AABA president Charles Jung and City Attorney David Chiu at left at Justice for Vicha rally. See this article for more. 

Hi all,

Election day is almost upon us. I'm cultivating hope though anti-democratic and even violent forces are at work. Paul Pelosi was just attacked with a hammer in his own home by a man who seemed egged on by right-wing conspiracy theories and the decades-long demonization of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Contempt, hatred, disinformation and gaslighting are tools of abusive power. I think we have to deconstruct the ways we hold or are infiltrated by bias and judgments, to look at ourselves with compassion and common humanity. I've also been thinking about the role of empathy, even radical empathy, in my life and as present in the world. Something that seems obvious to me as a psychiatrist and as a doctor, is so often subordinated in practice in society, which instead tends to gear us towards competition with each other, resource and opportunity-hoarding, instead of collaboration. How do we "win" against people and forces that don't respect our humanity or human dignity? As King and Gandhi said, it's by remembering theirs and our own, and affirming these in the face of what appears like Machiavellian manipulation and propagandization against it. While we largely seem to be winning in the virtual arenas, we still need to keep pushing in politics and culture - the IRL. So please vote and encourage your friends to vote and be active, to promote reason and compassion, and to minimize chances of violence, and in so doing, recover our humanity.

From East Wind:

MOSF 17.12: America, Under the Spells of Contempt and Idealization October 7, 2022 (the scariest article!!)

Contempt hangs heavy over us in our psychic skies, a false sun with great gravity, whose purpose is to mislead, and in misleading, lead us to a world of hate, violence, and the death of our human bonds.

MOSF 17.11: Do Trump Supporters or Their Opponents Have “Good Hearts”? October 6, 2022

Where are our good hearts when our minds and votes are in conflict? We are in “an era of warring mind states” as a friend puts it. This puts enormous tension on our humanity and our capacity to maintain “good hearts.” But what is a “good heart?”

Asian American films at PBS and DOC NYC, November 2022 October 23, 2022

November features important new Asian American documentaries on PBS, as well as films at DOC NYC. Plus a look at the dedication of Vicha Ratanapakdee Way in San Francisco on October 1, 2022.

From Psychology Today:

Action vs. Contemplation? Finding Answers in Empathy

The debate between active and contemplative lives goes back millennia. Summit and Vermeule's 2018 book is a great summation of Western thought. Empathy helps break the impasse. (October 13, 2022)

How Asian American Documentaries Promote Understanding and Empathy

Personal Perspective: Two Asian American documentaries streaming now on PBS offer opportunities to build understanding and empathy for diverse Asian and Black identities at this critical time. “Unempathic discord is dangerous for families, nations, and the world…Minority groups and vulnerable people everywhere have lived in close quarters with great peril throughout our existence. Our stories can offer important and healing messages to help the culture at large navigate distress and change to create better chances for safety, belonging, equity, and justice for all.” (October 24, 2022)

Other stuff:

I really enjoyed the 3 part RECLAIMED season 2 podcast from ABC News - 

"Before the March on Washington, before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, before the Mothers of the Movement — there was Mamie Till-Mobley. Her son, Emmett, was only 14 years old when he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered. By sharing the haunting image of Emmett’s body, Mamie Till-Mobley sparked what would become the civil rights movement. Through first-person narratives from her family members — and her own words — Season 2 of Reclaimed explores who Mamie Till-Mobley was before the death of her son, and who she would ultimately become. Season 1 of this series, “Tulsa’s Buried Truth,” covered the search for mass graves beneath Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the fight for justice for the descendants of the Black Americans killed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre."

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reclaimed/id1559956600

And this NYT article stirred a lot of thoughts - 

Missing the Home You Needed to Leave, by Alisha Haridasani Gupta, NY Times, October 22, 2022 (this link gets you past the paywall)
 

"The popular culture has gotten interested in trauma and migration, it seems “cultural bereavement” is part of that, though the term has been around for decades. 

As an Asian American I think I have experienced the possibility of belonging and also a sense of the “psychic nowhere” as Shinhee Han put it in her book with David Eng Racial Melancholia Racial Dissociation, in describing parachute children. This article emphasizes mostly the loss of physical signifiers of home and safety, but hints at the ways that relationship is different in the US vs elsewhere. EG the loss of status, respect, and even everyday markers of dignity and being known as “one of the group” and belonging, as opposed to the outsider/foreigner or a stereotype (the model minority).

For me (and us, I think) those dissonances rebound to heightened resolve to amplify the qualities of acceptance and affirmation of identity in the culture, and press for a more inclusive culture of belonging and empathy. But this requires pressing against a frequently disheartening and potentially dangerous gradient in the dominant culture, where power and even powerful people don’t always value empathy, and even view empathy as weakness - because life is all about getting your way as opposed to advancing the common good. 

I’m reading about the “success frame” trope in Asian Americans. What do we lose when some attain visible or tangential “success” and yet lose connection to the vulnerability and needs of the community? I have seen this kind of avoidance and shutting down. Sometimes it’s meant shutting out people (like me as a psychiatrist) who remind them of vulnerability, relatedness, and their complexities. But talking about vulnerability and loss is getting more popular as well." 

Solidarity and Safety, everyone!

Ravi