Would you Make this Recipe? And Other Asian Stories

Barbecued Steak with Blackberry Bourbon Sauce

Blackberry Bourbon Sauce (for barbecued steak):
1 tablespoon grapeseed or olive oil
½ small red onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely diced
¼ cup bourbon
3 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoon brown sugar
¼ cup ketchup
¼ cup water
1 cup fresh or frozen blackberries

Jalapeno peppers with bourbon with ketchup to add to the delicate taste of blackberries?

Theresa Visintin (formerly Wong) was on the Marilyn Dennis Show to prepare her steak with blackberry bourbon sauce, and I was curious. It is always nice to have a new take on a steak sauce.

But blueberries with jalapenos and ketchup?

I looked her up and she was booted off Master Chef twice!

The second time, her

...dessert was too sweet because she used too many cherries in her jam.

Her recipe is partly the "combining of strange ingredients" that has become the hallmark of Master Chef, which is why I no longer watch it.

But it is also about her background. Anyone who knows blackberries and has regularly eaten them realizes that the ketchup and the jalapenos wouldn't cut it. They would drown the taste of the berries. Maybe the bourbon or a light brandy, and even some bay leaves to add some herbal tang, but not ketchup! You would think that by the time she had made it to Marilyn Wong-Visitin would have figured all that out.

But her recipe is her business. What stuck out was the way she presented the experiences at meals with her Chinese family, who ran a restaurant while she was growing up. Running a restaurant is never easy on a family, but there is always a day in the week, a down time, usually a Sunday when people gather together and have a good meal, cooked by the restaurateur as a treat for the family.

This was not her experience. In fact, it sounds like she never had a pleasant meal with her parents at their home.

She met her husband in Sydney (Australia), who has an Italian background. And she realized what family meals meant when he invited her to his home. People enjoying each others' company as as much as the meal before them.

Her publicly undermining her parents was unpleasant to hear.

But she let us into Asian inter-family relations about which another public figure, the famous Amy Chua, has also disclosed. Chua was aggressively harsh on her daughters to prepare them for music and academic careers, and in the end they both bailed out.

Visitin is on yet another cooking show called on cable TV's Gusto where she hosts a program with two others (whom I've never heard of) called A Is For Apple, which is

a fun, fresh take on a food challenge show genre. In each episode, one of our three hip, young chefs randomly picks a letter of the alphabet and goes shopping for two very different ingredients that start with that letter. Then they come up with one crazy (but delicious) mash-up dish that features both ingredients. Kale and kumquats, anyone? Is For Apple is a fun, fresh take on a food challenge show genre. In each episode, one of our three hip, young chefs randomly picks a letter of the alphabet and goes shopping for two very different ingredients that start with that letter. Then they come up with one crazy (but delicious) mash-up dish that features both ingredients. Kale and kumquats, anyone?

Also, it is a threesome affair, the kind of group creativity which Martha Stewart (and Jamie Oliver) would never accept.

Taste is no longer the criteria, but rather "one crazy (but delicious) mash-up dish."

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Chua's daughters were on the road toward being a musician and a scholar. Both veered away.

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld manages a college tutoring business, which must be painfully ironic to everyone around her (including mother Chua) that it was that very institution Sophia rebelled against (although my theory is that she was never really quite that good). And like all things Asian, her loyalties go across the oceans and her website has a special section in Chinese for those overseas students.

She once performed at Carnegie Hall.

Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld stopped tennis with the original intention of going "professional"(after she dramatically stopped the violin lessons) and worked at a tutoring job at the New Haven Youth Tennis And Education - not in tennis but for "underprivileged elementary school students in math, reading, and writing." She is in an Art History undergrad at Harvard, I suppose with the intention of going into Law.

I wrote about Chua here, here and here.

Jed Rubenfeld, or Mr. Chua, took up soft porn/soft thriller authorship for a while but that doesn't seem to be on anymore.

Chua and Rubenfeld co-authored a book in 2014: The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America which The Atlantic described it as: "The holes in the Tiger Mom's theory that superiority, insecurity, and impulse control breed success."

He seems to be back at Yale Law, as does Mme. Chua.

Reclaiming our Civilization

Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch, about whom I've written here

There are a couple of fascinating reports by an anonymous blogger who calls himself The Educational Realist, who is reporting on "The Asian IQ." I write this in quotation marks, because I myself have posted on the much touted Asian IQ superiority, but have found many loopholes in the measurement to conclude that Asian "high" IQs don't tell us much about Asian intelligence.

In fact, regarding many things about Asians, whites in the US and Canada are having a wide-eyed love affair with Asians (literally and figuratively). But I'm beginning to find out that this indiscriminate wide-eyedness is slowly beginning to squint a little, to have a better view of what' really going on.

Here are the two articles:

College Admissions, Race, and Unintended Consequences

and

Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud

Excerpts from the first article:

- In November of 1996, the UC system was told by the people of California that it was not allowed to consider race in admissions anymore.

- Asians, particularly recent immigrant Asians, kill whites on grades. The test score advantage is getting (suspiciously) worse, but the grade advantage is huge.

- So in 1995, 14% of Asians, 5.8% of whites, and .6% of blacks scored over 700 in math, which means that the percentile for 700 was 86%, 94%, and 99%. In 2010 (confirm here), those percentiles were 77%, 94%, and 1%.

Only Asians got a lot smarter? Weird. Not impossible. A lot more Chinese and Koreans are taking the test. Not my pick as an explanation, though.

- [E]ither Asian Americans have gotten phenomenally better, the Chinese/Korean nationals are also getting high Verbal SAT scores, or….what? What explains this jump?

- The reason for this is that Asian students seem to be very good at figuring out the technical requirements of UC [University of California] eligibility.

Excerpts from the second article:

- [F]irst and second generation Chinese, Korean, and Indian Americans, as well as nationals from these countries, often fail to embody the sterling academic credentials they include with their applications, and do not live up to the expectations these universities have for top tier students.

- Less delicately put: They cheat.

- Scratch the surface of any cheating story and odds are well above average the school or the class in question is disproportionately Asian.

- Chaos cheating [collaborative cheating]...the testers rush into the room as chaotically as possible, pull chairs close together, sit next to a buddy, whine like crazy when the proctor tries to impose seating order. The proctor sighs, exhorts them not to cheat, and pretty much turns over control of the class to the students. At that point, the kids can quietly discuss answers, text a buddy for help, and basically “collaborate” in any way needed.

- Collaborative cheating also includes splitting up homework assignments and texting answers on in-school tests and quizzes.

- Another cheating scandal that involved both chaos cheating and texting occurred in Orange County, in which students were “allowed to talk, consult study aids, send text messages to friends and leave the room in groups during the exam” [I think by "allowed, the writer doesn't mean it was an official policy of the school, but that no-one stopped the students from those behaviors].

- Prior Knowledge...students are aware of the specific content of the test before taking it. ...Students take advantage of prior knowledge in school by breaking in or in some other way obtaining the tests ahead of time...Notice that none of the schools mention the dominant race of the students involved, but the hints are there and all but one of the example schools are over 40% Asian.

- Then there’s the national high stakes prior knowledge cheating scandals, in which the parties get the actual test information, sometimes from the Korean hagwons who pay testers to take pictures of the test, sometimes from principal whose brother works at a SAT academy that clearly has a large Asian clientele. (Wait–Asian schools in Plano, Texas? No way. Way: 32% Asian. Yeah, surprised me, too.)

- [M]any of the parents, who are recent immigrants, are ruthlessly and endlessly demanding...I know teachers who have quit Asian schools because of the 100 or more emails they get daily, demanding that grades be changed reconsidered.

- The universities look at the resumes of all Asian kids—recent immigrants, long-established natives, nationals—and know that many of them are fraudulent. They know that many of the kids they accept will not be able to function on their campus, whereas others will be able to get great grades so long as they cheat. They know that many of the students don’t have the inquisitive mind, genuine interest in intellectual pursuits that universities like to see in students (or pretend they do). But the universities want the great, if often fraudulent, stats to puff up their numbers for the rankings systems...

- [T]he cheating I describe perpetuates two frauds. The first, of course, benefits the cheaters and their schools at both high school and university level. But the second perpetuates a much larger misconception: People really believe that our top high school students are taking ten-twelve AP courses during their high school year, maintaining 4.5 GPAs, and have the underlying knowledge one would expect from such study. But this almost certainly isn’t true. And once you understand the reality, it’s hard not to wonder about all the “weeding out courses” in organic chemistry and other brutal STEM college courses, the ones that Americans are abandoning in large numbers. The willingness to accept the cheating, to slap it on the wrist if that, is leading to lies that convince a lot of American kids that they aren’t smart enough for tough courses because they don’t cheat and aren’t aware that others are.

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I've written about this on several posts, but I left the threads alone because I had more positive things to do than investigate Asians' inferiorities. I have a book project, and a long-term movement, which I've called Reclaiming Beauty: Winning Back Our Civilization

But, I will make a brief commentary on these articles.

1. Every single Asian with whom I have been close friends (or close colleagues) has surprised me with his (actually, it is one male and three female) inferior abilities. Now, this doesn't mean that they were stupid or intellectually incompetent, but that the actual results of their performance wasn't up to par with their initial input. Their abilities are also deceptive, since initially, they start out with high abilities, but this starts to wane with time, and with the complexities of the study or the project.

And in subtle ways, they start to find an easy way out, which is a form of cheating.

For example:

I studied on a PhD level in a program called Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut, performing a clinical sciences project. My project was to analyze vitamin B12 levels in blood to test for early B12 deficiency, and eventually to develop a sensitive test for descerning micro-levels of B12 depletion in the body (not full-blown deficiency). One of the objectives of this project was to establish an early detection method for vitamin B12 depletion in susceptible patients. Another was to test and eventually modify a quick vitamin B12 detection kit, again for clinical purposes.

I was good friends with a Korean student at the time. I had serious reservations about my research, and in fact left my program for six months. My friend, in the mean time, was advising me to just "get it done," like her. She ended up doing a data analysis dissertation, which involved doing correlative analyses of Mexican pre-school children's dietary status. Much of her finding was inconclusive, as in no significant correlations. In order to finish the dissertation, and have it published in a scholarly journal, she tweaked and rearranged her data. She received high praise for her "innovative" data analysis. By her own admission, when she discussed her work with me, she said that the correlations were hard to find. The professors were "in" on her methods, approved them and allowed her to pass. At that time, I was too polite, and too much of a friend, to call her out on it and to tell her that her work was basically a form of cheating. She had already abandoned two "international nutrition" (a euphemism for Third World malnutrition) post-graduate programs, in Tufts and in Columbia. Her father was paying all her way through school, and she had to return with some completed degree. She was also expected to teach at university level (with jobs lined up), and that required a graduate degree.

2. Asians in the public sphere, despite an initial spurt, produce inferior thoughts, designs, research, literature, architecture, and any other kind of endeavor they undertake in Western societies.

I compare Asians to whites. They certainly do have abilities, which does place them in challenging positions. But, their credentials and performance are sub-par to whites, as I discussed above.

- I've written here about Vera Wang, the wedding dress designer, who is now designing fluffy, unstructured, wedding dresses in red and black.

- I discuss here and here the mediocre orchestral musicians of Asian origin.

- I discuss here the inferior intellectual abilities of Asians, abandoning higher level positions for lower level ones once they find their up-graded positions too challenging.

- Here is an article who elaborates on: East Asians, though their average IQ is higher than European Caucasians (105 IQ to 100 IQ), are not as inventive, creative, or as historically accomplished as European Caucasians.

- And here is an article by Steve Sailer comparing cheating by "high ability" Asians and by "high ability" Blacks and Hispanics. He concludes:

Cheating by high ability black and Hispanic students is virtually unknown, both in my own experience and a complete dearth of reported stories.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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