An op-ed by Myung Marie-Ok Lee at NYT has been hammered for the author’s depiction of her immigrant Asian father as a buffoon.
For instance, she writes of her father’s allegiance to the Republican party:
For more than 40 years, my parents maintained their unshakable loyalty, even while living in Minnesota, the only state with the distinction of voting for a Democrat in every presidential election after 1972, and despite the Republicans’ rising anti-immigration fervor — which was aimed, I pointed out, right at them. After all, they were, for a time in the 1960s, undocumented aliens, and it was our Democratic members of Congress who stayed their deportation.
Lee mentions that her father came to this country with $200 in his pocket and established a medical practice and sent her and three siblings off to college. Yet, according to her, he, with false-conscience, supported the Republican party. A smart successful man in one arena was a dolt in another. This doesn’t add up. Perhaps dad was smarter than daughter believes.
Liberals and Democrats use this same logic to appeal to every minority group – including blacks, Hispanic, gays, Kansans, and, in a distortion of math, women. “But we’re giving you all of this stuff, why don’t you support us? You must hate yourself!” What they don’t understand is that many minorities that go against their bloc don’t just look at what the government is promising them. They look beyond and wonder about the ramifications of the policy which the government is using to purchase their allegiance.
Lee hints that her father should have been a single-issue voter (though she doesn’t say if he ever became naturalized). Being an immigrant, he should vote for the pro-immigrant party. What’s the logic there? Perhaps her father was less stupid than he was shrewd and opportunistic. Perhaps he understood that if the United States extended to everyone the same policies and procedures that helped him stay in this country, the country would become too similar to what he’d escaped. Not to say that it would or that the father would be naive enough to believe this would happen in his or his children’s lifetime. But perhaps he saw that just because he got lucky meant that everyone should get as lucky as him. Wisely, he embraced his incumbency.
And that’s just assuming that he opposed limitations placed on immigration. Maybe he was a “racist” – he might have favored Asian immigration over the immigration of Hispanics or blacks which, under the logic of liberalism, would proceed unfettered. Who really knows exactly what his thought process was.
It’s funny how liberals are so quick to proclaim that, when it comes to behavioral tendencies besides voting, minorities don’t monolithically adhere to the values generally embraced by their group. But when it comes to the weight they give to political issues and the platforms of the different parties, if they vote against immigration or welfare or high taxes, they are either blind or stupid. But it should be easy to see that an immigrant who becomes a high earning medical professional would switch from race-group allegiance to preference for policies that support high income earners.
There is much more to laugh at in this op-ed. Nick Gillespie focuses on the muffin top analogy which was supposed to be the cutesy selling point of the article. Lee’s argument there, if you didn’t read the article, is that her father (and all Asians since they’re all alike, right?) would abhor the story that Mitt Romney only eats muffin tops, discarding the stumps. This offends Asian/immigrant frugality. Though Lee has shrouded this argument behind a veil of sarcasm, she thinks that her father should be fooled by a superficial display of wastefulness. This ignores that he was probably smart enough to realize that the other party represents the party of profligate spending and waste. Mitt Romney eats tops and discards stumps. Democrats, Keynes adherents that they are, bake up batches of muffins and throw them in the trash. Stimulates the economy. Which would be worse to the stupid Asian immigrant?
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Maybe some immigrants came to the US a few decades ago with an expectation that this is a great, wonderful land of freedom and opportunity, ensured of its eternal prosperity, creativity, strength, and order by its solid European demographic, in particular its northwest European population and culture, and kept just interesting enough by a smattering of ethnic whites and small pockets of non-whites, all living in harmony within the dominant Anglo/Christian paradigm. And maybe those I’mmigrants love this country exactly for having been welcomed here and see America’s continued well-being as an investment in their own posterity. Perhaps they also are not fond of forces and ideologies that would ruin this great America.
Not that I would know anything about that.
The article is a tribute to her father. I think the whole thing about her father eating questionable food and cat food, was just her way of telling us her father wasn’t a wimp. I think the political stuff could have been left out completely.
Lara, are you kidding me? Her father was a tool in that story to make a larger point about Mitt Romney.
I’m serious. Whatever her issues are with Republicans, she clearly adored her father.
I’m serious. Whatever her issues are with Republicans, she clearly adored her father.
Traditional Asians would be horrified by her way of showing “adoration” of her father. I hope mom isn’t alive to read this.
Lara,
Whether or not she adored him is beside the point. The article is about his stupidity in siding with Republicans. All of the dolt fathers portrayed by the media are well-loved. But that love is undergirded by the pity that his wife, kids, and society feel for him. He is the butt of a joke.
I don’t read it as “throwing her late father under the bus,” at all, and frankly I find it a bit bizarre that you project that purpose onto an author who clearly writes of her father both affectionately and with an eye-rolling daughter-knows-best perspective.
The point of the essay, it seems to me, was to highlight a contradiction between the Republican platform’s superficial appeal for legal immigrants and the apparent lifestyles and attitudes of its proponents, which seem worlds apart from the immigrant experience. It’s the same disconnect one detects when the GOP claims to be the party with the interests of small businesses at heart or one of its candidates professes unironically that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.”
All immigration to this country must cease. All illegals deported, and all legal immigrants sent home.
Asia needs doctors more than the US. He and his illegal wife should have been deported. They were in effect criminals breaking this countries laws by being here illegally. Asia has colleges and universities. This fruit of illegality should have been in her parents own country going to college there. She, evidently, still does not believe in obeying the laws of this country.
The democrats don’t even want a person to show I.D. to vote much less papers to prove they are here legally. I have to show I.D. to buy a six pack of beer, and no one selling me alcohol could possibly think that I am not legal age to buy alcohol.
Call me what you want. I love my country not the masses of third world countries. Those countries would not allow me there illegally nor would I want to go there illegally, but then I am not a criminal. To all the masses of third worlders, stay home, build your own countries. This country don’t need you and don’t want you here.
anti-racist’s grammar and coherence have improved dramatically. here all this time i thought you were a dumb white boy.
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“Traditional Asians would be horrified by her way of showing “adoration” of her father.”
This reminds me of something. In my mid-20s I had a passing acquaince with a professional-feminist woman of Korean descent. She talked a lot about Korea’s ancestor-worship and patriarchal Confucian traditions that must be abolished. She talked about how deplorable traditional society is to women in that country.
At first I was very circumspect in offering any opinions to her, knowing how feminists hate men. But — she was nice to me. Even though I had just gotten out of the military. And had served in Korea. And had dated a Koran girl. As a matter of fact, her eyes shined brightly when I talked to her. Years later, it occurred to me that her feminism was a war against Korean men, not against men in general. In her eyes, quite plausibly I was the Other who gave her tingles. I was the Paki immigrant to her Swedish feminist.
So it may be with Myung Marie-Ok Lee. Her beef is with her Korean father figures.
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Thank you, George. Much needed fresh air. Non-white immigrants are on a mission to tear down the borders of the United States. This person openly states her parents came here illegally and they should have been working to eliminate immigration controls by voting Democratic.
George,
This woman’s father was recruited by U.S. soldiers in Korea, to come work as a doctor in the United States. He apparently was one of the few anesthesiologists in northern Minnesota. The problem is his daughter contributes much less to society than he did (writer for Slate magazine vs. in demand doctor), and yet has much more of an entitlement.