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December 12, 2008

Clint Eastwood in a scene from his new movie, "Gran Torino." Clint Eastwood, who looked at one of the most famous battles of World War II through the eyes of doomed Japanese soldiers in the 2006 film, "Letters from Iwo Jima," is now lookng at Asian Americans and racism in an upcoming movie, "Gran Torino." Eastwood plays a racist Korean War veteran and retired Ford factory employee, Walt Kowalski, who's been beaten down by life. The only two steadfast things in his life are his 1972 Gran Torino, an artifact from the glory days of Ford muscle, and his M-1 rifle, an artifact from the glory days of American muscle. Everything else around him is going to hell: his wife has recently died, he's estranged from his grown kids, and to his dismay, his rundown neighborhood is becoming over-run by Asians. The incoming foreigners are Hmong, not Korean. Eastwood's character gets to know the Hmong family that moves in next door after their 16-year-old son tries to steal his Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. Predictably, Eastwood at first hates them but then grows close, and protects them against the gang. The movie's trailer shows some typical interactions between a cranky white man and black neighborhood punks and scary-looking Asian gang members. Knowing Eastwood, I bet the plot is more complicated than the predictable scenes in the trailer, though. This is the first time a Hollywood movie has taken a deep dive into the Hmong community, so it's an opportunity to teach Americans about their history and culture, and of the AAPI culture of second generation Hmong Americans. Besides Eastwood, the movie stars a group of first-time actors, most if not all Hmong (no hiring of non-ethnically accurate actors just for the right "talent" or "star power" a la "Memoirs of a Geisha"), and the casting was featured in a series of interviews in a Hmong news site, Suab Hmong Radio:
December 11, 2008

Special ramen at Taki I'm having leftovers for lunch as I type. Really good leftovers: ramen from Taki's Restaurant, an inventive, unique and funky dive of a Japanese joint on E. Colfax Avenue and Pennsylvania in downtown Denver's Capitol Hill district. It a block from the state Capitol, and three blocks from my office. Ramen is relatively new to Taki's. The restaurant usually serves udon, the thick Japanese noodle, or soba, the thin but brittle Japanese buckwheat noodle. The owner, Hisashi "Brian" Takimoto, who usually just goes by "Taki," (I call him "Taki-san" out of respect but he's too unassuming to think he deserves an honorofic and seem embarrassed by it, just began buying fresh-made and packaged ramen noodles from a company in California, and now offers it as an option. We've been in an unrequited ramen mood for weeks. We'd heard that a new spinoff in Boulder of the great Amu (our current fave Japanese restaurant and itself a spinoff of Sushi Zanmai next door) called Bento Zanmai on the University Hill served ramen during certain hours. But we tried twice to go there and the place was closed. I checked a short list of area Japanese restaurants that serve ramen, and the only two candidates I found were in Longmont, a small town northeast of Boulder. The one place in the area thar's known for noodles, Oshima Ramen in southeast Denver, had fallen off our list over the years for being expensive, less tasty than when it opened over a decade ago, and recently, kinda dirty (never mind Westword's surpisingly naive rave "Best of Denver 2008" award). Hisashi Takimoto has operated his restaurant for 20 years.We'll make it to Bento Zanmai someday -- they serve ramen only from 3-6 pm weekdays, and from 11am-3 pm Saturdays (they close at 3 on Saturdays!) -- but for now, I've been so desperate I made a package of instant ramen at home one night last week. It actually hit the spot. So when we decided at stop at Taki's for a bite the other night after attending a reception hosted by the Consul-General of Japan to mark the birthday (Dec. 23) of Emperor Akihito, we were jonesing. When taki came out front to greet us, we accosted him: "When are you going to start serving ramen?" "I can make it for you," was the reply. We almost kissed his feet. Well, not really. Have you ever looked at the shoes of anyone who works in the kitchen of a restaurant? Gross. It turns out he'd just started serving ramen as a daily special. They'd stopped for the evening but he boiled some noodles for us anyway, and it was a real treat.
December 10, 2008

Nobel Prize-winning UC Berkeley professor Steven Chu is reportedly going to be named as President-elect Barack Obama MSNBC.com this afternoon reported that an Asian American, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had turned from studying quantum physics to combating global warming, will be named next week as President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for the cabinet post of Energy Secretary. Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley since 2004, is the 60-year-old son of Chinese immigrants who came to the US in the 1940s for post-graduate studies at MIT. He'll be the second Chinese American cabinet member; the first is Elaine Chao, who's currently serving as President Bush's Secretary of Labor. It's pretty cool to think that a scientist -- the ultimate geek and somewhat unfortunately, a living testament to the persistence of the "Model Minority" myth -- is going to be in charge of the greening of our country. We can call him the top national nerd. Huffington Post reports:
December 10, 2008

Ahn Joseph Cao is the new Congressman from LouisianaThe national organization APIA Vote made it abundantly clear during both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, where they did a lot of recruiting and convened caucuses: Asian American Pacific Islanders are not involved enough in politics. We're not great at getting the vote out, we don't participate as much as we could at the grassroots local level, and not enough Asian Americans run for and serve in elected office. A lot of that is cultural -- many of us are raised with the admonition: Don't bring attention to yourself. Don't make waves. The nail that sticks out gets nailed down (a particularly vivid Japanese saying that my mom has used on me). This logic steers us away from public career fields such as news media (oops, sorry, screwed that one up, mom) and politics. Given the range of offices and opportunities, relatively few AAPI politicians have national profiles. They include former Congressman and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, Former washington Governor Gary Locke, Congressman Mike Honda of California, current Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, Illinois Veterans Affiars Director Tammy Duckworth, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawai'i, Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawai'i... OK, Hawai'i skews the curve. Indian American Bobby Jindal is the governor of LouisianaBut Louisiana, which is probably not on most peoples' list of Asian-rich states, now boasts two AAPIs in nationally notable positions: Bobby Jindal (left) is the country's first-ever Indian American Governor, and as of last weekend, Ahn Joseph Cao (above right) is the country's first Vietnamese American Congressman. The kicker: both are Republicans, which really shouldn't surprise anyone but still has some people pondering the preponderance of party affiliations among the Asian American community. Jindal, for one, was one of John McCain's possible choices for running mate, and he's been touted as a possible presidential candidate for 2012, given his moderate social agenda and conservative fiscal outlook. Cao fled Vietnam during the Saigon with his mother (his father was imprisoned by the Viet Cong for seven years) with the wave of "boat people" refugees, and managed to defeat an incumbent Democrat in a Democratic stronghold district.
December 9, 2008

Actor Keanu Reeves, who is half-Asian, will play a samurai in an upcoming move, 47 Ronin.The Hollywood news source Variety reported yesterday that Keanu Reeves, everyone's favorite hapa actor (his father is Hawai'ian-Chinese) is going to play the lead role in a samurai epic, "47 Ronin." The 47 Ronin is the celebrated 18th century story from Japanese history, of a group of masterless samurai who avenged the death of their feudal lord, or daimyo, after a year of planning and then committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, to maintain their warrior code of honor, or bushido. The story's been told a lot in Japanese movies, in variations of the title "Chushingura." The most recent remake in Japan was "47 Ronin" ("Shijushichinin no shikaku") in 1994, written and directed by Kon Ichikawa. It's cool to think that Hollywood is going to tell this story, with the the spectacle of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the star power of Reeves. Keanu Reeves played Siddhartha in the 1993 film Little Buddha.But it makes me wonder about the choice of Reeves. Yeah, he knows martial arts (and proved it in the Matrix movies), and he's part Asian. But he's not Japanese. And, hellooo, he doesn't look very Asian. When "Memoirs of a Geisha" was produced with Chinese women in the lead roles, it bothered some in the Japanese American community, including me. (It also caused a stir in China, where the women were criticized for playing Japanese roles.) Could it really have been so hard to find qualified Japanese actresses (which was the filmmakers' excuse)? I definitely get that Reeves brings a big name-brand to the samurai film so he's important. But his one previous role playing an Asian was downright surreal, and it makes me apprehensive about how this one will go.
December 8, 2008

Sierra Club decalThe folk-rock group I play with, Mallworthy, was asked to perform at a holiday party and awards ceremony for the Sierra Club in Boulder last night. The event was held in the cafeteria of a Unitarian church, and there was a constant clatter with a couple-hundred people standing in line for the array of potluck food and then sitting and eating the food, while they talked and laughed. We could barely hear ourselves play our brilliantly rehearsed setlist, never mind anyone in the "audience" paying any attention. One woman who stood about four feet in front of me while she waited in the food line leaned over and said she could barely hear our instruments but not our voices at all. So when a well-heeled middle-aged woman in all black began banging her wine glass with a fork -- during one of our songs -- so the crowd could quiet down and listen to her announcements and several pages of "Bushisms" that she's collected, I had had enough. It was a reflection of how invisible and unnecessary we were to the festivities at hand. Almost half an hour later, while the merry members held their raffle giveaway, we decided we should just pack up and go home. We couldn't even consider this a rehearsal since we couldn't hear each others' parts. It was nice to just get out of there. But I had a cloud nagging at me all night, long after I'd gone home and started watching TV to distract my brain. Even before the presumptuous woman interrupted our playing, I had looked out over the room and noted a disturbing fact: Besides myself, there were two Asian faces (women, who appeared to be there with Caucasian partners) and one African American woman. I wasn't sure if anyone in the room was Hispanic. But it was clear that overwhelmingly, the room was filled with eager, erstwhile, Earth-loving white people.
December 7, 2008

Retired Army General Eric Shinseki was named by Obama to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs Back on Veterans Day I posted an article about how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been heroes for generations in the U.S. military, and ended the article with a note about retired Four-Star Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff and the highest-ranked AAPI in the military. Today, NBC released an excerpt of an interview with Barack Obama to air on tomorrow's "Meet the Press" program, during which the President-elect tells Tom Brokaw that he's naming Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. The timing of the announcement isn't coincidental. Tomorrow is Sunday, December 7, the 67th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Shinseki is Japanese American, and he was born in Hawai'i on November, 28, 1942. He and Barack Obama both have childhood roots in Hawai'i. Shinseki is a Vietnam veteran, who lost part of a foot from stepping on a land mine. He was named Army Chief of Staff in 1999 and retired in 2003... many thought, under duress from the Bush administration for his views which contradicted the official one on the war against Iraq. On February 25, 2003, a few months before the end of his appointment and the start of his retirement, Shinseki testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought an occupying force of several hundred thousand men would be needed to stabilize postwar Iraq. His analysis was bluntly dismissed by the Bush administration. Here's part of a transcript of the proceedings:
December 6, 2008

hapa singer-songwriter kina grannis Surfing YouTube videos can be like the early days of surfing the Internet. Following links to random Web pages is a leap of faith, a trust in kismet, that what you're about to see is both somehow related to what you were seeking in the first place, and hopefully entertaining. In the midst of one of my YouTube forays, following related videos then backing up and taking another path to other videos, I came across one of my favorite songs of all time, "Ue O Muite Arukou" by Kyu Sakamoto, the Japanese pop star who had a worldwide #1 hit with the song in 1963. You probably know the song better by the name put on it by its American label, "Sukiyaki." It's been covered in English by a number of artists, most notably Taste of Honey in the '80s and the Viet pop singer Trish Thuy Trang more recently. She sings both English and Japanese in her version. (See Sakamoto's, Taste of Honey's and Tran's video versions below. They're all available on YouTube.) From there, I clicked to a cover version of the song by a hapa musician named Kina Grannis and was pleasantly surprised by the sweet, cool, understated quality of her version of the song -- which she sings in the original Japanese -- as well as the scope and depth of her talent on other videos. Here's the video: Grannis is from Southern California, and won a songwriting contest sponsored by Doritos with the catchy song, "Message from Your Heart," which was aired during the Super Bowl in February. The contest led to a deal with Interscope Records.