Design for book cover of "Chinese Girl in the Ghetto"
The cover is designed by Kristina Phillips, whom Ying Ma credits in her book's acknowledgements. It is not clear what this Chinese character is doing. Is she sweeping, is she flying on a broomstick?
This is en par with the ambiguities of the book. Is Ma writing as a Chinese? Is she writing as and American? Is she happy to portray herself as a Chinese character (the painting is pretty and delicate)?--------------------------------------------------------------Jamie Glazov, of
Frontpage Magazine, and his news media company
Jamie Glazov Productions recently
produced a two-part show with a panel discussion on the Zimmerman case.
What especially interested me about this show are his guests, and particularly a guest called Ying Ma, who is identified as the author of
Chinese Girl in the Ghetto.
The show has this introduction:
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, and Tiffany Gabbay, National Development Director for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Gang members gathered to discuss Race-Hustling After the Zimmerman Verdict. The discussion also focused on Ying Ma’s memoir Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, which sheds disturbing light on the double standards in our society of what racial violence is discussed and what type is pushed into invisibility.
Ying Ma came to America as a ten-year old. She sounds like an American-born Asian, with her accent-less English. Yet, she identifies herself as "Chinese" in all her communications, and especially in her recently published book
Chinese Girl in the Ghetto. The ghetto of her book's title is the black ghetto in Oakland, California, where she immigrated from China. Why didn't she find a way to make an equally dramatic title for her book without emphasizing her Chineseness, but focusing on her Americanness instead?
I think she does so because of her life in the black neighborhood, where she was identified as Chinese and attacked because she was Chinese, by blacks and Hispanics, and how her racial make-up brought racial antagonism and violence towards her by blacks and Hispanics.
Some twenty-five years after those childhood incidents, after excelling in academics and maintaining a successful professional life in America despite her difficult beginnings, she ended up building her own Chinese ghetto.
Here is how Ma
describes her professional activities on her
website:
Ying Ma (馬穎)...writes regularly about China, international affairs, the free market and conservatism, and much of her research explores the nexus between political and economic freedom with respect to China’s rising influence on the global stage...
Ms. Ma has...managed corporate communications at Sina.com, the first Mainland China-based Internet company to list on the Nasdaq Stock Market; and served on the first professional staff of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional commission established to examine the security implications of America’s economic relationship with China.
From 2007 to 2012, Ms. Ma was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1998, Ms. Ma served on the staff of an American delegation whose leaders were appointed by former President Bill Clinton and invited by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit China and discuss religious freedom. She traveled with the delegation throughout China and co-drafted the report that the delegation subsequently presented to the U.S. Congress and President Clinton.
What is fascinating about the quote above is the Chinese script that she
uses for her name.
Her biography states:
Ms. Ma is fluent in Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese.
If ethnicity is such a problem for her, and if she has to refer to her Chinese ethnicity to validate her career and her life in America, then why doesn't she simply immigrate back to China, rather than change, or redirect, life in America to be more Chinese? The Chinese middle class has now has acquired many of the daily comforts that she didn't have when her family moved to America.
And in view of past evidence of Chinese-American spies infiltrating American companies and universities, how are we to trust Ma not to relay important, classified, information to her Chinese counter-parts in China? The evidence shows that she is a likely candidate:
- She is fluent in two Chinese languages
- Her university degree is in "Government" so she has good knowledge on the workings and functions of government
- She was involved in and employed by a China-based information technology company
- Her book relates her life in terms of her Chinese background
- She writes articles with China as the focus
- She served in the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission
- She is a policy advisor on China
- Her current job focussing on Chinese businesses in the U.S. as senior vice president of SDB Partners
- Her SDB role also states that she "assists international companies in developing positive relations with U.S. government agencies.." This sounds like a guarded way of including Chinese companies, without naming specific countries.
She clearly maintains Chinese contacts through her professional and editorial activities. And her life in general is focussed around China and her Chinese background. But her position on China is ambiguous and strained. On the one hand, she forthrightly acknowledges the many problems with China, yet on the other hand, she gives many green lights for the U.S. to nonetheless pursue economic relations with this secretive, and potentially dangerous, country.
Her book's unofficial sub-heading is "A story about defeating the welfare state," which are the words she's posted above the information on her book at
her website. Yet, the
table of contents doesn't indicate that this is the book's focus. The social conscience she wants us to obtain from her writing seems like wishful thinking and a guilty reappraisal of her criticism. Or to add a bit of political and social seriousness to another dime a dozen memoir. It seems like both a marketing and a political strategy.
Ma writes nothing personal in her articles, her "personal blog" and her social media sites. This is odd, considering she has penned a book that appears to be very personal. A link at her blog is titled "
My Favorites," which ends up being her favorite interviews and articles! What is it about America that she likes besides having this "freedom" to do whatever she wants? What is her favorite movie? What favorite restaurant does she frequent? What novels does she read when she's not working through her policy manuals? What paintings does she admire? What kinds of foods does she know how to cook?
This blogger has provided an excerpt of the kind of personal details I was looking for elsewhere. But the precious, personal item she covets is a pencil she received from a friend in China:
When Ying Ma comes to America she experiences theft for the first time. She encounters a situation [over which] she has no control due to the language barrier between her and her classmates. Three classmates steal her pencil that was a gift from her friends back in China and is very significant to her. When she can’t defend herself or communicate with her classmates who steal her pencil she turns to Cindy, another classmate who also speaks Chinese. Cindy translates to the teacher what happened and the teacher confronts the classmates, but they deny stealing anything. The teacher has no proof so she moves on from the incident and tries to replace Ying Ma’s special gift with an ordinary #2 pencil. Ying Ma is infuriated when she sees the classmates are not being punished for what they did. Her anger turns to hate, “I hated the three thieves. I hated their poverty, which had inspired then to covet my possession and conspired with them to take it from me. I hated their parents, who had failed to teach them that being poor was no excuse to steal. I hated myself for not adequately guarding an irreplaceable gift and for not doing all that I could have done to retrieve it once it was gone” (Ma 82).
And in another article, the author
excerpts Yang's "nail polish" story that Yang uses as an example of the things one cannot have in communist China. Yang doesn't look like a woman (serious conservative and all) who would regularly wear nail polish. So rather than mention the nail polish as an aesthetic desire, she inflates the story, and the nail polish, into a communist-forced "equality" episode. Now in America, she can have all the nail polish she wants, and for what?
It is very easy to provide a distant, impersonal portrait. Then she can get judged on the "rightness" of her endeavors. But it is also (perhaps especially) the small details make the man (or woman). And we have none of that from her.
I speculate that she cannot find these "favorites" to disclose. She may really not have any, or they may be few and insubstantial, like the nail polish story. Therefore, I once again question her commitment to America as a place, rather than America as the idea of freedom and liberation.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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