Pao Lee Vue Response Paper

I attended the Southeast Asian Heritage Lecture series where Pau Lee Vue was the speaker. The lecture took place at the UC on Thursday, December 8th, 2016. There, I had the privilege of hearing Pao Lee Vue, an assistant professor of sociology at St. John Fisher College in Rochester New York, talk about Southeast Asian gangs, assimilation, Hip-hop, and import racing. It was such a great lecture to listen to because Pao Lee Vue was incredibly knowledgeable on the topic. Not only had he done extensive research on the topics for his book, but he also had personal experience from his own adolescence. He showed a few videos that he shot himself from when he was a young man attending B-Boy competitions and import races.
At the beginning of his lecture he described the cultural timeline of southeast Asian youth. He described how in the 1980s there was “new wave”. This was a time where Southeast Asian musicians and singers sounded a lot like typical American musicians and singers. It was almost as if they were trying to copy and fit in to the “new wave” trend. However,
As Pao Lee Vue was describing the different phases of Southeast Asian Youth I couldn’t help but notice the similarities that they had with Chicanos. In the Lecture Vue explained that 2nd generation Hmong people were being harassed for simply being Hmong. They were getting beaten and their things were getting stolen from their properties. This is what triggered the emergence of gangs. Southeast Asian Youth had to come together in groups in order to defend themselves from their aggressors. Then they were viewed negatively for being trouble makers when they only started gangs to defend themselves. This reminded me a lot of the Zuit Suit raids and Pachucos. This was only a phase that some Chicanos went through and they were getting a lot of hate for it from Caucasians that already thought negatively about