| NCVA Reporter - December 15, 2003 |
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In this NCVA Reporter: Events National Congress of Vietnamese Americans December 15, 2003 In this NCVA Reporter: Funding Opportunities
Jobs/Internships Tips News
****************** Funding Opportunities Community-Based Abstinence Education Project Grants (http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/14mar20010800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2003/03-30597.htm) WHO: Public and private entities, including faith-based and community organizations, which develop and/or provide an abstinence program WHAT: Community-Based Abstinence Education Project Grants. Approximately $33 million will be available provide abstinence education to adolescents. The purpose of this grant program is to provide support to public and private entities for the development and implementation of abstinence education programs for adolescents, ages 12 through 18. This program funds the planning and implementation of community-based, abstinence-only educational interventions designed to reduce the proportion of adolescents who have engaged in premarital sexual activity, including but not limited to sexual intercourse; reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies among adolescents; and reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among adolescents. Specific objectives for the SPRANS Community-Based Abstinence Education planning and implementation grants are to:
1) Support
programmatic efforts that foster the development of abstinence-only education
for adolescents, ages 12 through 18, in communities across the country. WHEN: Letter of Intent due December 31, 2003. Applications due February 9, 2004. CONTACT: Not available until the Application Guidance is posted. ****************** National Civic League Invites Entries for All-America- City Award A program of the National Civic League, the All-America-City Award seeks to recognize exceptional grassroots community problem-solving and communities that work cooperatively to tackle challenges and achieve results. The award honors communities of all sizes in which citizens, government, businesses, and volunteer organizations work together to address critical local issues. The National Civic League is now accepting applications for the 2004 award. Cities, towns, neighborhoods, counties, and regions are encouraged to apply. Award criteria include participation of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and key constituencies to the maximum extent possible; recognition and involvement of diverse segments and perspectives (ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, age, etc.) in community decision-making; creative use and leveraging of community resources; significant and specific community achievements; projects that address the community's most important needs; cooperation across jurisdictional boundaries; clear demonstration of results and impacts; and projects that have impacted the community significantly within the last three years and have potential to continue improving the quality of life in that community. In addition, at least one project should document ways in which the lives of children and youth have been tangibly improved. For more information or to request an application form, see the NCL Web site. ****************** California Endowment Accepting Applications for Local Opportunities Fund Deadline: January 15, 2004
The California Endowment's Local Opportunities Fund provides grants of up to $50,000 to California-based organizations that are addressing important health issues on a local level.
Priority will be given to proposals that demonstrate one or more of the following: address a locally defined health need or health-related priority in an underserved community; are from a grassroots, nontraditional, and/or emerging organization, or address an issue or community that traditionally does not benefit from mainstream funding resources; and utilize the talents, cultures, and assets of the local community to address the health priorities of that community.
The Local Opportunities Fund features a streamlined application and timely review process to ensure that the program is responsive and accessible to organizations that address pressing community health issues.
See the California Endowment Web site for complete program guidelines and application procedures. ****************** Draper Richards Foundation Offers Funding to Social Entrepreneurs (http://www.draperrichards.org/) The Draper Richards Foundation provides selected social entrepreneurs with funding of $100,000 a year for three years. The funds are specifically and solely for entrepreneurs starting new nonprofit organizations. The foundation awards only four fellowships a year and, like a venture capital fund, offers strategic and organizational assistance in addition to financial support. The projects selected by the foundation will demonstrate innovative ways to solve existing social problems. The foundation will accept proposals for a variety of public service areas, including but not limited to education, youth and families, the environment, arts, health, and community and economic development. The foundation seeks organizations that are or plan to be national or global in scope. The foundation does not fund research, scholarships, or local community-based organizations. Experienced, dedicated social entrepreneurs with a developed idea for a nonprofit organization in the U.S. are invited to apply. The foundation funds the entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team; organizations at the beginning of their development; organizations based in the U.S. only; and organizations that are national or global in reach and social issue. Applicant organizations must demonstrate that their idea is sustainable, scalable, and has the potential to create significant social change. In addition, the founder/enterpreneur must have the skills to manage a national or global organization. For further information on the foundation and/or the program, see the foundation's Web site. ****************** Anti-Hunger Initiatives associated with faith based organizations can apply for funding through the Bonner Foundation's Crisis Management Ministry Program. Grants range from $2,500 - $10,000 and can only be used to purchase food, meaning no funds for general operating expenses, capital campaigns or star up programs. Non profits showing how funds will boost support and volunteerism among congregations and clergy receive preference. The first 2004 deadline is March 1, followed by June 1, Sept. 1, and Dec. 1. Info: Genevieve Gorman 609-924-6663 ****************** Children and family nonprofits looking for infrastructure funding can apply to the Ludwick Family Foundation. The funder provides up to 25 grants per year ranging from $5,000 - $50,000 for new equipment replacement and modernization, facility improvements and educational materials. Due date: Letters of intent are due March 31, 2004 ****************** Jobs/Internships NAPALC Summer 2004 Clerkships/Internships
Important Dates Our program is designed to compete with the large law firm summer associate programs, with respect to program design, quality of supervision and feedback, and activities. In brief, our program is a unique summer program that incorporates staff attorneys, law, and undergraduate students. Each program staff attorney is paired with a law student and an undergraduate student to form a summer working group. The pairing fosters leadership, management skills, peer learning, and organizationa l behavior learning. Although both student clerks interact with the staff attorney on a daily basis, the law student is expected to help mentor and manage the work of the undergraduate student. This provides the law student with the invaluable experience of working with individuals with less experience in law and policy and provides the undergraduate student with the experience of critical legal reasoning and a foundation in legal and policy research. In addition to the day-to-day work, each participant in the summer program is required to produce a minimum of one substantive project that must be completed by the end of the summer. Clerks are also required to attend a weekly clerk staff only meeting with the Legal Director to discuss and share the progress of the work with the rest of the class. This meeting also gives NAPALC management an opportunity to ensure that the clerks are receiving the best experience possible and an opportunity to correct if necessary. In addition to the projects, clerks attend a weekly NAPALC legal training seminar, where NAPALC staff lecture on various subjects including: how to brief a case, court rules and procedure, the legislative process, immigration law, resume and cover letter workshop, and the use of media in advocacy, among other subjects. Clerks attend weekly brown bag lunches co-sponsored by NAPALC, MALDEF, and NAACP-LDF and also participate in the APAICS summer intern events. NAPALC will schedule luncheons with law firm hiring partners for the law students to discuss career development. Clerks received VIP scheduled tours of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Capitol, and the Library of Congress. Lastly, clerks participates in outings to movie premiers, kickball/softball leagues, and other entertaining events. Last year, NAPALC recruited thirteen law and undergraduate students to participate in its summer clerkship program. Schools that were represented include: American(3), Catholic(1), Carnegie Me llon(1), Georgetown(1), George Washington(1), Harvard(3), James Madison(1), University of Maryland(1), and University of Pennsylvania(1). Clerks had a diverse experienced background including, a former professional tennis player, a Grammy award nominee, a Kennedy Center solo cello player, and a former L.A. Times reporter.
Here is a sampling of the projects that our 2003 summer clerk class
completed: We are confident that NAPALC has developed one of the most structured and organized summer clerkship programs in Washington, DC. We put a lot of resources into ensuring that the summer clerkship program is a top-notch program where alumni want to recommend others to participate and where alumni want to continue their relationship with NAPALC throughout their careers.
How To Apply
****************** William T. Grant Scholars Program (http://www.wtgrantfoundation.org/info-url_nocat3042/info-url_nocat_list.htm?attrib_id=4398)
The William
T. Grant Scholars program, formerly called the William T. Grant Faculty Scholars
Program, supports promising post-doctoral scholars from diverse disciplines
whose research deepens and broadens the knowledge base in areas that contribute
to creating a society that values young people and helps them reach their
potential. The program, now in its 24th year, has funded more than 110 Scholars
since its inception. ****************** Tips
Writing Effective Email Alerts
(http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=307&topicid=5) ****************** News October 2003 Report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions
Every year
millions of people around the world are displaced by war, famine, and civil and
political unrest. Others are forced to flee their countries in order to escape
the risk of death and torture at the hands of persecutors. The United States
(U.S.) works with other governmental, international, and private organizations
to provide food, health care, and shelter to millions of refugees throughout the
world. In addition, the United States considers persons for resettlement to the
U.S. as refugees. Those admitted must be of special humanitarian concern and
demonstrate that they were persecuted, or have a well-founded fear of
persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or
membership in a particular social group. (http://www.state.gov/g/prm/asst/rl/rpts/25691.htm) ****************** December 5, 2003 English Proficiency Impacts Cancer Screening for APAs By May Chow Despite the fact that cancer is the second leading cause of death in California and the United States, second only to heart disease, Asian Pacific Americans consistently trail other racial and ethnic groups in cancer screening, especially for cervical and breast cancer, according to a new study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. What was most important from this study, researchers say, was that racial and ethnic disparities exist in cancer screening rates and within the APA population, ethnic subgroups differ substantially in their rate of cancer screenings at recommended intervals, with APAs, who have limited English proficiency, having the lowest cancer screening rates among APAs statewide. Ninez Ponce, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Public Health said an earlier study that suggested APAs had one of the lowest cancer screening rates prompted the center to release this new fact sheet. “We suggested that education of individuals and their doctors is key and this should be tailored by that individual’s language and culture,” Ponce said. “But, because Asians consist of many different groups such as Filipinos, Koreans and Cambodians, we thought that aggregated statistics were not enough.” Ponce added that it was pertinent to present cancer screening rates for each group to the APA community and health care providers. Researchers gathered information from the California Health Interview Survey, a telephone survey of over 55,000 households in California conducted in 2001. More than 6,000 APAs were interviewed in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean, Khmer, Spanish and English. To my knowledge, the largest sample on Asians ever done in the United States,” Ponce said. The study shows considerable variations within the various APA ethnic groups on the frequency of cancer screening tests. All APA ethnic subgroups, except Filipino women, fall significantly below the overall cervical cancer screening rate for California (86.2 percent), while Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, South Asian and Cambodian women have lower rates of Pap smears, a test for cervical cancers, in the past three years than California’s average. Researchers say this is a disturbing statistic since a National Institutes of Health report showed Vietnamese American women are five times more likely than white women to have cervical cancer. Language ability seemed to play a part in those who received routine Pap tests. Among Chinese American women, the proportion reporting a Pap test is lower for limited English-proficient women (56.7 percent) than that for English-proficient women (75.5 percent). “We thought that rates for Asians may be lower because many may have difficulty navigating a health care system or communicating with their doctors because of language barriers,” Ponce said. “We found that language barriers are associated with lower rates of receipt of a mammogram and Pap tests for most groups, but not for colorectal cancer screening. Surprisingly, Vietnamese American women who reported that they speak English poorly or not at all had higher rates of Pap tests than Vietnamese American women who speak English well or very well. This may indicate that some culturally tailored strategies to expand cervical screening among Vietnamese Americans — a group that has one of the nation’s highest rates of cervical cancer — has worked well in California.” With routine mammograms, Cambodian American and Korean American women have had rates far below the state average continuously for the past two years compared to all women over the age of 40 in California. But the study also cited that language acted as a barrier to preventive care services. While 63.8 percent of English-proficient Korean American women received mammograms within the past two years, only 45.4 percent with limited English proficiency reported having a mammogram. Among the Japanese Americans and South Asian Americans, screening rates for colorectal cancer are comparable to the overall rate for the state, but less than 40 percent of Cambodian American and Korean American adults over the age of 50 reported having be screened for colorectal cancer. “Tests for colorectal cancer screening are very low overall for California (53.2 percent), but even lower for Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Cambodian men and women,” Ponce said. Ponce said the disparities in screening rates stress the need for public policy and culturally sensitive outreach to help high-risk population groups receive preventive care and education. “The report is for community advocates, health providers, legislators, program planners and funders to direct their attention on the low rates of cancer screening among specific Asian groups,” Ponce said. “These three tests — Pap tests, mammograms and colorectal cancer tests — should be done routinely even if one does not have any symptoms or even if their doctor does not recommend it. These tests could save lives.” She added that doctors who see APA patients need to be educated and be culturally sensitive, and patients need to learn to be more proactive with their doctors. A common reason among APAs who haven’t received a recent test is that the doctor never informed them about the routine exams. “We tried to get at the cultural question by examining cancer screening rates by how well the person speaks English,” Ponce said. “The language effect was less for mammograms, and not significant for colorectal test rates. It certainly is an access issue; for colorectal tests since getting a sigmoidoscopy/colonoscopy (a colorectal test) usually requires insurance. In California, there are programs that provide free Pap tests and mammograms, so financial access to these tests is not such an issue as it is for colorectal tests. This is surely a big reason why the rates for breast and cervical cancer tests are higher than the rates for colorectal tests.” Reach May Chow at mchow@asianweek.com. ****************** December 8, 2003
Bomb
Lady: Vietnamese American Makes Tools for War on Terror
Editor's Note: A
former Vietnamese boat person is now a top explosives scientist for the military
and the developer of the controversial "thermobaric" bomb. (http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7b82c31eb1a725262fb0af787a6ceaaf) ****************** December 10, 2003
An improving
economy has brightened the mood of nonprofit fundraisers after more than a year
of bad news, according to a new report. (http://www.philanthropy.iupui.edu/ (http://www.philanthropy.iupui.edu/announce.htm#PhilGivIndex) ****************** December 10, 2003
The Bush
administration this week unveiled
Grants.gov, billed as a "one-stop shopping" resource for getting information
and applying for all federal grants. ****************** December 11, 2003 In riskier world, U.S. recommits to aiding refugees BARRY NEWMAN, The Wall Street Journal Fifteen of Feruza Mamedova's relatives have just received an invitation to America from President Bush. Ms. Mamedova, who lives in New Jersey, belongs to a small ethnic group known as Meskhetian Turks. The Meskhetians are two-time exiles: Deported by Stalin from their Black Sea homeland, then expelled from Central Asia, many now live without citizenship in southern Russia, where Cossack vigilantes regularly beat them. In 1992, Ms. Mamedova was able to leave. She married a Meskhetian whose father had managed to slip out of the Soviet Union. The three of them, she believes, are the only Meskhetians to make it here. But in late October, President Bush announced that the U.S. would be glad to welcome 5,000 more -- as refugees. "Do Meshketians have to wait for another pogrom?" Ms. Mamedova asks, sitting in the kitchen of her new suburban home. "If there is an opportunity to save them now, bring them in and let them be happy. Wouldn't that be nice?" The White House thinks so. As it combs the earth for foreigners who menace America, the administration is also setting out on a search for nonmenacing ones: people who can let the U.S. reopen its humanitarian gateway without letting down its guard. The world's uprooted now total an epochal 35 million: refugees trapped where they aren't wanted, both outside and inside their own countries. But U.S. refugee admissions have been shrinking since the end of the Cold War. In 1992, 142,000 came here. By 2001, the tally had faded to 68,000. And after the attacks of Sept. 11, the sanctuary nearly closed. Admissions collapsed, to 27,000, in 2002; in the fiscal year just ended, they bumped up to just 28,000. When he came into office, Mr. Bush was intending to reverse the decline. His backers, in particular those who craved a larger presence for religious groups in public affairs, described it as a moral obligation. Now Mr. Bush has reiterated his original promise. "The administration acknowledges that the program is at a crossroads," the White House said in an October report to Congress. "We will do everything we can to sustain our rich tradition of offering refuge to those who need it most." But saving the desperate has become a lot tougher over the past decade. Refugees have scattered among dozens of failed states instead of a few fairly stable ones. The terror scare has forced them through a finer security screen and sometimes scared away the American screeners who interview them in camps overseas. For those and other reasons, a strong faction inside the State Department has been arguing that the U.S. should let admissions remain at low ebb. In its public statements, the administration isn't flinching. "The plan still holds," says Arthur Dewey, the State Department assistant secretary and Bush appointee who oversees the refugee bureau. "There are refugees out there. They're just more difficult to get to. They require a lot more work." So Mr. Dewey's office is setting its sights on groups it can certify as the least sinister among the world's least wanted. The administration has assured Congress that new arrivals won't "pose a threat to the people of this country." Mr. Dewey hopes this year's intake will reach at least 50,000. There is no shortage of refugees caught in camps for long periods, sometimes for decades: 540,000 Burundians in Tanzania; 100,000 Bhutanese in Nepal; 130,000 Burmese in Thailand. But the groups currently favored for admission to the U.S. fall mostly into familiar pools: ex-Soviet Jews and Evangelical Christians, Cubans, Vietnamese and some Iranians caught in Vienna. The Meskhetian Turks can claim a place on a new "nonmenacing" list for three reasons: They have no link to terror; they are close enough to civilization for Americans to meet them in safety; and they have been living in misery for 60 years. They come from a region of Georgia near the Turkish frontier. No one knows exactly why, but in November of 1944, Stalin had 110,000 Meskhetians put into cattle cars and sent to Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Feruza Mamedova has recorded some of her mother's memories of that trip and set them down in English: "It was a long journey -- about 20 days," her mother recalled. "On every train stop soldiers were throwing hundreds of dead bodies onto the snow. When we finally arrived in Uzbekistan, my little sister died from starvation, then my grandmother died; right after, my 20-year-old aunt died from the cold ... ." Never allowed to go home, the Meskhetians lived as outsiders in Uzbekistan. Ms. Mamedova, now 33 years old, was born in the city of Ferghana. In 1989, as Uzbek nationalism bloomed, a fight between Uzbeks and Meskhetians set off a murderous riot. Uzbeks went gunning for Meskhetians. The Soviet army evacuated 70,000 of them. About 18,000, Ms. Mamedova's family included, ended up in Krasnodar, a Russian province north of their native Georgia. From the first moment, Ms. Mamedova knew that "the local people didn't like us." But since she left Krasnodar in 1992, the province has been consumed by Russian nationalism. The local government refuses to give Meskhetians residency permits. Without permits, they can't buy houses or cars, obtain medical care, enter college or work. Their marriages, births and deaths go unrecorded. Trying to survive as subsistence farmers, they are harassed by gangs of Cossacks with deep roots in Czarist xenophobia who are pledged to seeing them deported. At the end of December, their old Soviet passports will expire. After that, the Meskhetians will be undocumented aliens in their own country -- and technically stateless. But does that qualify them for a flight to New Jersey? Not necessarily. The attacks of Sept. 11, refugee workers say, have brought to a head a decades-long debate within the State Department over the wisdom of resettling large numbers of refugees in America at all. The question is this: Should the U.S. take in as many as it can? Or should it help feed and clothe many more in camps, or in the countries where they have tried to find refuge, until a day comes when they can return to their own homes? Caring for them costs less, but their lives remain in limbo; bringing them here costs more, but their trials will end. For the U.S., the answer has never been pat. Before World War II, it welcomed hardly any refugees. Afterward, some were taken in mainly to stabilize Europe. Those accepted during the Cold War served to display communism's failings. The U.S. did set up a refugee bureaucracy and learn to move big, orderly groups of Soviet Jews and Vietnamese, but once the Cold War ended, many of them began to look like plain immigrants. The easy gets were gone, and the world was turning upside down: Failed states from Bosnia to East Timor generated millions of new refugees. None had propaganda value. And instead of being caught in two relatively peaceful places -- Vietnam and the Soviet Union -- they were caught in 60 hazardous ones. During the Clinton administration, the U.S. decided to focus on resettling only those it deemed to be in deepest trouble and in need of "rescue," while helping larger numbers in camps abroad. The Bush administration contests that view. It wants to broaden the definition of "rescue." "A rescue situation doesn't only mean a guy's got a gun to your head," says one State Department official. "It means kids growing up with no schooling. Those kids could be in the United States. Those kids could be going to medical school." Kelly Ryan, a conservative Republican who took office in February as deputy assistant secretary for admissions, has been charged with building up the numbers brought into the U.S. Though the State Department declined to make her available for interviews, a refugee worker who knows her says Ms. Ryan favors resettlement as "an expression of American values." In practice, however, security remains America's priority, and that gives a powerful lever to long-serving civil servants responsible for making resettlement work. At least some of them, it's said, still doubt its usefulness. Like other foreigners coming to the U.S., refugees are subject to strict new background checks imposed by the Department of Homeland Security. While the checks haven't unmasked any terrorists, they have exposed large-scale fraud in the refugee pipeline. Thousands who falsely claimed American family ties to help them get in have been rejected. For those in the government who think the system is lax, aid workers contend, this has been a handy justification for cutting admissions. "For people who view this program as compromised, it's an opportunity to make changes," says Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank. In fact, a new rule has narrowed the family category to immediate relatives. Security, moreover, has come not only to mean defending the homeland but defending the homeland-security officers sent to vet refugees in risky places. Unless it's safe, they won't go -- and that means many genuine refugees will have to stay put. Well before the 2001 attacks, the U.S. offered to resettle 12,000 Bantu tribespeople. Once enslaved in Somalia, they had fled civil war to a camp in Kenya. Sending American interviewers to the camp was judged to be so hazardous that in 2002 the U.S. spent $5 million to bus all 12,000 Bantu across Kenya to another camp. Last June, the State Department reported, U.S. interviewers had to be "evacuated in the midst of gunfire" from the second camp. For another $500,000, the U.S. has now built fences and guard towers around its camp compound. All 12,000 Bantu, it hopes, will at last make it to the U.S. before the end of 2004. "It tells you what a complicated business it is to select people and bring them in," a government consultant says. The extra security has doubled the cost of admitting one refugee -- to $4,800 -- in a system that spends about $750 million all told. "Which groups do you take?" Ms. Newland says. "How do you decide?" Adding new names to this list, specialists agree, requires more than assurances of security. A mass move to America shouldn't provoke a rush of fakers hoping to join the crowd; it shouldn't reward the inhumanity that made people flee in the first place; and it shouldn't come until every local exit proves a dead end. Only two new groups have made that cut for 2004 -- a sign that the Bush administration's internal debate is far from over. The Bhutanese in Nepal are one, the Meskhetian Turks the other. As Cossacks hound them toward statelessness, the Meskhetians seem to satisfy all views on the uses of resettlement: They are both long-sufferers and urgently in need of rescue. From the safety of her living room in Wayne, N.J., Feruza Mamedova put through a phone call to her uncle Asnar in Krasnodar. "If you had a chance to come to America, would you take it?" she shouted down the line. Asnar Mamedov shouted back: "Of course!" He is 43, jobless, and tries to live by selling fruit and vegetables in the market. "How are things now?" his niece asked. "They're strangling us," said Mr. Mamedov. "They take our produce and throw it on the ground. They take people to jail just for selling. The way it was is the way it is. It never stops. I would be happy to go to America!" There is, however, one loose end: Russia, a friendly country with democratic ambitions, has not yet signed on to the deal. Alexander Verkovsky, who tracks ultranationalists for Panorama, a Moscow think tank, says, "It is a scandal. Nobody in the Kremlin will agree with such a decision." Mr. Verkovsky wants Russia to grant the Meskhetians citizenship and move them to safer surrounds. America's offer -- limited to only 5,000, under a third of the total -- may, in fact, turn out to be a form of diplomatic arm twisting. As one U.S. official says, "One thing Russia still responds to is shame." Alexander Osipov of the Russian human-rights organization Memorial gives his government less credit. "They've talked for years about taking any opportunity to let these people go," he says. "Now it's working. We cannot object. This is the real life of real people. It's their one chance to save themselves." The Kremlin has made no public comment on the U.S. offer. In a document summarizing its still-unsettled refugee resettlement campaign, the State Department devotes three words to the prospects of a Meskhetian move to New Jersey: "Sensitive negotiations underway." (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/12/11/financial1003EST0050.DTL) ****************** December 12, 2003 U.S. Planning Anti-Bullying Campaign
The federal
government is launching a $3.4-million campaign aimed at curbing school
bullying, the
Associated Press reported Dec. 9. (http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/12/09/bullying.ap/index.html) ****************** December 14, 2003 New life for Little Saigon
By EDWARD
HEGSTROM
The sign on the door of Tropioca, the Midtown hot spot for Asian-inspired tapioca drinks, advertised extended hours during finals last week. Inside, Asian college students sipped on their multicolored beverages at tables strewn with notes and textbooks. At a table of three University of Houston pharmacy students, Hong Pham had a one-word description for the place: "Awesome." The idea to visit Tropioca came from a meeting earlier in the week, where City Councilman Gordon Quan called together community leaders to consider ways to save the area of Midtown known as "Little Saigon." Vietnamese shop owners occupied the area when it was little more than an urban wasteland 20 years ago, and many are leaving now that the region has been slated for gentrification. Quan wanted to see if there was any way of preventing this ethnic enclave from disappearing. Some Midtown promoters offered the typical boosterism, and some shop owners offered the usual -- though certainly legitimate -- complaints. There are not enough lights, they say. Transients are a problem, as are trash and crime. The trees need trimming. There was talk about ways to give Little Saigon a signature image. Some spoke of a gate, like the one marking the entrance of San Francisco's Chinatown. Others wanted to know if it would be possible to plant palm trees. There was an idea floated for an annual festival that would celebrate the region's Asian identity. "If you promote it, people will come," said Mark Dang, with Minh Tri Fine Jewelers. Everyone spoke of their desire to keep the Vietnamese presence. One representative noted that the first plans for Midtown redevelopment in the early 1990s included drawings of an area of shops and residences designed to look like Saigon. "I don't believe there's been any attempt to exclude anyone," said Quan. But the Vietnamese did invest great effort to bring Midtown back to life. Ironically, many were renters who found it difficult to stay once the improvements in the area led to higher rents. "It did not happen overnight that Midtown became what it is today," said Nicole P. Cao, a longtime business owner in the area. She noted that most longtime Little Saigon shopkeepers can tell horror stories of being robbed. There was not much talk of demographics, perhaps because people recognize that there is not much they can do about that. Asians in Houston have made a remarkable migration to the southwest part of the city and the suburbs. Businesses have naturally followed the customer base, creating a thriving new Asian district on Bellaire Boulevard. A store specializing in Vietnamese videos can hardly survive in Midtown anymore, because the vast majority of Vietnamese speakers now live 10 or 20 miles from the city center. Urban Asian neighborhoods in places like San Francisco and New York continue to thrive because Asians continue to live there. Can Houston's Little Saigon maintain an authentic feel after losing its Asian population base? Put another way: What's a Vietnamese restaurant without throngs of Vietnamese customers? Then again, maybe authentic is just another way of saying old-fashioned. Some of those who showed up to meet with Quan were young, second-generation Asian business owners who are defining a new urban market -- places like Jenni's Noodle House (which is in nearby old Chinatown) and Tropioca (in the heart of Little Saigon on Milam). It seemed worthy of a bit more investigation. The tables at Tropioca were remarkably crowded for midafternoon on a weekday. The clients were almost all Asian, many from UH. Pham and An Bui, both Vietnamese-Americans, described how they have learned to use both Midtown and Bellaire for different purposes. They offered a list of things to like better about Bellaire, including the better varieties of Asian restaurants and the quality of produce at the markets. "The food is fresher," said Bui. "The restrooms are cleaner," added Pham. But then they admitted there was something missing on Bellaire. "There's nothing on Bellaire that appeals to young people," said Bui. "That's why I like it here." E-mail Edward Hegstrom at edward.hegstrom@chron.com. (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/2296027) ******************
Founded in 1986,
the National Congress of Vietnamese Americans is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community
advocacy organization working to advance the cause of Vietnamese Americans in a
plural but united America – e pluribus unum – by participating actively
and fully as civic minded citizens engaged in the areas of education, culture
and civil liberties. |