Web Magazine Online

Previous | Web Magazine | Next

By Jennifer Joe My Interview with Anh Tran: A Name To A Familiar Face Every week I go to class and see the same students, yet I don't know anything about any of them. I know their faces, but no information to go along with all these familiar faces. This assignment gave me a chance to meet one student in our class. The person I interviewed was Anh Tran. I found Anh to be very friendly and extremely easy to talk to. Anh is a fourth-year Asian-American Studies major, specializing in public policy at UCLA. He is very interested in debate and speech. Currently he is a coach for the UCLA debate team. Anh used also to be a member of the debate team himself. He would spend about twenty weekends out of the school year traveling to different debate conferences. Last year (spring 1997) Anh was also a participant in the Chinese Student Association's culture night performance. Anh was born in Vietnam, and when he was four years old his family moved to the United States to Texas. From Texas, they moved to San Jose, California. From San Jose, they moved to Anh's hometown -- Stockton, California. After graduation plans for Anh include law school. After law school he is interested in pursuing a career in litigation or public relations. Currently, he works at a law firm, which has given him a lot of experience and affirmed his decision to attend law school. When we moved onto the subject of race relations at UCLA, Anh had many opinions and views. He sees race relations on the UCLA campus, as being better than they are in the U.S. as a whole. His belief is that people are smarter at UCLA. Classes at UCLA teach levels of tolerance, and allow different students to mix and get to know each other. Anh admits that there are students that tend to only stick with others of the same ethnicity, but there is also a lot of racial mixture. On campus there is a lot of mixture, whether it be with dating or friendships. Anh feels that it would be difficult to find that kind of mixture anywhere else. Here on the UCLA campus, Anh believes there are things that can be done to improve race relations. For example, there should be an increase of classes like Asian-American M163/African-American M195, where we can learn about others. He also suggested forming a class that focused specially on race relations. This class would discuss controversial issues. People would probably be highly opinionated, but at the same time they would learn from others. Anh also believes that UCLA should get rid of race-based affirmative action programs. He believes that a better way to determine needs would be socioeconomic status. Anh admitted that this topic would be very controversial, but he wanted to include this in his argument. He voted for Proposition 209 in the last election. He believes that by getting rid of affirmative action, there would be a positive increase in race relations. He gave three very strong arguments to support this view. The first one is that if there was no affirmative action, people wouldn't look down on others (for example, people wouldn't look down at a person at UCLA, and think that they were only admitted because of affirmative action). The second one is that it would get rid of the "victim based society." Minorities couldn't do less work, because they feel that they are being helped by affirmative action. The third reason is that we shouldn't hire/accept people on the basis of race. When asked if he was doing anything to help bring about the above suggestions, Anh thought that by taking a class like Asian-American M163/African-American M195, it was a step in learning about others. He also said that he could also help improve race relations more by making suggestions to others about forming new ethnic studies courses, and also encouraging others to take some of these courses. At the end of the interview, I found Anh to have good ideas and opinions. I wouldn't have thought of many of the ideas he had if I hadn't talked to him. I feel that I learned a lot from the interview, and that's one more step in learning about others. (Jennifer Joe is a Senior majoring in Economics.)