FrontPage Magazine, April 15, 2011
Interview by Jamie Glazov
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ying Ma, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. She is the author of the new book, Chinese Girl in the Ghetto , which has been endorsed by Ward Connerly, Founder and President of the American Civil Rights Institute and the man who has led the fight to end state-sponsored racial quotas and preferences across the country; and by Xiao Qiang, Adjunct Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a prominent Chinese human rights activist.
FP: Ying Ma, welcome to Frontpage Magazine.
Tell us about your new book.
Ying Ma: Thank you Jamie.
The book, at its most basic level, is a story about a little girl’s journey from the insidiousness of Chinese authoritarianism to the horrors of inner-city America. The story begins in China in the late 1970s, where economic reforms are rapidly transforming the country into a more hopeful, more colorful place, and where our protagonist immerses herself in a world of fantasy and foreign influences while grappling with the mundane vagaries of Communist rule. In the mid-1980s, she happily immigrates to Oakland, California, expecting her new life to be far better in all ways than life in China. Instead, she discovers crumbling schools, unsafe streets, and racist people. In the land of the free, she comes of age amid the dysfunction of a city’s brokenness and learns to hate in the shadows of urban decay. The book is a story about her journey and how she prevailed.
FP: And that little girl is you, you’re the Chinese girl in the ghetto.
YM: Yes, the book is autobiographical. It is about my family’s journey from Guangzhou, China’s third largest city, to inner-city Oakland, California.
FP: On your website, you refer to the book as “a politically incorrect memoir.” What makes it politically incorrect?
Read entire interview here.
Ying Ma 