• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.17 no.11
• /
• pp.4885-4892
• /
• 2016

Background: Chinese and Korean Americans have lower colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates than other racial/ ethnic groups, which may be explained by a low level of CRC knowledge and a high level of misconceptions. This study explores the role of knowledge in CRC screening among these groups. Methods: Chinese (N=59) and Korean (N=61) Americans older than 50 were recruited from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area. They completed a detailed survey and participated in focus groups to discuss their knowledge on CRC and CRC screening. Seventeen physicians, community leaders, and patient navigators participated in key informant interviews. Using a mixed methods approach, data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results: Participants lacked knowledge about CRC and CRC screening. More than half did not know that screening begins at age 50 and there are several types of tests available. More than 30% thought CRC screening was not necessary if there were no symptoms or there was nothing they could do to prevent CRC. Focus group findings suggested understanding about CRC was limited by an inadequate source of linguistically and culturally relevant health information. For example, many participants considered CRC a western condition mainly caused by unhealthy diet. This led to under-estimations about their susceptibility to CRC. Knowledge was positively associated with self-reported screening. Participants who had higher knowledge scores were more likely to report ever having had a colonoscopy and confidence in ability to have CRC screening. Conclusions: Mixed-methods analysis provides multi-faceted perspectives on CRC knowledge and its influence on screening. Study findings can help inform interventions to increase CRC screening among Chinese and Korean Americans.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
• /
• v.25 no.6
• /
• pp.671-679
• /
• 2010

This study investigated the perception, evaluation, and the possibility for globalizing Korean foods and Yak-sun among different nationalities of foreigners living in Korea. A survey was conducted with 171 foreigners (eastern Asian, southeastern and central Asian, European, and American). The questionnaire was composed of three parts, including perception, evaluation, and the possibility for globalizing Korean foods and Yak-sun. The reason for choosing Korean foods cited by southeastern and central Asians and Americans was "taste", whereas eastern Asians and Europeans chose "culture" and "curiosity", respectively. Americans and Europeans considered "spiciness" as a reason not to choose Korean foods (P<0.001). Regarding the possibility of globalizing Korean foods, eastern Asians and Americans/Europeans/southeast Asians and central Asians responded "Korean dining culture" and "incomprehensive menus", respectively (P<0.05). An "explanation of the menu to foreigners" was regarded as the main suggestion for globalizing Korean food. Most of the respondents understood that Yak-sun is an oriental medicinal food that provides improved health and disease prevention. A number of Europeans and Americans expressed high interest in the conceptualization of Yak-sun (P<0.001). With regard to the priority for developing Yak-sun, eastern Asians, southeastern and central Asians, and Europeans picked out "health status improvement", whereas "improved nutritional status" was manifested in the majority of the American's responses (P<0.001). Therefore, it is crucial that "localization" be applied to Korean foods and Yak-sun to meet the international standard. Furthermore, it is necessary to provide simplified and correct Korean food content information to foreigners.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.6
• /
• pp.1311-1337
• /
• 2010

This paper deals with one of the hottest debates in the history of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) since its inception in the late 1960s. In 1998 at Hawai'i, the AAAS awarded Lois-Ann Yamanaka its Fiction Award for her novel Blu's Hanging, only to have this award protested. The point at issue was the inappropriate representation of Filipino American characters called "Human Rats" in the novel. This event divided the association into two groups: one criticizing the novel for the problematic portrayal of Filipinos in colonial Hawai'i, and the other defending it from the criticism in the name of aesthetic freedom. Such a "crisis of representation" in Asian American identity reflects on the ways in which local Hawaiians are positioned in the complicate power dynamic between oppositional Hawaiian identity and cosmopolitan diasporic identity within the larger framework of Asian American pan-ethnic identity. The controversial event triggered the eruption of Asian Americans' anxiety over the identity-bounded nation of Asian America where intra-racial classism and conflict have been at play, which are primary themes of Blu's Hanging. This paper shows how Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging becomes so disturbing a work to prevent the hegemonic formality of Asian America identity from being fully dogmatic. Ultimately, it contradicts the political unconscious of the reading public and unmasked its false consciousness by engendering a "free subjective intervention" in the ideological reality of colonial Hawai'i.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.52-70
• /
• 2014

Gathering polling items about China and Japan from 1937 to 2011, we examine how Americans think about these two powerful East Asian countries. Our study investigates American attitudes from two perspectives. First, we analyze the content of polling items asked in the US about China and Japan to track changes in salient issues over a period of over 60 years. Second, by tracking repeated items, we show how American attitudes toward China and Japan have changed over time, both in long-term general favorability, and shorter-term perception of geopolitical, ideological, and economic threat in response to historical events.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.24
• /
• pp.46-61
• /
• 2011

This paper considers how Koreans found their positions in the complex, overlapping, disjunctive, and interconnected "Oriental" repertoires in the early Cold War years. When we use the term, Oriental, it should require careful translation from context to context because it may be subject to very different sets of contextual circumstances. Klein views Cold War Orientalism in the complex of various regions including East Asian and Southeast Asian countries; however, when Koreans are contextualized at the center of the discussion the Orientalism produces another discursive meaning. Even though many great researches have been done on Korean immigrations, Korean American literatures, and US-Korea economic, political, and foreign relations, not many discussions about Korean American popular cultures have been discussed in the basis of the Oriental discourse in the United States.For this argument, this paper investigates the performative trajectory of a girl group "Kim Sisters" who began to sing at the US military show stages in South Korea in 1952 during the Korean War. They moved to Las Vegas show stages in 1959 and later appeared in Ed Sullivan Show more than thirty times during the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, they not only returned to South Korea often times to perform at the stages for Korean audiences in South Korea but also played at the shows for Korean immigrants in the United States. Korean American immigration to the United States has followed a different route from the majority of Asian American population such as Chinese or Japanese Americans, which means that efforts to compare this particular group to the others may be unnecessary. Rather doing comparative studies, this paper, therefore, focuses on the formation of the intersecting and multiple identities of Korean female entertainers who were forced or forced themselves to be incorporated into the American popular "Oriental" imagination, which I would call "embedded" identities. This embeddedness has been continuously maintained in the configuration of Korean characters in the United States. This will help not only to observe the discursive aspect of Asian American identity politics but also to claim a space for comparatively invisible Korean characters in the United States which has been often times neglected and not brought into a major Asian American or Oriental historical discourse. This paper starts with American scenes at the beginning of the twentieth century to trace Americans Oriental imagination which was observable in the various American cultural landscape and popular music soundscape. It will help us more clearly understand the production and consumption of the Korean "Oriental" performances during the early Cold War period and especially the Korean performance in the American venue, silently overshadowed into the political, social, and cultural framework.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.5
• /
• pp.773-796
• /
• 2010

This essay examines, first, the possibility and limitation of Asian America as a category of identity and its political and cultural implications through various theoretical perspectives. Here, by closely reading David Mura's poem "The Colors of Desire," I will argue that "Asian America" as a category of identity is now on the verge of falling apart and its politics of identity is no longer an effective way of fighting back against racism in the US. It is because Asian America is indeed what might be called a historical block, a product of ad-hoc coalition between different ethnic groups historically situated and constructed. In this sense, it is a kind of phantasmal object that is marked by practical absence. This fabricatedness inherent in Asian America as an identity category signifies that it has no essence that is meant to define the group in a transcendental way. The internal totality and coherence of that identity can thus be achieved only by suppressing differences between various ethnic groups and positing a single 'authentic' Asian American identity and culture. More dangerously, according to Viet Nguyen, such idealization of a single subject position can reinforces ideological rigidity that might threaten the ability of Asian America to represent itself in a unified fashion. Then, he predicts, Asian America will lose its cohesive force and fall apart. Eventually, every group within Asian America will be ethnicized. The only way of escaping from this bleak situation, as Vincent Cheng argues, is to foregroud the fabricatedness and ad-hocness of Asian America and to perform "inauthenticity," because Asian America is nothing but a functional category that is marked by absence of essence or authenticity. If Asian Americans admit that they have no essence and that they are essentially inauthentic, the practice of performing inauthenticity can become what we might call an alternative Asian American culture and identity.

• International Journal of Human Ecology
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2010

Two elements of paisley textile design (color and size of motif) were manipulated to investigate their effects on people's perception. Korean and Caucasian American women were selected to represent Asian and Western countries to compare the differences in image perceptions of paisley patterns between two cultures. The participants were 168 female university students composed of 84 Caucasian Americans and 84 Koreans. The experimental design was a $2{\times}2{\times}7$ factorial design: two levels of perceiver's culture, two levels of motif size, and seven levels of the motif color. The four factors used to account for image perception were an elegance factor, individuality factor, maturity factor, and femininity factor. The results of the present study confirm that image perception can be different according to the color and size of a motif and the perceiver's culture. In the results, Americans perceived the paisley pattern as more preferable than Koreans did. Red background + Orange motif was perceived as the most feminine and Dark blue background + Sky blue motif and Dark gray background + Gray motif was perceived as the most masculine in both cultures. Compared to the big motif, the small motif was perceived as more elegant in both cultures.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.2259-2263
• /
• 2013

Background: Public use National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) and NHANES III linked mortality data were here applied to investigate the association between health insurance coverage and all cause and all cancer mortality in adults. Patients and Methods: NHANES III household adult, laboratory and mortality data were merged. Only patients examined in the mobile examination center (MEC) were included in this study. The sampling weight employed was WTPFEX6, SDPPSU6 being used for the probability sampling unit and SDPSTRA6 to designate the strata for the survey analysis. All cause and all cancer mortalities were used as binary outcomes. The effect of health insurance coverage status on all cause and all cancer mortalities were analyzed with potential socioeconomic, behavioral and health status confounders. Results: There were 2398 sample persons included in this study. The mean age was 40 years and the mean (S.E.) follow up was 171.85 (3.12) person months from the MEC examination. For all cause mortality, the odds ratios (significant p-values) of the covariates were: age, 1.0095 (0.000); no health insurance coverage (using subjects with health insurance), 1.71 (0.092); black race (using non-Hispanic white subjects as the reference group) 1.43, (0.083); Mexican-Americans, 0.60 (0.089); DMPPIR, 0.82, (0.000); and drinking hard liquor, 1.014 (0.007). For all cancer mortality, the odds ratio (significant p-values) of the covariates were: age, 1.0072 (0.00); no health insurance coverage, using with health coverage as the reference group, 2.91 (0.002); black race, using non-Hispanic whites as the reference group, 1.64 (0.047); Mexican Americans, 0.33 (0.008) and smoking, 1.017 (0.118). Conclusion: There was a 70% increase in risk of all cause death and almost 300% of all cancer death for people without any health insurance coverage.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.187-210
• /
• 2005

The acculturation of ethnic minorities is an increasingly important issue. This paper explores the role of two factors which may be related to Asian Americans' development of preferences for ethnic or non-ethnic shopping: level of acculturation and susceptibility to interpersonal influence. Several prior studies have found that strength of ethnic identification (a measure of level of acculturation) accounts for differences in consumption patterns among immigrant groups. The results of this study suggest that ethnic identification is not a unidimensional construct. Instead, two construct, ethnic identification and consumer socialization are found to be relatedto the level of influence exerted by culturally consistent in-group than "American." A strong positive relationship is found between ethnic identifi.cation and ethnocentric purchasing preferences. In contrast, no significant direct relationship between level of.consumer socialization and ethnocentric preferences is found. Implications for marketers are discussed.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.1277-1280
• /
• 2015

Aim: To report epidemiologic and anatomoclinical transitions of inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) in Tunisia. Materials and Methods: Data including clinico-pathological data for 208 cases of T4d or PEV 3 non-metastatic breast cancer diagnosed between 2005 and 2010 were collected from patient records. Chi2 and Z tests were used to compare variables with two Tunisian historical series and a series about Arab-American patients. Results: Thirty three percent of our patients had their first child before 23 years of age and 56% had their menarche before 12 years, 75% never receiving oral contraception. Obesity was observed in 42% of women and IBC occurred during pregnancy in 13% of cases. Tumor grade was II-III in 90% of cases, HR was negative in 52%, HER2 was over expressed in 31% and invasion of more than 3 axillary nodes occurred in 18% of patients. We observed a pCR rate of 19% after neoadjuvant treatment (anthracyline-taxane used in 79%, trastuzumab in 27% ). Compared to historical Tunisian series (since 1996), IBC epidemiology remained stable in terms of median age, menopausal status and obesity. However we observed a significant decrease in median clinical tumor size and number of positive axillary lymph nodes. Comparison to IBC in Arab-Americans showed a significant difference in terms of median age, menopausal status, positivity of hormonal receptors and educational level. Conclusions: Our assessment of epidemiologic transition showed a reduction of clinco-pathological stage of IBC, keeping the same characteristics as compared to Tunisian historical series over a period of 14 years. Features seem to be different in Arab-American patients, probably related to migration, "occidentalization" of life style and improvement in socio-economic level.