To counter violence and discrimination against Asian Americans, legislators and leaders like Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced the creation of a workgroup that will explore ways to combat anti-Asian violence. He has joined a long list of political and justice leaders, including the President and the Asian American lawmakers, in working out a plan to deter and curb this surge in crimes and incidents targeting the Asian American communities. A balanced solution, albeit still some way off, is gradually emerging including legal measures and broad-based public education program components.

Laws are an essential component of a long-term solution. However, in order to change people’s attitudes, education and changing our daily habits are just as important.

Out of all the educational options, cultural humility, I think, might have the most potential as an approach. If people don’t treat each other with respect and always with the assumption that “I am better than you are,” this kind of violence/hate might perpetuate forever.

That’s why, to stop anti-AAPI violence we have to start somewhere small, like learning to pronounce Asian names properly. We have to let language lead us where policy and policing can’t.

A person’s name is a critical part of that person’s individuality and cultural identity and power. Naming practice is much more than just a research interest in cultural linguistics. Naming traditions differ across cultures around the world, and they might bring forth some misunderstandings and misconceptions if too much assumption is made. Chinese and Koreans from the Far East, for example, do not follow the first name and last name conventions and invariably put their family names first and given names last, contrary to the traditional American naming schemes.

Being called differently other than your proper name is so insignificant that most foreign-born faculty deal with it with just a smile unless there is a malign intent with disrespect and contempt detected. I am so accustomed to being called all kinds of names. I answer to Mr. Han, Mr. Fu, Mr. Hanfu, and, of course, Mr. Mi, especially as I used to write my name Han Fu Mi or Han-Fu Mi when I first came to this country. Even when my family name is identified correctly, many people would pronounce it like an open syllable as [mai]. Another misidentification is that I would be more presumably mistaken as a Ms. instead of a Mr., which supposedly has something to do with my name as well.

A few Chinese family names look like English personal pronoun homographs, such as “He,” “She,” and “You,” which pronounce differently and certainly mean differently in Chinese. A former colleague of mine, Dr. Li, used to be called “Dr. [lai]” by many of his students when he was initially hired. I jokingly told him that he should be happy because at least nobody had called him as “Dr. Liar.”

I still remember the frustration when I was refused to be registered with a website for the first time. The error message stated that my last name was invalid and it needed at least three letters. I could not change my last name legally on the spot even if I wanted to. I later on developed a strategy to cope with it. Whenever a site didn’t accept my two-letter last name, I added a zero at the end.

It worked, and I never had any issues after that. But the lesson was clear: the “accepted” linguistics of society don’t include my name. The exclusion I experience is thorough.

People often mispronounce immigrants and international students’ names and their identities misunderstood. Researchers have found mispronunciation of names equates to racial microaggressions – subtle daily insults that, as a form of racism, support a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority.

It’s difficult to generate correct pronunciation of proper names but it might be a small but essential part of eradicating hate; there’s actually a “name-pronunciation effect”: easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names. Chinese names may be hard to pronounce, not only for the general pronunciation, but also for the specific tone ascribed to each character. Even amongst the Chinese, a wide variety of difficulty levels exists.

Pronouncing these foreign names accurately communicates a genuine sense of caring, and shows respect for other cultures and an attempt to get to know people individually. People feel vindicated if their names are treated with respect.

To the extent that President Elect Biden’s education platform seeks to raise teacher’s salaries, there may be hope for teachers to fill these gaps after all. 

Without more funding, relying on teachers colleges to produce quality professionals to meet these needs is unfair. The University of South Florida’s (USF) decision to close its College of Education and the ensuing reversal shows how teacher education in the Sunshine State dodged a bullet. USF’s reconsideration doesn’t soften any of the extant challenges its College of Education faces, including the nation’s teacher shortage, so the guns are still trained on educator preparation providers (EPPs). 

Approximately two thousand universities and colleges nationwide prepare teachers with a range from one to nearly 2,000 candidates annually. Mathematically speaking, every one of these 2,000 EPPs needs to produce, on an average, 100 new teachers yearly by 2025 to meet the demand. The reason why they can’t generate more of a workforce is that the flow of students into teaching programs has slowed recently mostly because teacher pay isn’t commensurate with the education and knowledge these professionals need to have. 

As we’re attracting more students into teacher training programs with competitive wages, it would behoove us to resurrect the critical mission of a college of education in training highly qualified educators and school leaders, which is to ensure both equity and excellence, and to recognize that improving educational attainment and key competencies for all is crucial, not only to economic growth and competitiveness, but also to reducing poverty and fostering social inclusion.

Many regional state colleges have started as a normal school with a strong teacher education tradition. Nevertheless, educator preparation programs have long been devalued and treated as a proverbial stepchild of higher education on many campuses albeit some of which are performing as both a workhorse and a cash cow. In addition to the low pay for a teaching position, the residual of “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” is still being felt overtly and covertly which greatly impedes the programs from attracting the best and the brightest to become teachers, school counselors and social workers.

One university provost even egotistically termed a so-called academic reorganization as his “New World Order” with an objective to dismantle entirely or submerge the college of education into some other convoluted organizational structure with additional administrative layers. The only outcome from such a short-sightedness is a demoralized and divided faculty facing competing demands for increasingly scarce resources without a common vision.

The history of teacher education in the university bears mention. Teacher education continued to evolve either into or within the university as a college of education, according to David F. Labaree from Stanford University, after the 1958 National Defense Education Act, one of the most successful legislative initiatives in higher education and with landmark improvements to American schools. While balancing science education and the original basic three Rs as stated in St. Augustine’s Confessions, educator preparation programs also revived their interest in the cause celebre of Why Johnny Can’t Read.

From “A Nation at Risk,” a 1983 report of the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education to “Our Future, Our Teachers: The Obama Administration’s Plan for Teacher Education Reform and Improvement,” both asserted that American schools were failing, and respectively actuated consequently a series of local, state, and federal reforms, such as an increased focus on program accountability and accreditation, strong candidates’ content and pedagogical knowledge, and impact on K-12 student learning.

Most of us have grown up being taught the importance of education, and we believe that education is valuable for students and beneficial to the country. Notwithstanding, without any fundamental transformative changes, the existing EPPs will hardly rise to the challenges of this new millennium. 

Universities should trust their teacher education faculty to continuously refine the quality educator preparation programs. Being one of the most heavily regulated professions, educator preparation programs should, with autonomy and integrity, work collaboratively with the state regulating agencies to cultivate the teacher candidates’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions so that they can serve their students.

Education is the best equalizer in society, and higher teacher quality has a direct impact on the nation’s economic innovation, productivity, and competitiveness, three facets that are threatened right now because of the pandemic. 

Part of the rebuilding of the United States should include a promise to and from national leaders that educator preparation programs won’t be weakened in any way. They should be, instead, improved and augmented via reforms and legislation like that of the past four decades to produce global-minded teachers so that generations of Americans will receive the best education possible.

One day, she took home her first big school project, “All About Me,” looking somewhat distressed. “What’s going on, baby?” I inquired, sensing that something might have happened at the center.

“Dad, am I an American?” Wow, an identity crisis of some sort already, I thought to myself. She was born an American. “Why do you ask, baby?” “My friends in school said that I am not an American. They said that I am Chinese.” Oh, one of those recurring situations so familiar to so many immigrants.

“What do you think, baby?” I asked.

“I am an American just like everybody else.” Her certainty reassured me so that I felt a little better.

“How do you know, baby?” I pressed on.

After a brief pause, she said, “Because I speak English.”

She was a loquacious girl, fluent in both English and Chinese. So I asked her again.

“But you also speak Chinese, baby.”

Without any hesitation, she said, “Then, I am also a Chinese.” I took a black marker and wrote in block letters on her “All About Me” poster:

“I AM BILINGUAL.”

She paid close attention while I was writing. “Bi- means two, and lingual means language. Bilingual together means a person who can speak two languages.” I explained to her.

“Do you like one or two pencils?” I asked her, knowing so well what her answer would be since she was an avid pencil collector then.

“Two, of course!” She exclaimed with excitement.

“Well, if two pencils are certainly better than one, then two languages are better than one as well, right?” I prodded.

It worked. Back to her care-free self again, she skipped happily around the house like a breeze, holding her Dora, the Explorer, shouting rhythmically, “I- am- bi-lin-gual! I- am- bi-lin-gual! … …” She even learned how to spell “bilingual” and understood its meaning. For quite a while, she retained its spelling. Even if she later on might have forgotten the word momentarily, the concept stayed with her, especially the concept that two languages are better than one.

Language is a huge part of a person’s identity; we are what we speak. Language is not only a carrier of culture, but also its cultural crystallization. To assimilate new immigrants into the United States, English is of necessity so that they can communicate and make contributions to the American society; simultaneously, to keep their rich cultural heritage, they need to use their own native languages respectively.

According to the Washington Post, 20 percent of Americans, roughly 63 million, can speak in two or more languages, whereas this number for Europeans is 56 percent, and for the entire world population it is estimated to be 50 percent at least. According to data from the Kids Count Data Center, as of 2016, 22 percent of American children, slightly more than 12 million, are bilingual who can speak a language other than English at home.

Being bilingual, Xun not only acquired the best out of two distinct cultures, she also doubled the ways in which she could help her neighbor. When she was six, she went back with the family to China to spend the summer as we normally do at least every two years if not every year. The Chinese school was still in session for one more month, so I made arrangements for her to attend first grade in an elementary school for the duration. Her fluent English and her stories about her life in America in general and her experiences in kindergarten in particular fascinated the Chinese children, and she instantly became the center of attention, a tiny American cultural ambassador and firm clapback against the schoolchildren who once taunted her as un-American.

As a second grader in America, her bilingual ability was called for to help solve a school emergency. One day, a boy from Taiwan came to her school with little English. His father was invited by the local university to serve as a visiting scholar for a year and he wasn’t as bilingual as Xun. His classroom teacher couldn’t communicate with him at all, so she asked Xun for assistance.

The old adage that “two is better than one” is even more true when it comes to language because it conscripts people into a form of service that binds communities and limits exclusion. Without Xun, that young boy may have felt alienated and confused. But with Xun and her two languages, he was understood and included.

Xun’s bilingualism made her third-grade project on China more appealing than maybe it should have been; it attracted quite a few visitors, including community and PTA members. She shared her personal experiences and knowledge about China with them together with her teachers and classmates, and she even spoke a few Chinese words as examples. Her China flag and photos of inviting landscapes, the Great Wall, foods and customs became relatable to people who never entered the country. It wasn’t the posterboard but the little girl who had pasted those paper lessons on it, she with the tiny legs that learned to keep one foot in each of two cultures, that drew in the audience. Bilingualism adds dimensions to people.

Seven years to the day from when she learned the word “bilingual,” Xun graduated from the Greater Plains Elementary School in Oneonta, New York. Named the salutatorian of her class, Xun gave a speech. A stool lifted her tiny mouth to the microphone, as the audience watched the top of her head — that was all they could see, even with the stool’s assistance — and spoke.  I don’t even remember anything that she said because I was so overwhelmed by it. I just remember carrying home for her a presidential award signed by President Barack Obama and one from the New York State Comptroller.

I’m her father so each day I’ve spent with her assured me that she’s brilliant. But what blighted my memory that day was the way that my daughter’s duality that drew in otherwise dispassionate onlookers. I know that it’s the multitudes that exist within her that allowed her as a girl — one of the little people so bombarded with negating messages daily about their intelligence, their faces, their bodies, their identities that’s it’s a wonder they can still stand up, much less stand tall — to have the confidence to succeed unapologetically.

Xun’s now a Political Science major at UIUC, and will take a Chinese class to better her character writing. Like any young adult, she will question her identity — all immigrants do in this country. But she’ll always be living proof that two languages are better than one, especially for children.

People still read to learn and be entertained but there’s a decline in reading interest and habit in the United States.

Based on the Humanities Indicators’ database — a comprehensive statistical information about the humanities in the United States —  as of 2017, Americans spent an average of close to 17 minutes per day reading for personal interest with a five-minute decrease since 2003. Roughly a quarter of U.S. adults (27%) report that they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, up from 19% in 2011, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

The same survey also identifies the non-reading populations, who stated not reading books in any format in the 12 months before the survey. Forty-four percent of adults with a high school diploma or less weren’t reading. Adults whose annual household income is $30,000 or less constituted more than a third of the non-readers. Racial disparities also permeated the data. Non-readers were mostly Hispanic (40%) and black (33%) versus white (22%). The majority of these self-reported nonreaders are regarded as aliterate, people who have the ability to read and write but choose not to.

The U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 percent. We don’t know who’s in this 1% who can’t read but, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey, 70% of all incarcerated adults cannot read at a 4th grade level. It’s likely that the people interacting with police and the criminal justice system, the people that BLM is fighting for, fall into this unfortunate 1%.

Historically, reading and freedom and change are interwoven and closely tied. Frederick Douglass, an illiterate enslaved American who became an accomplished orator and writer, regarded reading as the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Reading can indeed free the mind as well as liberate the body. Sir Francis Bacon, an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, said that “Reading maketh a full man” or a woman. In his Of Studies, he described that studies, or reading, serve three functions or purposes including for gaining delight, for ornamenting one’s life, and for improving one’s ability.

Even though reading and education can and do coexist in some contexts and serve to reinforce each other, they are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. Formal education can end but reading never does.

That BLM reading lists have been  put out by independent bookstores should support the idea that organizing doesn’t happen unless people are learning.

Reading itself is a political act. This is probably why the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus continued to set the stage for its fall legislative agenda, calling a news conference and committee hearing to discuss education policy and call for racial equity in education; and also why Netflix’s new show, Bookmarks, the Reading Rainbow for a whole new generation, was created to celebrate children’s books written by black authors, hosted by Marley Dias, who has spoken alongside Oprah and former First Lady Michelle Obama. These people know that new ideas gleaned from new texts encountered by young minds are going to be the engine of revolution.

But more can be done, especially if we define life as a series of experiences. Reading overcomes the limitations of time and space with the existence of several lives and in several geographic locations experienced at the same time, albeit vicariously. Reading gives people the power they’re fighting for.

If reading didn’t have power, there wouldn’t have been so many attempts throughout history to control it. Many tyrants and dictators in history have, in order to sustain the darkness and their tight control, purposefully deprived the right of the people to learn how to read and be enlightened. The First Emperor of Qin in China burned books with the hope of unifying all thoughts and political opinions. Hitler and his Nazi followers burned books opposed to Nazism. NEED A LINK.

Even in the United States, horrible, oppressive book burning has plagued our history. Under McCarthyism, books deemed anti-American or written by “Communists, fellow travelers, et cetera” were set to the bonfire, including the poems of Langston Hughes, the American poet who says reading can “make our world anew.” The full lists of books burned and banned have been kept secret.  President Trump has recommended a new patriotic education. There’s no book burning in his plan but I’m sure there’s a canon he has in mind.

As Oscar Wilde, an Irish poet and playwright, put it, “The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”

Of course, the mere ability to read won’t erase the country’s past or release people from custody or take a bullet out of the back of the Black man; George Floyd’s reading habits wouldn’t have lifted a police knee on his neck. We need much larger and aggressive strategies to shift the discourse of Black criminality.

And that’s just my point; reading and literacy are such basic foundations to  freedom that all of the other tactics can’t be as effective as they want to be if the people involved aren’t critical readers. Reading is a prerequisite for gaining political power and charting one’s own fate and destiny, a genuine democratic process.