U.S.A.
December 5, 2016
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
Lah Thao uses martial arts to overcome bullying
By Keith Uhlig
Wausau Daily Herald
AUSAU, Wisconsin (AP) —
Growing up Hmong in Wausau
during the 1990s wasn’t easy.
It was the height of cultural and political
upheaval created in the wake of the
Hmong immigration wave that brought
about a massive change in the racial pro-
file of the community. School leaders were
grappling with integration issues. Social-
service agencies were stretched. And
many longtime residents believed Asian
newcomers were demolishing their vision
of what an ideal community should look
like.
For Lah Thao, the son of an Asian father
and white mother, the times were argua-
bly even more difficult than for the typical
Hmong child. He’s 35 years old now, a
business owner, and a teacher at EEA
Learning Academy, a Wausau School
District charter school. But the memories
still sting: Hmong kids telling him he
belonged with white kids, and the white
kids not accepting him because he was
Hmong. He remembers being taunted,
kids yelling at him, “Go home you
(expletive) gook.”
“I had my fair shares of struggles in high
school,” Thao said.
He started wrestling in elementary
school. Thao used the sport to channel
aggression, but he still often found himself
answering taunts with taunts, punches
with punches. Sometimes, he became the
bully himself, he said.
W
His teenage anger was somewhat
softened by strong family support and a
firm Christian faith. But he also found a
turning point, he said, when he began to
study taekwondo, a Korean martial art
that blends karate and other traditional
fighting styles. The practice gave him
discipline and self-confidence, Thao said,
and curbed his tendency to lash out when
someone came at him.
“Taekwondo is primarily a defensive
art,” Thao told the Wausau Daily Herald.
“It just helped me stay calm. ... I didn’t get
into any more physical confrontations
after that.”
Knowing that he could do things such as
break bricks with his bare hands changed
his attitude. He got more patient. His
DISCIPLINE & SELF-CONFIDENCE.
Owner and instructor Lah Thao, right, trains his stu-
dents at the Rising Son in Wausau, Wisconsin. Thao
uses martial arts to overcome bullying. (T’xer Zhon
Kha/The Post-Crescent via AP)
confidence in himself got stronger. Things
got better.
Today, as a teacher and the father of two
daughters, Aerial, 15, and Akaya, 11, he
still battles bullying, this time as an adult
who works to curb it.
Overt racism isn’t as prevalent today in
Wausau as it was 20 years ago, Thao said,
but it’s still there. And kids face different
challenges than he did, including the
presence of online bullying.
Parents need to be aware of what their
kids are thinking and feeling, he said,
watching for the signs of bullying that
erode a child’s self-confidence and
wellbeing.
“Make sure you know what your kids are
doing,” Thao said.
As a teacher, his main strategy against
bullying is getting to know his students.
“In our school, we get the benefit of
developing strong relationships, and that’s
key,” Thao said.
He also uses the tool that helped him
deal with bullies when he was a kid — mar-
tial arts and physical exercise. He takes a
group of EEA students on an 83-mile bike
ride from Weston to Howard on the Moun-
tain Bay Trail. Thao also has received
grant money to offer martial-arts training
at the school. Both of those activities help
kids often understand they are capable of
doing more than they thought.
In graveyard of dead coral in Pacific, hope and life bloom
By Seth Borenstein
AP Science Writer
ASHINGTON — In a
ghost town of dead
coral off a remote
Pacific island, scientists have
found a bit more life.
In excursions a year ago and
then last April, scientists exam-
ined the normally stunning coral
reefs around the island of Kiriti-
mati and pronounced it mostly a
boneyard of dead coral. About 85
percent of the coral was dead, 10
percent was sick and bleached
but still technically alive, and
only five percent was doing OK.
The same scientists returned
in November and found six to
seven percent of the coral is alive
and not bleached, said University
of Victoria coral reef scientist
Julia Baum, speaking by Skype
from the island.
“We left with a sense of dread
and came back with a renewed
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purpose because there are some
corals that literally came back
from the brink,” said Georgia
Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb,
who returned from the expedition
earlier. “It’s the best we could
have hoped for.”
Many of the fish that rely on
the reef and had been absent
seem to be back, Cobb said.
Hot water — mostly from El
Niño, the natural occasional
warming of the Pacific that
changes weather worldwide, and
manmade global warming — had
made the area one of the worst hit
coral spots in the world. Later,
nearby Jarvis Island was even
more damaged. And the death of
85 percent of the coral of the
better known and much larger
Great Barrier Reef has been
reported, said C. Mark Eakin,
coral reef watch coordinator for
the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
“But
despite
this
mass
mortality, there are a few small
signs of hope,” Baum said. “It’s
clear that coral reefs have great
resilience and the coral here is
trying to recover.”
Not only has some of the
bleached coral recovered, she
said, but “there are coral babies
that have settled on the reef
sometime in the last year to
year-and-a-half and these are the
reef’s best hope for recovery.”
A study published recently in
the journal Current Biology goes
back more than a million years
and finds that even during mass
CORAL COMEBACK? Georgia Tech
climate scientist Kim Cobb explores un-
derwater on the remote Pacific island of
Kiritimati in November, finding a bit of
hope and life amid what in April was a
ghost town of dead coral. Cobb used
bags and drills to examine the coral and
take core samples. (Alyssa Atwood, Na-
tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis-
tration/Georgia Tech via AP)
die-offs, coral species are able to
rebound.
Eakin points to Scott reef off
western Australia where 12
years after the damaging 1998 El
Niño coral die-off, nearly half the
original reef revived. But it was
damaged again by the recent El
Niño.
Even after the recovery seen at
Kiritimati, Baum is wary: “It’s
like having a patient who is very
sick and instead of letting them
recover we keep infecting them
with more and more illnesses.
There’s only so much that any
person — or any natural system
— can take.”
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