Jerry Park discusses Asian American poverty rates and the roles “ethnic enclaves” play in helping minorities. If you’re like me, this is probably an issue that you have never considered before, although we should. Near the end of the piece, Jerry ponders about the role poverty and and the experience of living in an ethnic enclave might have had on an American soldier who recently committed suicide:
“I wonder about this too in part because of the recent news about Danny Chen, the 19-year-old Chinese American soldier who shot and killed himself in Afghanistan after a reported excessive and race-based hazing he underwent there. Reading Jennifer Gonnerman’s sketch of his home life, we learn that Danny grew up in New York’s Chinatown. To make ends meet, he and his parents shared the same bedroom. We don’t hear much about these Asian Americans, the ones who don’t go to Harvard or Berkeley–the non-model minorities.”
