Nov 14 0 comments
Blog, Hyphen Magazine

Hyphen issue 24 out now!

Winter '11 | "Medical Malpractice?"Don’t for­get to pick up Hyphen issue 24, which is now on (some) new­stands! You can also sub­scribe, or check it out online.

Once inside, you can read my fea­ture the sur­vival of a group of Fil­ipino nurses in the face of work­place dis­crim­i­na­tion, bud­get cuts and sweep­ing changes in the health indus­try, as well as:

Con­tribut­ing Edi­tor Nicole Wong’s visu­al­iza­tion of the Cen­sus num­bers, which illu­mi­nates how the Asian Amer­i­can com­mu­nity is grow­ing and changing.

Books Edi­tors Abi­gail Licad and Cath­lin Goulding’s round­table of poetry experts which exam­ines how Asian Amer­i­can poetry is endur­ing decades after com­mu­nity activists used it as a polit­i­cal tool.

And Meeta Kaur’s essay: “Liv­ing with a tur­ban in a post-9/11 world.”

…among many other offerings.

Tags: ,
Nov 13 0 comments
Blog

J-School Nightmares

I had the worst dream last night. I was assigned to report on a ser­ial killer in another city and spent sev­eral days track­ing him down—only to real­ize that he had been stalk­ing me, and planned to kill me and my J-school class­mates. In the end, I had to kill him.Brutally. And then wait alone next to his still-moving body for 30 min­utes before the cops came.

But the worst death was yet to come.…In the morn­ing, I picked up the news­pa­per and saw that, after every­thing I had been through, my edi­tors had killed my story.

Tags:
Nov 10 2 comments
Blog, Hyphen Magazine

The fraught history of Filipino nursing in the U.S.

I’ve been want­ing to do a story on Fil­ipino nurs­ing in the U.S. for some time and, this year, Hyphen gave me the oppor­tu­nity to do so, even facil­i­tat­ing fund­ing of the project through Spot.us. Issue 24, which is out this month, fea­tures a story I wrote about alleged dis­crim­i­na­tion against Fil­ip­ina nurses on the part of hos­pi­tal man­age­ment all over the coun­try. I focused on one hos­pi­tal in San Fran­cisco, St. Luke’s, where nurses claim hos­pi­tal man­age­ment enacted an ille­gal hir­ing ban against Filipinos—in an effort to squelch union activ­ity among the largely Fil­ipino nurs­ing staff.

It was a very chal­leng­ing story to write—not least because the nurses were (and con­tinue to be) in the midst of a bit­ter labor dis­pute with the hos­pi­tal chain. The dynam­ics of union con­tract nego­ti­a­tions are com­plex and both sides spin, spin, spin until you can’t left from right any­more. In the end, I’m still not sure what hap­pened at that hos­pi­tal. My great fear is that this arti­cle may not reflect that uncer­tainty as much as I would like it to.

But I hope the bot­tom line is clear: Regard­less of what did hap­pen at St. Luke’s, Fil­ip­ina nurses have—and do—suffer sys­temic inequal­i­ties within the Amer­i­can health care sys­tem. The best part of this project was learn­ing the long, fraught his­tory of Fil­ipino nurs­ing in the U.S.: How overtly racist notions drove Amer­i­can efforts to “san­i­tize” the Fil­ipino peo­ple in the early 20th cen­tury; how U.S. hos­pi­tals began recruit­ing Fil­ip­inas to bust up AMer­i­can nurs­ing  unions in the mid-century; how nurs­ing unions exploited cul­tural stereo­types and prop­a­gated gross mis­con­cep­tions of Fil­ipino nurses in order to limit their recruit­ment in the 1960s and 1970s; and how Fil­ipino nurses man­aged to carve out a place for them­selves and climb the ranks of nurs­ing unions in the 1990s…only to feel the back­lash of anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment in the 2000s.

My inter­est in the topic is also a bit per­sonal, as many women in my fam­ily are health­care work­ers who were trained in the Philip­pines, migrated to the U.S. to work, and send remit­tances back home. My lit­tle sis­ter, who turned 20 this week, is in nurs­ing school in Bicol province right now. Since she’s already an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, she won’t have to worry about being recruited or get­ting a Visa, but will rather effort­lessly head back to the States next year to try to find a nurs­ing a job. I’m excited about being reunited with her. But, know­ing what I now know about the myr­iad obsta­cles she may encounter as a foreign-trained nurse try­ing to make it in the U.S., I can’t help but worry, a lit­tle bit, about what her future will turn out to be.

Hope you check out the story at Hyphen, and con­sider sub­scrib­ing to the print mag­a­zine (it’s chang­ing dra­mat­i­cally next year, and you’ll want to see what sur­prises are in store…). Also check out spot.us, where you can sup­port com­mu­nity jour­nal­ism projects (It was started by one of my instruc­tors at Berkeley!)

Tags: , , ,
Jul 19 0 comments
Blog

Things Customers Say in Bookstores

British writer and per­pet­ual book­store employee Jen Camp­bell announced that she’s pub­lish­ing a book based on her blog series, “Weird Things Cus­tomers Say in Book­shops.” This, in com­bi­na­tion with Bor­ders’ recently announced bank­ruptcy, has prompted me to make my own list of the funny/irritating/weird things cus­tomers have said to me dur­ing my five years as a book­store employee (inci­den­tally, four of those years were spent at Borders).

Favorite cus­tomers from Borders:

“Can you tell me where the NON-fiction sec­tion is?“
”…Yes, it’s every­thing in the store except that small cor­ner marked ‘fiction.’”

“I’m look­ing for a book I saw on TV about a dog, and the guy goes to Afghanistan. I don’t remem­ber what it’s called.“
“Do you remem­ber who the author is?“
“No, but the cover has a dog on it. Like a yel­low dog, I think.“
“Do you remem­ber what TV show it was on?“
“No.“
“The chan­nel?“
“No.“
“Ok.“
(We actu­ally did man­age to find the book, miraculously.)

An irate cus­tomer, to me:
“You’re a god­damned white devil!“
”…But I’m not white.“
“Are you French?“
“No.“
“From New York?“
“No.“
“Jew­ish? You look Jewish.”

Favorite cus­tomers from a new age book­shop I man­aged after Borders:

“I need help.“
“Find­ing a book?“
“Maybe…Someone put a curse on me. Can you tell me how to get rid of it?”

Some­one try­ing to sell me a book they self-published:
(me) “There’s no way I can buy this book from you at this price, and sell it with a proper mark-up. It’s too expen­sive.“
“But it that’ s how much it cost to print it!“
“Where did you have it printed?“
“Kinkos.”

“I’d like to return this text­book.“
“Is there some­thing wrong with it?“
“No. But the class is over now, so I don’t need it.“
“We can’t refund a book you used for a class. We can only buy it back from you.“
“But I didn’t USE it!”

On another note, I’m very sad that Bor­ders is over. Not because I thought it was a par­tic­u­larly good book­store (it wasn’t), or because it’s demise is at all sur­pris­ing (I think most of us who worked there had been expect­ing it for years), but because it could have been pre­vented. Dur­ing my four years of work­ing at Bor­ders, the mis­man­age­ment of the com­pany was always very appar­ent. Their attempts to increase sales by estab­lish­ing cus­tomer loy­alty (a rewards pro­gram, for exam­ple) always back­fired because of poor plan­ning and mis­guided pro­jec­tions, they waited far too long to incor­po­rate online and used book sales into their busi­ness model, jumped on the e-reader wagon way too late and failed to suc­cess­fully imple­ment a planned self-publishing plat­form that could have done a great deal of good for the busi­ness. The worst part, though, is that when things got tight, the com­pany came down hard­est on the lowest-level employ­ees instead of restruc­tur­ing effi­ciently at the top. Already among the lowest-paid work­ers in the retail indus­try, Bor­ders employ­ees began los­ing long­stand­ing ben­e­fits and incen­tives, were assigned unre­al­is­tic hand­selling goals and threat­ened with puni­tive mea­sures if they didn’t meet these goals (For­tu­nately for myself, I had already left the com­pany, before much of that began). A com­pany as large as Bor­ders, which employs scores of buy­ers and mar­keters, shouldn’t rely on under­paid, part time work­ers to drive sales. Instead, they should have fig­ured out what wasn’t sell­ing and why, as well as what would have sold and how. It sounds sim­ple, and it really is. Among other things, they should have brought some peo­ple on board who knew how to more holis­ti­cally inte­grate their e-reader into their larger busi­ness model and sales plan, rather than treat­ing it as a nov­elty gift akin to a Paper­chase jour­nal or a pass­ing fad.

I agree com­pletely with Ian Crouch, who writes at The Book Bench:

It’s been said widely, but can stand repeat­ing: e-readers and dig­i­tal con­tent are not part of some tidal force bent on destroy­ing all that is fine and good about the writ­ten word. It is just another way for cus­tomers to buy books, for com­pa­nies to sell them, and for peo­ple to read them. The reces­sion has been tough on all book­sellers (Barnes & Noble’s tight spot last year brought on many of the same reflec­tions about the state of book retail) but the growth of dig­i­tal read­ing has not been equally hard on every­one. Short of chang­ing its name to Kin­dle, Ama­zon has done just about every­thing it can to pro­mote its e-reader; Barnes & Noble has doggedly pushed the Nook. Bor­ders, mean­while, owned just over ten per cent of the Kobo e-reader, and gave the device promi­nent place­ment in its stores, but never man­aged to make a clear con­nec­tion in cus­tomers’ minds. (B&N has since shored itself up enough that com­men­ta­tors were sug­gest­ing it as a likely ten­nant in many of the soon-to-be aban­doned Bor­ders loca­tions.) The Detroit Free Press gets it right this morn­ing by not­ing that the com­pany lost “a bat­tle with com­peti­tors, tech­nol­ogy and itself.”

Espe­cially itself.

Tags: