it's so weird because
i have these huge windows in my studio. windows look out onto rooftop. rooftop has a couple of guys working on the roof. they have been there all day today and yesterday working on something (drilling, nailing, etc.). it is weird because i have been sitting here in my apt. with my windows wide open and these rooftop workers are right outside, literally like a few feet away from me but we have not acknowledged each others' existence(s). they call each other names like, "bastard, bitch, pussnboots."
anyway, here is an article about an Asian Am basketball league. here is an article about Pacific Islander youth and their struggles these days in school and family. and thanks to nha_hang_chay for posting the article about Asian Am women and breast cancer and other cancers.
All articles are posted below in case you are afraid of clicking on links.
From eastbayexpress.com
Originally published by East Bay Express 2006-04-19
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Jumping Through Hoops
An adult Asian-American basketball league gains popularity, but rather than prove your skills, you have to prove your race.
By Momo Chang
Bayette Ross Smith
A league of their own.
Who / What:
Dream League
News Category:
Business
On a partly cloudy Sunday, a throng of men in their twenties are shooting ball at Bushrod Recreation Center in North Oakland. Ten guys run the wood floor in team jerseys, while others prepare for upcoming games or wait to sub in. It'd be a pretty typical hoop scene, except that all the players are of Asian descent, while the refs, scorekeepers, and neighborhood kids who peek in to see what's up are mostly African American.
The Asian-only Dream League launched in 2001 with nine teams at San Francisco's Potrero Hill Rec Center and has expanded around the Bay Area. It now has 64 teams in three divisions, with 650 players ranging in age from 18 to 49. For many players, it's an all-day affair. Some guys arrive hours before game time to check out the competition. Others play on multiple teams and travel between gyms. On this particular Sunday, Billy "BJ" Marshall, 25, arrived fresh from a game at East Oakland's Ira Jinkins Rec Center - one of several courts the league rents out - for his Bushrod match. At six-one and 238 pounds, he's one of the bigger guys.
Marshall is half African American, half Pacific Islander. When he signed up a year and a half ago, he had to go down to the courthouse to pick up an original copy of his birth certificate to prove he was at least one-quarter Asian, and present it to league founder Rich Twu.
Marshall expected as much. The race requirement is no secret; it's stated clearly on the league's Web site, DreamLeague.org. It's exclusionary, to be sure. But based on the popularity of Twu's pan-Asian league - Japanese leagues have been around for sixty-plus years, and the Bay Area also has Afghan and Filipino leagues - it's fulfilling an unmet need. "In baseball they had the Negro leagues," the 34-year-old founder explains. "The Negro leagues were just as good as the white leagues. They had to be as good to be accepted. They had to develop to such a high level in order to get the respect."
Twu is quick to point out that there are no Asian Americans in the NBA, despite "import" players such as Yao Ming. Thirty-year-old power forward Andrew Park, who plays for Dream team Five Ten, says he was drawn to the league by a combination of comfort, playing time, competitiveness, and a lack of organizations like it when he was growing up. "A lot of courts in Oakland, Berkeley, or the Richmond area, you can go on the court and it's the same ol' thing," says Park, who is six-one and two hundred pounds. "I'm a little bigger than the average Asian male. I may have an advantage. But if you're a small Asian guy trying to get on the game, they may not let you on."
Asian players just don't get respect, he says. Off-court stereotypes of Asian men as short, weak, and meek all play out on the court. "I know a lot of guys like us from urban areas like Oakland, and those stereotypes really make us mad," says Park, who grew up in Oakland and attended Skyline High. "That's something that we can't stand. ''Cause if we do [act like that], we get picked on every day, on the basketball court and in the street. We can't be like that. It's something we've been battling all our lives."
Racial politics also can play out in subtler ways. As a power forward - a very physical position - in Hayward's open league, Park he says he was always up against taller and heavier men, and when push came to shove, it always worked against him. The bigger guy felt he could punk the Asian guy, but if the Asian guy fouled hard, he always got called for it. It's common knowledge that refs sometimes cut the bigger guy - think Shaq - slack on fouls, since he just can't help fouling hard.
The stereotypes work both ways, though. When Marshall's team, Kurruption, first signed up in the Dream League, there was a lot of tension. His team has three half-black, half-Asian guys. Marshall believes that when a team beats Kurruption, they can boast that they beat the "black team." And whenever his team wins, it could be spun as unfair that African Americans are taking over the league. "You get a lot of comments on the sidelines, like 'Oh, I thought this was supposed to be an Asian league,'" he says. "But that's just ignorance if they assume I'm 100 percent black just off the color of my skin."
Twu prefers to see his organization as a way for people of different races to get familiar with one another. The league hires young people, most of them African American, as scorekeepers. "It takes time to build a symbiotic relationship between these two communities - inner-city kids and Asian-American basketball players," Twu says. "It starts with exposure, and just seeing each other every Sunday."
That's not quite the same as playing together, though. On another Sunday at Ira Jinkins, a young black guy was hanging out watching. Basketball in tow, he'd hoped to shoot some hoop, but the entire day was slotted with Dream League games. He seemed a little awestruck. Turning to a freelance reporter, he asked, "What is this? Can I play in it?" How do you tell someone he can't play because of his age and race?
"A lot of times kids will come and say, 'Hey, what is this? How can I get involved?'" confirms Paul Bates, a forty-year-old Oakland Parks and Rec supervisor who refs for the Dream League. Yet Bates, who is African American, insists the league has done nothing but good for the community. Most of the gyms were closed on Sundays before the league started renting them from the city, he says. And besides, the rec centers are open to all during the rest of the week, and most of the players are black. "While it's primarily an Asian-American league, you still have some levels where African Americans can participate," he adds. "Some are players, and others are employed. It's not just about basketball. It's more of a way for different cultures to come together in ways that they ordinarily wouldn't."
Bates also likes that the league hires youngsters. "Our whole vision is to mentor and employ kids from the streets, from the inner-city neighborhoods, and give them jobs they're interested in," says Twu, who gave up a job at Price Waterhouse Coopers to run his league full-time. He says the Dream League has six or so young people working part-time, and has employed more than thirty others over the past few years.
When asked point-blank about the race requirement, Twu takes a long pause, then responds that he has to draw the line somewhere. "Sometimes I feel that people may feel like we're prejudiced against them," he says. "You can group people differently. There's women's leagues, coed leagues, gay and lesbian leagues, corporate leagues. We just happen to be an Asian-American league."
Some of the guys play elsewhere - in city leagues, open leagues, at Cal's Recreational Sports Facility, or in a Filipino league, but many are weekend warriors - students or young professionals who just want a chance to play a game or two on weekends. "Here, the competition is still intense, but that environment is much more conducive for Asian players to do their thing in an environment that is relatively comfortable for them," Park says.
Witness a Dream League game and you can feel the love in the sweaty air. The players respect the refs, give 'em high fives, laugh, make small talk. Even the kids who walk in off the streets to catch a glimpse give props when one of the players makes a buzzer-beater or a longshot three-pointer. They laugh and jeer when someone is blocked or misses an easy shot. Everyone seems in his element. Even rival players joke around and have fun. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and respect is doled out freely.
Race really isn't the important thing here, says Marshall, adding that he doesn't think the league's requirements are discriminatory. "The important part is the friendly competition," he says.
Then again, he has his birth certificate to show.
+ + +
Invisible minority
A new study shows Pacific Islanders experience high dropout, arrest, and depression rates
By Momo Chang
A new community-based research report on Pacific Islanders - Tongans, Samoans, Hawaiians, Fijians, and other Polynesians - reveals disproportionately high dropout, arrest, and depression rates among the population in Oakland.
In the 2000 to 2001 school year, for example, 47 Pacific Islander ninth graders were enrolled in the Oakland Unified School District. By the 2003 to 2004 school year, when those students would have been seniors, only 14 Pacific Islanders were enrolled in the 12th grade.
Pacific Islander youths also have the second-highest arrest rate in Alameda County and the highest arrest rate - about 9 in 100 Pacific Islanders each year - in San Francisco County, according to the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center.
Often grouped under the larger Asian and Pacific Islander category, Pacific Islanders' experiences are overshadowed by larger groups like Chinese and Japanese Americans.
"We're invisible," Penina Ava Taesali, a researcher of the report, told the Guardian. "All we have is anecdotal data on issues. In every segment of the government - city, county, state, and federal - there's no data."
Taesali, who is the artistic director of Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, said that when she first began working for AYPAL eight years ago, she expected to see a program for Pacific Islander youths - and was surprised to see none. She helped create the youth program Pacific Islander Kie Association (PIKA) in 2001.
She is among those now trying to figure out why this relatively small cultural group is having such disproportionate problems - and how they might be solved.
Culture Clash
The first wave of immigration from the Pacific Islands came after World War II. During the war many Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, Tonga, and Samoa, were occupied by US troops. Previous to that, many Pacific Islands were colonized by Europeans.
After the United States loosened its immigration policies in 1965, more and more Pacific Islanders moved to the US, as well as to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. First men, then women, moved abroad for better jobs to send remittance back to the islands. Between 1980 and 1990, the US population of Tongans rose 58 percent.
When the 2000 US census was released, many were also surprised to learn that there are more Pacific Islanders living in California than in Hawaii: 116,961 compared with 113,539. The Bay Area - including Oakland, San Francisco, and San Mateo - is home to 36,317 Pacific Islanders.
Now a new generation of Pacific Islander Americans is growing up and learning to navigate family, school, and church - but many are feeling alienated from all three social structures.
"A lot of times, within Pacific Islander families, the children are very much seen but not heard," Venus Mesui, a community liaison at Life Academy and Media Academy high schools in Oakland, said. "They're not really able to express themselves at school or at home. Depression comes along with that, because they don't have the know-how to express themselves in a positive manner. They don't have a space, or they don't feel safe, to voice their opinions."
The report also revealed that several youths who were interviewed said domestic violence and corporal punishment occurred within their families.
Pelenatita "Tita" Olosoni, 18, told us she wished more parents would visit the schools to see what's really going on.
"Parents think school out here is easier than back on the islands," Olosoni said. "It would be helpful if they took time off from work to see what kids are going through every day."
According to Mesui, parents need to be trained in how to support their children, particularly if they attend underperforming schools.
"I know all of the parents want their kids to succeed, but unfortunately, older siblings are asked to take care of the younger ones, and this doesn't prepare them with good habits that will make them successful in school," Mesui, who is Hawaiian, said.
Olosoni said she and other Pacific Islander students have had to stay home and miss weeks of school to take care of their younger siblings and cousins.
Christopher Pulu, a 15-year-old freshman at Oakland High whose father is a landscaper, said, "That's what the majority of our fathers do." Most Pacific Islanders in the US are laborers, and 32 percent live below the national poverty level, according to 2000 US census data.
"They always need an extra hand," Olosoni told us. "So the boys will drop school and see it as an easy way to make money and work with their dads."
"Big-boned and heavy-handed"
Like many minority groups, Pacific Islanders suffer from stereotypes. The prevalent minority myth that all Asians (though most Pacific Islanders do not consider themselves Asian) do well in school actually hurts groups like Pacific Islanders, Cambodians, and Hmong, according to Andrew Barlow, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and Diablo Valley College.
"Most people say we're big-boned and heavy-handed," Olosoni said. "When Tongans get in trouble, the whole Tongan crew gets in trouble."
Olosoni remembers the day she, her sister, and three friends were called into the principal's office after a lunchtime fight at Castlemont High School in East Oakland. The security guard called another guard on his walkie-talkie and said, "Gather all the Tongans in the office," Olosoni recalls.
"I was like, 'No, they didn't go there,'" she told us. "It was just the five of us involved in the fight, but they called in all the Tongans." After the fight, the five Polynesian girls were given a one-week suspension.
Because Pacific Islander youths only make up 1.2 percent of a district's population, they are usually a small but visible group within each school. While security guards may not be able to call "all Latinos" to the office, for example, they can do so with a smaller population like Tongans, Barlow said. He said that being so easily targeted increases solidarity within the community but may also lead to insularity and even more stereotyping.
"When people are denied opportunities and when they're treated unequally, the way they're going to deal with that is increasing reliance on their community and increasing ethnic solidarity," he said.
Barlow, who teaches courses on race and ethnicity, told us stereotypes are just a part of the problem. Larger systemic issues such as the economy, access to jobs, and educational role models are just as crucial.
"Tongans are already coming into American society with a lot of problems caused by colonialism," Barlow says. "If you don't have access to a very wealthy school district, if you don't know people who have access to good jobs, if you don't have a high degree of education, then you're in trouble."
A New Generation
Pulu said he hopes to be the first in his family to attend and graduate from college. He has received at least a 3.5 grade point average every semester and attends church regularly.
At the beginning of the school year, his multicultural education teacher asked him to go to the front of the class and point out Tonga on a world map.
"It doesn't stand out," Pulu said. He is energetic and enthusiastic and doesn't mind educating others about his culture. "Most people think it's a part of Hawaii."
Mesui said Pacific Islanders have come a long way. Though the report focuses on a lot of struggles, Mesui said that she has personally seen increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders graduate from high school and go on to college, including her three children.
She believes schools should address the issue of youths who don't have support at home.
"When they're not in school, they're doing something else," Mesui said. "The majority of the arrests are due to them not going to school and getting in trouble on the streets. And I think it falls on the school - we're not doing something to keep them here."
Olosoni said she knows of 3 Tongan youths in the last school year who were kicked out of Castlemont - out of about 15 Pacific Islander students in the school - for cutting class.
"It comes from the lack of them getting help from people of their own kind to help them understand things better," Olosoni said. She is now attending adult school and working on her GED.
Over the years Taesali has pushed for more programming in the community. PIKA now has about 40 youths who meet every Tuesday afternoon at an Oakland high school.
"If we got more Pacific Islander staff and teachers, there would be immediate results," Taesali said. "I have no doubt about it."
Taesali sees Pacific Islander students engaged when they learn about their own culture.
"Every time we've done workshops on Pacific Islander history and culture, [the students] just don't want to leave," she said. "They are so happy to be learning about their culture."
+ + +
Silent suffering
By Momo Chang, Contributor
Susan Shinagawa recalls when she first detected signs of lumps in her breast.
As someone who worked at a cancer research organization, she knew what to do:
Keep track of the lumps through two menstrual cycles, see an oncologist and get a mammogram and sonogram.
The mammogram and sonogram both came back negative for cancer. She was still worried, but when she went to see a surgeon for a biopsy, he refused to do one.
He told the former Richmond resident that she had nothing to worry about, that at 34, she was too young to have breast cancer, and that "besides, Asian women don't get breast cancer."
Shinagawa says she remembers feeling frustrated and angry. So she sought a second opinion - and found out that she did indeed have breast cancer.
Now, 15 years later and still fighting, Shinagawa says she still
hears similar stories from Asian American women whose doctors don't believe could get breast cancer, simply because of their race.
These doctors are most likely being misled by statistics that show relatively low breast cancer rates among Asian women. The problem is that much of that data was gathered on women living in Asia. A 1993 study shows that Asian women born in the United States had a breast cancer risk 60percent higher than Asian women born elsewhere.
Many health advocates argue that few studies have been done on Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women in the United States and that studies need to focus on individual ethnic groups within the larger category.
Recent studies show Asian American women are more likely to die of cancer than any other cause. And while they are less likely than women in any other major ethnic group to develop breast cancer, their breast cancer rate is the nation's fastest-growing, according to a 2004 study by the Cancer Surveillance Section of the California Department of Health. That study shows that 97 out of
100,000 API women will develop breast cancer, based on most recent data gathered between 1996-2000. Among Asian women in California, breast cancer accounts for 28 percent of diagnosed cancers.
Recent awareness of this issue has spawned public health campaigns. For example, the Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project at the University of California, San Francisco, has been reaching out to Vietnamese women in Santa Clara County.
Project director Thoa Nguyen says that many Vietnamese women do not know about preventative care for cancer and only see a doctor when there are symptoms. Often there aren't obvious breast and cervical cancer symptoms until too late, but these diseases can be detected at the early stages with simple exams.
"In Vietnam, when we're sick, we go to the doctor," says Nguyen. "If we're not, we don't."
Get checked out
Nguyen says many women don't understand the importance of screening for cancer, don't know where to go and often are not covered by health insurance.
The project's outreach efforts include a bilingual guide and a media campaign in Vietnamese-language newspapers, TV and radio. Among the Vietnamese population, Nguyen says, about 25 percent of women over the age of 40 have not had a mammogram in the last two years.
Complicating the lack of awareness about the rise in breast cancer rates is the cultural taboo surrounding cancer within some Asian communities.
Shinagawa, 48, now lives in San Diego. She spends much of her time volunteering and speaking about her experience with breast cancer.
"In a lot of Asian communities, they don't talk about cancer," she says. "That's one of the challenges in our community. To get people to talk about it, (and to realize) that the myths are truly just myths. But it has to be talked about by respected people in the community that can tell them in their language, in the way that they communicate."
Women may feel they can't speak out within their own communities and families when it comes to cancer and other diseases.
"In the Japanese community, there's (a phrase that) basically means, 'Deal with it yourself and don't share your burden with others'," says Shinagawa. "In a lot of Asian communities, there's the belief that cancer is contagious, or people think it's a bad omen, that (cancer patients) will bring bad luck."
In addition to the cultural taboo is the language barrier of accessing the health care system.
The ethnic category Asian and Pacific Islander encompasses more than 30 ethnic groups speaking multiple languages. About 70 percent of all Asian and Pacific Islanders are first-generation, according to 2000 census data.
A recent study on language and healthcare access, conducted by the Berkeley-based Discrimination Research Center, shows that nearly two-thirds of test calls made to hospitals by people speaking in Cantonese and Vietnamese resulted in personnel hanging up the phone, disconnecting when transferring, or placing the caller on hold for more than 10 minutes.
The study's testers called 12 Alameda County hospitals in five languages - English, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Spanish and Tagalog. Only 56 percent of all the calls were properly transferred. None of the test callers speaking English were disconnected or placed on hold for more than 10 minutes.
"It's hard for populations like refugees, and new immigrants, if they don't understand the system," says Roxanna Bautista, a program director at the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum based in San Francisco.
Bautista, whose health advocacy organization oversees the national Asian & Pacific Islander National Cancer Survivors Network, says many people in this population group are not citizens or are undocumented, making them unlikely to seek health care and unable to pay for it due to lack of insurance.
"All groups need some assistance and more outreach, and something to let them know what's out there in terms of prevention and screening," she says.
Stigma of cancer
The stigma stigma of cancer is also prevalent among other ethnicities.
"There are similarities among ethnic populations," says Shinagawa. "In some Asian cultures and Latino cultures, the whole thing about karma, about talking about cancer, being afraid to go to the doctor, or fear that they will be deported even if they're legal."
She adds that some Asian languages don't even have a word for cancer.
In Khmer, a Cambodian language, it takes 19 words to describe cancer, according to Shinagawa.
And though many types of cancer are preventable and curable - cervical cancer, for example - many women still do not get screened.
The cervical cancer rate of Asian women is 10 percent higher than that of all women in California.
That's not surprising, given that Asian women also have a lower rate of receiving Pap smear tests. Ninety percent of white females in California have had at least one Pap smear, while only 67 percent of Asian females have taken the test.
Shinagawa says only recently have researchers and health organizations begun to focus on Asian and Pacific Islander women.
Just recently, the American Cancer Society, along with the Asian American Network for Cancer Awareness, Research and Training (AANCART), launched a searchable online database on cancer materials in 12 different Asian and Pacific Islander languages, including Khmer, Chamorro, Chinese, Hawaiian, Hmong, Ilokano, Korean, Samoan, Tagalog, Tongan and Vietnamese (www.cancer.org/apicem).
Shinagawa says that she is still in pain today. She has had two mastectomies, undergone chemotherapy and is now medically disabled after receiving another cancer diagnosis.
Still, she continues to advocate for equity in healthcare, especially for minority and low-income communities. She co-founded the Asian & Pacific Islander National Cancer Survivors Network and has been honored with many awards for her advocacy work.
But she says that all she's done is speak about her experiences.
"My claim to fame is that I went out in public and talked about cancer," she says. "There are a lot of women who don't want to talk about it. I'm no scientist or nurse. I'm a cancer survivor."
anyway, here is an article about an Asian Am basketball league. here is an article about Pacific Islander youth and their struggles these days in school and family. and thanks to nha_hang_chay for posting the article about Asian Am women and breast cancer and other cancers.
All articles are posted below in case you are afraid of clicking on links.
From eastbayexpress.com
Originally published by East Bay Express 2006-04-19
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Jumping Through Hoops
An adult Asian-American basketball league gains popularity, but rather than prove your skills, you have to prove your race.
By Momo Chang
Bayette Ross Smith
A league of their own.
Who / What:
Dream League
News Category:
Business
On a partly cloudy Sunday, a throng of men in their twenties are shooting ball at Bushrod Recreation Center in North Oakland. Ten guys run the wood floor in team jerseys, while others prepare for upcoming games or wait to sub in. It'd be a pretty typical hoop scene, except that all the players are of Asian descent, while the refs, scorekeepers, and neighborhood kids who peek in to see what's up are mostly African American.
The Asian-only Dream League launched in 2001 with nine teams at San Francisco's Potrero Hill Rec Center and has expanded around the Bay Area. It now has 64 teams in three divisions, with 650 players ranging in age from 18 to 49. For many players, it's an all-day affair. Some guys arrive hours before game time to check out the competition. Others play on multiple teams and travel between gyms. On this particular Sunday, Billy "BJ" Marshall, 25, arrived fresh from a game at East Oakland's Ira Jinkins Rec Center - one of several courts the league rents out - for his Bushrod match. At six-one and 238 pounds, he's one of the bigger guys.
Marshall is half African American, half Pacific Islander. When he signed up a year and a half ago, he had to go down to the courthouse to pick up an original copy of his birth certificate to prove he was at least one-quarter Asian, and present it to league founder Rich Twu.
Marshall expected as much. The race requirement is no secret; it's stated clearly on the league's Web site, DreamLeague.org. It's exclusionary, to be sure. But based on the popularity of Twu's pan-Asian league - Japanese leagues have been around for sixty-plus years, and the Bay Area also has Afghan and Filipino leagues - it's fulfilling an unmet need. "In baseball they had the Negro leagues," the 34-year-old founder explains. "The Negro leagues were just as good as the white leagues. They had to be as good to be accepted. They had to develop to such a high level in order to get the respect."
Twu is quick to point out that there are no Asian Americans in the NBA, despite "import" players such as Yao Ming. Thirty-year-old power forward Andrew Park, who plays for Dream team Five Ten, says he was drawn to the league by a combination of comfort, playing time, competitiveness, and a lack of organizations like it when he was growing up. "A lot of courts in Oakland, Berkeley, or the Richmond area, you can go on the court and it's the same ol' thing," says Park, who is six-one and two hundred pounds. "I'm a little bigger than the average Asian male. I may have an advantage. But if you're a small Asian guy trying to get on the game, they may not let you on."
Asian players just don't get respect, he says. Off-court stereotypes of Asian men as short, weak, and meek all play out on the court. "I know a lot of guys like us from urban areas like Oakland, and those stereotypes really make us mad," says Park, who grew up in Oakland and attended Skyline High. "That's something that we can't stand. ''Cause if we do [act like that], we get picked on every day, on the basketball court and in the street. We can't be like that. It's something we've been battling all our lives."
Racial politics also can play out in subtler ways. As a power forward - a very physical position - in Hayward's open league, Park he says he was always up against taller and heavier men, and when push came to shove, it always worked against him. The bigger guy felt he could punk the Asian guy, but if the Asian guy fouled hard, he always got called for it. It's common knowledge that refs sometimes cut the bigger guy - think Shaq - slack on fouls, since he just can't help fouling hard.
The stereotypes work both ways, though. When Marshall's team, Kurruption, first signed up in the Dream League, there was a lot of tension. His team has three half-black, half-Asian guys. Marshall believes that when a team beats Kurruption, they can boast that they beat the "black team." And whenever his team wins, it could be spun as unfair that African Americans are taking over the league. "You get a lot of comments on the sidelines, like 'Oh, I thought this was supposed to be an Asian league,'" he says. "But that's just ignorance if they assume I'm 100 percent black just off the color of my skin."
Twu prefers to see his organization as a way for people of different races to get familiar with one another. The league hires young people, most of them African American, as scorekeepers. "It takes time to build a symbiotic relationship between these two communities - inner-city kids and Asian-American basketball players," Twu says. "It starts with exposure, and just seeing each other every Sunday."
That's not quite the same as playing together, though. On another Sunday at Ira Jinkins, a young black guy was hanging out watching. Basketball in tow, he'd hoped to shoot some hoop, but the entire day was slotted with Dream League games. He seemed a little awestruck. Turning to a freelance reporter, he asked, "What is this? Can I play in it?" How do you tell someone he can't play because of his age and race?
"A lot of times kids will come and say, 'Hey, what is this? How can I get involved?'" confirms Paul Bates, a forty-year-old Oakland Parks and Rec supervisor who refs for the Dream League. Yet Bates, who is African American, insists the league has done nothing but good for the community. Most of the gyms were closed on Sundays before the league started renting them from the city, he says. And besides, the rec centers are open to all during the rest of the week, and most of the players are black. "While it's primarily an Asian-American league, you still have some levels where African Americans can participate," he adds. "Some are players, and others are employed. It's not just about basketball. It's more of a way for different cultures to come together in ways that they ordinarily wouldn't."
Bates also likes that the league hires youngsters. "Our whole vision is to mentor and employ kids from the streets, from the inner-city neighborhoods, and give them jobs they're interested in," says Twu, who gave up a job at Price Waterhouse Coopers to run his league full-time. He says the Dream League has six or so young people working part-time, and has employed more than thirty others over the past few years.
When asked point-blank about the race requirement, Twu takes a long pause, then responds that he has to draw the line somewhere. "Sometimes I feel that people may feel like we're prejudiced against them," he says. "You can group people differently. There's women's leagues, coed leagues, gay and lesbian leagues, corporate leagues. We just happen to be an Asian-American league."
Some of the guys play elsewhere - in city leagues, open leagues, at Cal's Recreational Sports Facility, or in a Filipino league, but many are weekend warriors - students or young professionals who just want a chance to play a game or two on weekends. "Here, the competition is still intense, but that environment is much more conducive for Asian players to do their thing in an environment that is relatively comfortable for them," Park says.
Witness a Dream League game and you can feel the love in the sweaty air. The players respect the refs, give 'em high fives, laugh, make small talk. Even the kids who walk in off the streets to catch a glimpse give props when one of the players makes a buzzer-beater or a longshot three-pointer. They laugh and jeer when someone is blocked or misses an easy shot. Everyone seems in his element. Even rival players joke around and have fun. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and respect is doled out freely.
Race really isn't the important thing here, says Marshall, adding that he doesn't think the league's requirements are discriminatory. "The important part is the friendly competition," he says.
Then again, he has his birth certificate to show.
+ + +
Invisible minority
A new study shows Pacific Islanders experience high dropout, arrest, and depression rates
By Momo Chang
A new community-based research report on Pacific Islanders - Tongans, Samoans, Hawaiians, Fijians, and other Polynesians - reveals disproportionately high dropout, arrest, and depression rates among the population in Oakland.
In the 2000 to 2001 school year, for example, 47 Pacific Islander ninth graders were enrolled in the Oakland Unified School District. By the 2003 to 2004 school year, when those students would have been seniors, only 14 Pacific Islanders were enrolled in the 12th grade.
Pacific Islander youths also have the second-highest arrest rate in Alameda County and the highest arrest rate - about 9 in 100 Pacific Islanders each year - in San Francisco County, according to the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center.
Often grouped under the larger Asian and Pacific Islander category, Pacific Islanders' experiences are overshadowed by larger groups like Chinese and Japanese Americans.
"We're invisible," Penina Ava Taesali, a researcher of the report, told the Guardian. "All we have is anecdotal data on issues. In every segment of the government - city, county, state, and federal - there's no data."
Taesali, who is the artistic director of Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, said that when she first began working for AYPAL eight years ago, she expected to see a program for Pacific Islander youths - and was surprised to see none. She helped create the youth program Pacific Islander Kie Association (PIKA) in 2001.
She is among those now trying to figure out why this relatively small cultural group is having such disproportionate problems - and how they might be solved.
Culture Clash
The first wave of immigration from the Pacific Islands came after World War II. During the war many Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, Tonga, and Samoa, were occupied by US troops. Previous to that, many Pacific Islands were colonized by Europeans.
After the United States loosened its immigration policies in 1965, more and more Pacific Islanders moved to the US, as well as to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. First men, then women, moved abroad for better jobs to send remittance back to the islands. Between 1980 and 1990, the US population of Tongans rose 58 percent.
When the 2000 US census was released, many were also surprised to learn that there are more Pacific Islanders living in California than in Hawaii: 116,961 compared with 113,539. The Bay Area - including Oakland, San Francisco, and San Mateo - is home to 36,317 Pacific Islanders.
Now a new generation of Pacific Islander Americans is growing up and learning to navigate family, school, and church - but many are feeling alienated from all three social structures.
"A lot of times, within Pacific Islander families, the children are very much seen but not heard," Venus Mesui, a community liaison at Life Academy and Media Academy high schools in Oakland, said. "They're not really able to express themselves at school or at home. Depression comes along with that, because they don't have the know-how to express themselves in a positive manner. They don't have a space, or they don't feel safe, to voice their opinions."
The report also revealed that several youths who were interviewed said domestic violence and corporal punishment occurred within their families.
Pelenatita "Tita" Olosoni, 18, told us she wished more parents would visit the schools to see what's really going on.
"Parents think school out here is easier than back on the islands," Olosoni said. "It would be helpful if they took time off from work to see what kids are going through every day."
According to Mesui, parents need to be trained in how to support their children, particularly if they attend underperforming schools.
"I know all of the parents want their kids to succeed, but unfortunately, older siblings are asked to take care of the younger ones, and this doesn't prepare them with good habits that will make them successful in school," Mesui, who is Hawaiian, said.
Olosoni said she and other Pacific Islander students have had to stay home and miss weeks of school to take care of their younger siblings and cousins.
Christopher Pulu, a 15-year-old freshman at Oakland High whose father is a landscaper, said, "That's what the majority of our fathers do." Most Pacific Islanders in the US are laborers, and 32 percent live below the national poverty level, according to 2000 US census data.
"They always need an extra hand," Olosoni told us. "So the boys will drop school and see it as an easy way to make money and work with their dads."
"Big-boned and heavy-handed"
Like many minority groups, Pacific Islanders suffer from stereotypes. The prevalent minority myth that all Asians (though most Pacific Islanders do not consider themselves Asian) do well in school actually hurts groups like Pacific Islanders, Cambodians, and Hmong, according to Andrew Barlow, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and Diablo Valley College.
"Most people say we're big-boned and heavy-handed," Olosoni said. "When Tongans get in trouble, the whole Tongan crew gets in trouble."
Olosoni remembers the day she, her sister, and three friends were called into the principal's office after a lunchtime fight at Castlemont High School in East Oakland. The security guard called another guard on his walkie-talkie and said, "Gather all the Tongans in the office," Olosoni recalls.
"I was like, 'No, they didn't go there,'" she told us. "It was just the five of us involved in the fight, but they called in all the Tongans." After the fight, the five Polynesian girls were given a one-week suspension.
Because Pacific Islander youths only make up 1.2 percent of a district's population, they are usually a small but visible group within each school. While security guards may not be able to call "all Latinos" to the office, for example, they can do so with a smaller population like Tongans, Barlow said. He said that being so easily targeted increases solidarity within the community but may also lead to insularity and even more stereotyping.
"When people are denied opportunities and when they're treated unequally, the way they're going to deal with that is increasing reliance on their community and increasing ethnic solidarity," he said.
Barlow, who teaches courses on race and ethnicity, told us stereotypes are just a part of the problem. Larger systemic issues such as the economy, access to jobs, and educational role models are just as crucial.
"Tongans are already coming into American society with a lot of problems caused by colonialism," Barlow says. "If you don't have access to a very wealthy school district, if you don't know people who have access to good jobs, if you don't have a high degree of education, then you're in trouble."
A New Generation
Pulu said he hopes to be the first in his family to attend and graduate from college. He has received at least a 3.5 grade point average every semester and attends church regularly.
At the beginning of the school year, his multicultural education teacher asked him to go to the front of the class and point out Tonga on a world map.
"It doesn't stand out," Pulu said. He is energetic and enthusiastic and doesn't mind educating others about his culture. "Most people think it's a part of Hawaii."
Mesui said Pacific Islanders have come a long way. Though the report focuses on a lot of struggles, Mesui said that she has personally seen increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders graduate from high school and go on to college, including her three children.
She believes schools should address the issue of youths who don't have support at home.
"When they're not in school, they're doing something else," Mesui said. "The majority of the arrests are due to them not going to school and getting in trouble on the streets. And I think it falls on the school - we're not doing something to keep them here."
Olosoni said she knows of 3 Tongan youths in the last school year who were kicked out of Castlemont - out of about 15 Pacific Islander students in the school - for cutting class.
"It comes from the lack of them getting help from people of their own kind to help them understand things better," Olosoni said. She is now attending adult school and working on her GED.
Over the years Taesali has pushed for more programming in the community. PIKA now has about 40 youths who meet every Tuesday afternoon at an Oakland high school.
"If we got more Pacific Islander staff and teachers, there would be immediate results," Taesali said. "I have no doubt about it."
Taesali sees Pacific Islander students engaged when they learn about their own culture.
"Every time we've done workshops on Pacific Islander history and culture, [the students] just don't want to leave," she said. "They are so happy to be learning about their culture."
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Silent suffering
By Momo Chang, Contributor
Susan Shinagawa recalls when she first detected signs of lumps in her breast.
As someone who worked at a cancer research organization, she knew what to do:
Keep track of the lumps through two menstrual cycles, see an oncologist and get a mammogram and sonogram.
The mammogram and sonogram both came back negative for cancer. She was still worried, but when she went to see a surgeon for a biopsy, he refused to do one.
He told the former Richmond resident that she had nothing to worry about, that at 34, she was too young to have breast cancer, and that "besides, Asian women don't get breast cancer."
Shinagawa says she remembers feeling frustrated and angry. So she sought a second opinion - and found out that she did indeed have breast cancer.
Now, 15 years later and still fighting, Shinagawa says she still
hears similar stories from Asian American women whose doctors don't believe could get breast cancer, simply because of their race.
These doctors are most likely being misled by statistics that show relatively low breast cancer rates among Asian women. The problem is that much of that data was gathered on women living in Asia. A 1993 study shows that Asian women born in the United States had a breast cancer risk 60percent higher than Asian women born elsewhere.
Many health advocates argue that few studies have been done on Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women in the United States and that studies need to focus on individual ethnic groups within the larger category.
Recent studies show Asian American women are more likely to die of cancer than any other cause. And while they are less likely than women in any other major ethnic group to develop breast cancer, their breast cancer rate is the nation's fastest-growing, according to a 2004 study by the Cancer Surveillance Section of the California Department of Health. That study shows that 97 out of
100,000 API women will develop breast cancer, based on most recent data gathered between 1996-2000. Among Asian women in California, breast cancer accounts for 28 percent of diagnosed cancers.
Recent awareness of this issue has spawned public health campaigns. For example, the Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project at the University of California, San Francisco, has been reaching out to Vietnamese women in Santa Clara County.
Project director Thoa Nguyen says that many Vietnamese women do not know about preventative care for cancer and only see a doctor when there are symptoms. Often there aren't obvious breast and cervical cancer symptoms until too late, but these diseases can be detected at the early stages with simple exams.
"In Vietnam, when we're sick, we go to the doctor," says Nguyen. "If we're not, we don't."
Get checked out
Nguyen says many women don't understand the importance of screening for cancer, don't know where to go and often are not covered by health insurance.
The project's outreach efforts include a bilingual guide and a media campaign in Vietnamese-language newspapers, TV and radio. Among the Vietnamese population, Nguyen says, about 25 percent of women over the age of 40 have not had a mammogram in the last two years.
Complicating the lack of awareness about the rise in breast cancer rates is the cultural taboo surrounding cancer within some Asian communities.
Shinagawa, 48, now lives in San Diego. She spends much of her time volunteering and speaking about her experience with breast cancer.
"In a lot of Asian communities, they don't talk about cancer," she says. "That's one of the challenges in our community. To get people to talk about it, (and to realize) that the myths are truly just myths. But it has to be talked about by respected people in the community that can tell them in their language, in the way that they communicate."
Women may feel they can't speak out within their own communities and families when it comes to cancer and other diseases.
"In the Japanese community, there's (a phrase that) basically means, 'Deal with it yourself and don't share your burden with others'," says Shinagawa. "In a lot of Asian communities, there's the belief that cancer is contagious, or people think it's a bad omen, that (cancer patients) will bring bad luck."
In addition to the cultural taboo is the language barrier of accessing the health care system.
The ethnic category Asian and Pacific Islander encompasses more than 30 ethnic groups speaking multiple languages. About 70 percent of all Asian and Pacific Islanders are first-generation, according to 2000 census data.
A recent study on language and healthcare access, conducted by the Berkeley-based Discrimination Research Center, shows that nearly two-thirds of test calls made to hospitals by people speaking in Cantonese and Vietnamese resulted in personnel hanging up the phone, disconnecting when transferring, or placing the caller on hold for more than 10 minutes.
The study's testers called 12 Alameda County hospitals in five languages - English, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Spanish and Tagalog. Only 56 percent of all the calls were properly transferred. None of the test callers speaking English were disconnected or placed on hold for more than 10 minutes.
"It's hard for populations like refugees, and new immigrants, if they don't understand the system," says Roxanna Bautista, a program director at the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum based in San Francisco.
Bautista, whose health advocacy organization oversees the national Asian & Pacific Islander National Cancer Survivors Network, says many people in this population group are not citizens or are undocumented, making them unlikely to seek health care and unable to pay for it due to lack of insurance.
"All groups need some assistance and more outreach, and something to let them know what's out there in terms of prevention and screening," she says.
Stigma of cancer
The stigma stigma of cancer is also prevalent among other ethnicities.
"There are similarities among ethnic populations," says Shinagawa. "In some Asian cultures and Latino cultures, the whole thing about karma, about talking about cancer, being afraid to go to the doctor, or fear that they will be deported even if they're legal."
She adds that some Asian languages don't even have a word for cancer.
In Khmer, a Cambodian language, it takes 19 words to describe cancer, according to Shinagawa.
And though many types of cancer are preventable and curable - cervical cancer, for example - many women still do not get screened.
The cervical cancer rate of Asian women is 10 percent higher than that of all women in California.
That's not surprising, given that Asian women also have a lower rate of receiving Pap smear tests. Ninety percent of white females in California have had at least one Pap smear, while only 67 percent of Asian females have taken the test.
Shinagawa says only recently have researchers and health organizations begun to focus on Asian and Pacific Islander women.
Just recently, the American Cancer Society, along with the Asian American Network for Cancer Awareness, Research and Training (AANCART), launched a searchable online database on cancer materials in 12 different Asian and Pacific Islander languages, including Khmer, Chamorro, Chinese, Hawaiian, Hmong, Ilokano, Korean, Samoan, Tagalog, Tongan and Vietnamese (www.cancer.org/apicem).
Shinagawa says that she is still in pain today. She has had two mastectomies, undergone chemotherapy and is now medically disabled after receiving another cancer diagnosis.
Still, she continues to advocate for equity in healthcare, especially for minority and low-income communities. She co-founded the Asian & Pacific Islander National Cancer Survivors Network and has been honored with many awards for her advocacy work.
But she says that all she's done is speak about her experiences.
"My claim to fame is that I went out in public and talked about cancer," she says. "There are a lot of women who don't want to talk about it. I'm no scientist or nurse. I'm a cancer survivor."