Category Archives: asian american

Steven Chu to be named President Obama’s Energy Secretary

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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:
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Asian Americans aren’t all members of one political party

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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.
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Keanu Reeves as a samurai: Is it still ‘yellowface’ if the actor is hapa?

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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.
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Obama names retired General Eric Shinseki as Veterans Affairs Secretary

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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:
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‘Sukiyaki,’ Kina Grannis’ music and the random magic of YouTube

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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.
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