UpFront News Briefs
May 30, 2003
OVERHEARD
“I don’t even move off the stool … It’s a totally different thing going on for me — a totally different muscle to exercise.”
— Actress Kelly Hu flexing her assets in the The Vagina Monologues as opposed to the rigorous role of villainess “Lady Deathstrike” in X2: X-Men United.
CIVIL RIGHTS
CAA Director Resigns
In a letter sent to board members, trustees and a host of members, Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) Executive Director Diane Chin announced that she will be stepping down from her post on June 13 to become the director of public interest and public policy programs at Stanford Law School.
“I have been honored to work with a remarkable staff of talented and committed individuals, each of whom has taught me lessons about integrity, hope and dedication,” Chin stated in her letter. “Together, we have continued to meet community needs through our service programs, to build understanding across communities in Visitacion Valley and other areas of San Francisco and to develop our local and statewide policy and legislative work.”
Chin is credited for having carried CAA into the 21st century and buttressing the 34-year-old organization through.
“Diane has done amazing work with CAA, and has provided her leadership and vision for the past five years,” said Gregory Chen, chair of CAA’s board of trustees. “She has had an impact on CAA, and the organization has benefited tremendously from her work. She’s led CAA to become stronger and more stable than when she first started. It’s sad to see her go, but I’m excited for her new opportunity.”
Ted Wang, CAA’s current policy director, will take over as interim director on June 13, until a new executive director is named.
Russ Lowe, a CAA member, said he had heard rumors within the past month that Chin was going to resign. Although Lowe was active in the debate (see AsianWeek, May 22, “CAA Retains Name, For Now”) to retain CAA’s name — which had Chin on the other side — Lowe said he never has had any bad feelings toward Chin.
With Chin and Lowe on opposite ends of the name-change, the board of directors on May 13 compromised, voting to retain its 34-year-old “Chinese for Affirmative Action” name while launching a new project under the name of “Center for Asian American Advocacy.”
“From the start, my issue [with the name-change] was questioning the process, not singling a single staff member out,” said Lowe. “The organizations’ staff and personnel were and are not an issue.”
Lowe said Chin has done a good job as director, again, saying she has moved the organization forward and promoted CAA to wide recognition.
— May Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer
VOTING RIGHTS
Doubts about S.F. Election
Four years ago, when Asian Pacific Americans gained four seats on the New York City school board, community leaders credited choice voting, a newly implemented system thought to empower minority and third-party candidates.
San Franciscans last year voted to use a similar system to elect city officials beginning in November. But now some community leaders are trying to halt the plans before a crucial mayor and district attorney’s race in San Francisco.
David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voter Education Committee, has filed a complaint to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley urging him not to certify the new voting system called “instant runoff voting” (IRV). Joining Lee in the complaint are The A. Phillip Randolph Institute and the California Voting Rights Foundation.
Lee said a lawsuit could follow.
Lee’s biggest concern is that there isn’t enough time to educate the APA community about IRV. He pointed out that APA political participation lags behind that of African Americans and Latinos, despite higher education and income levels. IRV could further discourage them from voting, he said.
“The last thing we want is a system that becomes a barrier to participation simply because it is too confusing to the voter,” he said.
IRV, which eliminates the need for runoff elections, requires a voter to rank candidates. If his first choice doesn’t get enough votes to remain in the running, his vote goes to his second choice candidate.
San Francisco School Board member Eric Mar agrees that community education and outreach is important, but he believes IRV would benefit communities of color in the long term.
“I think low-income and immigrant communities can figure out a simple system of choosing their first, second and third choices,” he said.
Proponents pointed out that IRV eliminates the cost of runoff elections. Moreover, people won’t waste their votes on third-party underdog candidates. For example, in the 2000 presidential election, the Greens who voted for Ralph Nader siphoned votes away from Al Gore. If IRV were in place, though, their votes could have ultimately gone to Gore, assuming he was their second choice.
Proponents also say IRV helps minority candidates in elections where more than one is running for a single seat. In the 1999 New York City school board election, for example, votes for losing APA candidates flowed to other APA candidates.
That process compels candidates to build coalitions in an effort to win their opponent constituency’s second choice vote. Mar said, “IRV encourages less adversarial approaches to campaigning with more focus on issues, rather than on personalities.”
But Lee said when San Francisco passed Proposition A in March 2002, which called for the use of IRV, “the community was sold a bill of goods.”
The voting system is supposed to get state and federal approval by July 1, but so far, the Department of Elections doesn’t even have machines that can count IRV ballots. Its backup plan is to use 500 temporary city employees to count ballots by hand, a scenario opponents said is reminiscent of the Florida count in the 2000 presidential election.
Lee said, “Right now we’re headed for a train wreck come November.” He said the worst case scenario is that Chinese American immigrant voters won’t know how to vote.
“They would vote for only one candidate, and if the candidate is not successful, their vote is thrown out,” he said.
— Joyce Nishioka
AsianWeek Staff Writer
STAR OR STRIPES
Clash over flying Vietnam flag
Enmity toward Vietnam’s communist regime’s defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 is still so strong that activists are lobbying U.S. cities and states to recognize the old South Vietnamese flag as the official symbol of the Vietnamese American community.
So far, the effort has met with success in a handful of places such as San Jose, Westminster, Garden Grove and Milpitas, Calif. and Falls Church, Va.
But similar campaigns in the California, Washington and Virginia state legislatures have faltered amid protests by the Vietnamese government and U.S. State Department concerns they could damage international relations.
In practice, the measures are mostly symbolic, allowing the South Vietnamese three-stripe flag to be flown at Vietnamese-American events held on city property and at a Falls Church shopping center.
But they also demonstrate how those who emigrated from South Vietnam to the United States still harbor anger about the war and remain convinced that someday the communist regime back home will fall.
“The war may have ended for the United States, but for many Vietnamese refugees, the war still continues at another level, at a political level,” said Garden Grove Mayor Pro Tem Van Tran, a Vietnamese American who supported his city’s resolution.
The flag issue flared up in February in Virginia and spread from city to city among a network of activists.
Upset that some schools were displaying the communist flag on days meant to honor students’ diversity, members of the National Congress of Vietnamese Americans and Vietnamese veterans groups asked Virginia Delegate Robert Hull to introduce a bill that would have allowed public schools and universities to use only the three-striped flag to depict Vietnam.
The bill died in a subcommittee after State Department officials — concerned about international friction — urged legislators to kill it.
The three-stripes flag campaign also has been denounced by the Vietnamese government.
“The war is long over and the people I think both in America and in Vietnam are looking to the future,” said Bach Ngoc Chien, press attache at Vietnam’s embassy in Washington.
However, Mai Lan, 20, a member of the Vietnamese Student Association at San Jose State University, said, “The younger Vietnamese, they don’t care that much about communism. It’s just more about over here now.”
— Deborah Kong
The Associated Press
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