Tuesday, 25 April 2006 @ 3:16pm.

Me: “Um, when does the dry season start?”
Him: “I don’t know. It will be the rainy season for a loooong time.” (chuckles)

I like the sound of rain, especially at night time. I think the rain cleanses the earth. Rain helps the trees and flowers grow. That being said, rain also contributes to crazy humidity, dirty floods, and breeding grounds for mosquitos!

Like the rain, bureaucracies can have their good and bad sides. Wish me luck as I go through the [insert your own adjective here] process of extending my stay permit in Jakarta (must be done every two months!) and attempt to get permission to travel to other cities outside of Jakarta.

Generation Asian-American: Time Magazine (Asia Edition, 01 May 2006) had a good article today: “Between Two Worlds: Born in the U.S.A. to Asian Parents, a Generation of Immigrants’ Kids Forges a New Identity” by Nadia Mustafa and Jeff Chu.

Did you know that exclusion laws in the U.S. limited the number of immigrants to 100 per year per country for most Asian countries until 1965? And that after President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, annual per-country quotes were increased to 20,000? See page 42 of the article for more details.

Quotes that spoke to me include:

Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call “forever foreigners.” Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like, “No, where are you really from?” (p. 43)

Vanessa DeGuia, now 26… Another [classmate] came over for dinner, took a bite of a Filipino egg roll made by Vanessa’s mom, spat it out and asked if it was made of dog. (p. 43) –> I didn’t experience this personally, but I vividly recall my sister having a get-together once and her little friends freaking out over the crab my mother served for dinner, which by the way, had they been informed was a HUGE deal for us culturally and financially. I also recall bringing fried rice to a class potluck one time, which no one touched, and my mother being confused and in tears when I brought the dish home. I didn’t understand it either at the time, particularly since who wouldn’t LOVE Filipino fried rice? :)

Racial alientation and ethnic mockery are commonplace in the immigrant-kid experience… But previous generations of immigrants’ kids, including those Italians and Jews, lived in neighborhoods with built-in social support structures - people who looked like them, ate like them, prayed like them. They had what Marissa Dagdagan, 28, a daughter of Filipino-born doctors, who grew up in Burr Ridge, Illinois, says she did not - “people like me that I could corrobrate with.” (p. 43)

The article briefly touches on issues of “discovery” in college regarding Asian and Asian-American identities, as well as interracial relationships. For example, “Both Grace Chang Lucarelli and her sister married white men. Although their Taiwanese parents weren’t pleased at first, Lucarelli says they understood the odds. ‘They took us to Texas,’ she says, of her upbringing in the small town of Terrell. ‘What did they expect?’” (p. 45).

Though the article spoke to my “Asian half” if you will, I wonder what an article would look like for those of us who are bi- or multi-racial. Imagine the issues we face on top of having an Asian-American identity since we have to straddle many more than two worlds!