Salon.com > Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Kids hate-tweet Obama, echoing what they hear at home

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 21:06:00 +0000

The reelection of President Obama has hardly dimmed the enthusiasm of hardcore GOP racists. Even Mitt Romney, not too many hours after his hasty but graceful (for him) concession speech, is already out on the airwaves bitterly claiming it was the president’s promises of “gifts” to the unwashed 47 percent (read: minority) that got him reelected. Paul Ryan blames the unexpected high turnout of the “urban” vote (if you feel at all that the GOP uses the word "urban" to mean anything other than black, please refer to this video of Lee Atwater and the birth of the GOP’s “Southern strategy”). Karl Rove, who should have his own TV show called “The Biggest Loser,” has been petulantly invoking a high “urban” turnout, even bafflingly labeling a large and enthusiastic voter turnout as “voter suppression” — he must mean that lots of minority voters are considered suppressors of the white vote.

Paul Ryan’s poverty tourism

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:44:00 +0000

Paul Ryan, in a recent photo, appeared to be vigorously scrubbing dishes at a soup kitchen in Youngstown, Ohio. As the Washington Post noted: “Ryan, his wife and their young children headed to the kitchen, donned white aprons and offered to clean up some dishes.”

However, they were in an empty facility, at a time when breakfast service was over, the homeless clients vamoosed, the place already scrubbed by volunteers. So what did Paul Ryan do, since he was there to express his concern for the poor and downtrodden? Make a donation? Actually, according to the Post, he “took some large metal pans that did not appear to be dirty, soaped them up and rinsed them … as the cameras clicked and the TV cameras rolled.”

I know soup kitchens. I’ve worked in one. Paul Ryan did not work.

Akin is the GOP

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Todd Akin, the Congressman with the curiously dead eyes, did voters a favor with his public airing of his belief that “legitimate” rape will not cause pregnancy.

Besides being disavowed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, presidential candidate Mitt Romney ]denounced Akin’s words as “outrageous,” and GOP officials called for Akin to step down. What’s lost in this fray, and what is most important for women voters, is that as bizarre as Akin’s statement was, it is in complete accordance with the official GOP platform: a ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape--or incest. This is the same platform it brought to the 2008 convention and the 2004 one.

What everyone gets wrong about Jeremy Lin

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote a Salon essay about my experiences with racial bullying growing up in northern Minnesota; particularly, a pair of girls who decided to sing “ching-ching-a-ling” and pull their eyes into slits when they saw me in seventh-grade gym class. It was painful to write, and — from the responses I received — pretty painful to read, especially by anyone who had experienced bullying. Thus, it felt almost as if counteracting forces in the universe were acting to promote Jeremy Lin’s farm-team-to-bench-to-global-superstar ascent in the basketball world. Finally! Being Asian American was cool, not something to be bullied over.

I happened to be in New York at the apogee of Lin hysteria, and I stopped into a sports store near Times Square in hopes of scoring his jersey as a Valentine’s Day present for my husband. After swimming through a chaotic but amiable crowd, despite it being near midnight, I was dismayed to find only unwanted XXXXXXXL sizes. A clerk confirmed there were no more; in fact they’d just gotten their first shipment -- and it had been decimated by feral shoppers.

Interview With My Bully: When I confronted my bully about racism

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Judy Blume, my mentor and friend, told me not to engage with my bully. “Forget her, she isn’t worth it,” she told me. But I had a strange curiosity over what happened to the woman -- I'll call her Mary -- who had once been my tormentor. Over the years I’d developed a secret theory of bullies, that they were the ultimate softies, the ones who have to build a fearsome spiked carapace over some sad, sad hurt. It's that kind of empathy, perhaps, that made me a novelist. And Mary certainly gave me a story to tell.

Bullying, unfortunately, was a part of the warp and weave of my childhood. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the '70s, where my Asian family was the only color in a sea of Scandinavians. When I was in second grade, a crew-cutted boy shoved me against some metal monkey bars, cracking the back of my head open.

But the most difficult time came when I entered junior high. I was underweight, bookish, bespectacled. Gym class was a convergence of all my anxieties. The other girls were tall with pretty hair that feathered and training bras, while I had no breasts and not even an undershirt for camouflage underneath the one-piece uniforms that looked like a baby’s onesie.