WEEK 6 REFLECTIONS

Week 6
Diana Lu

The idea of many Cambodians owning a donut shop is not something new to me. I have quite a few Cambodian friends and they all have donut shops in the Bay Area.  I am not of Cambodian decent but my family owns a couple of donut shops around the Bay Area as well.  I remember summer 2009; I had to wake up around 7AM to help my mom sell donuts. It was dreadful! Many people think running a donut shop or any type of restaurant is easy, but in reality, it really is not. Like Jason said, these donut shop owners want to achieve the American Dream, so they open these shops in hope of an upward mobility opportunity. They want to create a better life for their kids; a stabilize finance for their kids to search for a better education.  But instead, these owners have to wake up extra early, open 7 days a week, and make barely any profit from their donuts, is this really the “American Dream?” Ted Ngov was the man who started this Cambodian donut shop trend to help Cambodian refugees escape poverty.

Jason’s article about Ted Ngov was very fascinating to me. Ted Ngov was estranged from his wife and kids due to his gambling addiction and went from a multimillionaire to a poor, homeless man who lives on the porch of someone’s trailer home; it just seem so surreal. Would you think someone who is rich and have a business will have better morals and judgments?  This is something common in the Asian community, where Asian men have a gambling problem. When I read this article, it just reminded me of why my mother divorced my biological father. He was a gamble-holic and my mother could not do anything to stop him. He even sold the house we were living in to pay off his debts; he did all this without my mother’s consent. She did not want to me grow up around someone who would have bad influences on me, so she divorced him.

 The article “Where Do We Stand?” by Peter N. Kian and Jenny Kaplan is pretty outdated but the concepts still applies to today’s society. I believe the racism and segregation of each race/ ethnicity will be never-ending. I grew up in a predominantly Asian community, went to a 75% Asian Elementary, 60% Asian Middle School, and maybe around 60% High school, so this idea about being picked on by whites and blacks did not apply to me. Instead, people who got picked on were usually the gays and lesbians. When the group members came across the idea of “safe space” I personally think a safe space is nice for students of need, but the school officals cannot make a “safe space” for every individual of need. Even with this safe space, they are still bond to get picked on, whether its during passing period, lunch, or outside of school. It is just enviable. Instead of having safe space where they need adult supervision, they can create more, beneficial clubs for students. I remember my high school had different clubs/space for different people, one for the gays & lesbians, one for the latinos, and etc. And quite frankly, I thought it was a waste of space and time because instead of using time to educate, they used their time to socialize.