Author Topic: Chinese Girl in the Ghetto - Ying Ma  (Read 602 times)

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Offline PeteS in CA

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Chinese Girl in the Ghetto - Ying Ma
« on: April 18, 2021, 02:48:36 pm »
I just finished Chinese Girl in the Ghetto by Ying Ma. It starts with her in Guangzhou, China at age 5, in the years immediately post-Mao. Her family moved to Oakland when she was 10, and the book ends when she is in high school. The book is brief, almost 150 pages, the chapters being selected memories rather than a continuous narrative. The broad themes are her family dynamics/situation, the authoritarian atmosphere of her school in China, her struggles with the language barrier in US schools, and the relentless racism she experienced, even at age 10, almost entirely from blacks.

The simple explanations commonly offered (including by me) for black anti-Asian racism are probably factors, but the 10- and 12-year-olds from whom she heard racist epithets and by whom she was bullied probably weren't thinking of successful Asians as ruining an I-Am-Victim narrative, especially when many of their Asian classmates are obviously as poor as they are. Similarly, an Asian person barely able to speak English isn't going to be a success in most subjects, envied, and hated for showing up their lack of success.

Ying Ma and her brother (born before China's One Child "policy") were successful in learning English, their parents less so. Their survival jobs were compatible with that limitation, but also didn't force them to learn English. The consequence was that in her teens and even before, Ying Ma was helping her parents with household business (bills and such) as somewhat of a translator. At age 15 or 16 she pored over the documents and such related to their purchase of a house, a Chinese-speaking realtor helping them at the closing. Between school work that took her longer because of her limitations and constant assistance in the household, she was adulting while in her early teens. When she was in college at Cornell her brother was back in the house and helped his parents with household business.

My best guess about anti-Asian racism among blacks that she experienced is that they were in an us-vs.-them sub-culture, sometimes my-family/friends-vs.-others, sometimes us-blacks-vs.-all-non-blacks. In Ying Ma's situation, that Asians were usually fewer in number, smaller in stature, and of a compliant culture (she goes into that some) probably encouraged the racism and bullying. The racism wasn't just by children against Asian children, it was experienced by adults such as her parents, including the elderly.

Ying Ma did mention people who were friends to her - in China and in the US - and what helped her get past her hatred and into her adult life.
If, as anti-Covid-vaxxers claim, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/robert-f-kennedy-jr-said-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-deadliest-vaccine-ever-made-thats-not-true/ , https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2021/11/23/covid-shots-are-the-deadliest-vaccines-in-medical-history/ , The Vaccine is deadly, where in the US have Pfizer and Moderna hidden the millions of bodies of those who died of "vaccine injury"? Is reality a Big Pharma Shill?

Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.