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May 22, 2009

The brother and sister team of Tammy and Victor Jih were winners of season 14 of It's been a few weeks since this happened; I meant to write about it earlier, but better late than never, right? Asian Americans are finally getting more exposure on the TV screen, both in roles that don't require FoB accents (that's "fresh of the boat," for those of you new to the expression), and also in reality TV shows. Apolo Anton Ohno and Kristi Yamaguchi were "Dancing with the Stars" champions (and Carrie Ann Inaba is the best of the show's three judges). Each of the three seasons of "America's Best Dance Crew" has seen groups with mostly Asian American members as its champions. Yul Kwon beat out competitors to win "Survivor: Cook Islands." (Yul will be a guest on visualizAsian.com's AAPI Empowerment Series on June 9.) Now, congratulations are due to the Chinese American brother-and-sister team of Tammy and Victor Jih for being crowned champions of "The Amazing Race 14."
May 18, 2009

Erin and I are launching a new site this week, visualizAsian.com, that will celebrate the accomplishments of Asian American Pacific Islanders with live audio interviews conducted over a conference phone line that will also be streamed live on a webcast, and then will be playable online afterwards. We're pleased to announce the debut interview will be with Norman Mineta,...

May 16, 2009

Sakura in Tokyo byJames T. Kirk on Vimeo. No doubt about it, the springtime blooming of sakura, or cherry blossoms, in Japan is one reason the country is special. The Japanese treat the season with wonder, with weather forecasts about the optimal blooming days and following the cherry blossoms from the warmer southern climate all the way up to Hokkaido, the...

May 14, 2009

Yul Kwon, winner of Survivor: Cook Island, told stories about the show when he spoke at the Coors APA Heritage Month event. Call him Cool Yul. If you're a fan of "Survivor," you know who Yul Kwon is. He's the Korean American attorney who won the "Cook Island" season (season 13), helping to chip away at the myth that Asian men are meek and mild-mannered geeks. He was a good student, all right, and he works hard, so he fulfills the "model minority" stereotype in those ways. But he's also buff, handsome, an eloquent speaker (even though he says he hates public speaking) an Asian American activist and just plain cool. Kwon was in Colorado yesterday, as the main speaker for an APA Heritage Month celebration organized by the MillerCoors Asian Network, the beer-maker based in Golden just west of Denver. Also on the bill were traditional Filipino dances by members of the Filipino American Community of Colorado, and terrific Filipino food by local chef Leah Eveleigh's Tropical Grill Catering. The turnout was smaller than it should have been -- shame on the local Asian American community for not coming out to support this kind of event, which was free of charge and featured a nationally-known celebrity as a draw. But the crowd that was there about half Asian descent, and mostly curious Coors employees and their families, was appreciative of Kwon's speech, and the performances and food. I thought Kwon's speech was especially notable. He'd been to Denver before, last year during the Democratic National Convention, to urge Asian Americans to register to vote. He's still passionate about having AAPIs involved in politics, but he's not so interested in running for office himself, as he explained to a fan who asked. But his speech was all about his experiences growing up Asian in America, and how important it is for our future to have AAPIs to look up to as role models. He explained how he grew up without seeing anyone who looked like him on TV or in movies, except people who were subservient, foreign and exotic, or at the other end of the scale, martial arts masters.
May 5, 2009

The Korean Canadian teen who fought back against a bully and won the support of his classmates has been allowed back in school. Last week I wrote about the 15-year-old, who was suspended from school and charged with assault by the York Regional Police in a town north of Toronto, for breaking the nose of another student. The other student had been bullying him, and called him a "fucking Chinese" before hitting the boy. Unfortunately for the bully, the Korean kid (his ethnicity wasn't identified in the earlier story) is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, the Korean martial art (his father is a master), and he defended himself with his weaker left hand, but still broke the bully's nose. Because the bully wasn't initially charged (both were suspended form school however), 400 students at Keswick High School protested last week to point out the injustice. A racial bias investigation was kicked off (no word on what happened to that). Although the school board initially recommended expulsion and blocking the Korean Canadian student from any of the district's schools (seem pretty harsh to me -- any racial bias there on the part of the administration?), they changed their minds since last week.
May 4, 2009

Google ran into trouble in japan over the use of historical maps of Tokyo that showed areas where burakumin, or the lowest caste, used to live. Poor Google. They're in a tough spot this time. The Internet giant has hit some cultural snags in Japan before, over how it rolled out its products in the Land of the Rising Sun. This time, they're in trouble because Google used publicly available historical maps of Tokyo and Osaka in an overlay for its popular (and amazing) Google Earth program. The problem is, the maps showed the locations of former villages where the "burakumin" used to live in feudal times. The locations have long since been developed with the concrete, steel and glass of modern Tokyo, but the antique map has dredged up centuries and shame, and a fresh spate of anger from the descendants of burakumin as well as government officials who'd just as soon forget that such prejudice ever existed -- and apparently still exists.
May 4, 2009

A Japanese American festival in Seabrook, NJ where the community performs a traditional Japanese obon dance It's May. Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I wonder, though, if this celebration of our heritage is an idea whose time has passed. I'm glad that we have our month every year, but I'm worried that we're emphasizing the wrong things year after year. Erin and I are starting to feel that APA Heritage Month may be counter-productive. The Pacific Citizen published a well-written piece last week, "Time to Rethink Asian Pacific American Heritage Month?" and I agree, it's time to re-think the tradition even though it's only 31 years old. Last year, I wrote about how a 10-year-old Denver event, an Asian community celebration held in downtown Denver every May, needed to evolve from just Asians performing for other Asians. It was a useful educational display back when our many communities stayed cloistered and Japanese didn't know much about Vietnamese, and Vietnamese didn't know much about Filipinos, and Filipinos didn't know much about Cambodians and Cambodians didn't know much about Koreans... you get the idea. But today, with especially young people mixing a lot more outside their own communities, it seems like a closed celebration, like preaching to the choir about the richness of our heritage. If you attend the annual event, you've seen many of the same performers year after year. Even if the audience was expanded outside the Asian community, though, to the wider non-Asian population, I wonder if that would be good or bad for Asian Americans.
May 1, 2009

Two 13-year-old boys in Boulder, Colorado have been arrested (police plan a to arrest a third boy, 10) for calling a 12-year-old girl's cell phone and threatening to rape and kill her because she's Asian. Here's the story from the Boulder Daily Camera. It's more evidence that race in America is still an unsettled issue, lying just below the placid surface of even politically-correct communities. According to Boulder police spokesperson Sarah Huntley, the three boys dialed the girl's phone and described a violent sexual attack using explicit language:
The girl hung up, Huntley said, and they called back and left two messages telling her that she would die because of what they were going to do to her. "The girl answered the first call, but her parents intercepted the other messages," Huntley said. "They didn't pick up the phone, but they listened to the messages and shielded their daughter from hearing them." The messages included details about damaging the girl's female organs, Huntley said. "In the messages, they indicated that they wanted to have sex with her because she was Asian," Huntley said. "That is the basis for charging them with a bias-motivated crime."
Boulder may be liberal politically and environmentally, but not always racially. In recent years, the University of Colorado -- where most of the city's Asians and other people of color can be found -- has suffered a series of embarrassing racial incidents that range from vioelnce against minorities to a campus news website columnist satirically declaring "war against Asians."