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Transcription: [00:14:10]
As I said, the book talks about
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positive and negative interactions and encounters,
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but as I was walking through the exhibit yesterday and looking, particularly at the portraits of Korean Americans that are on the walls outside.
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I thought of a woman that I quote in the book, Phoebe Eng,
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and Phoebe Eng has done a lot of work, working with self-esteem among Asian Americans.
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And for purposes of this talk, I'm not making as clear as I should, the distinction between people who are born in China or Asia and come here,
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verses people who have been in the United States for many many generations; there are important distinctions.
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There are not only generation dimensions between various families who deal with the immigrant experience,
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but native born verses Diaspora, there are all sorts of other nuances as well.
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But Phoebe Eng talks about her life in both the U.S. and in Hong Kong, she worked in both places.
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She says, "My American roots would earn me the dubious label of juxing, a foreign born, literally, a bamboo hallow brain;
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which by the was isn't a Chinese complement.
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"With a faltering American tongue that tried in vain to sound truly Chinese and a western swagger that hardly fit in the rules of how a good Chinese women ought to walk."
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And my students always tell me, I can always tell an American women because when she walks on the subway, she swaggers
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or she takes bigger strides, or she takes up more space on the Hong Kong subway.
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So, when I see the swagger, I can relate.
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She says," I fell through the crack of an east west divide, in fact it was more like a vast gaping [cravast?],
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I didn't belong in Asia so I came back to America, resolved to accept it as home.
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But, back in America I found that being an Asian American women means living behind layers of imagery,
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that of dutiful daughters and mothers; straight 'A' students and diligent workers; silent and exotic seductresses; tragic and self sacrificing madame butterfly's.
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With these images of marginality, Asian American women as a group have and until now, been excluded from the core of most American dialogues,
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even within a Women's movement that is striving to be inclusive, we are an afterthought, an embellishment; if we exist at all.
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We struggle with our invisibility and we share desires to be treated seriously, past stereotype.
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The exhibit hanging in the gallery here is a testament to the fact that we haven't in so many ways, managed to move past stereotype
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and yet you still see stereotypes remain and there's a lot of unfinished business, the um...