Category Archives: pop culture

Japanese American entrepreneur launches MEGUMI-O sunglasses made for Asian faces

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OK, so you might think writing about sunglasses is not nearly as important as writing about racism or Asian American role models or earthquakes in Japan. But I submit that the search for glasses that fit on Asian faces without sliding down our noses and smearing on our cheeks, or smashing our eyelashes (those of us who have long lashes, real or fake) can be pretty darned important, and for one Japanese American entrepreneur, downright critical.

I’ve worn glasses since third grade, except for a few years after 2000 when I got lasiked and experienced the miracle of not having to wear glasses. Today, my eyes have gotten worse so I need to wear glasses again but I take them off when I’m sitting at the computer and don’t need them for watching TV. And the glasses I do wear have much — much — thinner lenses than I’ve worn in the past.

But one frustrating part of being Asian and wearing glasses is that I couldn’t wear plastic frame or horn-rimmed style glasses or sunglasses without having them slip down my nose and stick against my cheeks. My low bridge and high cheekbones never quite fit with the small protruding attached nose pieces those kinds of frames had. Instead, I had to order wire-framed glasses because they had the adjustable nose-pieces that I could pull out (I broke them off a couple of times) to make the glasses sit better on my nose.

There have been times when wireframes have been hip, so I accepted my fate. But I wasn’t able to wear timeless cool sunglasses like the original Ray-Ban Wayfarer, without pushing them up very few minutes.

But one entrepreneurial Japanese American, Megumi Hosogai, is bringing fashion flash to Asian faces with her MEGUMI-O sunglasses, Jackie Onassis-style big round sunglasses that scream retro-chic on any face. Hosogai created a frame that Jackie-O might have worn, but with an extended bridge designed specially for Asian faces (or for people who have extra-long eyelashes). So far she has them available in a handful of LA boutiques, but she’s started a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to raise money to mass-produce her glasses.
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Jeremy Lin and Linsanity: Followup thoughts on race and Asian America

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Jeremy Lin leads the Knicks over the Kings

I’ve been adding updates to the bottom of my previous post on Jeremy Lin, but there’s simply too much still flying across the Internet radar, and that post is already too long. So I thought I’d comment separately about the issue of Asian American identity and our embrace of the Jeremy Lin phenomenon.

As I write this, the New York Knicks have won seven straight games since putting Lin in the game as the starting point guard. For the first six, he shot for more than 20 points per game (38 against the Lakers!). Last night against Sacramento, he had only 10 points, but that’s because he was allowed to rest and only played 26 minutes. He still racked up a career-high 13 assists, and Linsanity continues in New York. He’s goosed the spirits of basketball fans in Gotham — and around the world — and taken over headlines on the news pages.

Let’s face it, he’s a great story: The American-born son of immigrants from Taiwan who led his high school team in Palo Alto to the state title but didn’t get even a sniff of a b-ball scholarship from the Cali schools he wanted to play for. So he attended Harvard, the stereotypical jackpot destination for children of Asian parents, and got good grades and earned a degree in Econ … while playing great basketball.

Cambridge isn’t exactly known as a breeding ground for NBA stars, but the guy left a trail of tattered records and dominated the Ivy League and earned some national attention, all to no avail. No NBA franchise noticed him. So he signed with Golden State Warriors but spent an uneventful year, and was cut in December right after the end of the NBA’s lockout. He was picked up by the Houston Rockets, but let go within a couple of weeks to make room for more famous players with higher price tags. He was then signed by New York but put on the bench as the fourth-string point guard, and even sent down to the development leagues. He was put into the game out of desperation.

That was two weeks and a whole lot of Linsanity ago.

The kicker for this made-for-a-movie Linderella story (yeah, I had to use it) is that until his contract with the Knicks was signed just a few days ago, Lin slept on the couches of his brother (an NYU dental student) and a teammate, even as his fame exploded like fireworks over the NBA. I could imagine the kid taking the F-train to Madison Square Garden to play.

He got his papers signed, and moved into a White Plains condo this week. His team’s doing pretty good financially too. The Knicks’ online shop jumped 3,000% in sales for Lin’s #17 jersey, which has been the best-selling jersey in the NBA since Feb. 4, when Lin first played more than 30 minutes in a game. The jersey at one point sold out. Lin has taken over social media, with more than 2.5 million mentions him in the week after his NBA debut, more than anyone else in the NBA and more than President Obama.
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Jeremy Lin’s NBA winning streak sparks “Linsanity” among Asian Americans

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UPDATES BELOW, INCLUDING OTHER REACTIONS, MORE LINSANITY, FUNNY STUFF, JIN RAPPING ON LIN, AND JASON WHITLOCK AND FLOYD MAYWEATHER’S TWEETS

Asian Americans have slowly become visible in American professional sports — player by player, sport by sport. Some sports were conquered early. Most people know stars from the ice skating world such as Kristi Yamaguchi, Apolo Ohno or Michelle Kwan — even though a Seattle newspaper headline about Sarah Hughes winning the Gold over Kwan in the 2002 Winter Olympics read, “American outshines Kwan, Slutskaya in skating surprise” (for the record, Kwan is U.S.-born in Torrance, Calif and is as American as… er, Sarah Hughes).

Japanese-born baseball players have become more and more prominent in Major League Baseball since Hideo Nomo arrived in LA back in 1995, and then Ichiro Suzuki fired up Seattle fans when he was signed by the Mariners in 2001. But it took until just a couple of years ago before Seattle signed Don Wakamatsu, the first-ever Japanese American to hire on as an MLB team manager (he didn’t last long, unfortnately). (Read my friend Daigo Fujiwara’s excellent blog, JapaneseBallPlayers.com, to follow the careers of Japanese playing in the Bigs.)

The NFL now boasts some prominent Pacific Islanders playing professional football, and a coupe of Asian Americans (some are hapa, or mixed-race) — Dat Tan Guyen, Hines Ward, Will Demps Jr., Kailee Wong, Yon Eugene Chung among them. (Here’s a good list from the blog Chinese Or Japanese.)

Golf has the ultimate superstar, albeit somewhat tarnished: Tiger Woods. The pro circuit now sports high-profile Asians such as Vijay Singh, Grace Park and a whole bunch of Korean women including Shin Eui-hang. Tennis has Chinese American Michael Chang.

But basketball…. Wow. The NBA has had few Asian stars, and even fewer Asian Americans. Few fans even know that the first player to break the NBA’s color barrier was Wat Misaka, a 5’7″ college star at the University of Utah who was a first-round draft pick in 1947 — 1947! — for New York and played a too-brief career with the Knicks. He was the first Asian, and the first player of color, to play for a pro team (back then the NBA was called the Basketball Association of America).

Yao Ming opened the door to other Asian import players when he was drafted in 2002. You can read a terrific 2009 blog post about Asians in basketball from 8Asians.

But there haven’t been many Asian American NBA stars. Certainly no role models. Nobody like us to look up to, even though Asian Americans are crazy about basketball. There’s a long-established history of intensely competitive basketball leagues within the Japanese American community in California, and even here in far-off Denver. Sure, here in Denver the JAs have thinned out a bit so non-JAs are welcome to play in the pickup games. But the point is Asians are crazy about b-ball, with no pro role models to follow.

So that’s why the emergence of Jeremy Lin as an NBA star (hopefully on his way to superstar status) has electrified Asian Americans. The AAPI blogosphere has lit up in the past week, since Lin has won three games in a row for the Knicks — yes, the Knicks; how’s THAT for karma? — as the team’s new point guard.
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Pete Hoekstra’s racist Super Bowl campaign ad feeds — and feeds on — paranoia about China

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(NOTE: Updates posted at bottom, including more parodies as they’re posted and more crazy stuff from Pete Hoekstra as he says them).

This ad was shown during the Super Bowl, but only in Michigan, where former Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra is running to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow. The 30-second spot shows a pretty young Asian woman in what looks like Vietnam, riding a bicycle among rice paddies with a conical hat slung over her back, who stops and says to the camera, “Thank you Michigan senator Debbie Spend It Now,” for contributing to U.S. deficit spending and borrowing more and more money from China.

Yes, the ad shows Southeast Asia (a familiar sight to anyone with even a modicum of familiarity with world history of the past 40 years, and certainly Hoekstra) but it bashes China as a way to get at Stabenow. The woman in the ad never says “China” but it’s clear who the target is, as the woman speaks in her sort-of-broken English, after a gong (that’s not a cliche at all) starts off the spot:

“Debbie spent so much american money, you borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you debbie spend it now.”

The ad is so chockfull of racially-charged symbolism it’s disgusting as well as unintentionally comical (some Chinese are puzzled because they can see immediately the setting isn’t China).

It’s messed up and offensive on multiple levels, and not just because Hoekstra’s campaign chose to mash together westerner’s scant knowledge of Asia into one image: “Oh, relax, it’s all Oriental, right?” It plays on stereotypes of the “Hot Asian Babe,” Asians’ broken English, sense of superiority over outdated notions of third-world rice farming economies, and fear of China/Japan/Koreans/Viet Cong/the Asian flavor-of-the-year.

It’s also politically very dishonest.
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Anime this week in Denver – “Fullmetal Alchemist: The Star of Milos”

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Denver fans of cutting-edge Japanese manga and anime can immerse themselves this week in the alternate steampunk European world of “Fullmetal Alchemy,” a popular series of comic and animated TV series and feature films that have captivated audiences on both sides of the Pacific since 2001, when the series launched in Japan as a serial comic.

The latest output of the franchise, “Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos,” continues the compelling tale of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, who are famous alchemists — scientists who can use their powers to change the molecular structure of objects and materials. Edward lost a leg and then an arm, and Alphonse his entire body when they tried unsuccessfully to use alchemy to bring back their mother to life after she died of an illness. Alphonse’s soul is contained in an armor.

In the new film, the Elric brothers track down a fugitive alchemist with unknown powers to a city where the Milos, a downtrodden people, are rebelling against their oppressors. The Elrics are drawn into the battle, and befriend a young woman who wants to lead the Milos even if it means using the Philosopher’s Stone, the powerful catalyst that could restore Edward and Alphonse’s bodies.

The film is a thrill ride of cutting-edge animation and action, and even if you’re not familiar with anime in general of the “Full Metal Alchemist” franchise, you’ll be immediately drawn into the sci-fi reality and soon forget you’re watching an animated movie.
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