Putin invita a los hijos de los diplomáticos de EEUU en Rusia a fiesta navideña en el Kremlin

El presidente de Rusia, Vladímir Putin, afirmó que Moscú no responderá de forma simétrica a Washington, que en la víspera anunció la expulsión de 35 diplomáticos rusos.

“Nos reservamos el derecho a tomar contramedidas, pero no bajaremos al nivel de diplomacia primitiva, irresponsable, y estudiaremos los pasos siguientes para restablecer las relaciones ruso-estadounidenses en función de la política que aplique la administración del presidente Donald Trump”, señaló el mandatario ruso en una declaración difundida por el Kremlin.

Putin afirmó que “no vamos a crear problemas para diplomáticos estadounidenses”.

“No expulsaremos a nadie”, añadió.

¡Felicito al presidente electo Donald Trump y a todo el pueblo estadounidense! ¡Les deseo a todos bienestar y prosperidad!”, dice la declaración presidencial.

Al comentar la decisión de Washington de expulsar a 35 diplomáticos rusos, Putin destacó que Moscú, a su vez, no va a prohibir a las familias y niños de los diplomáticos estadounidenses en Rusia visitar lugares de ocio durante las fiestas navideñas. “Invito a todos los niños de los diplomáticos estadounidenses acreditados en Rusia a la fiesta infantil de Año Nuevo y Navidad en el Kremlin”, dice el comunicado.

El Departamento de Estado de EEUU anunció la expulsión de 35 diplomáticos rusos por su supuesta implicación en los ciberataques.

Más: https://mundo.sputniknews.com/rusia/201612301065948676-putin-ninos-diplomaticos-eeuu-fiesta/

Rusia responde a las sanciones de EE. UU.

Tras advertir que tomaría “represalias adecuadas” en respuesta a las sanciones que le impuso Estados Unidos, el Gobierno ruso cerró la Escuela Angloamericana de Moscú, a la que acuden los hijos de muchos diplomáticos.

China Treffen Putin Obama (picture-alliance/Sputnik/A. Druzhinin)

Este jueves (29.12.2016), poco después de que la Casa Blanca impusiera duras sanciones sobre Rusia, acusando al Kremlin de injerir en las elecciones presidenciales estadounidenses para perjudicar a Hillary Clinton y favorecer a Donald Trump, el Gobierno de Vladimir Putin ordenó cerrar la Escuela Angloamericana de Moscú –a la que acuden los hijos de diplomáticos de habla inglesa– y clausurar el acceso que conduce a la casa de vacaciones de la embajada de Estados Unidos, ubicada en el parque de Serebryanyy Bor, cercano a la capital.

Así lo informó la cadena televisiva estadounidense CNN. Sugiriendo que Barack Obama estaba tratando de enturbiar las relaciones binacionales antes de finalizar su mandato, Moscú ya había advertido que tomaría “represalias adecuadas” en respuesta a sus medidas punitivas. En declaraciones a la prensa, el portavoz del Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, afirmó que el presidente Putin estaba llevando a la práctica el principio diplomático de la “reciprocidad”. El Departamento de Estado no comentó el asunto.

Peskov agregó que el presidente Putin no se daría prisa en reaccionar a la afrenta de Obama, pero adelantó que, cuando lo haga, le causará “notables molestias” a Washington. En el sitio web de la Escuela Angloamericana –en la que los hijos de los diplomáticos estadounidenses, británicos y canadienses tienen prioridad en los procesos de admisión– no se hace alusión alguna al cierre de sus puertas. La institución tiene su sede principal en el noroeste de Moscú, pero cuenta con otro campus en la ciudad de San Petersburgo.

Obama le dio 72 horas para salir de Estados Unidos a 35 diplomáticos rusos y a sus familias, y anunció el cierre de dos propiedades del Gobierno ruso en Nueva York y Maryland. Además, mencionó sanciones económicas inminentes, que pasan por congelar los bienes de dos de las principales agencias de inteligencia rusas: el Departamento Central de Inteligencia (militar, GRU por su acrónimo en ruso) y el Servicio Federal de Seguridad (seguridad nacional, FSB). Estas sanciones son las más duras adoptadas por Obama durante su gestión.

ERC ( EFE / AFP )

En: DW

this artist tattoos and beheads china figurines to take on art history’s gender bias

Jessica Harrison’s reworked ceramic heroines prove women are not ornaments.

British artist Jessica Harrison tackles and unpacks assumptions about the female body with her cleverly embellished figurines. The found ceramics are selected for their silly poses, onto which Harrison adds her own flourishes: an anatomical overhaul spiked with tongue-in-cheek humor. As Harrison puts it, “the re-worked ceramic makes the figure a participant in their own undoing.”

Deploying a wide variety of materials in her artistic practice, from paint to textiles to digital collage, she regularly explores the intricacies of the sensory body. She’s made silk scarves with muscle patterns and roughly articulated clay pin-ups. Examples of Harrison’s work are currently on view in the group show Ceramix, at La Maison Rouge in Paris, which explores experimental ceramics by a range of artists from throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We caught up with the artist to discuss feminism, creativity, and undercutting art history’s gender bias.

Your pieces in the Ceramix exhibition are shown under the sub-heading “Sacred and Profane: Revisited Traditions.” How does that title relate to your work?
I guess my work in the exhibition slots in quite well with that summary, given that I’m appropriating or re-thinking ornamental items that were acquired with the intention of showing off a particular taste within the home. Simplistically, you could say that traditional pieces are trying to appeal to some kind of “good taste” middle-class Englishness. They kind of have this weird pointlessness to them — their poses, their expressions — the figures are just in some kind of bizarre moment of blissful, bland nothingness. With the Broken figures, I am trying to activate their poses, give them some meaning; and in Painted Ladies, the crudeness of the tattoo designs highlights the ridiculous outfits these poor ladies are forever subjected to.

What prompted the Broken series of decapitated, scalped, and otherwise “injured” ladies?
I had an interest in working with the figure, but I didn’t want to make something figurative — I was trying to move away from overly defined outlines of the body. The series was a playful, cathartic way to try to re-work the figure. With these pieces, I reference that kind of anatomical enlightenment era, when the body was being explored from the skin down to the bone, and everything in-between. However advanced our explorations of the body have become since, this interior anatomical space is still gender-biased — a classically and continually male space. The female body is only typically used when illustrating a specifically “female part” of the body: the reproductive organs. The female interior space is still laced with taboo in a way that the male interior is not. I know this is still the case because I’ve received criticism for reworking female figurines — that it is somehow more “violent” than reworking male figurines.

You don’t consider the pieces violent?
I don’t. Each figurine has been carefully chosen based on their existing pose, where the re-worked ceramic makes the figure a participant in their own undoing. I like to think that these passive ladies have been given a more active role, more in line with how the male body is depicted, in both anatomical history and art history. I do consider them to be quite humorous though, and this is usually the reaction that they get, from children right up to older audiences (who more typically might have owned these kind of figurines originally).

Do you see these two series as feminist? What role does feminism play in your work?
I am a feminist and feminist issues are important in my life, work, ideas, and how I go about my everyday business. Having said that, I don’t consider “feminism” to play an active or overt role in my work, but the continuing issues facing women and young girls today is of course something that is always going to be threaded into my work when dealing with figurative pieces or the subject of the body.

Can you talk about your use of “found ceramics”? How does that influence your practice?
I started working with found ceramics because I didn’t know how to make ceramics from scratch — I decided to work backwards and get to know clay back to front. The Broken and Painted Ladies series, made using mass-produced figurines, could in theory continue forever. A part of me would like to keep going, to re-work all of the figurines that exist in the world, but there are too many other projects out there for me to be working on.

‘Ceramix’ is on view at La Maison Rouge and Cité de la Céramique in Paris through June 5, 2016.
jessicaharrison.co.uk

CreditsText Sarah Moroz
Images courtesy Jessica Harrison

Obama castiga a Rusia por hackeo; expulsa a 35 diplomáticos rusos

Los diplomáticos rusos sancionados por Washington tienen 72 horas para abandonar EU y también cerrar las instalaciones de Rusia en Maryland y Nueva York.

A días de que deje la presidencia de Estados Unidos, Barak Obama avaló un decreto por el cual Washington impone nuevas sanciones contra Rusia por su presunta injerencia en las elecciones estadounidenses que culminaron con el triunfo del magnate Donald Trump, informó la Casa Blanca.

De acuerdo con el Departamento del Tesoro estadounidense, estas nuevas medidas punitivas afectan a seis personas y tres empresas rusas “que suministraron apoyo material a las operaciones cibernéticas del GRU”, así como al Servicio Federal de Seguridad de Rusia (FSB) y el Departamento Central de Inteligencia (GRU).

Las seis personas sancionadas con la congelación de sus bienes son: Vladimir Stepanovich Alexseyev, Sergei Gizunov, Igor Kostyukov e Igor Korobov, que ocupan cargos directivos en el servicio de espionaje militar ruso, así como Aleksei Alekseyevich Belan (con pasaporte lituano) y Evgeniy Mikhaylovich Bogachev, dos individuos a los que no se vincula directamente con los organismos de inteligencia rusos, pero que Washington acusa de apropiación indebida de fondos y de datos personales a través de ataques informáticos.

Obama también anticipó acciones adicionales “en los tiempos y lugares que determinemos”.

En tanto, EU expulsó este jueves a 35 funcionarios rusos presentes en el país y cerró las instalaciones de Rusia en Maryland y Nueva York, en respuesta a una campaña de acoso por parte del Kremlin contra diplomáticos estadounidenses en Moscú, informó a Reuters un alto funcionario estadounidense en condición de anonimato.

“Esta decisión fue tomada como medida de respuesta frente al acoso de Rusia sobre los diplomáticos estadounidenses y por las acciones de sus homólogos rusos, que hemos considerado incompatibles con la práctica diplomática”, señaló.

Los diplomáticos rusos sancionados por Washington tienen 72 horas para abandonar EU, mientras que el acceso a las dos instalaciones diplomáticas rusas estará prohibido para todos los oficiales rusos a partir de la tarde del viernes.

De acuerdo con The New York Times, en las próximas semanas, el Gobierno de EU publicará un informe más detallado sobre el caso y ordenado por Obama, aunque se espera que las pruebas recogidas de “implantes” en los sistemas informáticos rusos, conversaciones y espías se mantenga como clasificado.

Aunque el Kremlin los ha negado, agencias de inteligencia estadounidenses coinciden en que Rusia interfirió en los comicios con ataques informáticos contra el Partido Demócrata y la campaña de Hillary Clinton para ayudar a la elección de Trump.

Trump exige “pruebas claras” sobre hackeo de Rusia

Por su parte, el presidente electo de EU, Donald Trump, exigió a la Casa Blanca que presente “pruebas claras” de una posible injerencia rusa en las elecciones presidenciales del pasado 8 de noviembre.

En conferencia telefónica con medios de comunicación, Sean Spicer, portavoz del equipo de transición del magnate, señaló que “si EU tiene pruebas claras de que alguien ha interferido en nuestras elecciones, debemos darlas a conocer”.

En: forbes

John Kerry: “La solución de los dos Estados es la única vía posible para la paz entre Israel y Palestina”

El secretario de Estado de EEUU, John Kerry, ha reafirmado hoy que “la solución de los dos Estados es la única vía posible para la paz entre Israel y Palestina”. A lo que ha añadido que esta solución está “en peligro”, dijo Kerry, que abandonará sus funciones el próximo 20 de enero, en un importante discurso en el que ha expuesto la visión del presidente Barack Obama sobre Oriente Próximo.

Kerry ha comparecido hoy para explicar la decisión de su país tras abstenerse en la votación del pasado viernes en el Consejo de Seguridad de Naciones Unidas por la que se exigió a Israel el fin de los asentamientos. Catorce estados miembros votaron a favor.

El status quo en Oriente Próximo conduce a la “ocupación perpetua”, dijo el jefe de la diplomacia estadounidense.

“Esto que nosotros defendemos: el porvenir de Israel como Estado judío y democrático, que viva en paz y seguridad junto a sus vecinos”, agregó.

El secretario de Estado ha ofrecido hoy una “amplia visión” de cómo reactivar el proceso de paz israel-palestino.

Su intervención se produce después de que Jerusalén anulara la votación para seguir construyendo en Jerusalén Este a petición de Benjamin Netanyahu. La ONG Ir Amim denunciaba horas después la aprobación por parte de la comisión municipal de la construcción de un edificio de cuatro plantas en el barrio palestino de Silwan, en Jerusalén Este.

La reciente resolución de la ONU le pide a Israel cesar la colonización, una votación que llevó al Estado hebreo a “reducir” sus relaciones con algunos países.

Entrevistado por EL MUNDO en Jerusalén pocos minutos después de la alocución de Kerry, el ministro israelí de Educación, Naftali Bennett, replicó que “es un discurso con buenas intenciones pero desconectado de la realidad, según informa Sal Emergui. La misma política ha conducido a un Oriente Próximo en llamas, al genocidio en Siria, a un Irán que avanza hacia la bomba y ahora el abandono de la única democracia en la zona, Israel”. Según él, “Hay ahora un Estado palestino en Gaza que se ha convertido en un estado de terror. No podemos tolerar otro Estado palestino del terror. Por eso nosotros seguiremos avanzando para conseguir seguridad y paz”. Como líder del grupo más derechista en la coalición del Gobierno israelí que además pide la anexión israelí de partes importantes de Cisjordania y se opone a la creación de un Estado palestino, Bennett fue uno de los dirigentes a los que Kerry aludió, sin nombrar, para denunciar la política de asentamientos de Netanyahu.

La respuesta de Trump

Antes del discurso de Kerry, el presidente electo de EEUU pidió a Israel mantenerse fuerte hasta que él llegue a la Casa Blanca.

“Nosotros no podemos continuar dejando que Israel sea tratado con un total desprecio y con falta de de respeto”, escribió el millonario, que ha nombrado recientemente un embajador en Israel favorable al traslado del embajador de EEUU a Jerusalén.

Los israelíes “están habituados a tener un gran amigo de los EEUU, pero esto ya no es el caso. El principio del fin ha sido este horrible acuerdo con Irán (en referencia a la política nuclear) y ahora (la ONU), mantente fuerte Israel, el 20 de enero está muy cerca”, dijo Trump.

En: elmundo.es

 

Encuentran muerto a un agente de la OTAN que investigaba la financiación del Estado Islámico

El auditor general de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN), Yves Chandelon, fue hallado sin vida en Bélgica. Varios medios señalan que se trató de un suicidio, versión que la familia no admite.

Yves Chandelon, auditor general de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte, OTAN. Imagen: Sputnik Türkiye

Yves Chandelon, auditor general de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte, OTAN. Imagen: Sputnik Türkiye

El cadáver de Yves Chandelon, auditor general de la OTAN, fue encontrado hace unos días en la ciudad de Andenne, Bélgica, a 140 kilómetros de su oficina, con un disparo en la cabeza.

El alto cargo de la OTAN investigaba las redes de financiamiento a los grupos terroristas, entre ellos, el Estado Islámico (EI), refiere el portal de Luxemburger Wort. Aunque la hipótesis de las autoridades, difundida a la prensa, fue que se trató de un suicidio, los familiares de Chandelon discrepan.

Según el portal belga Sudinfo, las circunstancias de la muerte han generado todo tipo de suspicacias, ya que aunque el agente tenía tres armas registradas, el disparo mortal en la cabeza provino de una cuarta que se encontró en la guantera de su auto y no aparecía entre las que estaban a su nombre.

Por otra parte, otros medios como La Gaceta, en España, destacan que el alto cargo de la OTAN “había recibido extrañas llamadas telefónicas”, lo que extiende un manto de duda sobre la versión del suicidio.

El parte oficial de la Fiscalía, citado por el diario Tageblatt no ha dado crédito a esas suposiciones, mientras se esperan los resultados de la autopsia, que se conocerán este martes. Chandelon vivía en la localidad de Lens, situada a unos 100 kilómetros del lugar donde fue encontrado su cuerpo.

Aunque el cadáver fue hallado el pasado 16 de diciembre, el hecho no fue reseñado inmediatamente por los grandes medios occidentales, lo que ha sido objeto de críticas encendidas por los internautas en las redes sociales.

En: RT

Mas en: Russian Ambassador, Senior NATO Staff and Russian Diplomat – All Dead Same Week

Here’s how American journalists covered the rise of Hitler in the 1920s and 30s

How to report on a fascist?

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

A leader for life

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

The ‘German Mussolini’

Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler. AP Photo

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ‘20’s to early ‘30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Adolf Hitler at the German Opera houseAdolf Hitler at the German Opera house. AP Photo

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In: businessinsider

 

I ‘Went Back to China’ — and Felt More American Than Ever

Six years in Hong Kong showed me how deep racism runs in Asia’s world city.

BY CRYSTAL CHEN / OCTOBER 21, 2016

On Oct. 9, New York Times metro reporter Michael Luo revealed that he and his family had been subject to a racist outburst on the streets of New York City’s posh Upper East Side. Readers, especially of Asian descent, were quick to volunteer their own stories in the aftermath, showing that while racism against Asians is not always in the U.S. public eye, it is widespread. I’d like to address this article to the woman who told the U.S.-born Luo — and to all those who may have harbored similar sentiments at one point or another — to “go back to China.”

My parents left China in the wake of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution to seek refuge in American higher education in the 1970s, eventually becoming entrepreneurs. I was born in Ohio, raised in Nebraska and California, and attended Yale University in Connecticut. Six years before that woman on the streets of New York told Luo to go back to China, I had already done so. After graduating college, I moved to Hong Kong, a port city that has been the West’s gateway to China since the mid-1800s.

I believed the city, a place brutalized and molded by colonial forces before its return to China in 1997, was somehow like me: an East-meets-West pastiche. I also believed that Hong Kong, more multicultural, global, and outward-looking than any mainland city, was likely to be the most racially enlightened. But after more than six years of living and working there, I would learn just how racially progressive the United States was by comparison. It’s not just because anyone can speak up and defend themselves, but because doing so is embedded in our culture.

Growing up in Nebraska, I was “ching-chong’d” in school and asked why my eyes were so small. Later on, popular kids would compel me to do their homework with overtures of friendship, only to ignore me at recess. Even in relatively liberal California, I was bullied and shut out by the girls in my all-white Girl Scout troop. My early life in white, Christian America impressed upon me the notion that my real home, my real friends, was where my parents had left it — back in China.

In college, I devoted myself to the notion. I holed myself up exclusively in Asian cultural clubs and worked to beef up my half-hearted, lisping Mandarin Chinese. I took classes in Chinese philosophy, sociology, and politics. Internships in Beijing and Shanghai and travels around the mainland gave me a glimpse of what my new home would be like. After graduation, I secured a job in Hong Kong.

My mother, who had moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong to the United States, was distraught: “Why do you want to go back there?”

But much, I insisted, had changed. The mainland wasn’t the Mao-era hot mess she’d left behind; the 2008 Beijing Olympics painted a glorious image of a new Middle Kingdom, and Lehman Brothers’ collapse that same summer foretold an ominous future for the United States. Out in the dizzying economic rise of the Wild Wild East, opportunities abounded for those willing to work in a globalizing China, particularly in Hong Kong, which billed itself as “Asia’s world city” and was also deepening ties with the mainland.

What I didn’t tell my mother was that my desire to leave was primarily motivated by the possibility of escaping the unfriendly U.S. racial climate. In Asia, I wouldn’t have to deal with being “Asian.” I wouldn’t be a minority, much less a model one. For once, I was certain, my race wouldn’t matter.

I moved to Hong Kong in 2010 to work for a multinational education company and cast myself with a privileged lot of expatriates, or huayi — ethnic Chinese who have grown up abroad. It was deeply comforting to be surrounded by people who looked like me. And because I spoke perfect English and had attended an Ivy League university, my social currency in status-conscious Hong Kong went further than most. I was not just able to “blend in” — I was privileged. I was heard, respected, and invited to glittering parties. Those first years in Hong Kong were beautiful and easy.

But eventually my conscience began to gnaw at me. At work, invisible walls divided colleagues by skin color. White managers who had worked all their lives in Asia sometimes looked surprised when I spoke up in perfect English to volunteer my opinion — a small thing, but revealing. A few seats away from my desk sat Filipino colleagues, often ignored or greeted with terse, awkward smiles when they tried to make conversation. I saw a Pakistani colleague of mine held at arm’s length during team happy hours, lonesome with his glass of wine while his colleagues buzzed around him. A Sri Lankan friend of mine working in investment banking cried when she was passed over for a raise once again.

The city’s thorny relationship with race was even more obvious outside of work. I remember dining with an Indian companion and being thoroughly ignored by the waitstaff, even beyond the standards of usually brusque Hong Kong service. Locals regularly complained to me about being paid less than their expat counterparts. And on the streets, images of hapa women, men, and babies — half white, half Asian — were featured prominently on billboard ads, the city’s aspiration to whiteness hiding in plain sight.

Hong Kong is also home to hundreds of thousands of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers — 320,000, as of 2013. On Sundays, their day off, Hong Kong’s otherwise mostly hidden domestic helpers swarm public parks, much to the chagrin of locals who I’d hear complain of what they saw as their parks being “overrun.” Workers who have served Hong Kong families loyally for decades cannot become permanent residents, dependent instead on a work visa that could be stripped from them at any moment. The 2016 Global Slavery Index — compiled by the Australia-based nonprofit Walk Free Foundation, which tracks government action on forced labor, human trafficking, and other conditions of modern slavery — ranked Hong Kong’s government in the bottom 5 percent worldwide. Reports surface regularly about domestic workers being beaten or sexually abused by their employers. These people served me cocktails, cooked the food I ate, bussed my plates without a sound, painted my nails, massaged me, and cleaned my apartment. “That’s just capitalism,” my erudite friends would say, but I couldn’t shake the truth that my privilege floated on cheap Southeast Asian labor and the diminished social position they occupied.

With each year that passed, I became increasingly aware of the morally fragile foundations of the lifestyle I enjoyed. I had believed that spiriting myself to Hong Kong would mean that I wouldn’t have to face racial discrimination anymore. Bewitched by the possibility of transcending the racial totem pole, I only later realized that I had merely relocated to the top, and the view wasn’t what I expected. Being brought up in the United States meant my standards for racial equality were forged in a culture built around the dissent, dialogue, and disruption that the First Amendment vouchsafes.

It was only after six years in Hong Kong that I began to understand why people leave their countries to come to the United States and why it’s so difficult to repatriate. You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned or unsee what you’ve seen. Neither could I unlearn the promises of equality that I’d repeated every time I took the Pledge of Allegiance.

I had been running away for a long time. I had run away from being a “victim” of American racism to become part of the perpetrating class in Hong Kong. I had hid from the yellow face in the mirror and pretended, with my perfect English and my elite education, that I was someone else. I had tried to “go back to China,” only to find myself more American than I’d realized. But I’m not running away anymore. I’ve found that my “home” isn’t limited to a physical place. It’s not in Hong Kong, China, or the United States. It’s in the people I love and the work that needs doing. It’s in the values I hold that grow and change over time.

So, to all those who have ever wanted people like me to “go back” to China: My home is on a bridge as short as a hyphen and as wide as the Pacific Ocean. My home is an in-between place, as it is for all Americans who remember their roots, their history, and the journey that got them here. My home is a compromise, a discussion, a negotiation.

In: foreignpolicy 

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