Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘Asians’ Category

If you’ve spent any amount of time in a classroom with young Asian people, you’re familiar with their penchant for spinning pens (interchangeably known as “pen flipping” or “pen twirling”). And, sooner or later, you’ve wondered what gives.

So, why do they love it so much and why are they so good at it? Even though other races engage in the practice, nobody comes close to matching Asian dedication and skill.

The Reasons Behind Asian Pen Spinning

1. Natural Extension of Chopstick Manipulation Skills

There’s no question that using thin, stick-like objects to pick up food, beginning in early childhood, predisposes Asian people to skillful manipulation of similar objects (e.g., pens and pencils). If you can use two sticks to grab a grain of rice, you can easily spin a single, shorter stick in intricate patterns.

2. Non-Threatening Form of Expression and Entertainment

Video games and pen spinning are things you can do at home without stressing out your smothering parents, and incurring their notorious wrath in the process. It’s not surprising Asians excel at both. But pen spinning has the added advantages of silence and portability (i.e., you can do it in class).

3. Asian Weapons Heritage

As with the Chopstick Hypothesis, traditional Asian weapons (e.g., nunchaku) also encourage every form of twirling and twisting of stick-objects.

4. Slender, Adroit Asian Fingers

The same physical feature that helps Asians become great piano players–and skilled detail-workers in Chinese factories–makes them master pen spinners in-the-making.

5. Spend a Lot of Time with Writing Utensils in Their Hands

Smothering parents are at the root of a lot of Asian behavior. Thanks again to their constant pressure–this time to get into one of the Historically Asian Colleges¹–kids spend a lot of time doing math homework, or at least pretending to. What else are you going to do with that idle time and mind?

¹ West of the Mississippi: one of the University of California campuses, especially Berkeley and Los Angeles (UCLA).

If you’re like me, you tune into the Winter Olympics to watch sports you wouldn’t otherwise know existed and then only think about every four years, when they’re suddenly all over your beautiful hi-def TV. “Curling” and “Skeleton” mean entirely different things in Los Angeles.

One such sport for me is Speed Skating. I never watch it, but when it’s on, I’m totally glued to it. And, all of a sudden—if you’re lucky enough to be watching it with me–I’m an “expert” that’s been “following it for years.”

This weekend, I was watching the Short Track Speed Skating 1500m finals, when I made an observation that I hadn’t really made before. A majority of the skaters were Asian. Alone, three of the six finalists were Korean. Even the Americans were half Asian. With Apolo Ohno (half-Japanese) and J.R. Celski (half-Filipino) representing the U.S. in the race, five out of six people on the track were at least part-Asian. That’s 83 percent–and seemed noteworthy.

Another Asian Sweep.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Asians seem to thrive on ice. Kristi Yamaguchi. Michelle Kwan. The list goes on.

So what gives? For obvious reasons, none of the broadcasters are going to point it out or, worse, try to explain it–even though it was begging for an explanation, and that explanation is quite simple.

At its core, ice skating is (very) skilled foot dragging. You’re basically shuffling your feet, but quickly and elaborately–and on skates. Sure, you lift your feet here and there, but not that much. And, for reasons we’ve explored before, Asians are absolute naturals at this.

No one gets more practice, in their daily life, at dragging their feet than Asian people. It’s not surprising they’ve perfected it to world-champion levels.

If you get the sudden feeling you’re watching the local news every time you talk to your friend, chances are: she’s a Television-Reporter Asian American Girl (TRAAG). Not all TRAAGs are reporters, but they certainly could be. You find them in all walks of life, though every newscast manages to recruit at least one.

A perfect specimen.

Appearance & Dead Giveaways

• Polished, Asian American look; zero trace of FOB-ness
• Conservative, expensive attire: turtle necks, slacks
• Immaculate English, so immaculate, in fact, that it constitutes an accent in itself
• Deep, sonorous female voice; toward the contralto side
• Not much of a sense of humor; face-value assessment of the world
• Anglo first name, ethnic last name (e.g., Tracy Tomonokawa)
• Sounds as if she’s “on location,” even in social situations
• Projects cultured, fancy airs; classically trained in some instrument(s)
• Incongruently pronounces some Asian words with perfect native accent, to feign ethnic pride
• Pretty much guaranteed she’s dating (or married to) a white guy

Even though everyone has surely noticed it by now, nobody has been able to conclusively determine why an overwhelming majority of Asian people, especially girls, routinely drag their feet when walking.

Asian shuffling is unmistakable indoors, but often still audible outside—especially with groups, and the more egregious individual cases. It’s not confined to any particular age group, though it seems to be more common in the Northern Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese) than in the Southeast Asians (e.g., Filipinos).

Unsatisfied with the few speculative hypotheses that exist on this subject, I resolved to come up with a better explanation for this phenomenon. This is the product of that “research.”

Three Theories for Asian Shuffling

1. Active minds. Lazy bodies.

The human body has a finite number of resources. In Asian people, many of those resources are dedicated to the higher faculties, the brain functions—working out math problems, reaching new heights in online gaming, stressing out about your parents’ ever-smothering pressures. With the mind working overtime, the body gets fewer resources.

2. Collectively tired from working so hard, being so pressured.

School all day, after-school tutoring, piano lessons, violin lessons, Calculus homework, helping out at the family business—those things all add up. And when you’re that tired, things like a deliberate, heel-to-toe gait go by the wayside.

3. Weird walking habits from years of wearing slippers, or tube socks, in the house.

I knew an Asian guy in junior high school that stepped on the backs of all of his shoes to make them, functionally, into slippers. It didn’t matter what kind of shoe it was, or how expensive they were, he wore them all like a pair of house shoes. Remarkably, he could play several sports like that and never have a shoe slip off.

If you’ve ever worn slippers, you know there’s a specific way to walk in them. It’s a forward-leaning “foot drag and shuffle.” You still lift your feet, but not as much. There’s always a little contact with the floor. This is very different than walking around in flip-flops (previously known as “thongs,” until the G-string mysteriously appropriated the name). With flip-flops, you have the aid of the toe-thong, which turns your motion into more of a “lift and slap.” This is why White Girls don’t drag their feet.

I’m sure this guy I knew, like many Asian people, wore slippers in the house. In fact, he was so used to it, that he felt compelled to replicate it outside of his home. Asian people with less of this impulse, wear their shoes normally on the outside. But, years and years of wearing slippers in the house—and unwittingly practicing the “foot drag and shuffle”—make walking any other way inconvenient, if not impossible.

If you’ve ever been to a convenience store in any major metropolitan area in America, you might already know that humanity is pretty much screwed. I’ll explain why.

Next month, the nations of the world are meeting in Copenhagen to discuss the ever-growing problem of global warming and CO2 emissions, and negotiate a “solution.” It’s a complicated thing, but the simplified version covers most of it. With the exception of a few dinosaurs-roamed-the-Earth-alongside-Jesus crazies, most everyone agrees the Earth is getting hotter—a problem for any living thing that doesn’t have gills. An overwhelming majority of the shit that’s caused (and continues to cause) the problem was put into the air by developed nations—especially the U.S. But now, it’s those same nations that are trying to talk everyone else into curbing emissions and restricting old, dirty technologies.

Standing in the way: billions of Chinese and Indian people.

The way China and India see it, the U.S. and Europe got to make all kinds of money polluting the Earth, and they want their piece of the action now that they’re up-and-coming themselves. Between the two countries, they have over a third of the world’s population, and all two-and-a-half billion people are lining up for their delicious slice of the pollution pie. The trick for the rest of the world is going to be to talk them down from that ledge. The prevailing guess is that negotiations are going to fail unless the current polluters come up with some serious compensation for the up-and-comers.

On their way to fill their baskets with cash.

Don’t get me wrong. Americans are greedy hogs that reinvented the meaning of living in excess. It’s the reason we’re the most obese, most indebted nation in the world. We invented things like food fights (not to be confused with fights over food), pie eating contests, and massive CEO salaries. But there’s nothing like ethnic greed. It’s not necessarily any worse, just different.

If you’ve ever crossed paths with: a no-substitution policy; a handwritten $10-minimum-to-use-your-credit-card sign; a guy that shovels food back out of your combo bowl because god-forbid-he-give-you-an-extra-piece-of-orange-chicken; no substitutions; no refunds; no exceptions; any of that—you know what we’re up against.

And you know it’s going to take a supreme haggling master to get a good deal out of these guys. Let’s hope Obama is good at saying things like, “come on buddy, we’re old friends, give me a good reduction on CO2.”