Asia Asia Asia

This post is dedicated to everything described with the adjectives Asia, Asian, or Oriental.

First, we will start with a menu item at the restaurant Fatz. Seriously, Fatz - where "everyone's a regular" [because they no longer possess the physical ability to walk out of the restaurant]. The aptly-named dine-in cafe has a bread service consisting of fried poppyseed muffins. Konichiwa, cardiovascular disease! But I digress. When I went there in August with my parents, my dad ordered this culinary delight:

Lu Lu's Chinese Chicken Salad

Grilled Asian chicken, crisp greens, Chinese vegetables, mandarin oranges and crunchy wonton strips all tossed with sesame oriental dressing and garnished with cilantro.

First, who the hell is Lu Lu? I want to know if she's getting a cut of the profits. (I hope that she wasn't an undocumented immigrant who lived most of her life in the U.S. and went to college here -- since we still don't believe that she deserves citizenship.) Anyway, I was horrified that Fatz had imported some poor chicken from Asia after it passed the TOEFL test -- only to grill its avian ass. Fatz then wanted to raise the red lantern, so to speak, by festooning the salad's canopy with Chinese vegetables such as broccoli, carrots, and, er..., red onions. (See?! Red. Authenticism abounds.) And then there are the mandarin oranges and sesame oriental dressing. Marco? Polo.

The moral of the story: wonton strips make anything Asian. This is why I carry them around the sleeves of my shenyi all the time.

The Asia Trail

Ok, fine. So the entire first part of this post was a lowsy front for my posting the following picture from the National Zoo. I went to see the pandas last Saturday with Lindsey and Jill, the Americorps member at Food & Friends. The zoo was a lot of fun, and it was festively decorarted for Halloween. There were interesting tombstones all around, each featuring an epitaph of an extinct species.

The panda habitat (sponsored by Fujifilm in an example of Pan-Asian love) was located on a part of the zoo called the Asia Trail. I mean, opium wars and Open Door Policies aside, I didn't find the name of this exhibit as egregious as Lu Lu's Super-Oriental Chinese Chicken Asian Salad. (I'm still waiting for Fatz to debut Fu Manchu's Pork Karate Chop.) However, the Halloween decorations in this part of the zoo were just a little out of control:

I mean, really? I was pretty hungry, and those sleeves did not have any wonton strips in them. I was sorely, sorely disappointed, to say the least. Thanks a lot, Smithsonian...

Turf Wars, Part I

Before I get to the substance of this series (covered in the much-anticipated Part II), I think that some background information is needed. If any of you were wondering what I'm up to in D.C., this will give you a much clearer picture. If you have no interest in what I'm up to these day, don't read this entry! You will be reduced to snores... Here goes.

I work for Food & Friends, a D.C.-based organization that provides free freshly-prepared meals and groceries to individuals with serious illnesses. Food & Friends was originally founded in the early 1990s, before aggressive highly-active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) for HIV/AIDS existed. Due to the stigma associated with AIDS (read about Ryan White if you have any doubt) and the lack of effective medical therapy, people with HIV/AIDS were basically up the creek. Some noble-minded and compassionate people, many from the LGBT community, founded nutritional organizations to help preserve the health and dignity of people who were literally starving because they were too sick to work, shop, and cook for themselves. And thus, Food & Friends was born -- in a church basement.

Since HAART came into practice in about 1996, people with HIV/AIDS have been able to live much more mainstream lives. Although nutritional inadequacies still existed for people with HIV/AIDS, the increased stability in medical treatment allowed Food & Friends to begin focusing individuals with other life-challenging illnesses such as cancer. (We've also moved out of the basement -- thank goodness. By "we," I mean Food & Friends because I currenly do live in a basement.) And thus, my organization currently provides free meals and groceries to individuals with various forms of serious health conditions and an inability to prepare nutritious meals for themselves. Our services are provided on a need-blind basis, and eligibility is only based on medical status.

As HAART changed the way that AIDS impacted society, it also changed the face of Food & Friends' clients. Unexpectedly, the new antiretroviral treatment transformed AIDS from a disease characterized by wasting syndrome to one that could be associated with insulin resistance and obesity. Protease inhibitors, a key element of HAART, have been shown to increase insulin resistance, which in turn can cause hyperglycemia and diabetes. In fact, one study estimated that individuals with HIV/AIDS were more than 3 times as likely to develop diabetes than the general population.

In addition, cancer -- the other primary focus of Food & Friends -- is also linked to diabetes in several ways. First, diabetes has been shown to increase the risk of developing several types of cancer; in fact, both impaired glucose tolerance and diabetes have been shown in separate studies to be independent predictors of cancer mortality. Second, certain cancer treatments such as androgen deprivation for prostate cancer have been shown to increase the risk of developing diabetes. Finally, diabetes has been shown to decrease survival after cancer diagnosis through its extremely serious implications on vascular health.

And for this reason, my work at Food & Friends focuses on co-morbid diabetes. So far, this topic has not been featured in much literature, so the other Emerson Fellow and I are really starting from the ground up. Also, Food & Friends has never systematically looked out our diabetic client population, so we're all essentially waiting to be surprised. My job involves a quantitative and qualitative study of (1) the needs of our comorbidly diabetic clients and (2) the effectiveness of our current (and extremely, extremely limited) services for diabetics. At the present, the only option for diabetic clients is to receive less dessert each week; instead of 6, they receive 1. While this is one method of carb control, many would argue that it is extremely limited in its focus and potential benefits. For instance, if the only food that you're eating comes from Food & Friends, you may find that our carb-rich portions of rice and pasta are too large to eat in one serving. However, since all of it is packged in one meal, I can imagine some of our clients' eating all of the carbs and then experiencing a large blood sugar spike. This is obviously not ok!

So here comes clueless Swiss Beats to walk it out and save the day. I will be running focus groups with diabetics who also have HIV/AIDS or cancer. I will be asking them for their opinions on what we're doing now and what we can do better (which seems like a lot!). I will also be visiting individuals' homes to conduct some in-home assessments that will explore similar themes (while collecting some quantitative data that will be used for statistical analysis). All of the data collection, analysis, and writing has to be completed before February (no pressure!), so I definitely have my work cut out for me.

So that's a big bit of what I'm doing in D.C. I'm going to shut up now because I'm boring even myself. To find out what turf has anything to do with it, you'll have to wait for Part II. (I'll give you one spoiler; no cheesy indoor sports are involved.)

Taxicab Rejections

Lindsey, my partner in crime and only friend in D.C., has a huge family. About 150 members are attending a bar mitzvah that is happening tonight ("really Reform," Lindsey informed me). Per family tradition, relatives flew in from all over the country as early as Thursday for some pre-ceremony celebrations. Last night, I went to the "young people's party," intended for the under-30 crowd. It was a lot of fun, and I was glad to meet a small cross section of Lindsey's family.

This entry is primarily about the ride home from the party -- and even more specifically, how it didn't really exist. Lindsey's mom insisted that I take a cab back to my house since the walk home from the Metro station has a pretty bad reputation. As I mentioned before in another entry, my company's official policy is that employees should take a shuttle to the Metro stop before and after work. And my workplace marks the halfway point between the subway stop and my house. On the walk home from the Metro station, my company is a poorly-designed intersection (sans pedestrian signal), a liquor store, and a 10-minute stroll away from my destination.

It was about 2:00 a.m. and kind of chilly outside. The doorman at the hotel was nice enough to wave down a cab for me, and I hopped in. "Hi. I'm going to Northeast," I told the driver. The taxi driver shot me a confused look and asked me, "How do you get there?" Not being a driver in this city [yet...], I really had no idea. But I described it to the best of my ability using landmarks and major roads. Apparently, I did an adequate job for the driver to pinpoint a location because his next response was "I really don't want to go there." This was the first time that I'd attempted to take a cab home in D.C., and I was pretty surprised. The driver further suggested that he take me to a Metro stop (a 4-block walk for $5.50? No thanks, buddy) or to Dupont Circle (also on the Metro) so that I could hail another cab. Well, I wasn't going to pay him some absurd amount of money to then have to pay for another mode of transportation, so I hopped out of the car, and we parted ways.

The doorman was probably confused as to why I had irreconcilabe differences with a taxi driver. But he hailed me another cab further down the street, anyway. I walked up to the passenger-side window and told the driver where I was going. I then received rejection #2. Rejection #3 was actually money-related as the driver insisted that I pay him $17 for the trip, which was an entirely arbitrary (and stupid) amount. D.C. has a zone system for taxis (no meters!), and Lindsey's mom had made the identical trip during the day for $14. When I suggested that he was being less than admirable with his price gouging, the driver told me that I could admirably find another cab. Fine. Rejections #4, #5, and #6 were equally entertaining. Driver #4 was headed to Virginia. Driver #5 was "on call duty." Driver #6 just flat-out refused.

Well, by #6, I was already by the Foggy Bottom Metro stop. So I just hopped onto a Blue train and headed home. After a 40-minute trip (including two pretty sizable waits), I finally made it back the Metro station nearest my house. By now, I'd realized that I'd left my jacket at the party. Chilled, I walked briskly home without incident or any encounters of the human kind.

In retrospect, I'm pretty amused at my experience last night. If taxis refuse to take me home, I'm structurally bound to economical public transportation. This, of course, is fine with cheap old me. However, it's not as if my neighborhood is a war-torn wasteland! I actually kind of like the area (less racist hollerings). Is there that much business at 2:00 a.m. in Foggy Bottom that 6 taxis would reject me? Is Northeast D.C. that bad?!

What's cookin'? - Part II

So apparently, my activity of choice for lazy Sundays is cooking. When I went to Trader Joe's on Friday, I bought some 99-cent pizza dough, feta cheese, olives, and baby spinach. I was pretty sure that I'd be able to find a recipe for spinach and feta pizza, and this morning, I certainly did.

So I greased a sheet of aluminum foil (who has pizza pans, anyway?!) and put some pizza dough on [after I tried to throw it up in the air, punch it, and all of that other stuff that's shown on TV].


I had to substitute a yellow onion for red onions since that's what I had left over. I also had baby spinach and didn't know how to convert units of adolescent spinach to units of voting-age spinach. So I just played it by ear. I also added some olives to the mix, which, by the way, are a huge freaking pain to pit. [Insert a Nick-esque pun such as "preparing olives..., it's the pits, all right!"] After I loaded the toppings on, this was the pre-baked product:

And this was lunch:

I ate this pizza while watching the first 2 episodes of Absolutely Fabulous. I used to watch this show when I was little (...) on PBS. It's still hilarious now, which just makes wonder exactly how messed up I was as a kid. Anyway, the pizza tasted pretty good! I think that it may have been too salty to be healthy, so I'll have to work on that.

Oktoberfest

Yesterday, I decided to drink beer in lieu of going to the gym. I think that this, generally speaking, is an acceptable subsitution.

Each year, Arlington, VA, has a pretty sizable Oktoberfest celebration. And despite not actually liking beer, I flet that the event was a nice way to get to know a new place -- and perhaps even to develop an appreciation for an ale or two. Also, Diana (BuRrrr '07) was going, and I figured that I could learn something from a person who actually enjoys drinking liquid bread.

So I hopped on a yellow line train, got off at the Pentagon (where there were some disturbing ads depicting tanks... in action!!!!11), and took a bus to the "Village of Shirlington." I'd never been to Northern Viriginia ("NOVA") before. But apparently, in this preppy suburbia, "village" is synonymous with "shopping strip." In other words, M. Night Shyamalan's movie of the same name was never a novel concept. But I digress.

The beer festival itself was a lot of fun. I sampled 5-6 beers and 8 wines. I actually went home with a $20 bottle of Riesling, so I may have missed the larger point of the event / forgotten my socioeconomic limitations... However, I am extremely happy that I went because, among other things, Oktoberfest in Shirlington was truly an immersion into German culture. I got to hear the Edelweiss Band (apparently "legendary" according to their own promotional placard) play classic German standards such as "The Chicken Dance" (*clap clap clap clap*). I also got to see a two-year-old, German-flag-wavin' tot smack his brother in the face with the ol' Bar and Bars of Germany. Said two-year-old was then knocked to the ground, where he was left unattended by his beer-sipping mother for at least one full minute. Es lieb Deutschland, baby!

But really, it was a lot of fun! I highly recommend it to any people in the D.C. area in October.

Do my screams sound in pentatone?

This entry is being retro-posted since it is based off of an email that I wrote on October 2. The original email was sent to 4 other people in my fellowship who make up my "learning group." Ostensibly, we are supposed to use each other as a support system in times of hardship, but as of 5 days after I sent this message, no one has really written me back. (One person did say that she would, though.) And so while I'm waiting, perhaps fruitlessly, I figure that I should open it up for broader discussion. If you have thoughts on this topic, comment or shoot me an email. People who read this blog know how find me! Changes or clarifications to the original email are written in [grey italics].

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I was talking with Lindsey [my field site partner, roommate, and o.f.f. (only friend, forever) in D.C. proper] this morning about an issue, and she suggested that I talk to the other Fellows about it. And then I suddenly remembered that this was kind of the whole point of our small groups. So with this, I present to you what I hope to be our first small-group discussion. [*crickets*] [Insert fanfare, blah blah blah, a flourish, &c.] And yes, I'm totally doing this during work hours. I was really upset about it yesterday and thus am taking a personal hour this morning just to think about it and promote my own mental well-being. (By "taking a personal hour," I mean sitting in my cubicle and typing this email in Notepad. I'm also in my "happy place" thanks to a cup of coffee...)

Here's basically what happened: Yesterday, I was walking to the Metro stop from my house at about 6:00 p.m. (I'm taking a Spanish class at GWU down in Foggy Bottom, so I have to commute 45-freaking-minutes...) Anyhow, I was walking down the street, and I noticed a group of three school-aged kids (probably 14 to 15 years old) walking in front of me. I was walking faster than they were, and as I passed them on the street, one of them sang (and this is hard to describe in writing) a stereotypical pentatonic melody at me. I'm not sure if that description makes sense, but it's like playing three adjacent black keys on the piano and is depicted in popular U.S. culture as an [East] "Asian" sound -- I've seen it played on cartoons as Asian characters are introduced: *da, da da, da da, da da dumm*. [Upon further research, it's known as "the Asian riff" and can be found notated here on Wikipedia.] And as I walked further, one of them said something else, and they started laughing at me.

I don't know if it's just because I've just been thinking about race issues a lot in the past week because of what's going on in Jena, but this really upset me. [During the previous week, I wore black to stand in solidarity with the Jena 6. It really smacked of the Herald/Rumpus stuff that happened during college.] I should also say that this is probably about the 4th or 5th time that something like this has happened to me here in D.C. since I moved for my field placement [on September 20, 2007 - so wihin the a 5-week period]. Three of these incidents were overtly racially motivated -- they all involved young kids saying things such as "ching ching chong" (a la Rosie O'Donnell on The View in re: Danny Devito) as I've walked by them. I've also had one young person scream at me (he shouted "BWAHHHHH!" -- I think in an effort to scare me?!) as I walked by and another person shout something at me from a passing vehicle. I know that I shouldn't automatically assume that all of these things have been race-related, but based on the obvious references to my Asian-ness in some of them, it's hard for me not to think that race has something to do with it. [This really takes me back to the first run-in with racism I had in college. Someone yelled, "Me like sushi!" at me and my parents from the back a moving vehicle. We were saying goodbye to each other during move-in in front of my freshman dorm. And then I broke down during the ethnic counseling intro, and everyone thought I was unstable. Great times!] Also, all of these things have happened during the 15-minute-or-so walk from my house to the Metro. I think that all of this is particularly upsetting because this is literally happening in the place where I live! (I work an 8-minute walk away from the Metro station, too.) And I walk to and from the Metro 6+ times each week.

In my neighborhood, I'm basically the only Asian person around, and the large majority of residents are black or Latino. I realize that I've just moved into what has been other people's homes for a long time and that local residents aren't used to seeing people of my race walking around Fort Totten. However, I really didn't expect to confront issues like this on such a regular basis (it's only been 4 weeks (!), and I'm going to be here for 6 months!). Stuff like this probably happened to me 6-7 times *total* during college. Also, for me, the most disturbing part is that I seemingly can't *do* anything about it. Being new to the area (and being told that I shouldn't walk to the Metro by myself at night -- or even from work?!), I don't think that it's prudent for me to have a throw-down with local youth. [At work, we are not advised to walk to the Metro station. There is a shuttle that operates at 5 p.m., expressly for taking employees and volunteers to the Metro station. While I don't think that the neighborhood is that dangerous at all, I still think that this arrangement says something.] And while I'm going to the gym and pumpin' my massive guns and all (...), I'm still about as sturdy as balsal wood and would definitely get my ass kicked.

Anyhow, thanks for reading this "massive missive," as one of my college friends would say [Nick, I love you and your punniness.]. I was wondering what you all think about the above and what you think I should do about it, if anything. I've talked to a couple of my friends [Chris, Nina, and Warren] about this, and right now, I'm just trying to come to terms with the reality of it all and cope with what has happened. Realistically, I'm going to encounter things like this until February, at least (and probably for the rest of my life), so I'd rather deal with it now than wait until later.

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As I mentioned, no one has written me back so far. I was lucky to get to an emotional plateau after talking to Chris and Nina. But this issue still bothers me a lot, and I'm nervous each time I walk to the subway. I'm just waiting for something absurdly racist to happen again. And I'm actually scared that it will.