Chinese Americans

Ten years ago, Los Angeles attorney Dolly Gee was nominated by President Clinton to serve as a United States District Court judge. But Clinton's term ended without a confirmation. On Christmas Eve, the Arcadia resident -- nominated again by President Obama -- heard from the office of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Gee called her 81-year-old mother to break the news that the U.S. Senate had confirmed her. "She said, 'Finally!' " Gee said on Friday. "It's a huge breakthrough not just for me and my family, but our entire community."

When aliens besiege Earth in Universal Pictures' recent action film"Battleship," it is the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong whom Washington credits with delivering the early proof that these invaders aren't exactly homegrown. But those aren't the only Chinese do-gooders on screen these days. In "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,"a romantic comedy about building a dam in the Mideast, Chinese hydroelectric engineers showed off their know-how; the original book included no such characters.

Carson Hom's family has run a thriving fortune cookie and almond cookie company in Los Angeles County for 35 years. And for much of that time, it was a business that required two languages: Cantonese, to communicate with employees and the Chinese restaurants that bought the cookies, and English, to deal with health inspectors, suppliers and accountants. But when Hom, 30, decided to start his own food import company, he learned that this bilingualism wasn't enough anymore.

It's official! A new study by the Pew Research Center proves the old trope true: Asians are the new Jews. All those essentially positive stereotypes you've heard about - the hard work and the Tiger Moms - have made Asian Americans the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. Not only that, in the last few years, Asians have overtaken Latinos as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S. This is all good news - both for Asian Americans and the United States - but the Jewish comparison has a dark side.

Cars, bank notes and TVs were going up in flames one chilly winter morning in the parking lot of Universal Chung Wah Funeral Home in Alhambra. Thirteen white-clad relatives of Dam Lam, 87, formed a circle, each cradling a stack of paper models: a foot-long 747 jetliner, a black-and-gold car sitting in the courtyard of a 2-foot-tall, red-tiled paper mansion. One by one, the items were thrown into the fire licking out of a 4-by-4-foot wheeled container, charred from years of use.

Headlines about dangerous toys from China dominated the news for months last year, prompting congressional hearings and consumer questions about the Asian manufacturing giant's product safety. But Walter and Shirley Wang, Bel-Air residents with three children, asked a different question: Where were the headlines pointing out that some of the problems were caused not by shoddy Chinese manufacturing practices but by American design flaws?

Wilbur K. Woo, a banker and produce merchant who first immigrated to Los Angeles in 1921, when he was 5, and decades later became an influential leader of the city's Chinese American community, has died. He was 96. Woo, who also worked to strengthen trade relations between the U.S. and Taiwan, died Monday at his home in Monterey Park of complications from a stroke and pneumonia, his family said. His son, Michael Woo, was the first Asian American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, in 1985.

After the Chinese government suppressed a student-led democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the Bush administration imposed economic sanctions on China, straining U.S.-China relations. Three months later, T.D. Lee, an American Nobel laureate in physics and a frequent guest of China's leaders, flew to Beijing to meet with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Upon his return to the U.S., Lee traveled to Washington to brief then-President George H.W.

As a professional journalist and a naturalized U.S. citizen, I am quite disappointed in your story on Chinese espionage activities (Part I, Nov. 20). Being unable to prosecute Chinese espionage cases, as admitted by Harry J. Godfrey III, head of FBI counterintelligence in Los Angeles, the FBI apparently intends to use the media, say the Los Angeles Times, to cover its fruitless operations and fictitiously distort the patriotism of the majority of Chinese-Americans, who are loyal to the U.S. like I am, by making statements like, "The Chinese would send 1,000 bathers to the beach in broad daylight and have each bathers bring back one grain of sand."