In Ads, Plea for Asians to Get Tests for Hepatitis - NYTimes.com

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By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — It is an image both shocking and strangely serene: 10 beauty queens, each with a broad smile, sparkling earrings and a beautiful gown. And written across the bottom of the photograph is a simple, stark question.

“Which one,” it reads, “deserves to die?”

The image is part of a provocative advertising campaign by San Francisco Hep B Free, which aims to eradicate the disease with citywide vaccinations against hepatitis B. The campaign debuts here in print and on television this week and is aimed at jarring the city’s large Asian population into confronting the stubborn public health hazard of hepatitis B.

San Francisco health officials estimate that as many as 1 in 10 residents of Asian descent are infected with the virus here, a percentage that contributes to the nation’s highest rate of liver cancer, an unhappy distinction for a city that prides itself on its innovative universal health plan as well as its response to past epidemics like AIDS. In the general population, about 1 in 1,000 people are infected with hepatitis B, which attacks the liver.

A large part of the problem, according to leaders in the Chinese-American community, which is the largest Asian ethnicity here, is the stigma attached to the disease, which is endemic in much of Asia. The advertisements encourage people to get a “simple blood test” because “hepatitis B can be treated, even prevented.”

“We are not a confrontational group,” said Fiona Ma, a state assemblywoman from San Francisco, who is Chinese-American. “No one wants to talk about it. But we know that people care about their families and their friends. And maybe if they know it can affect them, then maybe they’ll talk about it.”

Ms. Ma knows of what she speaks; several years ago, she learned she had hepatitis B, which she apparently contracted from her mother. The virus that causes the disease can be spread through blood or other bodily fluids, said Dr. Edward A. Chow, vice president of the San Francisco Health Commission, who said that the disease often displays few symptoms in its carriers.

“It doesn’t manifest itself until it’s really too late,” said Dr. Chow, who said about 25 percent of patients, if untreated, develop serious ailments like liver failure.

The campaign’s confrontational approach has ruffled some feathers. Vicky M. Wong, the president and chief executive of DAE, the San Francisco firm that developed the ads, said that several of the beauty queen models walked out of the photo sessions because they were worried about its approach.

“There were so many debates as to whether ‘Are we going too far, is this right or not?’ ” said Ms. Wong, whose company specializes in campaigns geared to Asian audiences. “We got a lot of pushback. But there’s a lot of people who loved it.”

Ted Fang, a committee member for Hep B Free, said the high rate of infection among Asians here has been especially frustrating considering that a vaccine for the disease has existed for nearly 30 years.

“We have the medical tools, so long as doctors will test their patients and monitor them,” Mr. Fang said. “We can knock out this disease.”

Mr. Fang and others liken the city’s efforts to the battle against AIDS, which ravaged San Francisco and its gay community in the 1980s and 1990s and also inspired in-your-face tactics. The Hep B Free program began several years ago with a more gentle campaign — the tagline was “B A Hero” — but organizers said it had gone only so far.

“Saying ‘Life is beautiful; get tested,’ doesn’t work,” Ms. Wong said.

For the “Which one deserves to die?” campaign Ms. Wong enlisted volunteers from the Asian community to pose for photographs, depicting families, a basketball team, a group of doctors and office workers.

While the campaign is being published in several languages — including Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese — a target group is English-speaking doctors, outside the Asian community, who might not be aware of the prevalence of the disease.

“Within our ethnic groups, we are all aware of this, because we all have friends and families who have it,” Dr. Chow said. “But if you are a very busy practitioner who has a lot of different types of patients, you may not know to check at first.”

For Ms. Ma, the assemblywoman, who said she discovered she was positive for hepatitis B when she tried to donate blood, her goal was to bring the disease “above ground,” she said. And it is personal: while she is in good health, her mother, who is in her 70s, had part of her liver removed as a result of the disease.

She recovered, Ms. Ma said, but others she knew have not.

“It’s a silent killer,” she said.

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Senate Judiciary Republicans ask pointed questions of appeals court nominee Goodwin Liu

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By Ben Pershing
Washington Post staff writer
Saturday, April 17, 2010; A02

Senate Republicans mounted a concerted attack Friday on federal appeals court nominee Goodwin Liu in a session that both parties see as a warmup for the coming fight to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Liu, an associate dean at the University of California at Berkeley law school, is being vetted by the Senate Judiciary Committee for a slot on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which covers nine Western states. Groups on the left strongly support him and many on the right oppose him for the same reason: Liu is an outspoken liberal whose writings have promoted the idea that interpreting the Constitution requires much more than just divining the intent of the Founding Fathers.

In their interrogation of Liu, Senate Republicans are testing arguments they will use when President Obama nominates a successor to Stevens, who has declared his intention to step down from the high court in the coming months. Many Democrats hope Obama will name an outspoken liberal in the mold of Liu, and they plan to mount a vigorous defense of the 9th Circuit nominee to demonstrate that such a candidate can clear the Senate gauntlet.

At the hearing, Republicans attacked Liu on three fronts -- his writings, his experience and his incomplete submission of biographical information to the committee. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the committee, made clear his belief that Liu's writings "represent, I think, the very vanguard of what I would call intellectual judicial activism."

Sessions said Liu would look at the Constitution and "find rights there that have never been found before."

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) suggested that Liu endorsed allowing judges to disregard the plain meaning of statutes in favor of their personal views. "Do you really think that judges should have this much power over the law?" Hatch asked.

Liu parried Republicans' charges with nuanced answers, saying he found both the "originalist" and "judicial activist" labels insufficiently precise to be useful. Liu said the original intent of the Constitution's framers was "very important" for judges to consider, but "it is not the sole touchstone" of legal interpretation.

Faced with Republicans' citation of several potentially controversial passages in his past writings, Liu made clear that there was a difference between his duties as a law professor and scholar vs. what his responsibilities would be on the bench.

"Whatever I may have written in the books and the articles would have no bearing on my action as a judge," Liu said.

Republicans, particularly Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), were critical of Liu for his past opposition to the Supreme Court nominations of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. They focused on a passage from Liu's testimony to the Judiciary Committee during Alito's confirmation, which read: "Judge Alito's record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse; where federal agents may point guns at ordinary citizens during a raid, even after no sign of resistance; . . . where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man."

"This calls into question your judicial temperament," Kyl said, later adding: "I see it as very vicious and emotionally and racially charged. Very intemperate."

Liu acknowledged using "overly flowery language" but largely stood by his comments. He also compared himself to Alito, noting that both are from immigrant families and have worked their way up from humble origins.

Liu is seen in some quarters as a potential future candidate for the Supreme Court. Liu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, was a Rhodes scholar and Supreme Court clerk before assuming his current position at Berkeley. No Asian American has served on the Supreme Court, nor are there any Asian Americans among the active judges on the U.S. circuit courts of appeal.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chaired Friday's hearing and urged Obama to nominate Liu, cited Liu's personal and professional background to make the case for his confirmation in opening remarks at the hearing.

"He has an exceptional legal mind and a deep devotion to excellence in public service," Feinstein said, later adding of the 39-year-old Liu: "I cannot in my time on this committee remember someone quite so young who has done so much."

Republicans had sought to postpone Friday's hearing, with Sessions complaining that Liu omitted several important facts and documents in completing his original questionnaire for the committee.

Liu apologized, calling the omissions innocent mistakes. "My record is an open book," Liu said Friday. "I absolutely have no intention . . . to conceal things that I have said, written or done."

Liu's nomination awaits an as yet unscheduled committee vote before it can proceed to the Senate floor. Democratic leaders hope to move a number of lesser judicial nominations before the fight over Stevens's replacement consumes the chamber's attention, but they have yet to decide which nominees will move when.

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California Apologizes to Chinese Americans

By Ling Woo Liu

What's in an apology? Some expressions of remorse are commonplace — we hear them on the playground when kids smack each other on the head, or they land in your inbox after a friend forgets your birthday. It's the grand-scale apologies, it seems, that are harder to come by.

On July 17, the California legislature quietly approved a landmark bill to apologize to the state's Chinese-American community for racist laws enacted as far back as the mid–19th century Gold Rush, which attracted about 25,000 Chinese from 1849 to 1852. The laws, some of which were not repealed until the 1940s, barred Chinese from owning land or property, marrying whites, working in the public sector and testifying against whites in court. The new bill also recognizes the contributions Chinese immigrants have made to the state, particularly their work on the Transcontinental Railroad. (Check out a story about the Asian-American experience in late–20th century California.)

The apology is the latest in a wave of official acts of remorse around the globe. In 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a similar apology, expressing regret to Chinese Canadians for unequal taxes imposed on them in the late 19th century. Last February, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to his country's Aborigines for racist laws of the past, including the forced separation of children from their parents. Five months later, the U.S. Congress formally apologized to black Americans for slavery and the later Jim Crow laws, which were not repealed until the 1960s. And most notably, in 1988 the U.S. government decided to pay $20,000 to each of the surviving 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned in camps during World War II. Says Donald Tamaki, a San Francisco–based attorney who helped overturn wrongful WWII-era convictions of Japanese Americans: "Part of what a humane society does is recognize past injustices and address them."

The California resolution moved quickly through the state legislature since it was first introduced in February. "It's symbolic to recognize that the state made mistakes," says assembly member Paul Fong, who co-sponsored the legislation with assembly member Kevin de Leon. "These laws reverberate to this date because racism still exists." (Read about a new Asian-American stereotype in TIME'S 1987 cover story.)

Most of the direct victims of the laws in question have already passed away. Fong's grandfather was held for two months at Angel Island, an immigration station near San Francisco that targeted and detained several hundred thousand Chinese immigrants from 1910 to 1940. Dale Ching, 88, arrived at Angel Island from China's Guangdong province in 1937 at age 16. Though his father was an American citizen, immigration authorities detained Ching for 3½ months. "My intent was to try to have a better life, better than in China," says Ching. "But at that time, they didn't want you to get ahead."

How times have changed. In the throes of huge budget cuts, California is wooing cash-flush mainland Chinese tourists to its sun-kissed coastline and world-famous theme parks. So far this year, the state's Travel and Tourism Commission has opened offices in three Chinese cities. In 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger toured China on a six-day trade mission to peddle his state's produce, technology and raw materials. China is now California's fourth largest export market, after Mexico, Canada and Japan. In 2008 California exported $10.9 billion worth of goods to China, up 40% since 2005.

With the California bill in the bag, Fong now plans to take the issue to Congress, where he will request an apology for the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only federal law ever enacted to deny immigration based exclusively on race or nationality. Passed in 1882, the law was not fully repealed until 1943, after China and the U.S. became allies in WWII. Given President Obama's decision to appoint Gary Locke as Commerce Secretary and Steven Chu as Energy Secretary, Fong says he's confident of the bill's passage. "As a person of color, President Obama would understand these issues," he says.

Fong does not plan to press for financial compensation for the surviving victims of the state and federal laws in question, despite the Japanese-American precedent. More important than individual compensation, he says, is to help educate younger generations about the mistakes of the past. That said, Fong may ask for funding to help preserve the Angel Island immigration station, dilapidated after decades of neglect. To complicate matters, the station is located within a state park that, along with several others, may be shut down to help balance California's budget shortfall.

Not long after his father helped negotiate his release, Dale Ching joined the U.S. Army and fought Japanese forces during WWII. He went on to become an electronics technician, but after retiring, he began volunteering as a docent at Angel Island in hopes of drawing more attention to that moment in history. "We've been fighting, but nobody would listen," he says. "Finally someone has said sorry."