We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors, women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages. Now our guide, a Korean Chinese man who often worked for foreign journalists, had brought us to the Tumen River to document a well-used trafficking route and chronicle how the smuggling operations worked.Their investigation took them into North Korea, but only for a very short time -- less than a minute, they say -- but the consequences were dire, and they wonder if they'd been set up by an informant.
PARAMOUNT APOLOGISES TO THE JACL Los Angeles -- The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the nation's largest and oldest Asian American civil rights and community advocacy organization, welcomed Paramount Pictures' apology for "racially demeaning language" in its recently released film, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard.
Turnabout is fair play, right? It's karma. In Japanese, it's a bachi coming back -- basically, you reap what you sow. McDonald's in Japan has started using a laughable nerd who doesn't have a clue in its ads, mangling Japanese, looking all uptight in glasses and ill-fitting khakis. You'd think it's how an Asian would be cast in American commercials...
I had to post this, although I haven't had time to blog about the Asian American Journalists Association convention last week in Boston. This illustration was in the organization's silent auction and I had to have it. Cartoonist Tak Toyoshima, who draws the syndicated comic "Secret Asian Man," drew this the day before the start of the convention, specially for...
This is a nice touch in the age of social media -- direct communication with the people who supported their cause and hoped and prayed for their release with petitions, Facebook posts, Tweets and candlelight vigils. It's nice timing, since the plenary session for the first full day of the Asian American Journalism Association convention in Boston kicks off this morning...
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