Half or more in seven of 10 Asian countries surveyed express a favorable view of Japan, while majorities in six of 10 say this about China. Fellow Asians take a fairly critical perspective on Pakistan — there is no country other than Indonesia in which a clear plurality gives Pakistan a positive rating.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is the only Asian nation polled in which less than half see the United States favorably. Whatever feelings Asians harbor about each other, most are likely to view the United States as the country they can rely on as a dependable ally in the future.
There is widespread concern among publics in East, Southeast and South Asia that these frictions could lead to military conflict. And that apprehension is shared by many Americans. The most prominent of these is with longtime adversary Japan, over what Tokyo calls the Senkaku Islands and Beijing terms the Diaoyu Islands, small uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
And Beijing claims that the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which the two nations battled over in the Sino-Indian war, actually belongs to China. Neither nation shares a border with China. Americans watch all this Asian regional territorial tension with a wary eye.
Furthermore, thousands of Asian children, particularly from Korea, have been adopted by families in the United States who may not be Asian American themselves. One may see, for example, a recently arrived Vietnamese Amerasian teenager who looks just like his African American father but speaks only Vietnamese or a Korean adoptee who may look obviously Asian but might be named Susan Williams.
There are critical distinctions between refugees and immigrants. Refugees are recognized as people who have been forced to leave their homelands because of well-founded fears or threats of persecution due to their background—their religious or political affiliation, for example. Refugees have typically suffered severe trauma, lost family members, and languished in refugee camps before coming to the United States.
Unlike many immigrants, refugees leave their homelands without hopes or plans to return again. Nevertheless, once here, Southeast Asian refugees share many experiences in common with other immigrants, such as the language barrier, culture shock, racial discrimination, and the challenge of starting new lives. Themes of work, family responsibility, generational change, community development, and investment in education link Southeast Asians to other Asian American groups, in spite of important social, cultural, and historical differences.
The process of defining who are Asian Americans is, in itself, a lesson in diversity and critical thinking with social, historical, and political dimensions.
The term "Asian American" is preferable to "Oriental," which connotes rugs, spices, and other objects of western colonialism in Asia rather than people. The "Orient," after all, is a concept generated by the colonial experience. In contrast, the continent of Asia is an actual geographic location from which many people in the United States trace their origins. Confounding the situation further are the stereotypes and distorted depictions of Asian Americans in movies, television, advertising, cartoons, and other media as well as school textbooks and children's literature.
But according to a new study, that may not be universally true — while Western cultures do fixate on the eyes, East Asians tend to focus on the nose. We owe a lot of our knowledge about the way we look at images to a Russian psychologist Alfred Yarbus. He was the first scientist to carefully record the subtle eye movements that people make when they take in a view.
For example, while surfing websites, our eyes tend to focus on headings, words at the top of the page and words on the left. The same thing happens when we look at faces.
Previous studies have found that viewers tend to flick their gaze between the eyes and the mouth — an inverted triangle of important features. Some psychologists have taken this to mean that humans have a single, universal and innate strategy for processing faces. To get a more cross-cultural perspective, Caroline Blais and colleagues at the University of Glasgow tracked the eye movements of fourteen white Western students and fourteen East Asians, eight of whom were Chinese and six of whom were Japanese.
The East Asian volunteers were all students who had recently enrolled in the university and had never been to a Western country before. Blais told the students that they had to learn a set of faces, including both Western and East Asian ones. After the learning trials, they were shown a larger set of mugs and had to say which ones they recognised and the expressions on the familiar faces were changed to make things a bit more challenging.
Later, they had to categorise a set of faces according to race, as quickly and accurately as possible. All of these tasks were essentially red herrings. What the researchers were interested in was the features that the students spent most time looking at. The results were striking — the two groups of students fixed their eyes on distinct facial features. In addition, any effort to preserve U.
Jonathan D. Bush Tuesday, December 13, Order from Chaos. A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era. Read all the Order from Chaos content ». Editor's Note: The new administration faces the challenge of actually formulating and conducting foreign and national security policy towards Asia.
Thornton China Center. Related Books. Order from Chaos Tillerson offers reassurance on Asia—But will it stand? Order from Chaos A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era. Foreign Policy.
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