“Do you think the shooter is Arab?” My brother asked me when he called me to tell me what was happening at Fort Hood yesterday afternoon.

News of it had just broke and neither of us knew his identity.

I remember asking him if he was just joking, or if he was being overly paranoid because so much experience has trained us assume that any violent attack reported in mainstream media was incited by an Arab or Muslim.

Then, “dammit!” I shouted learning from the newest news report that Nidal Malik Hasan was of Arab descent.

“I hope we’re not back to square one,” I kept thinking.

The wounds that I thought had healed from the 9-11 backlash began to reopen. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions as to how my American friends or colleagues or neighbors would address me as an Arab-American in the wake of this. I have more faith in them than that and I know that in the last eight years after the September 11 attacks, Americans are much more understanding and the current government is seeking to grow relations with Arabs and Muslims much more than in 2001, but still, it’s too difficult to forget the toll 9/ll took on me and Arabs and Muslims throughout the country.

When I learned Malik was an Arab, I immediately remembered when a police officer stopping me the following few days after 9/11. He told me that I didn’t completely stop at a stop sign, when I and everyone else in the car knew I did. The officer wanted my license and registration and immediately began asking me questions about my ethnic background. The same happened on numerous occasions, and still to this day, when I am “randomly selected” for airport security search, and security employees ask me what my ethnic background is, whether I was born in the U.S., whether I have visited the Arab and Muslim World. Unfortunately, it’s something that I and several others in my position have learned to accept, but wish were never the case.

Discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, particularly post-9/11, has been documented, and this blog isn’t intended to be “some other complaint.”

The point at issue is that discrimination against Arabs and Muslims remains a glaring problem and the mainstream media’s perpetuated stereotypes only exacerbate the situation.

Like anyone with an honest conscience and a heart, I feel horrible that 13 innocent people lost their lives. I condemn the violence and anything else like it, but I feel even worse that the alleged shooter is an Arab. Even though this is an individual crime that should not and does not represent Arabs and Muslims, and far from 9/11, it will unfortunately be difficult to convince the countless Americans following the mainstream hype.

-Suzanne Manneh

When I meet non-travelers, I often get asked why I have such a strong fire in my belly to travel. (Some may refer to the fire being beneath another part of my body, but I’ll keep that body part out of the conversation:))

I wonder why they don’t travel. We both look at each other in disbelief. They wonder why I have more stamps in my passport than some diplomats and I wonder why the highlight of their week is about going to Costco.

I answer that I want to see other ways of being, visit historic places, listen to native music, try local foods, enjoy their weather, explore local culture and festivities, see friends, expand my horizons, learn other languages, etc, etc.

But this trip to Thailand didn’t fit into any of my typical reasons.

Upon arriving in Bangkok, I wondered what I was doing there as I had spent a significant amount of time there almost three years prior. This trip was for me to clear my head and be at peace. I had been debating about whether to travel to Russia with my mom for an art exhibit, to attend the biggest bookfair in the world in Frankfurt, visit Lebanon and Syria or return to Thailand. When I discarded the work related trip to expensive Germany and the family trip to the grim and grey life of Russia, I was left deliberating between the Levant and the Kingdom of old Siam. Intellectually, historically, culturally and linguistically, Lebanon and Syria were the winners and I’d been wanting to go there for at least nine years. Politics aside, that’s not a part of the world one travels to when one’s goal is that of serenity. My mere three weeks of Arabic language lessons that are currently just vestiges in my mind would have distracted me from my own thoughts and entertained me into trying to understand the Arabic around me. I might have even enrolled in an Arabic language crash course with a beach view in Beirut had I gone there and spent more time perfecting my guttural sounds than clearing the junk from my head. Mind clearing? No, not at all. So I chose the land of smiles and inexpensive travel, lassis and smoothies. Having absolutely no interest in the music, language or dance of Thailand, I was certain to not get distracted by some cultural, linguistic or mental pursuit while there.

Now that I am in Pai, a small semi-hippie town in the northwest of Thailand, I can’t be bothered to venture up north to Laos or west to Myanmar. As a matter of fact, I can’t even get myself to visit the caves an hour outside of the city. I am so happy to just be in silence and do little. The art of the dolce far niente (beauty of doing nothing) could still be perfected in my life as I seem to still task myself everyday with errands (going to the cobbler to fix sandals, taking clothes to seamstress to mend, giving away my three kilos of laundry for less than $3 to get cleaned, fixing my sunglasses, illegally downloading music on my Ipod, etc).

What can I answer those who may inquire about all the wats (temples) I visited in Thailand or how much of the Thai language I learned?

I was visiting my inner temple and listening to myself.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in Southeast Asia on my wonderful trip here in January 2007 was to listen to myself, follow my heart and know that there were no wrong roads to take in life.

Sometimes we have to distance ourselves from our lives to know who we really are and where we want our life to go.

Thank you Thailand for giving me this opportunity. I may never learn your language, but I will certainly return to this beautiful land!
——-

—-Susanna Zaraysky blogs for New America Media about being a global citizen. She has just published a book, Language is Music about how to learn foreign languages using music, TV, film, radio and other low-cost resources. Her website is: www.createyourworldbooks.com

The year the Berlin Wall fell and Chinese students were massacred at Tianamen Square in Beijing and San Francisco was hit by the Big One was the year that I decided to become a journalist. Before that I, having graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in biochemistry degree, was working in a Cancer Research Lab killing mice and bombarding their mammary cells with carcinogens. Then I got accepted to San Francisco State creative writing school, and within the same semester I started freelancing for Pacific News Service, and tasted a little fame, and thought I could become a writer.

That year I wrote about a bill to penalize dog eating in California – and why it was unfair to legislate against those who eat dogs and but not against not those who eat cats or horses or pet goldfish – which got me tons of hate mail and when the Sacramento Bee called to interview me about it, the townhouse I lived in shook, and the chandelier swung like in the movies, and the building across the street swayed and their glass panes fell out and descended like guillotines to shatter like a million diamonds on the courtyard.

The earthquake hit hard, and the city seemed to have fallen apart – a segment of the bridge collapsed and the freeway overpass in Oakland fell down and killed dozens of people in their cars and the electricity was out and everywhere there was an eerie silence.

I remember driving up to Twin Peaks and looked down at a city in total darkness and, with the exception of a few scattered fires, it was like watching San Francisco before the industrial revolution, except from time to time an aftershock would send car alarms going off in the darkness. The world shifted in 1989, and for me it shifted literally and I couldn’t help but take it as signs of my own transformation.

Later we called it the end of the cold war and beginning of globalization, which soon after became a household word and I started traveling. It was first in Hong Kong where I watched boat people in the then notorious Whitehead Detention Center donned their Whitehead bands – what Vietnamese wore at funerals – and fought the Hong Kong police who rounded many up. They were being force repatriated back to Vietnam, where they, and I, came from. Only I was luckier because I left years earlier at the end of the Vietnam war and became American, whereas they came at the end of the cold war, and lost their status as political refugees and had nowhere to go but home.

Two years after that and I went to Vietnam, my homeland, which was accessible finally after all those years in exile. And I wrote about an elephant that had recently died in the Saigon Zoo and how the zookeepers, being so poor, sliced it up and sold it by the kilogram and people lined down the street to buy elephant meats. I thought how communism was a bit like that- bloated and not workable- and though the communist officials followed me everywhere and stood outside my Hanoi hotel’s window and even shared a cigarette or two with me they let me back in a few years later despite my criticism of communist Vietnam, which ran in several newspapers in the US.

Then it was to Cambodia where I saw mounds of skulls left by the Khmer Rouge during its reign and popularized by the movie The Killing Fields. It was there that I cut my reporter’s teeth as it were interviewing ex-Khmer Rouge on the outskirt of Siem Reap who still want to kill Vietnamese who once invaded their country. I wrote it all down and ordered more Tiger Beers for them and turned to my translator and told him to go get the motorcycle ready for I wanted to get back to town alive.

I did, and got an award for international reporting, so I was stoked. I kept on traveling. And I kept writing.

But 1989 when the Berlin wall fell, and the earthquake hit, and Chinese students were murdered will always be a marker for me. It was the year I broke away from familial expectations and began to treat my own heartbreaks by carving my own path, despite my insecurities and sadness I trudged on, slouching if you will, and if Didion will forgive me, toward my own Bethlehem.

That was also the same year that my parents and their friends, a jovial Vietnamese couple who both have sadly passed away, went to Berlin as Germans broke down the wall and East Germans streamed West. My father, feeling triumphant against communism, gave speeches to Vietnamese immigrants there and got a piece of the wall and brought it back. It sat on their bookshelf in the living room for many years until they moved to a condo in retirement, and I inherited it. It now sits by the window of my condo, looking completely out of place in a very modern glassy tower by the glittering waters of the San Francisco Bay.

Communism didn’t really end so much as changed its tactics, alas, turning into dictatorial, greedy, non-ideological governments, as we see now exemplified by Vietnam and China.

My parents gave me the piece of the Berlin wall but they still have a bottle of 1975 Dom Perignon. It was the year that we lost our homeland and became refugees. I am not entirely sure where it came from, but 34 years later and it still hasn’t been popped. At one point or another my father, who was a general in South Vietnamese army, whose vehemence of the communists remains unchanging despite the years, had hoped to open it when communism ended in Vietnam.

Has it already been 20 years since the Berlin Wall Fell and the earth shook?

So much has changed since then, and though one wall went down, several more went up, most notorious probably are the one along the US-Mexico border and the one between Israel and Palestine. I should like to collect pieces from both when they are down, but I’m not holding my breath.

And I doubt the Dom Perignon is drinkable now.

Read Andrew Lam’s Articles

Editor’s note: This blog by Tyler Moran, Policy Director at the National Immigration Law Center, originally appeared here, on Immigration Impact, the blog of the Immigration Policy Center.

While most employers are law-abiding, some unscrupulous employers have a secret weapon for keeping down wages and working conditions—our broken immigration system. Bad apple employers hire undocumented immigrants, subject them to unsafe working conditions, pay them less than the market wage, or don’t pay them at all. If undocumented workers file a labor complaint or try to form a union, the employer will threaten them with deportation or even call DHS to have the workers deported. Then the workers are whisked into detention or out of the country before they can seek remedies for the labor violations. Most employers don’t get punished for their misconduct, which puts unscrupulous employers at a competitive advantage over law-abiding employers.

Why is this bad for all workers, including U.S. citizens? Easy-to-exploit undocumented immigrants under the constant threat of deportation are forced to accept sub-standard working conditions. This spills over to authorized workers who must also accept these conditions or risk losing their jobs. This also undercuts union organizing. Undocumented coworkers have fewer legal avenues for redress of labor violations and far less incentive to participate in collective efforts to improve conditions at the workplace.

A recent report by the National Employment Law Project found a slew of labor and employment law violations in low-wage industries in three of the nation’s largest cities:

-At least 26% of workers surveyed were paid less than the legally required minimum wage the previous week, 60% of whom were underpaid by more than $1 per hour.

-More than a quarter of workers surveyed worked more than 40 hours the previous week and 76% of whom were not paid the required overtime rate.

-41% of workers surveyed had illegal deductions taken out of their paychecks for reasons such as damage, loss, work-related tools or materials.

-43% of workers who filed a complaint to their employers or attempted to form a union suffered illegal retaliation from their employers—such as being fired or suspended, cut wages and hours and threats of deportation.

-Of the 8% of workers surveyed who filed a serious injury claim, 50% experienced illegal employer reactions.

The Drum Major Institute argues that all workers benefit from a strengthening of workplace rights for immigrants. In fact, they find that undocumented workers’ ability to improve their own working conditions would benefit all workers by making jobs more desirable, which translates into more jobs that can support a middle-class standard of living. The Immigration Policy Center also reports that lack of legal status makes unauthorized workers extremely vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous employers, and at the same time jeopardizes the competitiveness of those employers who try to follow the law.

As immigration reform hovers on the horizon, we should learn a lesson from the failure of our current broken immigration system and ineffective worksite enforcement policy. Not only does current policy fail to address the economic incentive that employers have to hire undocumented workers, but it has allowed unscrupulous employers to gain an unfair advantage and use immigration law to drive down the wages and working conditions of all workers.

Worksite enforcement will be part of comprehensive immigration reform. However, the real answer to “enforcement” at the worksite is making sure all workers can exercise their labor rights, increasing enforcement of labor and employment laws, and closing the gaping loophole that allows immigration enforcement to trump labor law enforcement. Policymakers need to take on this critical issue. Otherwise, the employment rights of all of us are at risk.
—Tyler Moran

Editor’s note: Spirited conversation is always echoing through the NAM newsroom. One recent discussion topic—dating in the Bay Area—was spurred by New York Magazine’s analysis of their own sex diaries series, which sought to draw general conclusions about urban sexuality in New York using the diaries as a source text.

NYmag’s diarists revealed, according to the analysis, that New Yorkers are overwhelmed by choice, sexual and otherwise, that technology plays a large, sometimes intrusive role in how they mate and date, and that revelations of vulnerability or neediness are strictly taboo.

What, then, we couldn’t help but wonder, is particular to the Bay Area dating scene? Some quick hits from our informal examination: we don’t have all-night public transportation, so the decision to stay over or bolt is made earlier. The social scene is confined to the Mission and Oakland. Gay men get tons of play, but straight women have a harder time meeting people. And comparably to New York, technology is the 3rd partner in every relationship, casual or serious—Facebook, texting, iPhone apps, Gchatting, Yelp….the litany continues.

So here’s a vlog—the first of the EthnoVlogs—in which we begin to examine this complicated and totally subjective issue. EthnoBloggers Erricka X, Rupa Dev, and myself start to talk it out, to be followed by more in-depth coverage of Bay Area dating, or, as we like to call it, Bayting.
—Laura Goode