Lisa Cheng Smith’s mom told her learning Chinese would come in handy one day and on Thursday it did.
Cheng Smith, who grew up in Texas, describes her Chinese language skills as just “OK.” But they were good enough to welcome Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to Yun Hai, a small market store she co-owns with Lillian Lin in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.
The two showed off their store’s collection of goods sourced from the island, including dried pineapple, which Tsai sampled.
“She’s very charming and sweet,” Cheng Smith said of Tsai.
Tsai also stopped at Win Son, a Taiwanese American bakery and café next door where she took a few questions. The president’s favorite snack is bawan, which is a type of Taiwanese meatball, Cheng Smith said.
The drop-by wasn’t a complete surprise. Advance teams told Cheng Smith and Lin to expect a group of VIPs to visit. Cheng Smith thought Tsai may be one of them, but her mother, who was born in Taiwan, told her not to get her hopes up.
“She knows I’m sensitive,” she said.
Lisa Cheng Smith holds a copy of the Taiwanese cookbook she co-authored with Cat Yeh and Lillian Lin and at the Yun Hai shop in Brooklyn, New York, Thursday, March 30, 2023. Credit: Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA
The artisan shop features a variety of Taiwanese products, including the Tutong rice cooker, a ubiquitous instrument in Taiwan.
Cheng Smith and Lin have sought to build more demand for it in the U.S. by developing their own Taiwanese recipe book with their collaborator, Cat Yeh.
The Yun Hai Tatung Family Cookbook is sold at the store, as is a cookbook by Win Son owners Trigg Brown and Josh Ku and collaborator Cathy Erway, a food blogger and cook.
There are also an assortment of dried fruits, a staple of the Taiwanese diet that is much less sugary than American ones, and various cooking and seasoning oils, among other products.
Cheng Smith still isn’t sure why her shop was chosen, but it has been the subject of write-ups in Foreign Policy and New York magazines as well as a variety of publications in Asia. The name of the store, Yun Hai, means “sea of clouds” and refers to a fog that settles over the mountains of Central Taiwan and makes the region a fertile spot to grow tea, according to the store’s website.
Tsai’s trip to Brooklyn was a feel-good detour on a foreign trip with heavier geopolitical implications.
China views Taiwan as part of its territory and makes its displeasure known when foreign officials meet Taiwanese leaders. Beijing has threatened retaliation if Tsai goes through with a planned meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles. The president is due to stop in the U.S. city on her way home after visits to Guatemala and Belize, two countries that still have diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Cheng Smith demurred when asked about the political situation Taiwan faces.
But she said that she and Lin, who grew up in Taipei, wanted Yun Hai to provide Taiwanese small farmers another market after China banned pineapple imports from Taiwan in 2021. Cheng Smith said they also are hoping to teach Americans more about the country, which they might know only for its tech prowess or the bicycles it produces.
“The more people who feel connected to Taiwan, the better,” she said.
Two LGBTQ+ students from Beijing’s Tsinghua University have lodged an administrative lawsuit against China’s Ministry of Education after being harassed and threatened by the authorities over their sexuality.
In May 2022, Huang and Li bought 10 rainbow flags on the auction site Taobao, and left them on a small table in a campus supermarket, with a note that read: “Please take one #PRIDE.”
The pair, who asked to be identified by pseudonyms for fear of further reprisals, had already given a great deal of thought to what they knew was a highly risky action.
They considered posting about the flags on social media, but they knew the authorities would be able to track them down, as they had been forced to use their real names to sign up for an account.
Then they remembered an anti-fascist poster that had mysteriously appeared on the wall of the campus supermarket, and that the lack of surveillance cameras in the area had meant the students who put it there were never found.
It wasn’t until they had already put the flags in place that they realized that cameras had now been installed in the area, leaving them “terrified” over what would happen next.
But Huang told herself that 10 rainbow flags wasn’t going to have a massive impact on the life of the university.
Within two hours, they were getting calls from school officials wanting to talk to them about the flags, and warning them that the incident could affect their chances of graduating, and threatening them with possible expulsion.
They refused to meet with officials, who then went and found them in their respective dorm rooms, accusing them of “distributing prohibited propaganda material.”
By June 30, they had been issued with notification of punishment, and submitted a written defense to the student affairs office in accordance with school procedures. The school responded in July with disciplinary action in the form of a “severe warning,” which would remain on their official file and affect their chances of pursuing scholarships, further study or jobs working for the government.
‘I knew I was doing the right thing’
Huang and Li were furious, and vowed to fight back.
“I was in a state of anger every day,” Li said. “But I knew I was doing the right thing, so I didn’t feel scared.”
“It felt more as if I was getting some good practice in how to defend my own dignity, and that of my companion, and in not backing down.”
Within hours of placing the flags, the students received calls from school officials wanting to talk to them about the flags. By July 2022, the school disciplined the students with a “severe warning” [shown], which would remain on their official file and affect their chances of pursuing scholarships, further study or jobs working for the government. Credit: Courtesy of the respondents
They went public with the incident on July 18, posting to WeChat that they were being punished for the rainbow flag incident, in a post that garnered more than 100,000 views and which was later deleted by government censors.
By the end of the month, they had filed an official complaint with the university, which upheld the original disciplinary action.
So they took it further, lodging a complaint with the Beijing municipal education commission, arguing that they had left the flags for people to pick up, rather than distributing them, and that rainbow flags aren’t illegal in China.
But the response from the government was the same as that of the university.
Li, the child of a middle-class family, had been greatly affected by her experience of lockdown in the central city of Wuhan in the spring of 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I knew that a lot of people in my [residential] community had died, and I was affected by knowing that my neighbors were dying,” she said. “Since then, I’ve had no illusions about the current system at all.”
The formal warnings issued to Huang and Li expired after six months, but that wasn’t good enough for the two friends, who wanted to dispel the notion that it is wrong to fly a rainbow flag.
“It’s a matter of our reputation,” Huang said. “By punishing us, the school made a lot of people feel that we did something disgraceful.”
“We also want to do some public advocacy on this matter, and start a public discussion about sexual minorities in universities,” she said.
So Huang and Li took their lawsuit all the way to the top, lodging an administrative lawsuit with the Ministry of Education, and calling on its officials to review their case.
“We have to take the legal process all the way, so that this winds up in the legal archives, in the media and in online archives,” Li said. “I believe that history will eventually judge us fairly.”
“For me, this is a political declaration, and I have to take it all the way, or I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” she said.
But both activists still feared possible retaliation from the authorities.
Huang wrote to her family coming out as a lesbian, and detailing all of her actions and the reasoning behind them since May 2022, with a view to sending it if the police came looking for her.
They submitted their case to the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court on Feb. 20, and have yet to receive a response.
Party views on LGBTQ+ activists
The ruling Chinese Communist Party currently regards LGBTQ+ rights activists as being influenced by “hostile foreign forces” seeking to undermine its rule, and openly queer public figures are gradually disappearing from mainstream media, film and television under the watchful eye of government censors.
Huang and Li, who met at a queer book club and put the flags out to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Lesbophobia and Transphobia on May 17, came to a realization of their own sexuality in a piecemeal way, despite having been raised amid government propaganda that there was something wrong or shameful about it.
A man signs a rainbow flag during an anti-discrimination march in Changsha, China, in 2013. The ruling Chinese Communist Party currently regards LGBTQ+ rights activists as being influenced by “hostile foreign forces” seeking to undermine its rule. Credit: AFP
Huang used to hold similar views, recalling that she once had disapproved of a friend who kissed another woman. “Then I became gay myself,” she said with a laugh. “It was while I was watching the TV show Dragon Gate Guards, which had a particularly gorgeous actress in it, that I realized I’m into girls.”
Li remembers being queer from an early age, but not having a name for it. She first heard the letters “LGBT” in an English class, given as vocabulary by a foreign teacher, and remembers realizing that her attractions “had a name.”
By the time Huang asked her why she had joined the queer book club, she was able to reply with confidence: “Because I’m queer.”
For all Huang and Li’s bravery, LGBTQ+ activists continue to be targeted by the authorities, both for activism related to their own rights, and in wider crackdowns on political opposition.
Authorities in China held feminist and LGBTQ+ activist and Tsinghua alumna Guo Yi for months after she stuck up posters repeating the protest slogans hung from a Beijing traffic overpass in October by Peng Lifa, known as the “Bridge Man” protester, a rights group has reported.
LGBTQ+ activists were also among dozens of young Chinese — many of them women — detained for taking part in November’s “white paper” protests, which emerged out of frustration over zero-COVID restrictions, curbs on freedom of speech and out of solidarity with the Uyghur victims of a fatal lockdown fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s regional capital of Urumqi.
And last September, authorities in the eastern province of Shandong sent an investigative team to an arts university to probe the suicide death of Gao Yan, a rising dance star who was also an out gay man, amid allegations that he was bullied by faculty.
And while some Chinese cities have had a flourishing, though unofficial, gay scene for many years, pride marches have been suppressed under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, and some Chinese institutions still engage in the abusive and outdated practice of “conversion therapy.”
Changing climate for LGBTQ+ culture
In 2021, the social media platform WeChat deleted dozens of accounts belonging to LGBTQ+ groups at universities, in what activists said was evidence of a “changing climate” for LGBTQ+, or “comrade”, culture.
“By 2018, 2019, a lot of college LGBTQ+ associations were being targeted by school Communist Party Youth League and Communist Party committees for interviews and other kinds of pressure,” activist Wu Feiming said. “They began to be closely monitored.”
“By 2019, 2020, a lot of college associations had been canceled, moved underground, or were lying dormant,” Wu said.
At Fudan, the Zhihe Society, which once staged The Vagina Monologues, has been forced to cut ties with the university, while a lot of groups have changed their names to avoid constant harassment.
One of its members, Li Boran, said that while there is still plenty of social tolerance, official tolerance is fast disappearing.
“There have been more and more tolerant voices emerging in society in the [past] 10 years,” Li said. “I am out to most of my classmates.”
“But with political pressure constantly stepping up, I don’t know if that can continue.”
Participants take part in the Pink Party, part of the annual weeklong LGBT festival Shanghai Pride, in Shanghai, China, in 2019. While some Chinese cities have had a flourishing, though unofficial, gay scene for many years, some Chinese institutions still engage in the abusive and outdated practice of ‘conversion therapy.’ Credit: Reuters
Activist Peng Yanhui said he wasn’t optimistic about the outcome for Li and Huang’s lawsuit.
“Maybe if it was a few years ago, you could file a lawsuit like that, but now, I’m not so sure,” Peng said. “Before 2018, cases linked to LGBTQ+ rights could at least get some kind of procedural justice, and spark public debate.”
“But it’s still very encouraging,” he added. “At least schools may not move so quickly to issue punishments when dealing with similar incidents in future.”
Based on a collaborative report by RFA’s Mandarin Service and The Reporter, a Taiwan-based investigative magazine. Interviewees’ names have been changed at their request.
Lee Seung-yuop, the greatest slugger in South Korean baseball history, will make his managerial debut for a team coming off a down season, with pundits not giving his squad much of a chance to compete in 2023.
As first-year skipper for the Doosan Bears in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), Lee is driven to prove doubters wrong.
“We finished in ninth place last year, and we know experts don’t consider us contenders, but we don’t think we’re that weak of a team,” Lee said Saturday in a media scrum at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul, before the Bears hosted the Lotte Giants on Opening Day for the 10-team league. “Before last year, we played in seven straight Korean Series. I think we have a lot of players who know how to play the game. I think missing the postseason last year will only help us grow further.”
Lee admitted he has his share of concerns, namely the head injury that his starter Dylan File suffered after taking a batted ball to the head in spring training.
But with Opening Day here at last, Lee said he tried to keep things upbeat in the clubhouse.
“I told the players that no matter what happens, the coaching staff and I will have their backs,” Lee said. “I just want them to go out and play baseball the way they know how.”
Lee is the career KBO home run leader with 467, but he had a humble beginning in 1995. As a rookie with the Samsung Lions then, Lee didn’t start the team’s Opening Day game that year, which also took place at Jamsil.
“We lost that game because I wasn’t in the starting lineup,” Lee quipped. “Today, I am the starting manager. Hopefully, we will win this game and we will go from there.”
Lee’s counterpart for Saturday, Larry Sutton of the Giants, is very much in the same boat. The Giants finished in eighth place last year and haven’t been to the postseason since 2017. They have not been on many preseason lists as a potential playoff threat.
But Sutton said it doesn’t bother him at all, because the internal goal has always been to reach the Korean Series.
“I think it’s a great thing because nobody outside of our team expects us to finish high. So we’re the surprise team this year,” Sutton said in his pregame scrum. “And I’m totally fine with that. Within our organization, everybody’s on the same page. We want to be in the Korean Series. How we get there, our individual goals, that’s the thing we’ve been focusing on.”
Sutton said he and his players aren’t worried about outside expectations.
“The expectations that we put on ourselves, what we demand from each other and from ourselves on a daily basis, our standard is perfection,” the American manager said. “The expectations that are outside of our organization, we understand them, but we place a higher expectation on ourselves on what we’re trying to achieve on a daily basis.”
The European Commission’s (EC) decision to continue recognizing the Philippines’ training and certification will directly benefit more than 50,000 Filipino seafarers, the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) said on Saturday. The EC’s Directorate General for Mobility and Transport on March 31 extended its recognition of Philippine-issued seafarers certificates, saying Manila has made ‘serious efforts’ to address deficiencies in monitoring, supervision, and evaluation of training and assessment. DMW Secretary Susan Ople said the decision is a testimony to the leadership and political will of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. in ensuring the country’s compliance with the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for seafarers (STCW). ‘With this decision, a crisis of monumental proportions has just been averted,’ Ople said, adding that roughly 50,000 jobs of Filipino masters and officers aboard European vessels have been saved in light of the decision. In a letter on March 31, Director General Henrik Hololei told Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA) administrator Hernani Fabia that the EU Commission has assessed the actions taken by the Philippine government to address these deficiencies in the STCW Convention and Code. ‘Based on the answers of the Republic of the Philippines and on all available information, the Commission has concluded that the measures taken demonstrate concrete progress and improvement as regards the compliance with the requirements of the STCW Convention,’ Hololei noted. ‘The outcome of the analysis allows the EU to extend the recognition of the Republic of Philippines STCW system. Nevertheless, the services of the European Commission consider that there are still issues to be addressed.’ The EU official also noted that they expect the Philippine government to continue improving in other areas of the system. Hololei likewise lauded the country’s officials ‘for their efforts to comply with the STCW requirements and for the excellent cooperation we have had in this respect.’ Ople, who is currently in Geneva, thanked the EC for recognizing the significant efforts being made by the Marcos administration to comply with the requirements under the International Convention on STCW for seafarers. ‘We look forward to the start of technical cooperation between the Philippines and EC in professionalizing and further improving the skills of Filipino seafarers,’ she said. Marcos last December met with the European shipowners in Brussels, which led to the creation of the International Advisory Committee on Global Maritime Affairs (IACGMA) that now offers technical advice to the DMW on seafarers’ concerns. He also met with EU President Ursula von der Leyen on the margins of the EU-ASEAN Summit to discuss technical cooperation to improve the education, training, and certification system for Filipino seafarers. He further issued various directives to the DMW, the Department of Transportation (DoTr,) MARINA, and the Commission for Higher Education (CHED) on STCW compliance. ‘The President has been consistent and relentless in taking up the cudgels for our Filipino seafarers,’ Ople said. Meanwhile, she commended Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista for his work towards accelerating reforms in the maritime sector and in the country’s roadmap to the diplomatic and business community. The EC in December 2021 notified the Philippines of several deficiencies in its seafarers’ education system, prompting it to initiate the withdrawal procedure for the recognition of Philippine-issued STCW certificates for masters and officers – a decision that would have cascaded to its 27 member-states. Some of the deficiencies found are in the areas of monitoring, supervision, and evaluation of training and assessment; examination and assessment of competence; program and course design and approval; availability and use of training facilities and simulators; on-board training; and issue, revalidation, and registration of certificates and endorsements. The Philippines responded to this assessment on March 8, 2022, including details of the actions taken, referring to the six key areas. DOTr has vowed to continuously find solutions to issues raised by the EC amid the latter’s recognition of the country’s maritime training and certification system. Speaking at the Saturday New Forum in Quezon City, DOTr spokesman Joni Gesmundo said the department would formulate solutions to address other issues confronting the maritime sector. “As the EC lauded our cooperation and welcomed our efforts at improving the Philippine system of training and certifying Filipino seafarers, we commit to address the remaining areas identified by EC that require further improvement,” Bautista said
Nearly 5,000 recipients of welfare assistance, under various programmes, organised by the Social Welfare Department (JKM), have successfully come out of poverty last year, said Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri.
She said the number is from 533,167 aid recipients involving an allocation of RM2.4 billion.
“Although they are not many in terms of the number, 4,921 people, but at least they managed to get out of the group that received the aid. So we help them to be independent,” she said after attending the ‘Program Kasih Ramadan’, organised by The National Welfare Foundation (YKN) here, today.
Earlier in Dewan Rakyat, Nancy said about 1,500 aid recipients who participated in the ‘2 Years Exit Programme’ (2YEP), under JKM, have successfully exited from welfare assistance since the programme was held in 2016.
At the same time, she said her ministry has channelled an additional allocation of RM10 million to RM2.41 billion for the purpose of welfare programmes this year, compared to RM2.4 billion last year.
“We have an allocation of RM2.4 billion for welfare alone last year but this year it was increased to RM2.41 (billion) because the number of welfare aid recipients has increased. The target group involving the asnaf group is the highest number of recipients,” she said.
Earlier, Nancy, who is also YKN chairman and MP for Santubong, distributed food baskets to 100 villagers comprising the asnaf group from Kampung Beradek, Kampung Semilang and Kampung Tiang Api.
A group of the Manobo tribe, through a resolution, has declared the former president of Philsaga Mining Corp. (PMC) persona non-grata in their ancestral land, where the PMC operates, in Agusan del Sur. The clan leaders of the Manobo tribe belonging to the Rodrigo Clan – Maryjane Rodrigo-Hallasgo and Amatorio Rodrigo – led the signing of a resolution dated March 29, 2023, declaring former PMC president lawyer Raul Villanueva persona non grata on their ancestral land in Barangay San Andres, Bunawan, Agusan del Sur. The Rodrigo clan is the holder of the certificate of the ancestral domain title (CADT) in Barangay San Andres Bunawan, where the PMC is mining. The leaders of the Rodrigo clan said Villanueva, during his stint as PMC president, allegedly ‘allowed the release of the royalty share to CADT 136 leaders despite our opposition, which jeopardized our rights as the rightful claimants of the area where the mining activities are conducted.’ They also accused Villanueva of not exercising due diligence ‘in allowing the release of the royalty share, which caused strife and division among the Manobo tribe in Bunawan, Agusan del Sur.’ The Rodrigo clan recently learned that the Australian mining company, Ten Sixty-Four that owned PMC, has terminated the employment of Villanueva effective Feb. 15, 2023. Ten Sixty-Four recently announced and reiterated that they still have 100 percent legal control of operating subsidiaries, including PMC and Mindanao Mineral Processing and Refining Corp. It assured that PMC remains well funded with more than USD40 million readily available for working capital requirements. This includes the funding of community and social programs, which remain an ongoing priority for the company.
