One thing Latino and Vietnamese residents can agree on – Pho is delicious!
“Lan Quoc Nguyen, the Vice-President of Board of the Garden Grove Unified School District, in an interview published on a Vietnamese newspaper proclaimed that other ethnicities are wary of classes with a lot of Asian students in it because they can’t compete,” according to the Bolsavik blog.
Wow! Where do we even begin with that sentiment?
My son Joey goes to Godinez High School, in Santa Ana, where he is an honors student. He is taking Advanced Placement classes that will earn him college credit. I have met many of his peers. Most of them are Latinos. But my son’s girlfriend is Vietnamese – and yes she is brilliant. She speaks three languages and teaches piano lessons.
As for my son, he plays the guitar and pitches for his high school baseball team. And no, he is not wary of Asians. Nor have I seen any animosity between the different races in his AP classes.
It is however true that there is tension between the two communities – but that is largely due to the most Republican Vietnamese American politicians in the area who like to rip Mexican immigrants.
How sad because these two communities have a lot in common. Both have fled their countries of origin to find opportunity and freedom. Both speak other tongues and have had a hard time learning English. And both populations have their own newspapers, in their native tongues – and their own radio and T.V. stations. Finally, both populations like to shop at supermarkets that feature their native products.
Do Vietnamese students do better in school than Latinos? Sometimes they do. This isn’t because they are inherently smarter. It has more to do with parental involvement, or lack thereof.
I am proud of my son and proud of his girlfriend. They represent a future where folks in the area can be friends and overlook their differences.
You see this at local Pho restaurants all the time. Their clientele, at least in Santa Ana, is mostly Latino. One owner of a Pho restaurant told me recently that he would be out of business if not for his Latino customers!
Perhaps Lan Nguyen needs to get out more and see that what we ought to be doing is trying to get both populations to work together instead of making comments that just are going to set people off…
Of course it could just be that Nguyen likes courting controversy. “Nguyen is building an impressive resume for controversy. In 2008, he went on a Little Saigon radio station to preposterously brand Supervisor Janet Nguyen a communist because, in part, of her ties to the president of the Vietnam Business Association, which encourages trade between the U.S. and its former Southeast Asian enemy,” according to the OC Weekly.
Dear Art,
Great post and I agree that Santa Ana is a melting pot of cultures and races. The only thing your son has to worry about is that if he and his girlfriend get married they will be bringing together short genes from two races and the next generation of Peroza’s might be too short to play sports. You have to try to improve the gene pool physically and mentally. Just a thought.
#1,
My son is taller than me and I am 5′ 10.”
Besides, it is not the size of the athlete that counts – it is their heart that makes them champions.
My dad was only 5′ 6,” and he could kick my butt in any sport!
I am 5.6″ big for a Irish girl, but really, what makes someone smart is nothing to do with colour, size,ect… it is passion. and Asians have the passion for knowledge!.
It is no secret that the UC system amongst other great universities saw an end to the “Honor System” once they became infested with asians. No offense—the truth hurts but for those of you that don’t know this—–do your own investigative work! So insinuations that Latino students are intimidated by Asian students is bologna. We just know how good asian students are at cheating.
“Academic dishonesty is a problem in U.S. higher education, with some studies showing 70 percent of students admit cheating. But it also plagues Asian countries. In March, the College Board dropped the results from part of the SAT exam administered in South Korea after an investigation found that the test was provided illegally to students through Korean test-preparation companies. Last year, the Chinese government said 3,000 students cheated on college entrance exams, according to the Xinhua News Agency.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q97BrYKvrS8
Asians are cheaters and gamblers–they are not intellectually superior this is a MYTH.
They have good food and I have good friends that are asian. No offense
Art,
My children should be going to Eisenhower Elementary in the Garden Grove school district but four years ago I did some research and found a high achieving school about four miles east on the 22 freeway, Sunnyside Elementary.
Remember the term “high achieving school” was thrown out by Sacramento’s finest because they felt that those students not attending these schools would be demoralized and feel inferior to students attending schools with high schools.
It seems to me that one becomes demoralized or feels inferior when after twelve years of public education, one has absolutely nothing to show that she/he went to school. Around 50% of Valley High students can’t pass the high school exit exam. Is it not demoralizing when one can’t write a sentence or do a simple math problem.
The issue about these words “high achieving school” was another way of school administrators not facing the facts and parents not understanding the facts.
I work in Santa Ana and see the students leaving Carr jr, high or Spurgeon jr high everyday and these kids have no books with them, caring no backpacks, but instead a crumpled binder.
Last week I talked to a co-worker and she mentioned that she felt safe(with all the security) the first day she placed her children at Carr Jr High but then based on her daughter’s account was shocked about the students’ lack of respect for the teacher in the classroom. She mentioned that the students not only didn’t turn in their homework but constantly talked in class and talked back(cuss) to the teacher.
I moved my kids to a high achieving school because I wanted to avoid these things aforementioned and knew that the particular things I saw in kindergarten and 1st grade with my daughter was my warning. Parents sending their children to school for seemingly daycare reasons and kids sent to school knowing the four letter word, not knowing any manners or respect for others.
I’m not saying that I’m not seeing or witnessing careless, insensitive, or rude behavior from students or parents at my children’s current school but there is considerably less of these issues.
Sunnyside Elementary is a high achieving school that has a 863(?) API for 2008 and has consistently had high marks as far I could research. Yes, there are a high percentage of Vietnamese students at Sunnyside but I certainly didn’t feel that my children couldn’t compete and/or help raise the bar in attending this school.
In fact my two older children were late bloomers( talking and walking late) and they now just a tad below advanced on state testing.
My wife and I worked with my daughters and continue to work with them everyday. I have personally bought over 400 children books at 25 cents a piece at a local Thrift store. The days of coming home and watching TV till dawn are gone, sometimes not seeing TV for weeks, because homework and studies are the priority in my family’s home.
I feel my wife do this because we don’t want our kids to suffer later when they are on their own. Does this mean that the 100,000.(many of them Hispanics) of parents who don’t read with their kids nightly, ask them about their school day, visit and talk to their teachers do this because they want their kids to suffer? Absolutely not! But the reality is that we are becoming a globally competitive environment and the unskilled low wage jobs that someone can get with no education is evaporating and I would not wish this employment prospect for any ones son/daughter.
My children can coexist with other children no matter if they are different. Sure as group, Hispanic students has a significant lower percentage that Vietnamese students in achieving high scores but I’m not going to conceded that my children are inferior to any other children. Humans are humans, children are children and all children have a potential to excel but it is extremely hard to accomplish anything without supportive parent(s), school(s), and community(s).
If this Board member said that I avoided a predominately Vietnamese school because of the demographics and my fear of my children’s ability to compete, he just as racist as any KKK member from the south.
Yes, humans are humans, and humans always seem to has this tribe mentality. This mentality always seems to manifest itself into finding differences in people so to segregate that group as being inferior… why not pick on a Mexican kid!
to Short Eyes, really? has Mexico won a whole lot of gold medals in past Olympics??? more than any of Asian nations?? look it up.. Mixed breeding, if anything, will result in an IQ higher than Mexicans and lower than Vnmese.
“It is no secret that the UC system amongst other great universities saw an end to the “Honor System” once they became infested with asians. No offense—the truth hurts but for those of you that don’t know this—–do your own investigative work! So insinuations that Latino students are intimidated by Asian students is bologna. We just know how good asian students are at cheating.”
Infested? You are using a word that is used to describe bugs and insects to describe other human beings? You are seriously disgusting. And you are basing your “cheating” accusation on a tongue-in-cheek silly commercial? You are not only disgusting, you are a absolute moron. And the reason Asians dominate the UC system is because of Prop 209 banning Affirmative Action. Without racial quotas, Hispanics just cannot compete. So if you want to throw around silly unfounded stereotypes, I can too.
Here goes: The reason Hispanics do not do well in schools are because their illegal alien parents are uneducated and have lower IQs, and stupid parents beget stupid kids. And then the illegals bring their Mexican and Salvadoran street culture to this country and ends up infesting (ooh, look at me, I can NOT cause offense too) all of our great Californian cities with gangs and unimaginable violence. The less uneducated illegals and their violent procreants we import into my great state, the better. Time to deport all the illegals and build a really tall solid wall on our southern border.
“Asians are cheaters and gamblers–they are not intellectually superior this is a MYTH.
They have good food and I have good friends that are asian. No offense”
Again, you have no real facts and statistics to back up your accusation, just more unfounded accusations and innuendos. This just makes you look petty and uneducated (look up the scientific method while you are at it).
As for the “No offense” in the end. Are you serious? You wrote all that disgustingly racist bullshit to NOT offend Asians? Is your Mexican brain so small that you cannot understand speech that will cause offense and speech that will not? If you are representative of your people, then yes, Asians do have superior intellect, considering the sorry competition they have. Stupid beaner.
Anyways, don’t just take my words for it. Here is the result of last year’s SAT results, and the UC System is just what would happen if you ban Affirmative Action and judge applicants based only on “merits.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-08-25-SAT-scores_N.htm
Note: The SAT score disparity between Asians and Hispanics have actually widened, not closed, over the years. If we only take into account objective criteria like high school GPA, SAT, and other verifiable merit-based skills, and not some subjective “life experience”-based criteria, Asians would dominate the flagship universities of this country even more.
So before you learn how to quote from a reliable source, do not come back and embarrass yourself with more silly unfounded accusations and innuendos.
And finally, do these “Asians friends” of yours know that you are an ignorant closet racist? And I highly doubt that you have Asian friends anyways, since you do not seem to exhibit the qualities that Asian peoples respect and want to be around with, qualities such as studiousness (in other words, a great respect for education. If you have respect for education, you would not dismiss objective education-based merit score systems so readily), respect, honesty and integrity, and just a very sound logical scientific mind. In other words, Asians enjoy hanging out with other smart kids, and you, frankly, miss the cut by a HUGE MARGIN.
And my posts are only addressed to that stupid racist beaner “Asian Myths discarded,” so if I have offended anybody else, do please forgive me. That was / is not my intention ;p :)) !!!