23 Feb 2007 2058H

Yes, vote for Naisy, but, back to the 25th Ward now

Friday. Love Friday nights.

So I’m watching Chicago Tonight, and there’s Laura Washington, one of my favorite writers for the Sun-Times, and behind her there’s this picture of the historic landmark On Leong Tong building/Pui Tak Center, the same building that WTTW (”Wilmette Talking To Winnetka”) flashes across the TV when they show the program schedule for every evening to show how oh-so-diverse they are, and it makes me sick. Because when it comes down to Chicago Chinatown, when it comes to our people, that’s the most respect we get across the city, even in our own ward, maybe somebody strikes a gong, we do our little dance with a coolie hat, they play some oriental-sounding tune on the piano and that’s that. Ah Chinatown. I love egg rolls. Say, do you know/Are you related to John or Mary [insert the only other Chinese person’s name they know, from some suburb]? Yes. All us Chinese folks, we’re all related. We all look the same, you know. How about you? Are you related to [some random person’s name I pull out of nowhere, from some randomly picked suburb]? Why do you look offended when I ask that question? Just questions, folks. By the way, I love that you speak English so well. Were you born here? I see. When are you going back?

Grumble. It’s always like this the week before city elections. I was hoping that we’d be in a better spot than we were four years ago but it seems to have gotten worse. City sure looks purty, don’t it? I got news for ya. You can gild a corpse, but it still stinks. Nobody’s gilding Chinatown these days. We have to even buy our own road sweepers, cos the city isn’t giving us squat.

So Medrano, the guy who people have said would pick up the phone when Chinatown rang? Being a convicted felon, he is ineligible to run in this election, says the Illinois Supreme Court. Could’ve told him earlier, but, I suppose, why bother? He knew what he was getting into. Of course, it is too late to remove his name from the ballot, so anyone voting for him Tuesday or who’s already voted for him via Early Voting? Your vote won’t count.

When I was heading downtown for the e-marketing event we did yesterday, I saw one of the 25th ward candidates, Temoc Morfin, who runs the storefront gym over on Halsted just south of the Pilsen Arts District, throw the community a bone. Or rather, his backers’ union dues did: he got an ad truck. Those trucks aren’t cheap. And his website sucks too. Don’t use Flash for your site, dumbass, none of that content gets indexed. And your description meta field is bad.

Anyway, so I was stepping out Thursday morning across the Square when along comes the ad truck with Temoc’s grinning mug and about three lines of very small simplified Chinese, written in red on a yellow background, much too small and too much to be read in a second. It vectors quickly eastbound along the mostly empty stretch of Archer Ave between Cermak and Clark before making a left on Wentworth at about 7:15AM. It was still parked up on the 18th Street Bridge above the Chicago River, at about 1:15PM when I came back, where no one in Chinatown would see it, unless they were driving away from C-Town west along 18th. Your union dues hard at work. And that’s when it struck me that, really, that sign wasn’t meant for us, despite the token Chinese message written in a script that most of us Cantonese who were driven out after the Communists took over couldn’t understand, for those of us who can read Chinese at all. I’d’ve voted for the guy, cos of all the choices we have he’s really the only one I can trust, kind of not really. Because he’s the one who’s least obvious and naked about what he wants from the position, compared to the others, and how he plans to get it. Apart from that, why should I trust him or anyone else, knowing what they’re going to take from the community in the future? What is it that we need changed? What’s gonna change for us?

And even if we knew what we needed changed, who, really, freaking listens? Everyone knows what the real prize in this ward is. It’s Pilsen. That’s why there’s six Chicanos running for office, no Chinese people, no Italians, no Greeks and definitely no near west side African Americans. I have nothing against chicanismo — I fought Prop 187 and a host of anti-immigration bills in the 90s — but why are we in this stupid ass ward anyway? Let’s look at the geography of the ward:

Chicago 25th Ward with Chinatown

So there you have it. One half of our power above the Stevenson, one half below. We could stay or leave and it wouldn’t make a difference. We’re still stuck with an unofficial mayor, just like we were back in the 1880s, when we were living under Chinese Exclusion. True, the tongs are significantly weakened than they were in the 1920s; the clans, the Mainlanders, and the Taiwan bloc bicker more loudly now down at the CCBA. But on the eve of our centenary in this neighborhood, we still have no real ability to determine our own political fate. How did this happen in a place where we should have a solid bloc?

I hear that in 1991, the ward was redistricted and in the process our political power is now split between Armour Square in the 25th, which is 60% Asian, and Bridgeport in the 11th, which is more than 26% Asian, the vast majority, if not all, of whom are Chinese Americans. The end result is pretty grim. I’ll even quote MALDEF’s own manual on the subject of redistricting:

In 1991, Chicago’s Chinatown was split between two districts. If it had been kept together, Asian Pacific American voters in that area could have sustained a 20%-25% voting bloc in one district. However, the division reduced the voting bloc to 10% in two different districts, significantly diminishing voter strength of Asian Pacific American residents.

We’re cited extensively as a national example of what happens when your community doesn’t pay attention to redistricting.

Since redistricting happens every 10 years, that means the last time we looked at this was 2001, 2002. We need to get in now to bring the Chinese American vote back to a place where we have power. Of course, by that point, we’ll be hit with two tax whammies, one for Cook County, one for the City, to pay for the perennial massive budget shortfalls and all the expenses that the administration are accruing as a result of corruption and other forms of misconduct and waste, and then we’ll also have the Olympics to pay for, and by that time, it’ll be too expensive to live in Chinatown, I’ll have bailed and moved to Cantonese suburbia in Toronto or some other place where it’s just much less hassle to get respect and just focus on living.

I’m going to have a mojito. Later, cabrones.

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