Chinese Girl in the Ghetto

My friend at Diversity Chronicle just sent me a copy of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto by Ying Ma. I found it to be riveting – as evidenced by the fact that I finished it in one sitting.

One of the Amazon reviews states that the author highlights racial tension in the Bay Area’s lower-income neighborhoods between blacks and Asians. This might be accurate, if by “tension” we mean a one-sided onslaught of callousness, abuse and hatred by blacks and Hispanics against Asians.

Ma describes ongoing  black-on-Asian abuse in the introduction, where she writes (pg. xii):

Then the year 2010 arrived and brought forth multiple crimes that forced me to look at my book project in a wholly different light.

In April, two black teenagers punched a Chinese immigrant, 59-year-old Tian Sheng Yu, in the mouth in downtown Oakland. He fell on his head, spend the next few days in critical care, and subsequently died. The same two teenagers assaulted the victim’s 27-year-old son before and after they assaulted the father. Between late March and early April of the same year, five black teenagers assailed five older Asian women, including one who was 71 years old, on separate occasions in or near a public housing project on the Lower East Side of New York City. In late March, five black teenagers surrounded a 57-year-old Asian woman at a light rail bus stop in San Francisco; one of them grabbed her and threw her from the platform onto the rails before beating her. In January, black teenagers kicked and beat 83-year-old Huan Chen after he got off the same bus stop. He, too, died from his injuries.

Some of the perpetrators, like those who attacked Mr. Huan Chen, demanded money before they ran off laughing. Most, however, acted for no apparent reason aside from the satisfaction of perpetrating a beating.

After the attacks, an uncomfortable question stared everyone in the face: What role had racism played in motivating the attacks? In response, local officials and local media bent over backwards to deny or discount the issue of race…

Later (pgs.81,82), she describes her first experience with casual black theft, when other students stole her treasured, and sentimental, pen from her. She writes:

In the ghetto, however, I could not count on my classmates to know right from wrong, nor could I count on the adults to ferret out fault and dispense punishment. Standing in a church with less than a month under my belt in this new country, I clutched a stubby No. 2 pencil that I did not want, far away from my friends who would have never subjected me to the same display of shamelessness. Instead of my former classmates’ familiar faces, I now saw panhandlers who refused to take no for an answer, thieves who stole my belongings, and thugs who harassed my grandmother.

Others have already written about the problem of black on Asian crime. What this book brings to the table is, in my opinion, an excellent first-hand account of a young, naive, civilized person’s first encounter with savages. It also presents a thought-provoking comparison between two brutal, and failed, big-government approaches to social problems. I’ll quote another Amazon reviewer, M.J.R.:

But at a deeper level, it is a fascinating anecdotal account of the the unintended results of government planning in two very different societies

Indeed. Ma’s account of the heavy-handed way communist Chinese schools dealt with students (pgs. 35-40) should make American students treasure the freedoms they have, while her account of her aunt’s forced abortion (pg. 101) is a tearjerker. While tales of black racism, against Asians, are abundant, Ma does not delve into their root causes, other than to state (pg. 82):

I hated the three thieves. I hated their poverty, which had inspired them to covet my possession and conspired with them to take it from me. I hated their parents, who had failed to teach them that being poor was no excuse to steal.

But there can be little doubt that Ma is acutely aware of the fact that liberal government policies have taken normal black dysfunctions and magnified them considerably.

Thanks to her life experiences, Ma leans to the right. She supported California’s Proposition 209 (pg. 144) and, thanks to her life-experiences, is an active participant in American conservative thought and politics.

I doubt we’ll ever know if Ma appreciates the importance of HBD (Human Biological Diversity – or the reality of biological racial differences), her book exists at the crossroads of ethnic identity and HBD. Her experiences were similar to mine. She writes (pg. 16, after recounting a long fistfight she had with a racist Hispanic bully):

I firmly held onto my ethnic pride. In elementary school, I reverted to my Chinese name. In junior high school, I got into a fight.

Getting into a physical fight with one of her tormentors was an act of great courage on her part; it goes against the very nature of Asians in America, as Ma describes on several occasions, for example on page 146:

Shortly after I graduated from college, I saw a black woman shriek curses at a Korean man on a bus between New York City and Washington, DC. “You f—ing Chinese person! Didn’t you hear that I asked you to move your ass? You too stupid to understand English or something?” she berated him. Years later, I saw a black girl yell at the top of her lungs on a Manhattan-bound Number 7 train, “Man, I fucking hate Indian people. They smell, too, because I know they don’t wash.” Just as in Oakland, those who witnessed these incidents looked away and pretended nothing had happened. More often than not, I joined them in their silence.

But even if such verbal abuse is met with silence and retreat, it still has an effect on the target population. The effect is often a heightened sense of ethnic identity among the target population. In my case, years of forced busing in California, with its constant threats and intimidation by blacks (along with their grotesquely exaggerated sense of racial pride), helped reinforce my own ethnic identity. Both Ma and myself were acutely aware of our ancient heritages – as we each confronted the black inner-city non-culture of mindless savagery. I was 11 when I was thrust into the jungle. Ma was 10.

Ma comes close to supporting HBD. For example, on page 109, she writes:

The white students at school made up an extremely small minority of the student population, but along with certain Asian students, they were always present in the small number of “gifted” classes the school offered.

At some point, it must surely have occurred to Ma that the stark racial disparities she witnesses might be due not only to upbringing, but also to inherent differences between the races. Not wishing to destroy her career, she would have avoided stating so in her book.

Regarding Hispanics, she writes (pg. 124):

Over time, our street became browner, but not less poor or less dangerous. After a couple of years had passed, the two-story apartment building that the police had visited on my first night in the neighborhood became almost entirely populated by Hispanics residents…

Our new neighbors offered up blaring music every weekend, starting early in the morning and lasting well after dark. They also threw parties that caused hordes of cars to be parked everywhere along our block, on the curb, in front of our house, and sometimes in our driveway. On weekends and late afternoons, the children of the families who lived next door screamed outside, climbing over the fence into our backyard and horsing around on our front porch without permission.

After the Hispanics kids next door destroyed the Ma’s sunflowers, Ying found the courage to enter the offending childrens’ apartment to confront the parents – and, after telling the culprits’ middle-aged mother about their crime, the children were mercilessly spanked and forced to apologize.

Regarding busing, and its effects on white schools, Ma writes about transferring to a school in a whiter part of town. Unfortunately, many NAMs* had the same idea (pgs. 128,129):

Each day, they took public buses up the hill from neighborhoods farther away from the school, far poorer, and more unsafe than mine. Somewhere between where they lived and our high school, the buses stopped and I hopped on. Together, we made our way up to a pristine and beautiful part of town that neither their parents nor mine could afford to live in. On our way up, we caught a view of the bay that divided San Francisco from Oakland. On clear days, we could even see as far as San Francisco. At first I imagined that we were leaving behind the grittiness of Oakland. In reality, we were merely bringing it up to the hills.

Taking the book at face value, I admire Ying Ma. She’s not afraid of confronting her own flaws and sins. At the same time, we might say that she did a great job of “overcoming diversity.” I would hope that just as she was not afraid to expose the biased media and black racism in the past, so too will she speak up for what is right and take an openly pro-white stance. After all, Asians aren’t the only ones who suffer from black and Hispanic racism.

*Non Asian Minority