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Kate Agathon is organizing an exhibit in Indiana for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Kate Agathon, a grad school instructor at Purdue University and producer for photographer William L. Snyder (who took the portrait above, which was used originally on AngryAsianMan.com in a profile of Kate), is taking on a big art project and she needs your help. She's organizing a show called "ImaginAsian," and inviting anyone who is interested in submitting artwork to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, to get the art by Feb. 28. You don't have to be an "arteest." You just need to fit an image or statement about the Asian American experience into an 8 1/2x11" space, and submit it with a mere $5 donation as an entry fee. The project is a fundraiser for Purdue's Asian American studies department, which is just getting started. The exhibit will be on display at the Tippecanoe Arts Federation in West Lafayette, Indiana, from April 2-May 9. Agathon explains the concept very eloquently:

Japanese have trouble saying certain English consonants and vowels. Will they be able to say "iPad" and keep it different from "iPod?" Like a lot of geeks and a lot of people in journalism, I paid close attention to the weeks of hype and rumors, and then the official announcement yesterday, of Apple's potentially "game-changing" new tablet computer, the iPad. For weeks, the tech media have passed along rumor after rumor about the device and its features, but the most vexing of all rumors was the name. Blogs tracked down trademark filings and obscure documents and the main contenders for the name were "iSlate" and "iTablet." At the last minute, "iPad" was proposed. And during Apple's hour-and-a-half media event unveiling the gadget, Steve Jobs immediately announced it would indeed be called the "iPad." Then I immediately thought, "Wow, I wonder how the Japanese are going to deal with this name?" The iPod has been long-established in Japan as the premiere digital music player, as it is all over the world. I saw "i-pahd-do" everywhere in Tokyo, in shop windows and being used by music fans, with those iconic but crappy white earbuds. Now comes the iPad. And I predict there will be some major consumer confusion stirred up in Japan.

I saw this on Angry Asian Man and it made me smile, both because Erin and I really enjoy the Fox series "Glee!" and because it's good to see that Akebono, the sumo wrestler who sings "Don't Stop Believin'" on the commercial, is still a star with drawing power in Japan. You might notice that for a sumo wrestler, Akebono sings...

Many of my fellow Asian American bloggers have mentioned this already, but time's running out so I thought I better get a word in too. The Center for the Pacific Asian Family, a Los Angeles-based provider of support and services for women who are victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, is trying to get enough votes on Facebook to receive $1 million from the Chase Community Giving campaign. To help out CPAF, an all-star group of Asian American personalities including artists, performers, musicians and yes, bloggers in the LA area took the time to be part of the video above. Here's how it works: You click to the "Vote CPAF" page on Facebook (you'll have to approve the Chase Community Giving app) and just vote for CPAF by THIS FRIDAY to try and boost their tally to the top of the list. You can see the leaderboard of all the non-profits across the country vying for this funding (the Chase Trust is giving away a total of $5 million, with $1m going to the top organization and the rest being spread out in smaller amounts). So vote today, right now. Having said all that, here's why this Chase Trust program bugs me: It reduces charitable giving to a popularity contest, and forces hundreds (perhaps thousands) of non-profits to scramble and try to get votes from people who already support them, and people who who've never heard of them. I'm sure all the groups on the leaderboard are worthy causes. And I'm sure CPAF is deserving of the $1, or any smaller amount.

Gwendoline Yeo, an actress and musician, is writing a funny and powerful autobiographical one-woman show about growing up an Asian American who immigrated as a child from Singapore. We saw an awesome theatrical performance over the weekend, as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' "Stories on Stage" series of dramatic literary readings. The performance was a draft of "Laughing with My Mouth Wide Open," a work in progress. It's a one-woman show by Gwendoline Yeo, an actress and musician from Los Angeles whose script is an autobiographical look back at her life as an Asian American who immigrated as a child from Singapore. Yeo sat on an austere stage accompanied by only one other actor sitting at the back, who read the light and sound cues from the script, as well as some lines as the Speak and Spell toy she speaks to as a child, and later, a college professor who befriends, and then betrays her. Set up on one side of the stage was a guzheng, or Chinese zither, which Yeo played with great passion and ability several times during the performance. She read from a script she held in her hand -- this was only the second time she'd performed the entire piece in front of an audience. The first time was the same day during a matinee reading. The only prop on stage was the Speak and Spell. Although the completed one-woman play will have props and furniture and costuming, the lovely Yeo didn't need any embellishments to hold the audience's attention. She had us laughing and thinking, inspired and outraged, as we followed her life from an 11-year-old from Singapore, raised by a strict, authoritarian father and strict, traditional mother, competing for attention with a perfect, over-achieving "model minority" sister and a freakish but cool brother whose love for cowboys has turned him permanently into a drawling, American-style country boy. Her stories are full of sharp observations about cultural differences, and the journey that all immigrants, not just Asians, undertake to become Americanized. She recites stereotypes of white people when her father announces the family is moving to San Francisco in a week. In an effort to fit in at her private school in San Francisco, young Gwendoline tries to hang with a gang of Asian chicks who identify more with African Americans and speak "Chinkbonics," but can't quite make it through the initiation crime. She wants to break family tradition and attend college in Los Angeles instead of UC-Berkeley, where her sister and brother go. She wants to study communications, not medicine or law, which are the two choices her father gives her. She gets in trouble with her parents for coming home with a B on a test. The scenes are full of insights about traditional Asian values butting up against American ambitions. She tells these stories with incredible humor, and mostly keeps us laughing out loud with our mouth open -- something that she points out early in the play, is what white people in America do, but not Asians.

Is it just me, or is it irritating to have some white guy co-opting Asian iconography for a TV commercial and combining two different cultures? Sure, it's a cool idea, and certainly well-executed production-wise. But this stop-action video made to pimp Google's new Nexus One "super-phone" (their description, not mine) bugs me. The animated miniature ninjas -- of non-specific, though...