The First Amendment; Gloria Chun

The First Amendment and the Free People, a weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s, produced by WGBH radio Boston, in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the Institute's director, Dr. Bernard Rubin. How can we increase the representation of minorities in the media? How can the mass media in this country fully represent all of the people? With me today is Gloria Chun, who works here in Boston, Massachusetts, producing among other things a program on television called "Asian Focus" on WNAC, is also in the Corporate Communications division of the Gillette Company, and is the editor of Sampan, which is a grassroots kind of communication newspaper for the Asian community. Especially the Chinese community in Boston. She's a Boston University graduate as well, I'm

happy to say. Gloria, the minority that, that you're primarily working with, the Asian community, has very little impact on the mass media of this country. Let me ask you the toughest question first: What can we do to change that balance a little bit? I think we might start by remembering that there are stereotypes, and while there are good and bad stereotypes, sometimes even the good stereotypes -- and certainly Asian Americans, particularly the Chinese and the Japanese, have good stereotypes in the sense, they are looked upon as a model minority group, which means that we'll say they're very nice. Geez, I know a Chinese family and they're really swell people and their kids are very bright and they don't bother us, they're just great people. Well, that's good but then that means you also tend to put them aside as something different and ignore them. Not realizing that they're human beings with problems and they're people with feelings. And there are problems. Ah,

one thing that most Asian communities tend to do is to kind of sweep under the rug some of the problems and not show in public, because of a cultural thing, the problems that do exist. That sometimes because of this good stereotype that the Asian community has, it's ignored. Well, eh, despite the stereotypes in our own community, here in the eastern part of the United States, and this is true in other communities, a great many people who live in the more central band where Chinese people are ghettoized in the city: uh, the men work in restaurants to a great extent, and the women work on sewing machines to a great extent. They work long hours with the men having very few weekends. So, how well does the stereotype fit in terms of -- well, let me ask you this question: How many Chinese people who are truly representative of working people do the average non-Asian people meet on this stereotype?

Probably not many. And I think I'm gonna to have to say the mass media itself is responsible for that stereotype, and that's what we're talking about today, is the mass media and how it might affect the creation or the maintenance of that stereotype. I think a lot of us do see people but don't see them. For example those who wait on us in restaurants, and the Chinese particularly in the Boston area, in the San Francisco area, in the New York area, Los Angeles area, Chicago area where there are fairly large clusters of Chinese and there are Chinatowns. Chinatowns are little ghettos. Here are where the large numbers of immigrants come in and the immigrants tend to take low-paying jobs, they're struggling along. As you pointed out, a lot of them are working waiters. A lot of them are underemployed. A lot of them have skills and abilities and training. They brought back with them from other countries from Hong Kong, from Taiwan other parts of Southeast Asia, but cannot get into a proper job here because of their language limitations. But we don't see this. All we see is somebody waiting on us in a table.

All we know is that they're working, they're productive, but they do have problems. And the tendency of course, also in large areas where there are immigrant populations, mother and father both work and the children get very little day-to-day supervision that they need. Now, as the editor of two major Asian-directed efforts in the mass media in one community -- you are the editor of a newspaper, Sampan, that has half of its material in Chinese, and half of its material in English. You also appear once a week for 15 minutes at 9 o'clock of a Sunday morning. That takes care of the Asians kind of thing. [laughter] On one of our major stations -- you didn't say it, I did -- on one of our major stations doing very fine work bringing different types of people and interviewing them. What is, in sum total, what is the purpose of your own efforts? Let's start with Sampan.

Bern, I started doing Sampan, oh gosh, nearly 5 years ago, maybe closer to 6 and I was a student at Boston University. I should add that I am from Hawaii, so I didn't grow up being a minority person. I was a majority person, Maybe that changes my views. Maybe that allowed me to get into a field, communications, in which a lot of Asians do not get into. But I came from Hawaii, I went to Boston University, and of course was very inspired and became very impressed with the media and what its responsibilities are and what it should be doing. And this is all theory, of course -- we talk about in practice -- and well-meaning theory. But then when you get outside and you want to be doing something for the community, being in Boston I chose the Boston Chinese community. What I wanted to do with Sampan was to simply communicate and to inform people. And it seemed like such a tiny, tiny effort way back then. You know, we started typing, hand collating, working very hard. All we wanted to do was inform, not even to excite or to bring news to the forefront of the Chinese

community. We wanted to talk about what Social Security was, what availability of police services were, because we were talking to a community that didn't understand English and didn't have access to the regular newspapers. The Boston Globe or the Herald. At that time all we wanted to do was to provide a service, information. And as Sampan group we took on a few new people on the staff and the community began to accept the Sampan, because here was the only publication in Boston which addressed the needs of the Chinese community. And the community began to really depend upon it for news. What was going on in Chinatown. And slowly and bit by bit we developed credibility, which is important for the press. But more important, little issues began to develop in Chinatown. One which I've talked about in the past resulted when 2 Chinese men were attacked in a parking lot, in Chinatown by 2 white men who were rather drunk. The police took into custody into the

police station and booked the 2 Chinese men. Why? Because they were Chinese and they didn't speak English. Perhaps that was the reason. I'm suggesting some racism here. But this might have been forgotten, and no one would have heard anything about it, except that suddenly throughout Chinatown, all the old people were sitting around and talking about past incidents of humiliation like this, about discrimination. You can see anger in their eyes. You can see tears, and you could see memories, and you can see hurt, and you can see pain. And nobody covered this story. You mean nobody from the majority press at all...nobody, no nobody at all... or the major media as we... no, nothing at all. This goes on all the time. Um, the Asian community isn't covered. It's not a big community; we're small in numbers and we're scattered. And I grant that because of cultural and language problems, maybe the press is somewhat excluded, but I don't think it makes enough of an effort. The Sampan hit the streets with that story, the story about discrimination. It called into Chinatown the police department, and as it

turned out, Joe Jordan who is now the commissioner of the police department did turn up, did try to apologize to the community. But do you know, at that point, then the mass media appeared. But we had covered that story weeks and weeks earlier, bef-- and we had aroused community sentiment. We had aroused the leaders in Chinatown to demand and ask for an explanation. Um, but it took that much work to get the mass media to begin to realize that there's a story here. Um, but that was, that's what the Sampan is all about and why it's important. So you're inferring that the, the media cover a story if you stand them on their heads in, with some device. But normally the stories aren't covered. Now, what are some of the stories that are not covered? For example, the rights of the Chinese: many, many Chinese people in the inner Chinatowns do not speak English, or do not speak it very well. Ummhmm. Is that one of the stories that is not covered, that people who cannot speak English very well don't get their Welfare checks on time, or they don't get their rights from police or fire or

garbage, and so on. Yeah. There are literally hundreds of different kinds of stories that, stories that I wish you could cover even in the Sampan, but because of our all-volunteer effort -- and we have no substantial financial strength except a little bit of advertising, it's all on a voluntary effort -- we ourselves can't even give it justice. But there are lots of stories, the human interest stories. There, there's as se--, there's a man I know who has lived in this country, was born here, went back to China, got married, returned to the United States after the war but could not bring his family back. Do you know, in the next few weeks his son will be returning from mainland China. He's never seen his son and his son is about 47 years old. There are these kinds of stories. The press is beginning to, to uncover some of them but y'know, it's just the tip of the iceberg, if I may use that old cliche. There are lots of stories. There's, there's a bilingual education story. Here's a story that has a national impact, if you will, because bilingual education not only affects the Hispanic community, but very deeply affects the Chinese community, the Asian

community. Um, the questions of discrimination are never touched as they affect the Chinese or the Asian-American community. There's so much that you read about in the black and Hispanic communities. The Asian community is as much hurt by and affected by the discrimination, and the subtle discrimination that exists in in society and is allowed to exist because no one really focuses in on it. Now, you're-- one of the remarks that you made earlier was that you came from Hawaii and therefore were in the majority. I take from that, that when you arrived in a typical American city -- or in this case, an atypical American city, Boston, Massachusetts -- that you felt that you were no longer in the same kind of democratic structure that you were before. Uh, now you've been a reporter. How successful have you been as a reporter to, to gain access to the mass media, other than through Sampan, which is a

specialized community effort? My own personal efforts? Yes. There aren't [laughter] that many people who can't talk as, as a bridge speaker between the 2 communities. Fairly recently I joined some other people from the Chinese community and sat down with some editors from one of the local papers, the Boston Globe, and they were concerned, that they voiced concern and interest in coverage of the Chinese community. And at this time they too admitted that they did not adequately cover community news. And one of the concerns was, well, it's very difficult for us because you're a for--, foreign community in the sense that, um, you have language differences and you have cultural differences. My response to that argument on their behalf was that, well, I think as a journalist, you and I speak the same language and that is, it's your responsibility to make the special effort as a journalist, as you would an investigative journalist and as a good journalist, to take the time and to go in and to look for that story and be a little bit more sensitive. And I guess that's what a lot of what the minority

peoples are saying: is to be a little bit more sensitive and to take a little bit more time, the time that you might spend muckraking. Uh, that takes a lot of work and that takes a lot of diligence. Spend the same amount of effort an', and time and concern going into some of the minority communities that don't ever see the mass media except when there's something that's overly glorified or something that's exotic or something that's sensational. Which often is very bad for the community. At the local level how well-staffed are the newspapers, television stations, radio stations, with people who are acquainted with the Asian communities of Japanese, Korean, uh, Chinese, uh, Vietnamese and so on? When we talk about the Asian community we're talking a lot of people. Ummhmm. An' it's a changing community because, as you know, the Indo-Chinese population is increasingly growing and they are increasingly more and more problems and stories and needs to be covered that are not being covered. There are a large host of, of peoples in the

bloc of Asian-Americans that we talk about, are Asians. In reference to your question about, uh, are there people on the staffs of papers or, or media, I don't know and I don't think there's -- I, I, I have difficulty with that question. Do you have to have an Asian-American on board to cover Asian-American news? And I think as a pure journalist, I would say no. However, but because the times do not exist where we have that kind of sensitivity -- and it's very obvious because we have no coverage -- because there is not that sensitivity now, maybe the first step has to be increased effort to hire minority people to cover some of these minority issues and stories. Clearly, the current press -- the current press meaning both, ah, written media and broadcast -- is not, does not have the sensitivity or the staff or the caliber of people able to cover adequately, I think, the minority communities. It's not, certainly does not have the sensitivity to coverage -- to cover the

Asian-American community. If it means initially having to hire and to train and to give support to minority journalists, I think that should be made. Again, my, my answer is sort of qualified but I think it's important because a lot of people will question the need of, well, just hiring minority persons, does that answer it? Well no, but right now that's what we need. That's right. You, you take a look at the fact that there is very little coverage, virtually no coverage. Well, one way to get coverage to get somebody who can speak to different communities. Another way is to do what you do so valiantly, and that is to, ah, ah, get guests to appear for 15 minutes on a major television station in the small hours of Sunday morning [laughter] -- not, not, not the, not the dark hours -- certainly 9 o'clock is not dark [laughter] -- but it is, it is an effort that is prodigious, an' it seems to me that, and again I'll say it, that television stations like the one you are doing this with are

more or less making amends and not doing the job, they're just sort of sloughing you off and let you do what you want for 15 minutes. Well, um, as we well know, FCC requirements does require major broadcasters, the media, to provide access to local communities, and I guess I should be thankful for the 15 minutes that I do have on a local network. uh... What would you do if you had more time? Oh, I think I'd get below just, just the surface of some of the issues. I think in 15 minutes you can just begin to uncover some of the real issues that exist, and it's -- well, it should be more than just 15 minutes and more than just 30 minutes, it should be a wholehearted station effort, and not just by one station but by all stations, to really be concerned about and to really be able to dig deeper into a lot of the problems and, and issues that confront the Asian-American community. There ought to be concern by the news stations as well as the public affairs programming people as well as the scheduling people. I think 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning is perhaps not the best time, but it's better than no time at all. But

it, there ought to be some sensitivity into that, that minority programming ought to have a little bit more priority. Uh, it's, it's important to also realize that Asian focus is not only looking at -- it's not only for the Asian-American community...it's for the majority community...it definitely is. The majority population, the majority audience is still, y'know, the non-Asian community and they're learning something about it, and we're helping to break their stereotypes and hopefully their impressions and their misconceptions about Asian-Americans. And for everyone it's a learning experience. Well, if we approach the viewer incorrectly or without much planning -- if you remember, as children in public schools we used to get these these little gadgets that you put to your eye and you turned and the glasses formed different pictures, and sometimes we kept looking to see what the picture was when at the same time our friends had only one purpose in giving us the gadget to put to our eye, and that was it was covered with soot [laughter] on the outer edge, an'

we walked around with a black eye for the rest of the day -- and I think that sometimes we don't recognize that it's the majority community that needs the information as much as the minority. We all get a black eye. Exactly. Um, another, another question that arises from your comments about feeling as part of the minority: We have many Asian people -- doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers, eh, architects and whatnot -- who live out in the suburbs all over the United States. Yes. And it seems to me that this not only harms, this pattern not only harms the, the people living in the Chinatowns and Little, Little Tokyos and so on, but it also harms the people outside who are totally invisible to their neighbors. They're just that nice Asian family down the street or in the neighborhood without, without understanding that their youngsters need jobs; that the youngsters need to be accepted when they, ah, apply to schools; that they are architects who need commissions, and so on. Exactly. I think in, in talking about the needs of the Asian-American community, I guess

initially I'm, as most people are, very concerned about the Chinatowns an' the ghettos and the immigrant population with their language and cultural problems. Not that there are problems, but there should also be brought out in terms of breaking stereotypes that there are many Chinese, many Japanese, many Koreans who are professionals and whole professional jobs have struggled long and hard to make it into, oh, into society and to make it within their professional fields. And they exist there too. And sometimes they tend to stay away from the Chinatowns. They stand -- they tend to stay away from the problem areas because they really were talking about 2 different classes of people. But we're all Asians and we we find we still have the same problems. Um, an example being, our mental health clinic in Boston Chinatown has uncovered many, many mental health problems not only within Chinatown but from suburban-type Chinese who are really having identity problems. Now this is something that is just beginning to show itself and to creep up. Because they tried so hard to be white. You've heard about the banana -- well,

maybe we've all become bananas. They tried so hard to, to be adjusted and to be accepted by white society, we've perhaps given up too much of what we are in terms of being Asian. and their, or their children have problems identifying themselves as being Asians because they try too hard to assimilate, and these are problems that are showing themselves today. So the problems, the needs and the sensitivity to Asian-American ?experience? really affect all of us across the board and shouldn't just be limited, or we should just look at the, the Chinese who are in the ghettos in Chinatown. There's a widespread spectrum of Chinese-Americans, Asian-Americans who have made it in this country and those who are still struggling. Y'know, it has to be covered, and it should be brought up in the media and it shouldn't be -- we should not forget, as I said to you at one time, that there are things Asian and there are things Asian-American. We must be concerned internationally about what's perhaps going on in China. But the needs of the Chinese-Americans are somewhat different, as are the Japanese- Americans. We're talking about a different group of people. Well, the same single person at one moment of life is the Asian-American...umm... at the next moment of

life is the Asian...yes... at the third moment of life is the American, and transposing from one part of the kaleidoscope to another, almost with, uh, shiftless gears, is nerve-wracking. And, uh, it seems to me that, uh, that, uh, because my travels in part have taken me to Asia several times, I tend to see the problem looking at other societies where Asians are in the majority and wandering around Asian cities where I am very, very peculiar -- I look peculiar, I probably smell peculiar, I eat peculiar things, I have peculiar thoughts-- makes me very aware of, ah, being adrift in a sea of others. Do you think that we can overcome this? Now, you've had conversations with local publishers and so on. They, they give you good, uh, reception, they give you, um,

acquiescence, they agree with you. Do they do what you want them to do? Probably honestly and frankly, no. I think there's a voiced concern and there's a very voiced polite interest. But as one reporter who was assigned to Chinatown recently -- just after this meeting, very coincidentally, just after this meeting we had some coverage -- um, who attended a community meeting said, "Well, I can't put this story into 500 words or less. Y'know, I sat there and I was baffled because here was some token effort by the mass media to cover an event in Chinatown that was of significant importance Chinatown, and he couldn't fit it into 500 words. And my thought was, well, if you can't fit it into 500 words, perhaps it's because you haven't covered the story at all and there's just too big a story now suddenly. And yet it's not a sensational story, like a murder or a big robbery or a,

something that's sensational, but you couldn't cover an issue because it would involve some in-depth reporting, it would involve a little bit more time. And here's where I'm talking about that sensitivity and that willingness to put in a little bit more of an effort into some of the minority issues, which I do not see happening at all. Um, we have not had sufficient coverage in Chinatown and while the mass media will say, well we just can't cover any of the communities very well. I dare say if we did as I'm trying to do in terms of doing a study on mass media coverage of the Asian-American community, I think a study will show definitively that there is very little effort and very little attempt to cover anything that's going on in the Asian-American community. Well, there's very little effort on behalf of minorities across the board. A new study shows that even National Public Radio an' television has, ah, minority, ah, representation, uh, in a very disgraceful sense... definitely ... less than 50 percent have any

token representation. I think a telling, telling sign of this is that I have 15 minutes in Boston to do a TV program. It seems like a very small, as I said, a tiny effort. Yet I was very stunned to learn from a colleague in New York -- New York is number one or number two, I guess, it back, goes back and forth ... in terms of Asian-American population?... in terms of Asian population is the largest in this country -- does not have on commercial TV any programming for the Asian-American community at all. In San Francisco the only programming that I understand exist is on educational public broadcasting as well as on, um, cable an' UHF, but nothing on your major stations. Is it any wonder, then, on a larger scale that the American people are without proper knowledge about stories such as the boat people of Vietnam...ummhmm... or that their reaction to possible immigration of families is, ah, desultory,

or people are absolutely opposed in some parts of the country, or that, ah, we don't really focus on ourself as a Pacific power as well as an Atlantic power... ummhmm.. to the extent that we should? Particularly being on the East Coast, everything -- an' even on the West Coast, I'm sure -- everything is, is always very Europe-oriented, all of our concerns are World War, World War II experience while we are heavily concerned about what's going on in Europe. We're a little understanding, I think. An', and perhaps this made it very muddy and very difficult when we were both in Korea and in Vietnam that the American public's perception of what was going on, their sensitivity to these issues -- there's incr--, there's still large insensitivity to what is going on in Cambodia -- comes because the media has not played its role and taken its responsibility to adequately coverage what is going on, both abroad in Asia and here in the United States with our own Asian-American communities. There's so much that we can learn and the history of the Asian peoples is, is very

long. An' I'm, I'm, I guess I'm very ethnocentric. I'm very proud of being Chinese-American, and I'm definitely Chinese-American -- I can't pretend to be, um, someone from China; I'm not -- I probably will be as foreign as you are there. Well, that is the point. That is the point. When I was 17 when I first saw Asia, and we landed in, ah, in the Philippines, and a little bit later went up to Japan. And I have never ceased to be impressed. But I'm also impressed with the fact that we are all, uh, strangers in a wide world. So to be Chinese-American or to be Jewish-American or black American: we are all American; we are all strangers outside of our own little community. We need the mass media to bring us all together all the time, do we not? And, an' that's what America should be. We were brought up to believe it is. If we look at ourselves as, as stained glass and all different colors, and how wonderful we'd all look together if we worked harmoniously, an' we understood you can learn so much from each other. That's, that's the whole beauty of

what could lie ahead for us if we worked a little bit at it. Well, that seems to be so basic that, like the great religious teachings that come in groups of 10 and so on and so forth, they are almost unabsorbable. But we in the mass media will keep working at it. And I am delighted to have you, and I thank you for your candor. Thank you for having me. Gloria Chun. For this edition, Bernard Rubin. [music] "The First Amendment and a Free People," a weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in the 1970s. The program is produced in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communications at Boston University by WGBH radio Boston, which is solely responsible for its contents.[music ends] This is the station program exchange. This is NPR National Public Radio.