[Woj] For Jeremy Lin, a jagged journey back to Houston gives him reason to trust again

Basic American history, for one.

 

This. GAWD THIS!!!!

 

This is the thing that annoys me about the Lin fans.

Lin doesn’t represent me. Because I’m not Asian. I have never been Asian and never will be. Asian is a term which the American bureaucracy uses out of necessity.

Because of that, Lin as a racial thing is just irrelevant to me. All that matters is whether he can help the Rockets or not. I really think he can, and one airball does not a bad point guard make. But don’t act like I’m supposed to rally behind him as some racial miracle. Because he’s not.

 

Is that a promise?

 

Maybe to you, he's not, but to a lot of Asian-Americans, Jeremy Lin is a huge deal because they've been ignored or ridiculed as a demographic (especially the men) for so long.

Just because you're not affected by it doesn't mean that his relevance as something more than just a sports figure is non-existent.

If you think that it's silly that one basketball player can mean that much to a people, well, then consider yourself privileged enough to be part of a demographic that gets plenty of positive portrayals in American society.

But obviously, comparing Lin to Robinson is severely lacking in perspective. Maybe you can compare Lin to, say, Warren Moon.

 

Yes. I will let the games play out first. But honestly coaching is one thing, but I also blame Jeremy being so passive ie passing up good look and taking less than 10 shots a game. If he continues this and acts like he is content to play the role of a role player than it is what he is. He was never the player we all hope he would be.

 

People have different reasons for liking him. The underdog story, the couch etc. but for a lot of Asian fans, we support him because he is one of his kind- a Asian American player who is not a genetic freak like Yao beating the stereotype and excelling in an area of sport that has never had anyone like him. I don't expect to understand the zeal if you are not an Asian, but to a lot of us, we want him to succeed so he can pave the way for other Asian players.

 

tru dat...you don't know until you've stepped in someone elses shoes.

on another insightful note, here's a good/quick read about JLin's journey - written from the perspective of a Stanford basketball player who's known about JLin since his high school days, played against him in college, trained with him in the D league and now paving his own path in Europe. Written yesterday: http://www.slamonline.com/online/nba/2012/11/jeremy-lin-livin-his-dream/

 

I guess I should have been more clear. I'm not Asian. I'm Japanese. I get why Taiwanese/Chinese/whatever can rally behind Lin, but I am annoyed when they denigrate Lin, and when whites or blacks or whatever thinks I'm supposed to cheer for Lin because we're supposedly part of the same demographic. Perhaps that's a failure of society and now I’m getting into politics and should shut up. But it does irk me when someone like jae rants like that for that very reason.

 

Great article. Thanks!

 

The Japanese don't consider themselves as part of Asia. Western countries do but they do not. If Lin doesn't represent you then that's cool. He doesn't have to represent anything other than a Rockets player. People are fans of players for different reasons, no reason is better, or worse, than the other.

 

Basic American history for ya

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02sfcrime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


Fun facts:

Chinese people fought in the American Civil War
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44949

Segregated units?
http://janmstore.com/javeterans.html

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States)
The 442nd is considered to be the most decorated infantry regiment in the history of the United States Army.

Documented phrase go for broke origination

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Asian_Americans

With the desegregation of the United States Military in 1948 segregated Asian American units ceased to exist, and Asian Americans continued to serve in an integrated armed forces. Actions of valorous Asian American individuals continued to be recorded in the Korean and Vietnam Conflicts, and Asian Americans have continued to serve until the present day.

Army Prosecutor Details Racial Abuse That Preceded Soldier’s Suicide
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/n...ial-abuse-that-preceded-soldiers-suicide.html

US Marine commits suicide
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/loca...rry-Lew-Hazing-Case-138410254.html?fullSite=y


Jason Whitlock podcast on Jeremy Lin and racism bias against Asian Americans
http://podbay.fm/show/421604653/e/1329860040?autostart=1

Vincent Who?

http://www.vincentwhofilm.com/interviews/angela_oh/index.php

http://modelminority.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Hate+Crimes

Who needs death threats when americans of Asian descent are still dying be ause they are yellow even to this day?

Time traveling to the 80s now
The most notable example is that the case of Vincent Chin which galvanized the Asian American community into link building actively speaking out on and educate the public on crimes directed against Asian Americans that are racially motivated. For the Vincent Chin example, the perpetrators stated to Vincent Chin that "It's because of you little mother****ers that we're out of work." This statement was due to the perception by Ebens and Nitz that they lost their manufacturing jobs at a Detroit automobile plant due to downsizing caused by competition from Japanese automakers in the 1980s. Vincent Chin was brutally murdered by Ebens and Nitz due to the perception that as a Chinese American US citizen, Chin was equivalent to a Japanese foreign national for Ebens and Nitz to vent their frustrations out on.

Vincent Chin's case is interesting in that it was caused by the perception of Asian Americans being the perpetual foreigner stereotype ; that somehow Asian Americans are never equal citizens to white Americans of European descent.

Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans
"Driven Out is the most comprehensive history of the period, written with a keen eye for the horrifying, heartbreaking, and often uplifting and triumphant details."--Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
About the Author
Jean Pfaelzer is professor of English and American studies at the University of Delaware. The author of four other books and numerous articles on nineteenth-century history, culture, women’s literature, feminist theory, and cultural theory, she has served as the executive director of the National Labor Law Center, been appointed to the D.C. Commission for Women, and worked for a member of Congress on immigration, labor, and women’s issues. She lives near Washington, D.C.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Pfaelzer, professor of American studies, reveals one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history--the purging of thousands of Chinese immigrants in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain region between 1850 and 1906. Drawing on newspaper accounts, diaries, legal pleadings, and photographs, Pfaelzer retells the story of the horrific purge of the Chinese. Testifying in their own words, Chinese businessmen recall being driven out of their shops, while women tell of being forced into prostitution; they were driven from gold mines, orchards, and small towns in the booming West. The Chinese responded with defenses from boycotts to lawsuits asking for reparations, challenges to police harassment, shipments of arms from China, and pressure on the Chinese government to intervene. Pfaelzer also catalogs the racist images of docile and dirty Chinese subject to lynchings, night raids, murder, expulsion, and deportation. She compares the expulsions to those in Nazi Germany, as well as modern Rwanda and Bosnia, and puts the Driven Out campaign into the broader context of American racism. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Jean Pfaelzer has pulled back the veil on one of the most horrendous, frightening, violent, and little known moments in American history, when the Chinese were driven from their homes and businesses in an effort to expel them from communities, states, and ultimately the country. This is the most comprehensive history of this period I have ever read, and Pfaelzer has written it with sensitivity and a keen eye for the horrifying, heartbreaking, and often uplifting and triumphant details. Driven Out couldn't be more timely or important.”
–Lisa See, Author, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Driven Out: the Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans is a meticulously researched and very readable recounting of America’s systematic effort to purge all Chinese immigrants, from the mid-19th into the early-20th centuries. Jean Pfaelzer documents hundreds of cases in which the Chinese were lynched, maimed, burned out of their neighborhoods, and forced at gunpoint to leave mining camps, small villages, Indian reservations, and Chinatowns. The methodical and ruthless nature of this ethnic cleansing was matched only by the resistance from the Chinese — sometimes with guns and knives or fists and sometimes with savvy recourse to their government representatives as well as petitions, public confrontations, and hundreds of lawsuits using white attorneys up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pfaelzer has names and stories for these incidents — making the actors real and accessible. This is a valuable addition to our understanding of the making of modern America.”
–Franklin Odo, Director, Smithsonian Institution Asian Pacific American Program; Author, The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience


Product Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents–and how the victims bravely fought back.
In town after town, as races and classes were pitted against one another in the raw and anarchistic West, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built.

Here, in vivid detail, are unforgettable incidents such as the torching of the Chinatown in Antioch, California, after Chinese prostitutes were accused of giving seven young men syphilis, and a series of lynchings in Los Angeles bizarrely provoked by a Chinese wedding. From the port of Seattle to the mining towns in California’s Siskiyou Mountains to “****** Alley” in Los Angeles, the first Chinese Americans were hanged, purged, and banished. Chinatowns across the West were burned to the ground.

But the Chinese fought back: They filed the first lawsuits for reparations in the United States, sued for the restoration of their property, prosecuted white vigilantes, demanded the right to own land, and, years before Brown v. Board of Education, won access to public education for their children. Chinese Americans organized strikes and vegetable boycotts in order to starve out towns that tried to expel them. They ordered arms from China and, with Winchester rifles and Colt revolvers, defended themselves. In 1893, more than 100,000 Chinese Americans refused the government’s order to wear photo identity cards to prove their legal status–the largest mass civil disobedience in United States history to that point.

Driven Out features riveting characters, both heroic and villainous, white and Asian. Charles McGlashen, a newspaper editor, spearheaded a shift in the tactics of persecution, from brutality to legal boycotts of the Chinese, in order to mount a run for governor of California. Fred Bee, a creator of the Pony Express, became the Chinese consul and one of the few attorneys willing to defend the Chinese. Lum May, a dry goods store owner, saw his wife dragged from their home and driven insane. President Grover Cleveland, hoping that China’s 400,000 subjects would buy the United States out of its economic crisis, persuaded China to abandon the overseas Chinese in return for a trade treaty. Quen Hing Tong, a merchant, sought an injunction against the city of San Jose in an important precursor to today’s suits against racial profiling and police brutality.

In Driven Out, Jean Pfaelzer sheds a harsh light on America’s past. This is a story of hitherto unknown racial pogroms, purges, roundups, and brutal terror, but also a record of valiant resistance and community. This deeply resonant and eye-opening work documents a significant and disturbing episode in American history.

“Jean Pfaelzer has pulled back the veil on one of the most horrendous, frightening, violent, and little known*moments in American history, when the Chinese were driven from their homes and businesses in an effort to expel them from communities, states, and ultimately the country.* This is the most comprehensive history of this period I have ever read, and Pfaelzer has written it with sensitivity and a keen eye for the horrifying, heartbreaking, and often uplifting and triumphant*details.**Driven Out*couldn't be more timely or important.”
*–Lisa See, Author, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
*
“Driven Out: the Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans is a meticulously researched and very readable recounting of America’s systematic effort to purge all Chinese immigrants, from the mid-19th into the early-20th centuries. Jean Pfaelzer documents hundreds of cases in which the Chinese were lynched, maimed, burned out of their neighborhoods, and forced at gunpoint to leave mining camps, small villages, Indian reservations, and Chinatowns. The methodical and ruthless nature of this ethnic cleansing was matched only by the resistance from the Chinese — sometimes with guns and knives or fists and sometimes with savvy recourse to their government representatives as well as petitions, public confrontations, and hundreds of lawsuits using white attorneys up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pfaelzer has names and stories for these incidents — making the actors real and accessible. This is a valuable addition to our understanding of the making of modern America.”
–Franklin Odo, Director, Smithsonian Institution Asian Pacific American Program; Author, The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience

“Thanks to this gripping narrative, Chinese immigrants to the Far West — so long overlooked — now stand front and center in the saga of the struggle for civil rights in these United States.”
– Kevin Starr, University of Southern California; Author, California, A History

"Too few Americans have any idea that these events mark the nation’s past. Pfaelzer capably reconstructs a shameful history.”
– Kirkus Reviews







From the Inside Flap
"Driven Out is the most comprehensive history of the period, written with a keen eye for the horrifying, heartbreaking, and often uplifting and triumphant details."--Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
About the Author
Jean Pfaelzer is professor of English and American studies at the University of Delaware. The author of four other books and numerous articles on nineteenth-century history, culture, women’s literature, feminist theory, and cultural theory, she has served as the executive director of the National Labor Law Center, been appointed to the D.C. Commission for Women, and worked for a member of Congress on immigration, labor, and women’s issues. She lives near Washington, D.C.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1



GOLD!

“PEACEABLY IF WE CAN,

FORCIBLY IF WE MUST”

On February 2, 1848, a vanquished Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and ceded California to the United States, unaware that just nine days earlier, nuggets of pure gold had been found in a creek at a sawmill in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada range. The discovery of gold did not make the front page of the San Francisco papers until March 15, but sailing vessels quickly carried the news to countries that bordered the Pacific Ocean. Word soon spread from Mexico to Panama to Chile. In April, the Pacific Mail Steam-ship Company launched five side-wheel steamships to carry eager South American miners north to San Francisco.

At the dawn of 1848, 150,000 native people and a few thousand Mexicans and Californios lived in the northernmost corner of Mexico. Yuroks, Miwoks, Nisenan, Yokuts, and Karuks were among fifty tribes or nations who first inhabited the area. Mestizos, rancheros, peons, Spanish priests, and runaway African American slaves were the first settlers. Their worlds were about to collide.

Word of gold traveled across the Pacific to the Sandwich Islands and from there to China. In port cities across Asia, captains and crews altered their routes, sailed for California, and abandoned laden ships in San Francisco Bay. Many ships rotted and sank in its cold waters as officers and sailors headed for the Sierra mountains. Other ships anchored at the docks and were promptly rebuilt as saloons or restaurants to serve the tide of gold seekers. In San Francisco and Sacramento, stores and offices closed, houses were boarded up, crops were abandoned, and Mexicans, Californios, and white laborers, merchants, artists, and physicians all rushed into the Sierra foothills. They traveled any way they could, on burros, horses, or wagons, sometimes hiking, sometimes buying overpriced tickets on steamships to carry them up the Yuba, Bear, and American Rivers.

From the East Coast, unemployed veterans, just home from the Mexican War, returned to the West—back overland by carriage, on horseback or foot, across the mountains and jungles of the Isthmus of Panama, where they desperately awaited ships to finish their voyage up the Pacific coast. These new “argonauts” joined mechanics, ranchers, laborers, merchants, and professional men and stormed up California’s mountains, sharing an expansionist vision and a military determination. None was interested in laboring as a waiter, servant, mill worker, or field hand, even at wages of ten to twenty dollars per day.

When news of gold reached the newly “open” port cities in China, shipmasters in Hong Kong and Canton had little difficulty convincing Chinese men to sail for California. In rice-growing and fishing villages in Guandung Province, shipping companies circulated broadsheets and maps urging men to forswear country and clan for gold. Facing warlords, destitution, and British battleships, villagers read ads promoting America as a haven of plenty and equality:

Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and will make him welcome. There will be big pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write your friends or send them money any time, and we will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike; big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinamen there now, and it will not be a strange country. China God is there, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky. Come to Hong Kong, or to the sign of this house in Canton and we will instruct you. Money is in great plenty and to spare in America. Such as wishes to have wages and labor guaranteed can obtain the security by application at this office.

Dreaming of wealth on “Gold Mountain,” as California came to be known, Chinese villagers sold their fields or fishing boats, or borrowed money to sail to California. They landed in a raw new territory, a land without traditions of nationhood, authority, ethnic commonality, or even clear geographic borders.

Few Chinese women journeyed across the Pacific. Unlike their brethren, most Chinese women who entered California in the mid-1800s were slaves. Kidnapped for prostitution from the southern ports of China, they were brokered and owned by Chinese merchants who also emigrated to in San Francisco.

The Chinese arrived as California was growing from a cluster of harbor towns and mining camps into a national financial and political force. From San Francisco up through the Sacramento Delta and north to Crescent City, fishing villages and small towns built to trade in hides and tallow rapidly became staging and supply centers for miners eager to move into the mountains. Ninety percent of California’s workforce was tied to gold.

California’s new leaders promptly abandoned the area’s ties to Spanish priests and Mexican ranchers. They identified with the Anglos and debated how to govern thousands of Chinese, Chilean, French, Mexican, and Peruvian prospectors. In the Sierra Nevada the Chinese argonauts encountered Native Americans and Mexican Americans who were facing death, enslavement, or violent pogroms by white men eager to quickly gather the golden ore that had lain sparkling in California’s rivers for thousands of years.

The gold rush also offered a serendipitous finale to a war premised on national expansion and the extension of slave territory. By 1845 abolitionists had lost their decadelong struggle to prevent the annexation of Texas. The Washington Union, a paper of southern Democrat views, wrote, “Who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the West? The road to California will be open to us. Who will stay the march of our Western people?” That year John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, declared that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Ideas of white superiority bracketed the image of white expansion, “free development” and industrial inevitability in California and the West. The Illinois State Register insisted, “Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance? . . . myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its rich and inviting prairies; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.” Mexicans, wrote the American Review, must yield to “a superior population, insensibly oozing into her territories, changing her customs, and out-living, out-trading, exterminating her weaker blood.”

At the same time, the final push for the abolition of slavery was taking hold. The American Anti-Slavery Society declared that the Mexican War was “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery through the vast territory of Mexico.” The poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell, through his character Hosea Biglow, a New England farmer, announced,

They just want this Californy

To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,

An’ to plunder ye like sin.

Newly organized workingmen in New England well understood that despite the military’s promises to enlistees of plunder, pay of seven dollars per month, and a land grant of 160 acres, territories seized from Mexico “would be giving men that live upon the blood of others an opportunity of dipping their hand still deeper in the sin of slavery. . . . Have we not slaves enough now?” As the war began, a convention of the New England Workingmen’s Association announced that its members would “not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor.”

... Buy the book or visit amazon for more info

 

The largest scale if ethnic cleansing was against Chinese Americans. Hundreds of towns, hubs were burned down all around the USA. Chinese women were imported enmasse as sex slaves in the 1800s. After they were KIDNAPPED. Don't you ever wonder why the remaining enclaves on the are most firmly based on the east and west coast? The rest were wiped out more than 100 years ago.

Just some Basic American History.

 

You shouldn't feel you should cheer for him. Like you said your Japanese. Hell I'm surprised anyone would try to force you. There is still plenty of bad blood between Japan and all other Asian cultures as it is; from my observations.

Just cause your skin tone = Asian doesn't mean your Chinese, not everyone gets that.

 

OMG LOL! Lets keep it basketball related guys so here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBA_Asia

 

Guys.......

Be patient.

Knicks 5-0 is not sustainable. It will be a 45 win team by the end of the season.

Lin's play will improve and this time he will come out stronger, balanced and more experienced.


This is a very young team. Just let them play and learn.

As far as coaching, I think Lin will be more involved as it goes. I see a very defensive Lin right now. Once his shots are back, you will see a much balanced Lin with the ability to penetrate if the opportunity is there, to spread the floor and facilitate Harden/Asik or to pop a jumper when defense clamped down on the others.

Just wait and see. The Rockets do not invest 25 million just to put Lin in the corner doing 3s. Lin's faults are well known and I see a deconstruction of his skills and reassembling of it to a more durable and robust PG. He does have the talent and is above average. By season end you will see a more even PG that will get the respect of his peers.

 

I'm a bit surprised at knicks board reaction TBH.
I understand the thinking of every players need to complement their teams,but this is ridiculous.He's better off,knicks doesnt really have time to develop him(see: amare durability) and knicks is better off with a veteran style,what's wrong with it?
And I think that's why they get baited as per your quote.People need to really read only the part that they are "quoted" .How the article is formed is actually the author's imagination/perception that he wants his users to see.

Melo does occasionally answered questions which are not to is favour (and he could have answered better to stay out of trouble),but I dont think he's that bad of a guy,just a lack of awareness.

JR ...well you know what he is.And I agree Woodson used him well.

The race thing is something that actually exists.I cant say I experience it first hand,but every time I read a lin article in a chinese sports forum,there's comments like "yellow skin so he's less athletic " . Who says he won't be looked down in a place where his race is a minority if his own race said something like that?