Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

Served as the emcee of our county Chinese New Year festival this past Saturday.  The crowd was about half of what it was last year.  It is disappointing but not surprising.  The Covid-19 scare is real and prejudice about Chinese is alive even in Southern California.

The local newspaper had called our association president three times to know we were cancelling the event.  They asked the same question three times even though we said that we were going ahead as planned each time.  Apparently one of our neighboring city had cancelled their Chinese new year festival a couple of weeks ago.  I don't know the reason they were canceling .   I tried to spread the word that  unless you are willing to boycott Lakers or Clippers games, there is no reason not to come out to an outdoor event like ours. 

Apparently not too many people took my advice.  I guess I can't compete with scary news coming out of the media.  It doesn't help that Trump does not inspire confidence, saying things like someday the virus will miraculously stop.  Appointing the great science expert Pence to be in charge does not alleviate any fear.  Apparently people see Wall Street panicking and figure things must be going south.

The thing that disappoint me about the smaller crowd is that we were honoring Chinese American WWII veterans from our county at the festival.  Trump had signed into law the Chinese American WWII Veterans Congressional Gold Medal ACT in 2018.  There were 20,000 people of Chinese descent serving in U.S. military branches in WWII.  That would be about 20% of the total Chinese population in the U.S. at that time.  Congress decided to give gold medals to these veterans in appreciation of the great percentage of service despite the discrimination they faced before and after the war.  The bill passed with bipartisan support.

But Congress has yet to commission the gold medals and to decide when to give them out.  So we decided to hand out certificates to all the veterans from our county who are scheduled to receive the gold medals.  Only one veteran is still alive and he is 96 years old.  We invited all the families for the festival.  Local politicians showed up to give the awards.  The emotional one was when the mayor from the city that the lone surviving veteran came to hand the award to that veteran.  The mayor revealed that he actually grew up 100 feet from the veteran.  The veteran had inspired him to go to college and becoming a lawyer.  So he was thrilled to come out to present the award and say thank you to his old neighbor!

It was great to meet the families of these veterans.  I wished we had a much bigger crowd to greet them.  More people need to see that the Chinese have contributed in many ways to this country.  I was inspired about the sacrifices some of these men made and how many of their descendants are now in professions that were not open to the Chinese veterans of WWII.

I was also encouraged by  some audience members who came up to us afterward to thank us for holding the event.  Some of the performers also thanked us to allow them the opportunity to perform even as some other cities had cancelled events.  I told them, we are thankful to THEM,  for coming out since there would be no show without them!