Geisha Blog Tiff

I've been twittering a fair amount lately. Here's a twitter-inspired microblogpost:

It's a Geisha blog tiff, not quite a war.

I'm glad to see that Jenn at Reappropriate is back to regular blogging, at least for now.

Chinese Adoption Corruption and Maddening Stereotypes in the Media

These last few weeks there have been a flurry of large media stories covering major corruption in international adoption. Guatemala. Guatemala again. Ethiopia. Now China.

I hope this new exposure will eventually lead to some serious reforms.

It's not like there aren't ethical minefields in foster care adoption... but at least families have some degree of insight into the problems. When I have questions, I can pick up the phone and talk to everyone involved. Problems in international adoption are ten times worse, and they're also ten times less transparent. You're dealing with foreign legal systems, foreign languages, foreign cultures. International adoptive parents who shrug off these corruption stories by saying "well it doesn't apply to my case" usually have no evidence whatsoever. They just don't know at all and likely never will.

There are exceptions. International adoptive parents may or may not face the same knowledge barriers (e.g. some Chinese-Americans adopting from China).  Or they're adopting older children and/or are in touch with their childrens' biological families.  In fact, that's how I think a lot of these corruption cases have come to light: older adopted children tell their new parents that the agency's story is a lie, and the new parents have enough integrity to believe them and investigate further.

Anyway, I think the fact that these corruption cases are being discussed in the mainstream media is a good step. However, I still have major issues with the way they're being framed. The LA Times China article has two major failings: 1) it doesn't include the adoptee viewpoint and 2) it fails to challenge stereotypical thinking about China.

How hard would it have been for the reporter to ask an adoptee for their perspective?  The same reporter, Barbara Demick, wrote an article several weeks ago --
Adopted teen finds answers, mystery in China -- about a teenager who had a reunion with his birth family in China. Why not include a few sentences of his reaction to the story? Instead, the American perspectives are all from adoptive parents. And this includes one randomly chosen adoptive mother who is pretty much the living embodiment of cluelessness.

She wonders what she would do if she discovered that her daughter was one of the stolen babies. She knows she could never return the Americanized 6-year-old, who is obsessed with "SpongeBob" and hates the Chinese culture classes her mother enrolled her in. But she said, "I would certainly want to tell the birth family that your daughter is alive and happy and maybe send a picture."

"It would be up to my daughter later if she wanted to build a relationship," she said.

Shades of the Anna Mae He coverage I complained about last year.  There are so many things wrong in this paragraph. It presumes being Chinese as somehow incompatible with being American, ignoring the existence of 3.5 million Chinese-Americans who have somehow managed to pull off this incredible feat.

And SpongeBob obsession is supposedly total proof of being American. They don't watch Sponge Bob in China... actually, let me confirm that by doing a few seconds of searching on Google.

Variety: China sponges 'SpongeBob'
Cartoon sweeps ratings on CCTV
"SpongeBob SquarePants" has swept to the top of the ratings on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV's Kids Channel. The quirky toon has become the most popular children's show in 15 key cities, drawing viewership of 20.5 million to Bikini Bottom.

Oops!

And I won't get into that "because she doesn't like Chinese culture classes that lets me off the hook for everything" implication. This is an extremely complicated issue (see a great blog post on it here).

Leaving reunion totally up to the child is also a cop-out. There are many complicated steps that need to be taken as soon as possible in order to maintain relationships. Waiting until it's no longer your responsibility means removing choice from the child, not giving them more choice.

I can't stand this woman's attitude and what it represents about international adoption. It's so selfish and ignorant. If this were me, I would feel morally obligated to do a lot more than maybe send a picture.

Family History, National History

We spent our family vacation in Washington DC. It was awfully nice. I already know the area fairly well from the time I spent long ago as an au pair working for a family in the Maryland suburbs.

One day, we drove all the way down to Jamestown and its historical museum. I loved the exhibits, which covered the culture of 1) the English settlers 2) Powhatan Native Americans and 3) Angolans of dubious status (perhaps slaves, perhaps indentured) who all once lived in or near Jamestown. One exhibit covered a fascinating bit of history that I never knew before: the colonization efforts were based on a pattern already established... in Ireland. The goal was establish an ethnic enclave while extracting wealth from the natives (Irish cattle-herders/Powhatan farmer-hunters) using a combination of trade and force, then send money back to England.

We watched a museum movie which showed that life in Jamestown was pretty much hell on earth for the first English settlers. During one famine, some people dug their own graves, laid down in them and just waited to die. Jamestown wasn't very successful, which was why the Pilgrims are usually thought of as the first real settlement colony for the United States.

One of my ancestors on my mother's side was a Jamestown settler. His name was William Farrar, and he came over in 1618 from Lincolnshire. That's one of the main reasons I'm interested in Jamestown (although I'm not a full-fledged genealogy person).

Sunny had a vacation journal in which he had to write five sentences for every day. He liked the museum, and the ship we saw in neighboring Yorktown, but also wrote that hearing about all the Indians killed in Jamestown made him sad.

Sunny's favorite museum, of course, was the National Air and Space Museum. There are plenty of cool things to touch and pull and push and climb... it's a wonderland for a kid his age.

We took a tour through the WWII Pacific room. I looked for an exhibit on Japanese soldiers, but all they had was a single one on kamikaze pilots. I don't really blame the museum, since there weren't many exhibits on German soldiers in the other hall, either. But I do wish the Japanese could have been represented by something other than kamikaze pilots. I didn't draw it to Sunny's attention. Too complicated.

I did point to a picture of a Japanese battleship and explain that Ojiichan's father died when American fighter planes sunk his battleship. Because Ojiichan's father, my grandfather, died and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, we never got to meet him. I said that the Japanese were on the wrong side in the war and the Americans were on the right side, so it's a good thing we Americans won, but it was still a very sad thing that Ojiichan's father had to die like that.

Sunny said, "If I was around back then, I would save Ojiichan's father!" What a sweet boy.

Later on, we had dinner with my Guy's colleague who lives in DC. This was the first time I'd ever met her, although she and Guy have been friends for a while. She's a Japanese-American woman one generation older than me. I told her about what Sunny had said in the WWII Pacific exhibit, and she remarked, "My father was probably trying to sink your grandfather's battleship." She explained that in WWII her family had all their property seized in California and were taken to an internment camp, and from there her father volunteered, and ended up in the Pacific translating Japanese communications for American military intelligence.

Some people can't afford to be bitter and angry about the past. We have to remember, but we also have to move on. I thought of grief and letting go, and our strange relationship to WWII, when I read this recent article about the aftershocks of a war that's even further away in time.

Sunny said that he didn't understand hardly anything Guy's friend had just explained. I told him it was all very complicated history, but he would understand more when he got older.

Joy Luck Hub Submission

This sounds like an interesting project, so I'm submitting my own entry. 299 words...

When people found out I was "half-Japanese" they would always ask me about my Japanese mother. In their minds, my story was already written. My father was a white military man, my mother a Japanese girl he had married and taken away back to the States when his post was finished. In the beginning I was simply confused by how wrong this story was. Later on, it made me angry that people kept imposing it on me.

When they met, my mother was a radical hippie and my father was a hippie radical. He made his own sandals out of used car tires, and was once jailed for punching a policeman in a student riot in Tokyo. He loved retelling the anecdote: "Pig hit me with stick. So I punch pig. Then pig take me to jail!" We lived briefly in England during the 70s, and the Sex Pistols caught his imagination, for obvious reasons. He used to sing me to sleep with "God save the queen, iza fascist regime," which he intoned in a bizarre but somewhat credible imitation of a cockney accent.

My parents raised me with bits and pieces of the traditions they were raised with. They also raised me not accept authority at face value, and to question any claims to an ultimate truth.

So I didn't ever experience a "Joy Luck" clash between a sense of Asian tradition and American modernity. I was always on the outside looking in, no matter where I lived. This wasn't easy. In fact, it was incredibly painful. I had no hometown, no home culture, nowhere to stand my feet... and nothing to rebel against in order to define myself. But I still like my own story much better than the stories other people try to force onto me.

The Asian Flush Article

This story has spread all over the Asian-American blogosphere. Also, my mother emailed it to me.

NYTimes: Drinkers’ Red Face May Signal Cancer Risk
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: March 20, 2009

People whose faces turn red when they drink alcohol may be facing more than embarrassment. The flushing may indicate an increased risk for a deadly throat cancer, researchers report.

The flushing response, which may be accompanied by nausea and a rapid heartbeat, is caused mainly by an inherited deficiency in an enzyme called ALDH2, a trait shared by more than a third of people of East Asian ancestry — Japanese, Chinese or Koreans. As little as half a bottle of beer can trigger the reaction.

The deficiency results in problems in metabolizing alcohol, leading to an accumulation in the body of a toxin called acetaldehyde. People with two copies of the gene responsible have such unpleasant reactions that they are unable to consume large amounts of alcohol. This aversion actually protects them against the increased risk for cancer.

But those with only one copy can develop a tolerance to acetaldehyde and become heavy drinkers. [...]

Fascinating. It's a little academic for me now, because I don't drink anymore. I'm not sure if I have one copy or two copies, but the flush always gave me massive problems. My father has it and so do I.

When I was a teenager (and I moved away from home at the age of 15, so don't blame my mother for this!) my circle of friends were heavy drinkers. I'm talking malt liquor and Kool-Aid-mixed-with-Everclear type of heavy drinkers. But drinking didn't come naturally to me. I had to work really, really hard to keep up. Here's a chart of my physiological reaction to different levels of alcohol.

1 beer: I turn bright red. My heart starts beating faster. Everyone asks me how I got the terrible sunburn, and I have to explain, "no, I'm just experiencing an allergic reaction to alcohol that some Asians happen to have". This is very irritating.
2-3 beers: I turn a slightly darker shade of bright red. My heart is pounding, and I begin shivering, no matter what the temperature. I get dizzy and have problems standing up straight.
4 beers: I go sit down on a couch and close my eyes, because I feel so bad. This isn't anything like passing out... I'm basically conscious, I just don't feel like moving.
5-6 beers: If I force myself past the napping stage, I finally get to be drunk. This is the part of drinking alcohol everyone actually enjoys, I'm guessing. I'm drunk enough to ignore the pounding heartrate and nausea. I'm actually starting to have some fun.
7+ beers: OH NO... IT'S... GODZILLA!!!!!
The angry mutant lizard brain takes control. I begin staggering around with vicious intent, bouncing off the walls, screaming obscene insults at anyone in range, and flailing my arms at them. Luckily, my depth perception is nonexistent at this point, so I don't hit anyone. Then comes the projectile vomiting.

The worst part of all of this is that I've never actually "blacked out". That is, I remember everything I did the next morning.

Anyway, I gave up on heavy drinking by the time I was in my early twenties. When I was in grad school I'd drink at parties, but I'd never go past the napping stage. At a certain point, I'd just say, "Excuse me, I need to rest for a while, I'll be back in about half an hour". Everyone thought it was bizarre and antisocial behavior, but they should have been grateful to me for stopping the Godzilla attack.

And I can't drink wine at all, or champagne. The effects are much worse than with any form of alcohol. After one glass of wine, I feel paralyzed and on the verge of death because my heart starts beating so fast. I've had people actually get visibly angry at me because I refuse a glass of wine in social situations, even after I explain it's not that I want to refuse their hospitality, it's that I can't. I'll say "I'm allergic to wine" and then they'll deny that it's even possible.

Today, I just don't drink alcohol. Or maybe I'll have one sip of someone else's drink.

Alcoholism makes me really sad. Both my grandparents were alcoholics. My grandfather was a happy drunk. As a child, his drinking never bothered or affected me, and by the time I was an adult he was too ill with cancer to continue drinking. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a mean drunk. I once saw her throw a footstool at my grandfather across the dinner table, just because she was in a particularly nasty mood. She never hit me, but I was always a bit scared of her.

My father also turns bright red. My mother once saw him literally pass out in the soup. He used to be a drinker -- not a particularly heavy one -- but has now quit because of liver issues.

I know that a lot of Asians who have the reaction keep drinking a lot anyway, just like I used to when I was a teenager. Drinking is so much of a social and cultural thing. There's a positive aspect as well as a terribly destructive aspect. All over the world, it's a method for bonding and forming networks. I'm glad I am not a part of it anymore, but being a non-drinker does make me feel cut off and isolated sometimes.

Another Veteran's Day Post

I first read about this at Angry Asian Man. What an incredible story!

For Veterans Day, CNN has a crazy story about four brothers who fought in World War II—two for the United States, two on the side of Japan: Veterans in focus: Brothers fighting brothers.

Jeff Yang's Article on Asian Interracial Relationships

I don't talk about this subject very much at this blog.

But I agree 100% with everything Jeff Yang says. His article is incredible. Comprehensive, balanced, thoughtful, persuasive.

If you read some of the comments, you'll see why I don't discuss the subject. There's too much ignorance, and it would wear me down to a nub trying to fight against it.

But read the article.

The De-Asianification of "21"

This post by Jenn from Reappropriate has already been cross-posted all over, but I thought I'd give it an extra plug here.

I was quite irritated when I saw the trailer for this movie. "21" is a great, true-life story about a group of MIT students who started a card-counting operation and won millions from casinos. These were Asian-Americans whose Asian-ness was pretty central to their initial success at card-counting. Wow, what a great opportunity to show Asian-American men engaged in an exciting activity that's not kung fu! But of course the movie was de-Asianified in favor of white leads. This has been going on for so long, and it has GOT to stop. I won't be seeing this movie.

Short Post on Sexism

This month I read two great, thoughtful posts about sexism, feminism and Asian-Americans.

Both were by Asian-Americans, one by Kai at Zuky (Sexism and Confucianism) and the other by Jenn at Reappropriate (Helen Zia: Be the Change).

If you are interested in the topic, follow the links and read the comments. You will notice a startling difference in the quality of the dialog in the comments section.

This makes me so mad, I can't make this post much longer, but I wanted to get it off my chest and get back to enjoying my vacation.

Comments off.

The End of May

In an attempt to climb out of blogging doldrums, I'm posting two links here to commemorate the end of National Foster Care Month, and the end of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Thought Leader Forum on Disproportionality: This is a very interesting link that someone just left in my comments. it's to a forum exploring issues in racial disproportionality in foster care. I will be going through it and listening to some of the sound clips soon. Here's one that I'm going to find especially interesting, as it touches on a local Atlanta issue: "Ray Torres, executive director of Casey Family Services, explores the impact of disproportionality on Hispanic foster children, as well as the urgent need for Hispanic foster parents to improve outcomes for these children".

Fallout Central: Along with the OCA, Fallout Central organized a swift, powerful and effective defense against recent racist attacks by DJs JV & Elvis. Their show was taken off the air. Yay for victory!

In personal news, things are moving pretty slowly. My husband and I have decided on a lifestyle change that is going to improve our home life while also preparing for the arrival of kids. We'd been getting into a habit of internet surfing at night. From now on once I get home from work, no more internet. We'll be doing more reading together on weekday nights. I know, it sounds like one solitary activity replacing the other, but we both think reading together is much more involving.

I finally finished Stephen Saylor's book, Roma, and I was not terribly impressed with it. I love, love, love his Gordianus the Finder mystery series, and this book was also all about Roman history, but organized as a James Michener-type multigenerational historic novel. Saylor is a great writer but this particular genre is not a good fit for him. Historical fiction and science fiction face exactly the same problem of how to impart background information to the reader. There are many potential solutions, and sometimes nakedly artificial ones are better than forced natural ones. In the detective format, background information comes along naturally as the detective follows the clues. But in Roma, there were way too many passages like this:

"Hello my friend Tortuous Prosus Historicus, what a coincidence running into you at this significant geographic location on the anniversary of an important event that happened fifty years ago to an ancestor of mine."

"Nice to see you too, Expositor Pompus Maximus. You know, a strange fit of amnesia came over me, and I seem to have forgotten all the important political and cultural events of the last fifty years, by Jupiter, so could you go ahead and give me a recap?"

Oh boy do I hate that stuff, but once I skimmed through those passages the rest of the book was not too bad. I do highly recommend his detective series, starting with Roman Blood.

Asian-Pacific Heritage Month PSA

Here's a PSA to get this blog back into a good mood. Go Beau Sia!

No More Entourage (it sucks now, anyways)

I sent a message via this form in response to an episode of Entourage I saw last night after the Sopranos.

Do the writers of the show realize that May is Asian-American heritage month? The last thing I want to see is another example of Asians treated as sex objects servicing their white masters.

I used to enjoy watching Entourage but I have grown increasingly disgusted with the treatment of Asians on the show. Lance's character seemed promising, but the only show on which his character really mattered was one where he was a prostituted sex object. And now the massage parlor episode...

I will not watch this show anymore.

Praise, Asian-American Parenting, Self-Esteem, Behavior Change

This will be a rambling post that touches on Asian-American approaches to education, then takes a turn into foster care adoption world.

Following a link from the Process blog, I read this article about the negative effects of too much praise of innate ability. This excerpt sums up the argument:

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

The article doesn't make any mention of Asian-American parents. I know this isn't true of all Asian parents, but the general tendency, especially among first-generation immigrant parents, is to give little to no praise. In fact, insults are common.

I think my dad was extreme even for a Japanese father. The best compliment he's ever given me is "I guess you're not hopelessly stupid". My mother was the complete opposite. She also maintained high standards, but gave me unconditional support and constant praise.

The effective part of the general Asian approach to parenting is the focus on effort. The idea is that children start off stupid by default... but if they work really, really, hard, they might become a little less stupid. If you get a 99% on a test, it's because you didn't work hard enough to get 100%. That's the amazingly simple secret to why Asians tend to score higher on tests than other American ethnicities. There's no biological component whatsoever. It's just hard work from the parents and hard work from the kids. And if Asian families lack resources to do this hard work because of extreme poverty or family breakdown, then the model falls apart.

In adulthood, someone raised by this method doesn't need a lot of praise to stay motivated. I notice this a little bit in myself. When other people praise me it often feels weird and insincere. I'll expect it after I accomplish something really major, but otherwise, I'm thinking to myself, "I'm not two years old, I was just doing my job because it's my job, I'm not looking for a freaking cookie and a pat on the head." I have to remind myself that other people often expect this kind of praise and find it much more meaningful than I do.

The dark side is obvious: issues with self-esteem and identity. Someone raised by a hardcore version of this method often doesn't know why they're do so well in school, they just have to. It's like someone reached inside them and wound a spring very tightly then released it. Work, work, work. If they deviate from the course of hard work and excellence, they'll start to break down. They don't know what they really want to do in life or what they really enjoy.

Thank goodness my mother ameliorated most of the aftershocks of my dad's approach to education. Otherwise I'd probably be completely nuts by now. I don't want to go into any details, but I've accomplished a lot of things in my education and done very well in some competitive efforts, especially when I was in my teens. I've also been through some fairly spectacular failures. No one really taught me how to deal with failure when was a kid (my mother just minimized it, then redirected) and I consider that lesson the most important one I taught myself.

Getting to adoption, the article mirrors a lot of things we've been reading about in older child and foster care adoption. Some of our classes touched on it as well. The goal is not to create excellence, but to try and compensate for earlier trauma by building self-esteem. We might be adopting children who blame themselves for being taken into foster care; children who've been through years of emotional abuse and neglect.

From everything we've read, you cannot build self-esteem just by telling the child "you're good". Like "you're smart", it relies too much on innate qualities. It doesn't encourage the child to take action or change behavior. When the child does something they know is not good, the failure is all the worse. The child may even stop believing "you're good" statements.

Instead, we're supposed to concentrate on more sophisticated behavior change techniques. At Baggage's blog she has some great examples of those at work. Of course they're not magic, but I totally trust in the logic behind this kind of advice. I just hope I can follow through on it when we get a placement.

We're also supposed to make sure children don't associate love and belonging 100% with good behavior. Love should be unconditional, and we need to reinforce that even if they behave badly, we still love them, we just don't like the behavior and we believe they have the power and responsibility to improve that behavior.

The goal is wildly optimistic. Children build back damaged self-esteem if we can encourage them to work hard enough? I've always hated the saying "failure is not an option" but in this case, it might be appropriate.

Two Asian-Americans That Totally Suck

I'm in an irritated kind of mood right now, so I'm not going to post anything thoughtful or remotely uplifting. Instead, here's my opinion on two Asian-Americans who I wish would just shut up and go away.

Anchor-baby-hating anchor baby Michelle Malkin. Not only is she an embarassment to Asian-Americans, and Americans, and women, she is also an embarassment to the human species, to mammals, to vertebrates... I could go on. Her most evil act of many evil acts was her book that attempted to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans. She hangs out with white supremacists at vdare.com and serves as a kind of Asian smokescreen for racist-nativist people who think Mexicans are ganging up with Muslims and gays to poison their water supply. She's a hatemonger, a racist, a liar and a fascist.

Financial guru Robert Kiyosaki. This money-grubbing slimeball peddles financial advice that is either horribly wrong, or else ripped off from other basic sources. For example, in one of his recent columns on Yahoo! Finance he encourages people with credit card problems to "fight bad debt with good debt" and start speculating on real estate! Oh, and they need to drop out of college because valuing education is for suckers. According to the ungrateful Kiyosaki, his own father, "Poor Dad", was just a big fat loser for getting degrees from Stanford, Chicago, and Northwestern Universities, on full scholarship, including a PhD... because he didn't become obscenely rich through dishonest and cultish schemes like his son.

Encounter with a Transracial Adoptee

My first encounter with a "TRA" was at the age of 15. I was in an all-girls academic boarding program in a small town in the mountains of a certain Southern state. Our program had regular mandatory mixers with a neighboring military boarding school. Things like "mandatory mixers" didn't sit well with me, so I left the program after one year, thank goodness. After my experience there, I turned totally anti-single-sex education.

In our program, there were plenty of outrageous rumors about the military school. One girl had it, on good authority, that the boys were regularly having sex with each other in the locker room and that one guy had traded his virginity for a Rolex! Nevertheless, we sometimes had phone calls and highly supervised group dates with them. There wasn't much else to do.

After one mixer, I started phone calling with one of the boys. I'll call him C. C immediately stuck out from the rest because he was Asian. He was good-looking, a little bit shorter than me, muscular, quiet, with a slightly nervous way of carrying himself. He told me he was a Korean adoptee in a military family. He liked his parents but his dad was very, very strict.

We got to meet in person again, briefly, and we held hands and he gave me a homemade brownie. I wanted to get to know him better. I was a bit dubious that anything actually romantic would develop. We had so little in common, and our conversations often had a strained politeness to them. At 15, I felt like I already knew who I was and generally where I wanted to go, and if he tried to talk about that those kinds of topics, he came across as painfully confused and just... weird. I only had a tiny vocabulary to talk about Asian identity issues. Looking back, I really had no idea where he was coming from. "He's Asian, like me, I guess he had to face a lot of the same stuff..." and that's where my ability to understand hit a brick wall. Perhaps I could have understood if he'd communicated better, but I think he was still searching for any vocabulary at all.

C sent me a strange letter. I already knew he had a medical problem with alcohol; if he drank it at all, there was some kind of organ reaction that would happen and he'd have to go to the hospital. He started the letter saying that he drank some alcohol and had to go to the hospital, and then went further into the details of the night. His cousin was wearing a sexy dress and had started hitting on him and he sort of made out with her but not really. Then he felt funny so he drank some alcohol. What the hell was he trying to tell me? Why was he acting like an idiot? I felt insulted. I stopped taking his phone calls; I don't think he tried very hard to keep in contact, either. I wrote him off as another one of those messed-up military school boys. That was that. I hope he's in a better place now, more than 15 years later.

Politics and Flipping

My mother and I just got back from seeing Pan's Labyrinth (separate post coming on that).

On the way she told me a great story from a Democratic political meeting she'd been to today. A strategist was talking about how to turn neutral groups into dedicated Democratic voters. This is a big subject in her county, which is experiencing a huge influx of Hispanic immigrants. The strategist gave, as a recent example, a campaign in a Virginia county that helped turn the state for Jim Webb instead of George "Macaca" Allen.

The strategist noticed from demographic data that Korean-American men in the county, who were mostly of fairly recent immigrant origin, were voting majority Republican. He asked a Korean man if he felt that Republican politicians were really serving the Korean community. The man told him he didn't really know, but all of his friends and family voted Republican because they were from the Republic of Korea. Now, I know this sounds moronic, but I can sort of believe it. My mother worked with a woman in New York who was a Republican, and when my mother asked her with polite curiousity why she had become one, she said, "In college someone from the Young Republicans told me I should be a Republican, because Republicans were on the right, which meant they were right, right?"

To be absolutely fair, I'm sure there are some voters out there with equally stupid reasons for becoming Democrats.

Anyway, through a concerted effort of outreach, the strategist "flipped" the Koreans and they turned into Democratic majority voters.