dismantles all its nuclear programs.___Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi, Audra Ang and Christopher Bodeen in
 

Beijing, and Jae-Soon Chang in
Seoul contributed to this report.

Nationalism Increasing in Thailand

I have also read that since the coup, some nationalists are calling for Buddhism to be the official state language due to the problems they are having with the practitioners of the “Religion of Peace” (AKA Islam).  

I knew some Thai folks as an undergrad.  They are very modest and reserved, contrary to popular belief.  They are also quite nationalistic and in love with their monarchy.  Their king is like a living god. 

I have never been to the country, knew a lot of foreign English teachers, while in
Japan, who took a trip.  They reported the typical tourism and debauchery that young foreign men are interested in.  Likely, embarrassed the Western world and made complete @$$es out of themselves I’m sure and we wonder why some Thai speak like those in the article.

 

Famed Thai hospitality shows signs of strain

By Thomas Fuller

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

BANGKOK: Long one of the most open and accommodating destinations for tourists and businesspeople in Asia, the well-advertised “land of smiles” is showing signs of a subtle frown directed toward foreigners.
Over the past seven months, successive Thai governments have passed measures scrutinizing land purchases by non-Thais and clamping down on long-stay retirees and expatriate workers who lack proper visas. In January, the cabinet passed a sweeping bill that tightens restrictions on foreign companies, a measure that awaits final approval.
“There’s been a trend that suggests rising economic nationalism,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University. Thailand, he said, has fallen into a “very complex mood of ambivalence” toward outsiders under the military-led government that seized power last September.
That mood is evident in a 12th-floor conference room at the headquarters of Bangkok Bank, where Vongthip Chumpani, an adviser and former vice president at the bank, expresses her frustrations about certain types of foreigners who come to Thailand — and tend to stay.
“We are getting a lot of weird retirees here,” Vongthip said. “They can’t survive in your country so they come here.”
Thailand needs to slow down and catch its breath, she said. Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister ousted in September, had entered into a flurry of free-trade agreements with Australia, China, Japan, the United States and others. To Vongthip’s thinking, he tried to pry the country open too quickly.
“We bent over backward all the time to accommodate foreign investors,” she said.
That could be changing.
Under proposed new rules for foreign investors, companies such as Federal Express might have to give up control of their operations in Thailand. Car and electronics manufacturers could be barred from delivering their cars or disk drives to ports for export; only Thai-owned companies would be allowed to transport items within the country.
Retail chains — big ones like Carrefour and hundreds of smaller ones — could be frozen out of future expansion. Land purchases by thousands of foreigners could be declared illegal.
These amendments to the Foreign Business Act were approved by the Thai cabinet in January and are now under review by the Council of State, an independent government body of legal experts.
Since the very first boatloads of Portuguese and Dutch emissaries arrived here five centuries ago, Thailand has had a knack for dealing with foreigners: trade but not domination, hospitality but not subservience. Thais successfully gleaned technology from Europeans, Americans and Japanese, and the elite sent their children to study abroad. Unlike all of its neighbors, Thailand was never colonized.
But this was before millions of tourists poured into the country’s spas, beaches, golf courses and restaurants — not to mention red-light districts and massage parlors. The number of tourists visiting Thailand, whose population is 64 million, is expected to reach nearly 15 million this year, a doubling over the past decade.
On the southern resort island of Phuket, roadside billboards, written in English, advertise million-dollar condominiums — this in a country where a schoolteacher is lucky to bring home a few hundred dollars a month. In northeastern Thailand, men from Germany, Switzerland, Britain and other Western countries live with their Thai wives on neatly groomed streets that stand out from ramshackle neighboring villages.
“I’ve seen so many old farangs with young Thai women,” said Nattaya Rattanamanee, 31, an accountant working at a hotel on the resort island of Samui, using the Thai word for Westerners. “These old farangs damage the reputation of Thailand; they turn Thailand into a land of prostitutes.”
Feeling the strain of the tourist influx, the Thai government recently announced a new approach: the country would no longer focus on the quantity of tourists, but instead target “quality” — read “wealthy” — tourists.
“In years past we’ve always targeted numbers: trying to achieve the highest numbers of arrivals possible,” said Chattan Kunjara Na Ayudhya, a spokesman for the Tourism Authority of Thailand. “It’s time to change. If we continue to focus mainly on numbers, some destinations will not be able to handle that many people.”
Any resentment that Thais may harbor toward foreigners is unlikely to be felt by short-term vacationers. It is hidden behind an often genuine Thai smile and shielded by a wall of politeness. There is no generalized backlash against foreigners, Thais say, but rather concerns about specific problems: criminals who come to Thailand on the lam, the increase in land purchases by foreigners and foreign companies having too much influence in the economy.
In September, just before the coup, the head of the country’s immigration department announced that foreign tourists would be limited to staying in Thailand for 90 days within any six- month period. This was primarily aimed at foreign retirees who take up permanent residence without proper paperwork and the thousands of people working here without work visas.
One such person was John Mark Karr, the American who falsely confessed to the 1996 killing of JonBenet Ramsey, a Colorado schoolgirl, and was living in Bangkok as an English teacher. Karr’s apprehension last August in Bangkok buttressed Thailand’s image as a magnet for creeps and perverts.
“I hate them. There are so many of those in Thailand,” said Yupa Boontaworn, a 22-year-old university student, when asked about people like Karr. Tourism is good for the Thai economy, she said, but the government should move more aggressively against pedophiles and sex tourists.
As a tourist destination, Thailand shares much in common with the Netherlands: a hands-off government and the veneer of a tolerant society, but a surprisingly conservative core. In some ways, anti-foreign feelings in Thailand arise from the clash between the permissive Thailand of skimpily clad bar girls twirling around poles and the more traditional side of the country, where women are too shy even to wear a swimsuit on a beach. Today, that veneer of tolerance, while still intact, is chipping.
“Foreigners shouldn’t be able to do anything they please in Thailand,” said Samree Ardsuan, 68, a retired civil servant. If someone led a demonstration protesting foreign ownership of companies, Samree said, he would definitely join in.
With a few exceptions such as condominiums and small plots, foreigners are barred from owning property in Thailand. But many have skirted these laws by registering shell companies, a practice that the government now promises to stop.
The mood toward foreigners today, analysts say, is a corollary to Thailand’s political crisis. Many Thais became defensive when foreign governments criticized the coup in September as undemocratic, and today there are occasional nationalist outbursts. In February, the head of the military junta, Sonthi Boonyaratglin, vowed to retake stakes in a satellite company that Thaksin’s family sold to a Singapore government agency last year.
The Thai government says the proposed amendments to the Foreign Business Act are long overdue clarifications. But to some Thais, including Vongthip of Bangkok Bank, the law would also help redress what is seen here as the injustices that accompanied the financial crisis of the late 1990s, when indebted Thai companies were forced to sell their assets cheaply to foreigners. Foreign banks and companies, Vongthip said, “picked up everything for a song.”
Many questions about the amendments remain. Analysts say there could be less pressure for a new law since one of the more nationalist members of the Thai cabinet, Pridiyathorn Devakula, stepped down as finance minister in February.
The legal committee also appears to be casting a skeptical eye on the proposed new law. “The majority of the committee is not sure that the law needs to be amended,” Pakorn Nilprapan, the committee’s secretary, said this month. “We are seeking explanations from the Ministry of Commerce.”
Even if the amendments do become law, many here predict that the law’s harshest provisions will be quietly forgotten.
“I don’t think it’s going to be enforced — it’s just not the Thai way,” said David Lyman, chairman of Tilleke & Gibbons, a prominent Bangkok law firm.
Lyman, who first moved to Thailand in 1949, says he has seen this all before: the government has threatened to restrict foreign ownership on and off for nearly four decades.
“Reason usually ends up prevailing in Thailand — after all other options have been exhausted,” Lyman said.

Tokyo’s Racist Mayor and Japan’s Only White Politician

People talk about right wing politicians rising in Europe (France, UK, Austria, Russia) but I have never heard a politician speak as much vile racist and sexist filth as the Mayor of Tokyo, and he is wildly popular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shintaro_Ishihara#Racism
When I lived there (2001-2002) , I saw him speaking in front of Shinjuku Station (the largest Metro station) which is common for politicians in Japan, he was promoting someone else…he said something like “Look over there at Kabuki-cho (Redlight district less than half a mile away) the center of Sankokujin (third world) criminality, especially that of the Zainichi (Koreans born in Japan). I tell you if there is a major earthquake they will run wild in the streets of Japan like the Mongols, raping and looting like animals.”

—————————-

Oh but wait…it gets better:

In the 1983 general election, Ishihara’s first public secretary (Toshiki Kurihara) violated the public office election law by pasting 5000 black seals which read “Shokei Arai came from North Korea” on election posters of rival candidate Shokei Arai.[citation needed] Arai and Ishihara belonged to same party (LDP) and both were competing for the same election district (Tokyo-2). Kurihara was soon arrested by the police, but Ishihara did not acknowledge any connection with this violation, and did not apologize to Arai. [citation needed]

On April 9, 2000, in a speech before an SDF group, Ishihara publicly speculated that in the event a natural disaster struck the Tokyo area, foreigners would be likely to cause civil disorder, and stated that illegal immigrants in the Tokyo area were a major cause of crime. He referred to these immigrants as sangokujin (Japanese: 三国人; “third world person”), a term commonly viewed as derogatory.[2] Regarding this statement, Ishihara later said:

I referred to the “many sangokujin who entered Japan illegally.” I thought some people would not know that word so I paraphrased it and used gaikokujin, or foreigners. But it was a newspaper holiday so the news agencies consciously picked up the sangokujin part, causing the problem.
… After World War II, when Japan lost, the Chinese of Taiwanese origin and people from the Korean Peninsula persecuted, robbed and sometimes beat up Japanese. It’s at that time the word was used, so it was not derogatory. Rather we were afraid of them.
… There’s no need for an apology. I was surprised that there was a big reaction to my speech. In order not to cause any misunderstanding, I decided I will no longer use that word. It is regrettable that the word was interpreted in the way it was. [3]
Much of the criticism of this statement involved the historical significance of the term: sangokujin historically referred to ethnic Chinese and Koreans, working in Japan, many of whom were actually attacked by mobs of Japanese people following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923.[2]

Ishihara has made several other derogatory statements about non-Japanese. For instance, in a highly publicized statement at the Tokyo International Anime Fair on March 25, 2006, he said: “I hate Mickey Mouse. He has nothing like the unique sensibility that Japan has. The Japanese are inherently skilled at visual expression and detailed work.”[9] On February 20, 2006, Ishihara also said: “Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don’t mean African-Americans — who don’t speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent.”[10]
[edit] Other controversial statements
Ishihara stated in a 2001 interview with women’s magazine Shukan Josei that he subscribed to a theory that “old women who live after they have lost their reproductive function are useless and are committing a sin,” adding that he “couldn’t say this as a politician.” He was criticized in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly for these comments, but responded that the criticism was driven by “tyrant” “old women.”[11]

During an inauguration of a university building in 2004, Ishihara stated that French is unqualified as an international language because it is “a language in which nobody can count,” referring to the counting system in French, which he believed to be based on units of twenty rather than ten (as is the case in Japanese and English). The statement led to a lawsuit from several language schools in 2005. Ishihara subsequently responded to comments that he did not disrespect French culture by professing his love of French literature on Japanese TV news. [12]

In the 1983 general election, Ishihara’s first public secretary (Toshiki Kurihara) violated the public office election law by pasting 5000 black seals which read “Shokei Arai came from North Korea” on election posters of rival candidate Shokei Arai.[citation needed] Arai and Ishihara belonged to same party (LDP) and both were competing for the same election district (Tokyo-2). Kurihara was soon arrested by the police, but Ishihara did not acknowledge any connection with this violation, and did not apologize to Arai. [citation needed]

On April 9, 2000, in a speech before an SDF group, Ishihara publicly speculated that in the event a natural disaster struck the Tokyo area, foreigners would be likely to cause civil disorder, and stated that illegal immigrants in the Tokyo area were a major cause of crime. He referred to these immigrants as sangokujin (Japanese: 三国人; “third world person”), a term commonly viewed as derogatory.[2] Regarding this statement, Ishihara later said:

I referred to the “many sangokujin who entered Japan illegally.” I thought some people would not know that word so I paraphrased it and used gaikokujin, or foreigners. But it was a newspaper holiday so the news agencies consciously picked up the sangokujin part, causing the problem.
… After World War II, when Japan lost, the Chinese of Taiwanese origin and people from the Korean Peninsula persecuted, robbed and sometimes beat up Japanese. It’s at that time the word was used, so it was not derogatory. Rather we were afraid of them.
… There’s no need for an apology. I was surprised that there was a big reaction to my speech. In order not to cause any misunderstanding, I decided I will no longer use that word. It is regrettable that the word was interpreted in the way it was. [3]
Much of the criticism of this statement involved the historical significance of the term: sangokujin historically referred to ethnic Chinese and Koreans, working in Japan, many of whom were actually attacked by mobs of Japanese people following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923.[2]

Ishihara has made several other derogatory statements about non-Japanese. For instance, in a highly publicized statement at the Tokyo International Anime Fair on March 25, 2006, he said: “I hate Mickey Mouse. He has nothing like the unique sensibility that Japan has. The Japanese are inherently skilled at visual expression and detailed work.”[9] On February 20, 2006, Ishihara also said: “Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don’t mean African-Americans — who don’t speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent.”[10]
[edit] Other controversial statements
Ishihara stated in a 2001 interview with women’s magazine Shukan Josei that he subscribed to a theory that “old women who live after they have lost their reproductive function are useless and are committing a sin,” adding that he “couldn’t say this as a politician.” He was criticized in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly for these comments, but responded that the criticism was driven by “tyrant” “old women.”[11]

During an inauguration of a university building in 2004, Ishihara stated that French is unqualified as an international language because it is “a language in which nobody can count,” referring to the counting system in French, which he believed to be based on units of twenty rather than ten (as is the case in Japanese and English). The statement led to a lawsuit from several language schools in 2005. Ishihara subsequently responded to comments that he did not disrespect French culture by professing his love of French literature on Japanese TV news. [12]

He has said other things too, like America ships its low class blacks and Hispanics to Japan (speaking of the military) to commit crimes against Japanese people…

Now you would think if a guy like this is so popular there would be Japanese hate groups roaming the streets like in Russia, but it is exactly opposite…well for now. It is one of those things I still don’t understand about Japan, no matter how much my wife tries to explain it.

He also routinely says Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese are all different races.

Contrast this with:

In Japan to be a Japanese citizen you have to take a Japanese name that can be written in Chinese characters (kanji).  Marutei Tsurunen (ツルネン マルテイ or 弦念 丸呈 Tsurunen Marutei, born 1940-04-30) is the first European and openly foreign-born Japanese member of the Diet of Japan (a Korean had previously served in the Diet, but presented himself as Japanese). He is a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, where he serves as Director General of the International Department.

He joins Sarkis Assadourian, Nabih Berri, Gisèle Halimi, Tom Lantos, Pierre Lellouche, Amir Peretz, Jacques Saada and Dominique de Villepin among politicians who are serving or have served in a legislature in a country other than their country of birth.
[edit] Biography
He was born Martti Turunen in Jaakonvaara, Finland.

In 1967, at the age of 27, he traveled to Japan as a lay missionary of the Lutheran Church, accompanied by his first wife, who was also Finn (they later divorced). [1]

In 1974, when he was 34, he met his second wife, Sachiko, and he became enamored with the country. Having decided to become Japanese, he gained his citizenship in 1979, at the age of 39, and took on a Japanese version of his Finnish name.

Over the next decade, Tsurunen completed the first Finnish translations of The Tale of Genji and several other Japanese books while teaching English in Kanagawa prefecture.

He has two children, an older daughter and a son.
[edit] Politics
In 1992, at the age of 52, he ran for the town assembly in Yugawara and was elected. He subsequently wrote a popular book called Here Comes a Blue-Eyed Assemblyman (青い目の議員がゆく, Aoi me no giin ga yuku?).

He served on the Yugawara assembly until 1995, when he made his first bid for the House of Councillors and lost.

In 2001, after writing another book called I Want to Be Japanese (日本人になりたい, Nihonjin ni naritai?), Tsurunen again failed to achieve a seat but was the first runner-up for the DPJ.

After the resignation of Kyosen Ohashi, Tsurunen finally entered the House of Councillors on 2002-10-04. His seat was not up for election in the election of 2004.

Asian Domination on American Campus

I’m guessing that many white parents in
Cali are regretting the end of affirmative action in college admittance, because it benefited Asians more than anything else.  Instead of a few seats going to poor blacks and Hispanics, now Asians are taking them from white kids by the hundred. LOL  I guess this is a case where you should be careful what you wish for.  I do not have an animosity toward Asians, they work hard.  They are also a self selected group being that most of their parents come here educated.  It is not like the majority of them worked their way up from nothing.  I would say though that they have a superior work ethnic (at least the Northeast Asians and some Vietnamese…Southeast Asians, not so much). 

 

I have always argued that quotas are bad and not the type of affirmative action we should be focusing on.  What we should be doing is improving our schools (not NCLB) and improving our society in general, as I believe that jobs for the parents will do more to improve the academics of the poor children then anything else.  This situation is holistic.  Making the children competitive from primary school up and improving the state of the families will make quotas at the college level unnecessary because the children will be competitive.  If then the kids are equal in academic performance and certain minorities are not getting accepted at the same rate as whites, then sue.

 

January 7, 2007

Little Asia on the Hill

By TIMOTHY EGAN

WHEN Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.
“Here, many people speak Chinese as their primary language,” says Mr. Hu, a sophomore. “It’s nice. You really feel like you don’t stand out.”
Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. “Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars,” reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, “just below the angels.”
There are now mostly small protests, against the new chain stores invading Telegraph Avenue, just outside the campus entrance, and to save the old oak trees scheduled for removal so the football stadium can be renovated. The biggest buzz on Telegraph one week was the grand opening of a chain restaurant — the new Chipotle’s, which drew a crowd of students eager to get in. The scent of patchouli oil and reefer is long gone; the street is posted as a drug-free zone.
And at least on this morning, there is very little speech of any kind inside the Free Speech Cafe; almost without exception, students are face-planted in their laptops, silently downloading class notes, music, messages. It could be the library but for the line for lattes. On mornings like this, the public university beneath the towering campanile seems like a small, industrious city of über-students in flops.
I ask Mr. Hu what it’s like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian — what it’s like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of “selective self-racial segregation,” which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. “The different ethnic groups don’t really interact that much,” he says. “There’s definitely a sense of sticking with your community.” But, he quickly adds, “People of my generation don’t look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they’re pretty much like your average American teenagers.”
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report’s top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year’s freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from “the old Blues” — older alumni named for the school color — “who complain because their kids can’t get in,” says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
Mr. Hu applied to a lot of colleges, but Berkeley felt right for him from the start. “It’s the intellectual atmosphere — this place is intense.”
Mr. Hu says he was pressured by a professor to go into something like medicine or engineering. “It’s a stereotype, but a lot of Asians who come here just study engineering and the sciences,” he says. “I was never interested in that.”
But as the only son of professionals born in China, Mr. Hu fits the profile of Asians at Berkeley in at least one way: they are predominantly first-generation American. About 95 percent of Asian freshmen come from a family in which one or both parents were born outside the United States.
He dashes off to class, and I wander through the serene setting of Memorial Glade, in the center of campus, and then loop over to Sproul Plaza, the beating heart of the university, where dozens of tables are set up by clubs representing every conceivable ethnic group. Out of nowhere, an a cappella group, mostly Asian men, appears and starts singing a Beach Boys song. Yes, tradition still matters in California.
ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.
And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.
Asians have become the “new Jews,” in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, “Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science.”
As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.
To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.
“This is just a very, very egregious system,” Mr. Li told me. “Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race.”
To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, “seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism.”
Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. “I’m not seeking anything personally,” he says. “I’m happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter.”
Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important “to ensure a diverse student body,” says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, “Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite” — discrimination.
Elite colleges like Princeton review the “total package,” in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics — factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. “There’s no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students,” she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. “We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections,” Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.
In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.
When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world’s finest public university — Harvard on the Hill — he demurs.
“We are a meritocracy,” he says. And — by law, he adds — the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.
Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned.
Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and ’80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.
In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.
University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since.
“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”
The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. “You really do feel like you stand out,” says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. “I’m almost always the only black person in my class,” says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action.
“Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it’s overwhelmingly Asian,” she says. “I don’t feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don’t really identify with the Asian community as a minority either.”
Walter Robinson, the director of undergraduate admissions, who is African-American, has the same impression. “The problem is that because we’re so few, we get absorbed among the masses,” he says.
Chancellor Birgeneau says he finds the low proportion of blacks and Hispanics appalling, and two years into his tenure, he has not found a remedy. To broaden the pool, the U.C. system promises to admit the top 4 percent at each high school in the state and uses “comprehensive review” — considering an applicant’s less quantifiable attributes. But the net results for a campus like Berkeley are disappointing. His university, Dr. Birgeneau says, loses talented black applicants to private universities like Stanford, where African-American enrollment was 10 percent last year — nearly three times that at Berkeley.
“I just don’t believe that in a state with three million African-Americans there is not a single engineering student for the state’s premier public university,” says the chancellor, who has called for reinstating racial preferences.
One leading critic of bringing affirmative action back to Berkeley is David A. Hollinger, chairman of its history department and author of “Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.” He supported racial preferences before Proposition 209, but is no longer so sure. “You could argue that the campus is more diverse now,” because Asians comprise so many different cultures, says Dr. Hollinger. A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.
He believes that Latinos are underrepresented because many come from poor agrarian families with little access to the good schools that could prepare them for the rigors of Berkeley. He points out that, on the other hand, many of the Korean students on campus are sons and daughters of parents with college degrees. In any event, he says, it is not the university’s job to fix the problems that California’s public schools produce.
Dr. Birgeneau agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”
IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented? Is that the inevitable result of color-blind admissions?
Eric Liu, author of “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker” and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.
“I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy,” says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book “Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose.” Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”
He also says Asian-Americans are tired of having to live up to — or defend — “that tired old warhorse of the model minority.”
“We shouldn’t be calling these studying habits that help so many kids get into good schools ‘Asian values,’ ” says Mr. Liu, himself a product of Yale College and Harvard Law School. “These are values that used to be called Jewish values or Anglo-Saxon work-ethic values. The bottom line message from the family is the same: work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal.”
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says. “Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it’s not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing.”
One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. “This can make for some big problems,” she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. “But people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it.”
As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason “isn’t a mystery,” Dr. Markus says. “This needs to come out and we shouldn’t hide it,” she says. “In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that’s the most honorable thing you can do.”
BERKELEY is “Asian heaven,” as one student puts it. “When I went back East my Asian friends were like, ‘Wow, you go to Berkeley — that must be great,’ ” says Tera Nakata, who just graduated and now works in the residence halls.
You need only go to colleges in, say, the Midwest to appreciate the Asian feel of this campus. But Berkeley is freighted with the baggage of stereotypes — that it is boring socially, full of science nerds, a hard place to make friends.
“About half the students at this school spend their entire career in the library,” one person wrote in a posting on vault.com, a popular job and college search Web site.
Another wrote: “Everyone who is white joins the Greek system and everyone who isn’t joins a ‘theme house’ or is a member of a club related to race.”
There is some truth to the image, students acknowledge, but it does not do justice to the bigger experience at Berkeley. “You have the ability to stay with people who are like you and not get out of your comfort zone,” says Ms. Nakata. “But I learned a lot by mixing it up. I lived in a dorm with a lot of different races, and we would have these deep conversations all the time about race and our feelings of where we belong and where we came from.” But she also says that the “celebrate diversity aspect” of Berkeley doesn’t go deep. “We want to respect everyone’s differences, but we don’t mix socially.”
Near the end of my stay at Berkeley I met a senior, Jonathan Lee, the son of a Taiwanese father and a mother from Hong Kong. He grew up well east of Los Angeles, in the New America sprawl of fast-growing Riverside County, where his father owned a restaurant. He went to a high school where he was a minority.
“When I was in high school,” he says, “there was this notion that you’re Chinese, you must be really good in math.” But now Mr. Lee is likely to become a schoolteacher, much to the chagrin of his parents, “who don’t think it will be very lucrative.”
The story of Jon Lee’s journey at Berkeley is compelling. As president of the Asian-American Association, he has tried to dispel stereotypes of “the Dragon Lady seductress or the idea that everybody plays the piano.” His closest friends are in the club. It may seem that he has become more insular, that he has found his tribe. But Mr. Lee says he has been trying to lead other Asian students out of the university bubble. Once a week, they go into a mostly black and Hispanic middle school in the Bay Area to mentor students.
For the last five semesters, Mr. Lee has worked with one student. “I take him out for dim sum, or to Chinatown, or just talk about college and what it’s like at Cal,” he says. “We talk about race and we talk about everything. And he’s taught me a lot.”
The mentoring program came about not because of prodding by well-meaning advisers, teachers or student groups. It came about because Mr. Lee looked around at the new America — in California, the first state with no racial majority — and found that it looked very different from Berkeley. And much as he loves Berkeley, he knew that if he wanted to learn enough to teach, he needed to get off campus.

Timothy Egan reports for The Times from the West Coast. He won a 2006 National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”

Chaos in Southern Thailand: Muslims again

 This has been going on for awhile, but you know what I don’t see? I don’t see my wife and other Buddhist in Asia declaring Buddha Jihad against these Muslims and flying to Thailand to join in an armed struggle against them. It seems of all the major world religions only Muslims act like that.

——————————-

Thailand and Malaysia

In need of help to douse the flamesFeb 15th 2007 | BANGKOK
From The Economist print edition

AP

Malaysia has offered help to tackle the violent separatist insurgency on their mutual border. But no end to the violence is in sight
Get article background
BOMBINGS, shootings or, more recently, al-Qaeda-style beheadings now happen almost every day in Thailand’s southern provinces. Bloodthirsty but strangely publicity-shy separatists attack symbols of Buddhist Thailand’s rule over a region whose people are mostly Muslim and ethnic-Malay. Teachers and monks, not just soldiers and police, are targets now. Muslims are also regularly murdered, either in revenge for killings of Buddhists or because the militants suspect them of collaborating with the authorities.
In the most gruesome incident of recent days, an elderly Buddhist man was beheaded in Pattani province on February 8th. His head was later found in a roadside plastic bag. A note reportedly left near his corpse said it was revenge for a grenade attack on a Muslim tea-shop. The conflict has risen and subsided several times since Thailand annexed the region, formerly a Malay sultanate, in 1902. Violence surged again in 2004, since when around 2,000 people have been killed.
When a wave of bombs hit Bangkok on New Year’s Eve, Thailand’s military government was quick to deny the insurgents had planted them. It blamed supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister deposed in last September’s coup. But one of several police squads investigating the explosions now says that a suspected southern militant was caught on camera near one of the blasts.
The violence continued unabated as Malaysia’s prime minister, Abdullah Badawi, visited Bangkok this week. Mr Badawi offered to mediate with the militants. In late 2005 Mr Badawi’s predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, already out of office, brokered talks between separatist leaders and Thai officials. But Thai ministers later contradicted themselves on whether Mr Badawi’s offer was welcomed. What the Thais do want is help sealing the border, across which southern Muslims, including militants, easily slip. Mr Badawi and his Thai counterpart, General Surayud Chulanont, agreed on measures to stop people holding both Thai and Malaysian identity cards; and Malaysia will offer training to boost Thai Muslims’ job prospects.
Mr Badawi has an incentive to help, since he clearly does not want what his foreign minister this month called a “hotbed of international terrorism” to emerge on Malaysia’s doorstep. But the treatment of Thai Muslims is a sensitive subject in northern Malaysia, where the country’s Islamist opposition is strong. So Mr Badawi will not want to risk providing political ammunition to his opponents.
Co-operation would be a welcome change from the two countries’ frequent rows over the Thai south. Mr Thaksin used to accuse Malaysia of sheltering the militants. He was furious when, in 2005, it refused to send back around 130 Thai Muslims who had fled across the border, claiming their lives were in danger.

Since the Thai coup, there have been tensions over a security barrier that the Thai generals want to erect along the border. The Malaysians were miffed at General Surayud’s claim that funds were being raised for the insurgency by extorting money from restaurants selling Thai tom yum kung soup in Malaysia.
Mr Thaksin dismissed the separatists as “bandits” and tried to crush them by military force. This led to atrocities such as the Tak Bai massacre of October 2004, when Thai soldiers gunned down at least six Muslim protesters and then killed 78 more, mostly through suffocation, by cramming them into army trucks. Last year Mr Thaksin clashed with Sonthi Boonyaratglin, his army chief (and a Muslim), who wanted talks with the rebels. Soon after, General Sonthi led the coup against Mr Thaksin.
The military government has been more conciliatory. General Surayud has apologised for the Thaksin government’s brutal mishandling of the conflict. Around 90 southerners, held for two years over the Tak Bai incident, have been released without charge. And a civilian-led agency to oversee the southern provinces and build links with local Muslim leaders—which Mr Thaksin had scrapped—has been revived.
But, as General Surayud admitted this week, this softer approach has yet to show results. He also lashed out at his fellow general, the army chief, for failing to make the south more secure, complaining that his work “does not meet our expectations.” The national police chief was sacked earlier this month, ostensibly for failing to solve the Bangkok bombings. Duncan McCargo, an academic studying the insurgency, says the Thai security forces have proved incapable of fighting it. The militants’ success means they are under little pressure to negotiate or even to spell out what exactly they want.
The obvious solution is “special autonomy” for the Thai south, like that granted to the Philippines’ Muslim south and to Indonesia’s Aceh province. But this is a distant prospect. It may be extremely hard to persuade ethnic Thais to let southerners govern themselves and to give their Malay dialect official recognition. Some Thai nationalists are even demanding that Buddhism be made the state religion in the new constitution now being drawn up. Mr McCargo says an eventual solution may demand a leader with a strong democratic mandate—as Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had with Aceh.
General Surayud is, sensibly, warning his countrymen that the road to peace will be arduous. The danger is that itchy generals tire of talking and revert to seeking military solutions, becoming once again the separatists’ best recruiting-sergeant.

Desperate Koreans Buy Wives

February 22, 2007

Kuorean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

HANOI, Vietnam — It was midnight here in Hanoi, or already 2 a.m. back in Seoul, South Korea. But after a five-hour flight on a recent Sunday, Kim Wan-su was driven straight from the airport to the Lucky Star karaoke bar here, where 23 young Vietnamese women seeking Korean husbands sat waiting in two dimly lighted rooms.
“Do I have to look at them and decide now?” Mr. Kim asked, as the marriage brokers gave a brief description of each of the women sitting around a U-shaped sofa.
Thus, Mr. Kim, a 39-year-old auto parts worker from a suburb of Seoul, began the mildly chaotic, two-hour process of choosing a spouse. In a day or two, if his five-day marriage tour went according to plan, he would be wed and enjoying his honeymoon at the famed Perfume Pagoda on the Huong Tich Mountain southwest of here.
More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem.
The rising status of women in the United States sent American men who were searching for more traditional wives to Russia in the 1990s. But the United States’ more balanced population has not led to the shortage of potential brides and the thriving international marriage industry found in South Korea.
Now, that industry is seizing on an increasingly globalized marriage market and sending comparatively affluent Korean bachelors searching for brides in the poorer corners of China and Southeast and Central Asia. The marriage tours are fueling an explosive growth in marriages to foreigners in South Korea, a country whose ethnic homogeneity lies at the core of its self-identity.
In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14 percent of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4 percent in 2000.
South Korean news organizations have reported that many of the foreign brides were initially lied to by their husbands, and suffered isolation and sometimes abuse in South Korea. Partly in response, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is now moving to regulate the international marriage industry, which emerged so suddenly that the Consumer Protection Board can only estimate that there are 2,000 to 3,000 such agencies nationwide.
After an initial setback — his first three choices found various reasons to decline his offer — Mr. Kim narrowed his field to a 22-year-old college student and an 18-year-old high school graduate.
“What’s your personality like?” Mr. Kim asked the college student.
“I’m an extrovert,” she said.
The 18-year-old asked why he wanted to marry a Vietnamese woman.
“I have two colleagues who married Vietnamese women,” he said, adding, “The women seem devoted and family-oriented.”
One Korean broker said the 22-year-old, who seemed bright and assertive, would adapt well to South Korea. Another suggested flipping a coin.
“Well, since I’m quiet, I’ll choose the extrovert,” Mr. Kim said finally, adding quickly, “Is it O.K. if I hold her hand now?”
She went over to sit next to him, though neither dared to hold hands. She spelled out her name in her left palm: Vien. Her name was To Thi Vien.
In South Korea, billboards advertising marriages to foreigners dot the countryside, and fliers are scattered on the Seoul subway. Many rural governments, faced with declining populations, subsidize the marriage tours, which typically cost $10,000.
The business began in the late 1990s by matching South Korean farmers or the physically disabled mostly to ethnic Koreans in China, according to brokers and the Consumer Protection Board. But by 2003, the majority of customers were urban bachelors, and the foreign brides came from a host of countries.
The widespread availability of sex-screening technology for pregnant women since the 1980s has resulted in the birth of a disproportionate number of South Korean males. What is more, South Korea’s growing wealth has increased women’s educational and employment opportunities, even as it has led to rising divorce rates and plummeting birthrates.
“Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards,” said Lee Eun-tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. “If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he’ll find it very difficult to marry in Korea.”
Critics say the business demeans and takes advantage of poor women. But brokers say they are merely matching the needs of Korean men and foreign women seeking better lives.
“But this business will get more difficult as those countries get richer,” said Won Hyun-jae, the owner of i-Bombit, another agency. “Now, even a disabled Korean man can find a Vietnamese bride. But eventually Vietnamese women will ask why they have to go marry a Korean man when life in Vietnam is good.”
For now, Vietnam remains a popular source of brides, second only to China. Marriages with Vietnamese women are considered so successful that the local government of at least one city, Yeongcheon, in South Korea’s rural southeast, subsidizes marriage tours only to Vietnam.
At Incheon International Airport to the west of Seoul, an increasingly familiar scene unfolds in front of the arrival gates in the mornings. Korean men, holding telltale bouquets and often accompanied by relatives, greet their Vietnamese brides as they arrive on overnight flights from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.
On the Marriage Tour
It was also at the airport that a tense-looking Mr. Kim and another client began their marriage tours. Three brokers for Interwedding and i-Bombit arrived.
Mr. Kim, urged on by an older sister, decided to go to Vietnam after a last-ditch effort to meet a Korean woman in December failed. A high school graduate, he lives with his mother and his sister, and he works on the assembly line of a small manufacturer of car keys. Though he lives in one of the world’s most wired societies, Mr. Kim does not use the Internet.
The other client was Kim Tae-goo, 51, who grows ginseng and apples on the 2.5 acres of land he owns in Yeongju, a town southeast of Seoul. Mr. Kim had recently divorced a Chinese woman he married after the death of his first wife, a Korean woman. He lives with his 16-year-old daughter and his elderly mother. His 21-year-old has left home.
Ahn Jae-won, a Korean broker who has long been based in Hanoi and is married to a Vietnamese woman, began: “The women have come out looking their best for you. But don’t expect them to look as pretty as Korean women. There is a big gap in our G.D.P.’s. Don’t be condescending. Don’t lie. If you lie, they’ll find out eventually and feel betrayed and run away.
“The parents know that their daughters will marry a Korean man. The authorities know this is happening, but there’ll be trouble if we do it in front of them. So I seek your understanding. Once we land in Hanoi, even though it’ll be very late, we’ll go meet the women right away. It’s safer to do this at night.
“One last thing. Other companies allow you to sleep with the women on the first night. We don’t. Only on the bridal night. We must, after all, keep our decorum as Korean men. Is that O.K. with you?”
The two nodded.
Introductions and a Choice
And so, at the Lucky Star karaoke bar here, the older Mr. Kim addressed the Vietnamese women, most in their early 20s.
“My 16-year-old daughter lives with me, and I’m a farmer,” he said, after informing the women through the brokers that he would also send $100 a month to their parents in Vietnam. “Is that O.K. with you?”
“I know how to farm,” said Bui Thi Thuy, 22, one of the two women Mr. Kim eventually focused on.
Asked whether she had any questions, Ms. Thuy said she had none. But the other woman, an earnest 28-year-old in a light-green jacket, asked, “If I marry you, will you love me and take care of me forever?”
“Of course,” Mr. Kim answered, then quickly settled on Ms. Thuy.
After a few hours’ sleep, the new couples and the brokers squeezed into a small van for the four-hour ride to the women’s home province, Quang Ninh, about four hours east of Hanoi. There, the couples would be interviewed by the local authorities before registering for their marriages.
The road out of Hanoi, a wide highway flanked by new factories owned by multinationals like Canon, eventually narrowed to two lanes crisscrossed frequently by cows. Farther out, farmers could be seen working the soil by hand, and signs of Vietnam’s booming economy grew fewer.
Most of the Vietnamese women marrying Korean men came from the rural areas around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
Both Ms. Vien and Ms. Thuy had friends who had married Korean men and lived, happily it seemed, in South Korea. Like many Vietnamese, they were also avid fans of Korean television shows and movies, the so-called Korean Wave of pop culture that has swept all of Asia since the late 1990s.
The Korean Wave
The Korean Wave has transformed South Korea’s image in the region, presenting the country as having successfully balanced tradition and modernity, a place that produces coveted Samsung cellphones and cherishes family ties.
The week the two women met their future husbands, Vietnamese television was showing in prime time a South Korean television series called “Successful Story of a Bright Girl” — the story of a simple country girl who goes to Seoul and captures the heart of a tycoon.
“To be honest, I don’t know much about Korea except what I’ve seen on television,” Ms. Vien said. “But the Korean landscape is beautiful. Korean men look sophisticated and affectionate. They seem responsible, and they live in harmony with their family members and their colleagues.”
A soccer fan able to rattle off the jersey numbers of David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane, she had registered two years earlier with a broker for marriages with Koreans. Her father, a construction worker for a local firm, was able to send his two children — Ms. Vien and her older brother — to college.
By contrast, Ms. Thuy was one of five children of rice farmers. She had registered with the agency soon after graduating from high school.
“A friend of mine married a Korean man and now lives in Seoul,” Ms. Thuy said. “We talk on the phone sometimes. She’s very happy. She says there are so many people and tall buildings in Seoul.”
At age 22, she said, half of her peers had already married. As she waited to marry, she helped with household chores, forbidden by her parents to engage in the farm work that might blemish her looks.
The couples registered for their marriages and underwent medical checkups, running into other Vietnamese-Korean couples along the way.
The younger Mr. Kim wrote a letter in Korean to his bride — trying to allay the anxieties he saw on her face, promising to protect her and surmount the inevitable problems — but found no way to relay its meaning. The couples bought Korean and Vietnamese dictionaries, pointing to words or using broken English.
The In-Laws
About 40 hours after landing here in Hanoi, the Korean men married their Vietnamese brides in a double ceremony. The brides’ relatives waited at a large restaurant here with expectant looks.
“Today is the union not only of two people, but of two countries,” said Ms. Vien’s father, To Minh Seu, 55. “Vietnam and Korea share many similarities. We are both Confucian societies.”
Standing next to her daughter and her new son-in-law, Ms. Thuy’s mother, Nguyen Thi Nguyet, 56, said: “This is a poor country, but conditions are much better in Korea. I hope my daughter will have a better life there.”
But Ms. Thuy’s father, Bui Van Vui, 52, was displeased that his daughter was marrying a man just one year younger than he was. The night before, he had telephoned Mr. Ahn to complain about the age gap between his daughter and Mr. Kim.
“I’m still very worried because of the age gap,” he said as his son-in-law listened to Mr. Ahn’s interpretation. “I’m slightly relieved now that I see my son-in-law for the first time. But I can’t stop worrying.”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry about a thing,” Mr. Kim said.
Still, the father looked grim throughout the ceremony.
“Let’s tell him about the compensation,” Mr. Kim told Mr. Ahn, referring to the $100 he would send every month.
“Later, later,” Mr. Ahn said.
As he left the restaurant after the ceremony, the father turned around at the entrance to take a final look at his daughter. He pressed two fingers against his lips and kissed her goodbye.
Later, Ms. Thuy said: “I was my father’s favorite. He really adores me and is worried.”
She, too, was worried. “I know Korea only from television, but it must be very, very different from reality. I don’t know whether my new family will like me, and I don’t know how I’ll adapt. I’m overwhelmed with worries.”
A New Chapter Begins
Two days later, it was time for the Korean men to return home, with their wives staying behind to complete the paperwork to join them.
At the airport here, Ms. Thuy announced that she had something to tell her husband and asked Mr. Ahn to interpret.
“Please extend my greetings to your mother and children,” she said.
Mr. Kim reached out for a handshake, but the brokers pressed him to give his wife a hug.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll study Korean very hard, and by the time you see me I’ll be good at it. We had only a short time together. But I felt affection between us and started to feel love for you. When you’re in Korea, please call me.”
“I’ll call you in two days,” he said.
The two women would leave Hanoi in three months, the same way half a dozen other Vietnamese brides, visas in hand, did on a recent night. The extended families of these brides had come from the countryside to bid them farewell, some still wearing car sickness patches behind their ears for the long drive here.
Many, it seemed, were visiting the airport for the first time. Some kept riding an escalator up and down, their faces showing the thrill of a new experience.
Then, with the boarding time approaching, they clustered in front of a window looking into the immigration office, noses pressed against the glass, and waved at the brides as they were stamped out of Vietnam and went off to catch the red-eye to South Korea.

Su-hyun Lee contributed reporting.

Sex in China

A people’s sexual revolution in China

By David Barboza

Sunday, March 4, 2007

 

 

 

SHANGHAI: When Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue hit the newsstands last week in mainland China for the first time, with the sexy singer Beyoncé on the cover, the competition was fierce.
Readers here had already seen the February issue of For Him Magazine, which features a Chinese singer, A Duo, on its cover wearing a white V-neck leotard that reveals every other inch of her rather substantial figure.
Inside, A Duo poses like a dominatrix, clutching her breasts, wrapping her naked body in celluloid and bending, sweat-drenched, over a submissive man.
The racy For Him Magazine also offers tips on “how to do it in five minutes” (because a “sex break is the same as a coffee break”) and features stories with titles like “The Dangerous Sex Journey of QiQi.”
The images and text would hardly be shocking to North American or European readers. And the magazine’s photographs are tame compared with what appears in magazines in Japan and other parts of Asia, including the rest of China — Hong Kong and Macao.
But in mainland China, where sex is still a taboo subject and pornography is outlawed by the ruling Communist Party, the images are not only highly provocative, but also perhaps the latest sign that sex and sexuality are infiltrating the mainstream media.
And this powerful burst of sexual energy seems both a symbol of how rapidly the transformation of China is unfolding and, to some, a harbinger of the troubles ahead for a nation that will inevitably struggle to absorb its newfound freedoms. “There is a fine line between the open mind and sexual indulgence,” said Xie Xialing, a professor of sociology at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Even five years ago, mainland books and magazines were banned from showing pictures of scantily clad models or publishing content that was deemed offensive or morally corrupt. The only sexual content to be found was in sex education pamphlets or books of nude Chinese women sold as “art works” at big city airports.
Today, however, with the Chinese economy booming and the government loosening its hold on the personal lives of everyday citizens, magazines are beginning to publish soft-core pornographic photographs, sexual fantasies and even clues about where to pick up call girls.
Popular mainland Web sites are going further, posting erotic videos and creating forums for women eager to market their sex appeal and post their photographs on the Internet: images of traveling with friends, undressing at home, even striking erotic poses.
“This is a kind of grass-roots sexual revolution,” said Annie Wang, author of “The People’s Republic of Desire,” a satirical novel about the mad race to modernization.
The government announces periodic crackdowns on pornography and often censors sexual content in magazines and on the Web. But since about 2000, the censors have started to look the other way. Political activism is still a no-no in New China. Entertainment is a different matter. Even the Web site of Xinhua, the official press agency, offers slide shows of the “10 Hottest Babes of 2006″ and “Rarely Seen Photos of Sexy Men.”
Many say the trend is being driven by the market, and by entrepreneurs eager to cash in on the freer lifestyles on the mainland.
“The market is the No. 1 driving force behind the boom of such magazines,” said Pan Suiming, a professor of sociology at Renmin University in Beijing. Western luxury brands entering the mainland market want to advertise in popular magazines and on Web sites that draw consumers. And on the mainland right now, pictures of sex kittens draw.
For Him Magazine is one of the success stories of this genre, with a circulation of about 480,000. It probably helps that the magazine is published by a government agency, the National Tourism Administration, an indication of official interest in investing in the phenomenon.
Jacky Jin, the magazine’s editor in chief, said he wanted to affirm a new kind of lifestyle for readers that he calls the new mainland metrosexuals, guys who love cars, gadgets and girls.
“We’re opening a new window for Chinese men,” he said, noting that he has been criticized by government censors on several occasions.
A decade ago, the private lives of people on the mainland were still quite restricted. Whom you married, where you lived and what was considered permissible were tightly controlled or closely monitored by the government, employers and other authorities.
But urbanization, greater mobility and the power of the World Wide Web have challenged all that.
Now, experts say, the mainland is going through a period of enormous personal and sexual freedom. Young people — most of whom grew up without siblings under the one-child policy — are wearing more hip and provocative clothing. And they’re growing addicted to entertainment online, where they can also search for love and indulge their lust.
Pan said he thought one reason for the cultural change was a change in women’s attitudes.
“Women, especially young women in the cities, no longer think it’s a bad thing to expose their bodies,” he said. “Five or six years ago, when some women started to wear clothes that exposed their midriff, most people couldn’t understand why belly buttons should be regarded as beautiful and deserve public exposure. Today, young women think it is natural to bare their midriff.”
Zha Jianying, a Beijing writer and author of “China Pop,” said the growing openness was actually a good thing.
“This trend of being more open about sex is definitely healthy, coming after all those years of puritanism and Maoist suppression,” Zha said. “Now, maybe we’re seeing the pendulum swing in the other direction.”
But Xie at Fudan University said things had gone too far.
“In certain periods in history, such as the decadent Ming dynasty, sex was not a taboo and even intellectuals would talk about their sex skills casually over tea,” he said. “Today’s society is still better than that. But I do find that people care less about dignity.”
He went on to call for limits on how much skin can be shown publicly, and said: “Human beings should have a sense of shame.”
Other critics say the new freedoms have brought degeneracy, a boom in prostitution, and what Wang, the author, called “the concubine mentality.”
Hard-core pornography remains under assault by the government, which can exact heavy fines on trespassers. One pornography kingpin was recently sentenced to life in prison.
And the censors are wary of influences from the West, like the TV show “Sex and the City,” which has a huge following here, mostly on pirated DVDs.
Even “The Vagina Monologues” theater play was canceled in Shanghai recently, apparently because of the title.
But in a country that also happens to be the largest manufacturer of sex toys, being naughty is catching on.
In November a man in Shanghai was selling condoms in packages bearing the likeness of Chairman Mao.
His shop was closed for selling condoms in “inappropriate packages.”

 

---