Category Archives: places

Why it’s important for me to be part of AAJA and in the company of Asian American journalists

By | | , ,
Leave a comment

Tak Toyoshima, creator of Secret Asian Man, and Jeff Yang, one of the editors of "Secret Identities," at the 2009 AAJA Convention in Boston.
Tak Toyoshima, creator of “Secret Asian Man,” and Jeff Yang, one of the editors of the recently-published book “Secret Identities,” sign copies at the 2009 AAJA Convention in Boston.

“Where are you from?” “So, where are YOU from?” “Hi, where’re you from?”

I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago, at a convention where everyone asked each other “Where are you from?” and no one got offended. It cracked me up, hearing the question over and over.

Let me explain, for my non-Asian readers: Just about every Asian American I know – seriously – has been asked this question sometime (or many times) in their life. It’s often preceded by a variation of the statement, “You speak English so well… where are you from?” And once we answer “California,” or “Denver,” it’s often followed by a variation of “No, you know what I mean, where were you born?” Which might be followed, after we answer “California” or “New York City,” by “No, where’s your FAMILY from?”

That’s when we can cut off the silliness and get to the point: “Are you asking what’s my ethnic heritage?”

I just don’t see European Americans having this conversation, unless they have, say, a British or French or German accent. People assume Asian Americans are foreigners even if we “speak English so well” because of the way we look.

Anyway, I heard the “where are you from?” question dozens of times and we all answered eagerly without getting defensive. It’s because the ones asking were also AAPI, and we really did want to know where each other was from. We were at the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association, a non-profit professional organization that supports Asian Americans in the media.

And after spending several days in Boston with the AAJA, I have hope for journalism. Continue reading →

Boa mashes Asian, Mexican cuisine in cross-cultural menu

By | | , ,
2 Comments

Since the fastest-growing population in the United States is mixed-race and we live in an increasingly global and multicultural world, it makes perfect sense that a restaurant like Boa on West 32nd would open, and serve a mashup of Mexican and various Asian cuisines.

Erin and I got to sample some of Boa’s cooking recently, when we were asked by Asian Avenue magazine to write up one of their ‘Restaurant Peek” features on the eatery. We met photographer ace Brandon Iwamoto there and tasted the food and spoke with the owners on an afternoon interrupted by a tornado warning and a twister curling down from the sky in the neighborhood (it never touched down).

Inside, the restaurant reflected none of the dark fury of the weather outside (except when the entire staff and all the customers ran out in the street to gape at the funnel cloud).

The small, comfy eatery is located in the heart of the bustling, hip Highlands business district off 32nd and Lowell, and welcomes passersby who look puzzled at the combination of Asian and Latin foods. When they give it a try, say the co-owners and chefs, Julie Villafana and Braydon Wong, they like it. Continue reading →

Author-activist Phoebe Eng is next up on visualizAsian.com’s AAPI Empowerment series

By | | , ,
Leave a comment

Author and activist Phoebe EngErin Yoshimura and I started visualizAsian.com to interview Asian American Pacific Islander leaders and tell their stories to empower other AAPIs to follow in their footsteps. So far, it’s been an absolute blast.

The website launched with a conversation with former Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta on May 21, and this week we spoke with Yul Kwon, the hunky winner of “Survivor: Cook Islands.” Both men told powerful stories about the challenges they faced as Asian Americans, and the stereotypes that had to battle.

The next guest on visualizAsian.com’s AAPI Empowerment Series is social activist and author Phoebe Eng. The interview will be held Tuesday, June 23 at 6 pm PDT (9 pm EDT).

I met Eng when that book came out, a decade ago, and she was in Denver for a book reading and signing. She was a great speaker, and as inspiring in person as she is in the prose of her book, which is in part an autobiography of her search for identity as an Asian American and as a woman, a double-whammy of identity-politics. Continue reading →

Okole Maluna brings Hawai’i to Colorado

By | | , ,
7 Comments

Kalua Pork and Lau Lau dinners, with a bowl of saimin on the side to share, at Okole Maluna, a great little Hawai

We drove an hour north from our house last night, to dine in Hawai’i.

Well, not exactly Hawai’i, but an outpost of Hawai’i, in the most unlikely place: On a quiet Main Street corner in Windsor, a typical small, old-fashioned mid-western town on the plains of northern Colorado. Definitely not a tropical paradise, although inside the clean modern restaurant, you might as well be along Oahu’s North Shore, or somewhere in Kauai.

But Okole Maluna (Bottoms Up) isn’t in the islands. The intimate restaurant is in Windsor.

Erin and I love Hawai’ian food and seek it out in the few places where it’s available in Colorado. Most often, we find ourselves at L&L Hawai’ian Barbecue, a Hawai’i-based fast-food chain with a franchise in the eastern Denver suburb of Aurora. We think it’s a bit pricey for what you get, as well as being entirely too generous with salt on everything they serve (maybe it’s needed in hot humid Hawai’i, but our palates don’t require so much sodium).

We’ve also tried 8 Island Hawai’ian BBQ in Boulder and were disappointed both by the food and the service — especially when the staff made a bog deal of charging us 75 cents extra for a little dollop when we changed our mind on the kind of sauce we wanted on a dish. Come on, that’s like charging for ketchup and mustard!

And more recently, we had a very fine meal for my mom’s birthday at Iwayama Sushi and Da Big Kahuna Bistro, which is as known for its sushi as for its Island vittles.

Iwayama’s fun, and closer. But I’d make the hour drive any day for the Kalua pork at Okole Maluna.

Its deep smoky flavor is tantalizing, and it’s not overly salty (hooray). It’s served with two mounds of rice (for the full portion), a side of creamy Hawai’ian macaroni salad, a little bowl of Lomi Lomi salmon, which is like pico de gallo with bits of salmon mixed in, and a little serving of haupia, a conconut custard.

In fact, overall, Okole Maluna is the best place in the state we’ve found for Hawai’ian food.
Continue reading →

“Slumdog Millionaire” opens in India, nominated for 10 Oscars

By | | ,
4 Comments

The British film "Slumdog Millionaire," a rags-to-riches story about an orphaned child in Mumbai, India, has been nominated for ten Academy Awards.

On the eve of its release today in India, the British independent film “Slumdog Millionaire” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. It’s already won four Golden Globes: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Score. The movie’s up for all of those categories at the Oscars, and may well win some if not all of them, and then some.

We saw the film just last weekend and I was stunned by its power and eloquence, and for me, its sheer entertainment value in spite of the grimness of the life it portrays. It deserves its kudos.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s the story of a two orphaned brothers from the slums of Bombay — now Mumbai — and their relationship as they survive their childhood and grow into their destinies. One, Jamal, played as an adult by the boyish Dev Patel, falls in love with an orphaned girl, Latika (luminously played as an adult by Freida Pinto).

Poster for "Slumdog Millionaire"Jamal’s devotion to Latika, even though they’re repeatedly separated, sometimes for years, and his dedication to finding her again, is the film’s narrative thread.

But “Slumdog”‘s visual leitmotif is the chaotic and tragic backdrop of modern Indian life. The story follows the characters from childhood through their teen years and into adulthood, in and out of the utter poverty that pervades the teeming slums. It’s structured as a series of flashbacks with Jamal, who’s been arrested for suspicion of cheating after winning 10 million rupees on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” explaining to a detective how he came to know all the answers he was asked on the show.

His life experiences coincidentally gave him the knowledge and prepared him to reach the next day’s final question, for a possible payoff of 20 million rupees.

Almost immediately, viewers are taken on a breathless tour of the shantytown as a group of kids are chased by police, the camera moving as if the audience is one of the fleeing kids, looking for the next escape route. Then the view shifts to the cops’ perspective, or others in the alleys, even a sleeping dog who’s not the slightest bit fazed by all the commotion. The colors, the clatter and closed-in settings convey claustrophia … and incredible excitement.

The movie opens up visually and feels pastoral only when the brothers get out of town atop a train and live like hobos, then spend some time scamming tourists at the Taj Mahal, and in one striking scene where the grownup Jamal meets up with his brother Salim (played by Madhur Mittal), now a low-level gangster, in a skyscraper construction site high above where their shantytown had been located.

Modern Mumbai’s financial wealth has paved over the poverty and pushed the poor elsewhere.
Continue reading →