Popularity: 2
Vote:   | After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | As the Chinese grew in numbers, the immigrant population grew to the extent that it became a huge economic threat, there were efforts among white workers to organize among themselves politically, and what was unfortunate was that both major parties adopted anti-Chinese platforms. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | California, where the anti-Chinese racism was greatest, became a very crucial swing state during presidential elections, and therefore both parties had to court California. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Congressman David Woo, when he wanted to give a speech at the Department of Energy -ironically to celebrate Asian History month - they stopped him. They wouldn't let him in. This was shortly after the Wen Ho Lee scandal. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Even if you wanted to be a hermit, people come out looking for you. I don't want to cloister myself away, but it is important for me to write about issues that have universal significance. One of them that have resonated with me all my life has been the theme of injustice. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | General histories - there have been a few that have served as pioneering books. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I certainly didn't have a three-book plan or a 10-year plan when I worked on the first book. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I don't mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have friends who are Caucasian who have pitched ideas for a Chinese-American show, and there is great resistance in Hollywood and the networks to support that. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I learned about the atrocities first from my parents; my family had escaped from Nanking before the massacre began. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I remember going to an exhibit of photographs documenting the Japanese invasion of Nanking and other regions and looking at these photos, the decapitations, the torture, the pornographic poses - they would rape women and then photograph them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I started off majoring in math and computer science and then majored in journalism because I knew I wanted to become a writer one day. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | In 1937, in December, the Japanese swept into the city of Nanking and within six to eight weeks, they had massacred more than 300,000 civilians and raped 80,000 women. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In fact, in my book there's a doctor who had committed horrible crimes in Nanking, but now he's a respectable family practitioner, and it's a true life Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde story. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It was interesting for me to learn that the Chinese-white interracial marriage was more common than I expected among Chinese men and Irish women during the 19th century. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It's almost a cliche now to see Chinese-American broadcasters and anchorwomen. Every major city has them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's much more difficult to work on a broad subject than on a specific one, because even if it's hard to find the information, if you look hard enough for something specific you will find it, and you will discover things that you wouldn't have thought of before. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Men all across China are going to have trouble finding wives in just a few years. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | Not only do people go into Chinese restaurants, but people are more likely to work with other Chinese-Americans, more likely to marry them. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Now, most of the new immigrants coming to this country are from Asia as opposed to Europe. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Often what is deeply offensive to Chinese-Americans that they are really well-represented in medicine, and yet on all these doctors' shows you hardly see any Chinese-American faces. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Often when times are good and when the US is on good diplomatic terms with China, the Chinese are viewed as a bridge between the two countries. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The Chinese encountered great prejudice in places like Southeast Asia where they assumed these middle-man minority roles, as Armenians and Jews have done in other countries. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The Committee of 100 commissioned a survey in which they found that Asian-American candidates are the most unpopular of all the races. They found that people were less likely to vote for Chinese-Americans than other minorities. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The Japanese even forced fathers to rape their own daughters or sons their mothers, brothers their sisters in order to further degrade the victims. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The Japanese need to do three things: One, pay reparations to the victims, which they have not done; two, give a sincere official apology to the people of Nanking; and thirdly, they have to stop censoring this event from their textbooks. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The pattern of acceptance and abuse is closely linked with economic and political realities of that era and the state of Sino-American relations. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | The reason Chinese went into groceries was that it was easy to start them. It required little skill and served an important function. In the South they almost completely dominated the grocery industry after it became clear to plantation owners that they couldn't replace slaves with Chinese. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The worst... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | There are now hundreds of thousands of new engineers that are being trained in China. If people start finding themselves losing their jobs, not to the Chinese here but because China has become such a dominant force - then there could very well be a backlash. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | There is a perception that the Chinese started out downtrodden and abused in the 19th century and gradually rose to the top of society as model minorities, and you see them winning Nobel Prizes and getting into our best colleges. But it is not a linear progression. Things don't always get better. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There is also an epidemic of infertility in this country. There are more women who have put off child-bearing in favor of their professional lives. For them, the only way they are going to have a family is to adopt from China. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | These episodes of racism occur in cycles. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | They probably do have an Asian Barbie. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | This by no means the last word on the Chinese in America. This is my personal interpretation of the 150-year epic history of Chinese in this country. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We have to keep in mind that it's not just about the numbers of people who died; it's also the manner which many of these victims met their deaths. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | When you count all the obscure monographic books, there have been many. I probably have most of them in my library. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You also see backlashes at different times, such as the Korean War, when Chinese forces clashed with American forces. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else. |