Nation Briefs
February 20, 2008
Golf’s Next Generation Is Waiting
SAN DIEGO — Scrutiny begins anew on another crop of 20-somethings. Jason Day, 20, a talented Australian, and Anthony Kim, 22, an American with confidence that is as easy to see as his big, silver belt buckles, are two for whom the bell may toll.
When Tiger Woods was Kim’s age, he had won six tournaments, including his first of four Masters. Woods’ friend Mark O’Meara said that Kim had a swing that may be better than Woods’ at 22.
Challengers like Kim would do well to adopt Woods’ mind-set if they ever hope to approach his achievements.
When Woods entered his 24th year, he had 15 tour victories and was about to embark on what some consider the single greatest season in golf history: nine victories, including the United States Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship.
— The New York Times
. . . . . . . . . .
NYC’s Little Cambodia Shrinking
NEW YORK — From 1990 to 2000, the Cambodian population of New York City decreased by 31%, according to a census analysis by the Hmong Studies Internet Resource Center. By 2005, barely 1,000 Cambodians remained in the city. The decline occurred as nearly all the country’s other Cambodian communities were expanding.
At one time, 2,565 Cambodians lived in the city. Most were refugees fleeing the repressive Khmer Rouge regime, which fell in 1979 and claimed nearly two million lives.
In the turbulent Bronx, few of the Cambodian cultural, religious and community centers that have formed in places like Long Beach, Calif., Lowell, Mass., and Minneapolis took root.
“The violence they experienced during the Khmer Rouge was similar to the violence they saw every day in the Bronx,” said Chhaya Chhoum, director of the youth leadership project at CAAAV, formerly the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, “so they were never able to move away from their trauma.”
— The New York Times
. . . . . . . . . .
U.S. Governor’s Wife Offends Asian Students
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A group of Southeast Asian students wants an apology from the wife of Rhode Island’s governor.
The Providence Youth Student Movement is also asking Gov. Don Carcieri and his wife, Sue, to meet with them.
Sue Carcieri made the remark to The Providence Journal in response to students who had called the governor’s decision to lay off three Southeast Asian-language interpreters “racist.”
“First of all, I think they have mentors who are much older than them who are training them up. You know — how those terrorists have kids blow up, you know, Benazir Bhutto and so forth? You think the kids thought of it? I don’t think so,” Carcieri was quoted as saying.
A spokesman said Sue Carcieri did not mean to imply a connection between people who oppose her husband’s layoff plan and Bhutto’s assassins. She was objecting to people who accuse her husband of bigotry or racism. The Carcieris do not plan to meet with the teenagers.
. . . . . . . . . .
Vietnamese Organize For Burial Ground
A group representing more than 300 Vietnamese elders is hoping to establish its own affordable central burial ground in Boston.
Distress over future digs can weigh heavier on Vietnamese seniors, whose culture honors its forebears with religious or communal rites at the burial site.
Those who fled Vietnam for Boston largely came here in four major waves. There were the early refugees of 1975, the so-called “boat people” who escaped by water in the ’70s and ’80s, the Amerasians of the ’80s and ’90s, and the former prisoners who arrived in the ’90s and early 2000s.
Now the Vietnamese population is over 10,000 citywide, making it the second-largest group of Asian descent, behind the Chinese.
As they get older, many Vietnamese here have little money to spend beyond everyday needs, let alone the private burial plots that can run up to $10,000.
Forty-six percent of Vietnamese in Massachusetts are living on low incomes, says the Institute for Asian American Studies at UMass-Boston.
— The Boston Globe
. . . . . . . . . .
Battered Asian Women Find Help Downtown
The New York Asian Women’s Center, based in Lower Manhattan, was founded in 1982 to help Asian and Asian American women who were victims of domestic violence. Today, its counselors and caseworkers support and guide women through the tumult of leaving their abusive partners in 15 different languages, including several dialects of Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Vietnamese.
About half of the women who seek help there are Chinese, said Larry Lee, the center’s executive director. The rest come from Korea, South Asia and Southeast Asia. To protect the women they serve, the center’s staff will not disclose the address of their offices or shelters. The two
temporary shelters the shelter runs can house up to 37 women and their children.
Lee said there are 300 women a month who are part of the non-residential program, where women get emotional counseling, legal aid to obtain orders of protection from their batterers and to apply for green cards, and help with benefits and entitlements.
— Downtown Express
Comments
Got something to say?
