Erin and I are excited to announce the next call in our series of conversations with Asian American leaders and newsmakers. We’ll be speaking with Jen Wang and Diana Nguyen of Disgrasian on Tuesday, September 21 at 7 pm PT (10 pm ET — it’s an hour later than our usual calls).
If you follow Asian American news and issues, there’s a very short list of must-read blogs to visit every day. They include Angry Asian Man, 8 Asians and Slant Eye for the Round Eye, for starters.
And there’s also Disgrasian, the influential blog created by Diana Nguyen and Jen Wang, two friends in the LA area who cover Asian American pop culture and politics with an edgy, acerbic, funny, smart and smart-ass attitude.
Diana and Jen have been featured on NPR, The Associated Press, The Daily Beast, Metro NY’s “Best of the Blogs,” and Hyphen magazine (a cover story!), and they have spoken at NYU, Yale, Harvard, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, and USC. Diana and Jen are also regular contributors to the Huffington Post and have created a web series for Adult Swim called Hollywood Slant. But their greatest achievement by far has been being named “Race Hustlers” and “Assorted Moonbats” by conservative pundit Michelle Malkin.
Jen received her BA in Literature from Yale and her MFA in creative writing from Columbia. Her fiction has appeared in WSQ. She’s also worked as a freelance journalist and her writing has been published in Vogue Hommes, V-Man, C Magazine, and The New York Times’ T Magazine.
Diana is a Los Angeles-based writer and producer. Her production company, New Birch, creates non-fiction/documentary television. She has developed viral marketing strategies for various LA non-profit organizations, including Youth Mentoring Connection and Generation Obama Los Angeles. Previously, she served as Associate Director of Norman Lear’s Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign that has registered 4.4 million first-time young voters.
Together, the pair are a terrific tag-team of opinionated rants and acerbic observations of Asian America, including news and issues for and about AAPIs from Tila Tequila — a popular Disgrasian target — to the upcoming reboot of “Hawaii Five-0.” No one is safe from the pair’s sharp wit, including their own “hard-ass Asian parents” (a topic they bring up often). Here’s an excerpt from a recent post by Diana:
I spent most of today trying to remember what my official “birds and bees†talk was like. My memory was just so fuzzy—didn’t my mom walk into my room one day during junior high, sit down on my bed, pat the seat next to her, and ask if I’d been feeling a little different lately? Something like that?
Oh wait, that was a Full House episode or something. My mom never gave me the talk. Like, NEVER. We NEVER TALKED ABOUT SEX.
… I think the conversation, if we’d ever had one, would have been one-sided: “Don’t have sex.†Conversation over.
These women don’t suffer from the Asian stereotype of being meek and mild-mannered, and not wanting to make waves. They don’t hold back, and they’re in your face with their running commentary, which is what makes them so refreshing.
Please join us for what promises to be one of the most unforgettable visualizAsian conversations we’ll have (and submit questions for Jen and Diana)!
Here’s a great video interview with Diana and Jen by Steve Nguyen of FlipHD:
SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE LIVE INTERVIEW WITH JEN WANG & DIAN NGUYEN OF DISGRASIAN AT 7 PM PT (10 PM ET) THURSDAY, SEPT. 21! You can listen to the live interview over the phone (long distance charges may apply) or FREE via a webcast. You can also submit questions for Jen and Diana before and during the interview. If you miss the live event, you can listen to the interview for a limited time online.
