: 1098376513

Setting an American precedent, the three candidates for the seat in the New York State Assembly for the 22nd District in Queens will square off for a debate where the only language spoken will be Mandarin, one of the two main Chinese dialects.

The three candidates, Jimmy Meng (Democrat), Meilin Tan (Republican) and Evergreen Chou (Green), all fluent in Mandarin, taped the event on Oct. 19 at QPTV Studios in Flushing. It was moderated by Ada Sheng, the event’s co-producer, on The Chinese New Yorker, a public access television show cablecast throughout Queens.

“We want to bring American democracy to New York’s Chinese community,” Sheng said.

Thomas Hillgardner, the event’s co-producer, agreed that the main goal of the show is to open up the political debate to the overwhelmingly Asian community of the 22nd District.

“Statistics show that eligible Asian voters are less likely to vote than either white, black or Hispanic voters,” Hillgardner said. “And it is understandable; if there’s a language barrier, the issues are not accessible, hence people are less inclined to vote for people they don’t know.”

The turnaround from the taping to having the show “in the can” for broadcasting was incredibly short—only one day, according to Hillgardner. This is one of the reasons no English-language subtitles will be offered when the event airs on Channel 57 on the Time Warner Cable system in Queens on Oct. 22 and 29 at 4:30 p.m. and Oct. 23 and 30 at 7 p.m.

“There was simply no time, physically, to invite translators and technicians to put together the English translation,” Hillgardner said.

Another reason translation was not considered essential was that the candidates will square off in a debate again—in English this time—on Saturday, Oct. 22.

Even though the event is billed as a debate, Hillgardner said it was more like a candidate forum in its format.

“We submitted questions to the candidates before the debate,” Hillgardner said. “The first three questions were kind of softball, allowing them to introduce themselves to the public. The last three dealt with their reactions on the Brennan Center findings about the State Legislature, the state death penalty law and bilingual education. All the candidates addressed the camera [during the taping] and not each other, so, even though I don’t know the language, I’m pretty sure there were no actual rebuttal, accusations or any other confrontational behavior attributable to a debate.”

Hillgardner sees multilingual political debates as a sign of time.

“Living in the most ethnically diverse metro area in the U.S., I am surprised this hasn’t happened earlier,” he said.