WeChat ban blocked + California’s Asian COVID-19 deaths undercounted: Your AAPI newsletter
It is Thursday, Sept. 24, and this is The Sacramento Bee’s AAPI weekly newsletter.
Here’s a recap of the stories I’ve covered and ones I’m following:
A federal judge in California on Sunday blocked the Trump administration’s ban of the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, leaving Chinese Americans in Sacramento relieved yet apprehensive about their access to the app.
San Francisco-based federal judge Laurel Beeler stopped the Trump administration’s order forcing Apple and Google to remove WeChat from their app stores, which was set to go into effect this past Sunday at midnight. Removing the app from their stores would have prevented Tencent, which owns WeChat, from updating or debugging the app for American users, which would eventually render the service useless.
“(The WeChat conflict) is not going to be ended right here, but I feel a global sigh of relief,” said Evette Tsang, a Sacramento resident from China whose family overseas only uses WeChat to communicate.
But even with this temporary stay of WeChat’s removal, several Chinese Americans in Sacramento expressed lingering uncertainty about how long WeChat will be able to survive in the U.S.
“(WeChat is) too important for Chinese people to communicate with people back home,” said Stephen Zhou, president of Sacramento’s U.S.-China Railroad Friendship Association. “The Trump administration might (see a security risk). I just don’t see the proof.”
California may have undercounted COVID-19 deaths among its Black, Latino and Asian communities, according to a review of data from the state Department of Public Health.
By the end of July, California had logged about 9,200 deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 in county death records. That left about 5,000 “excess” deaths for those months — meaning deaths above the norm not attributed to COVID-19. Latinos make up the vast majority, accounting for 3,350 of those excess deaths, followed by Asian people (1,150), Black people (860) and other Californians of color (350).
Several epidemiologists interviewed said they believe a sizable portion of the excess deaths among people of color did, in fact, stem from COVID-19 infections but went undetected for a variety of reasons.
Kathy Ko Chin, president of the Oakland-based Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, said Asian Americans tend to be overrepresented in essential worker occupations, noting that a large proportion of the state’s nurses are Filipino. In addition, she said, government officials have not done enough to translate COVID-19 educational materials into the many languages spoken by California’s Asian Americans. The Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration during the past four years, she added, has had a “chilling effect” that has kept many foreign-born Asian Americans from visiting a doctor.
“People were really, really scared,” Chin said.
In other news
Californians have 3 ways to vote on Election Day. Only 1 requires a visit to a poll [The Sacramento Bee]
Korean-American YouTuber says she was told to ‘go back to Wuhan’ in a racist public tirade [Insider]
Mental healthcare for Cambodian, Vietnamese refugees limited by shortage of bicultural, bilingual providers [Los Angeles Times]
Anthology explores Asian American California through art [Cornell University]
Asian Americans make up 1% of Emmy nominations. Why is representation so low? [NBC News]
Change or keep your name? For ‘Kamala,’ ‘Nikki’ and others, a story of identity, culture and power [NBC News]
Proposition 16: Why some Asian Americans are on the front lines of the campaign against affirmative action [The Mercury News]
Chizu Iiyama, Bay Area activist who was detained in Japanese internment camps, dies at 98 [San Francisco Chronicle]
USC Pacific Asian Museum Announces Plan To ‘Decolonize’ Collections [CBS LA]
Kal Penn quit Hollywood for politics. Now, politics are following him back to Hollywood [New York Daily News]
Karthick Ramakrishnan wants academic insights to help solve policy problems [The Press-Enterprise (Riverside)]
How Asian Americans Are Thinking About The 2020 Election [FiveThirtyEight]
Andrew Yang says defeating Trump could be ‘the major political awakening that Asian Americans have been waiting for’ [Business Insider]
House passes resolution condemning anti-Asian sentiment [CNN]
Susan Chen’s Portraits of Asian Americans Reckon with a History of Exclusion [Artsy]
US judges question Asian-American bias claims against Harvard [Al Jazeera]
Opinion: We Must Confront Anti-Asian Racism in Science [Scientific American]
This week in AAPI pop culture
Kal Penn, the actor and comedian known for playing Kumar Patel in the “Harold & Kumar” comedy film series, launched a TV show Tuesday that’s aiming to boost young voter turnout this fall.
“Kal Penn Approves This Message” is a six-episode Freeform show which will focus on issues important to Gen Z and millennial voters such as education, health care and climate change. It’s meant to be a nonpartisan approach to
“We wanted to really have a chance to make a show [for] a demographic that hasn’t really been catered to in terms of issue-specific shows,” Penn told Entertainment Weekly. “There are plenty of shows about politics, but they do tend to be a little polarizing or a little bit in the bubble — you know, you’ll find the shows if you already agree with their political slant.”
The series will consist of monologues, comedic field pieces and one-on-one interviews. Penn has done time in politics himself, having served in President Barack Obama’s White House for six years at the Office of Public Engagement.
“Yelling at each other isn’t actually going to solve that issue,” Penn told USA Today. “So let’s discuss what people are working on to solve it. We can disagree rationally on what those decisions are. But let’s get to that point. Let’s start the conversation from there instead of starting from reacting to something.”
Got a story suggestion? Please reach out to me at awong@sacbee.com.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Please spread the word about our newsletter and send to a friend. Sign up here to receive this newsletter each week.
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 11:01 AM.