Laura Ling and Euna Lee tell their story… or part of it

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Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two US journalists who were captured, put on trial and convicted of trespassing and “hostile acts” by the government of North Korea, have written part of their story — a lot is still too traumatic to tell. The article appeared last night on both the LA Times (interestingly, as an “Opinion” piece) and on the website of their employer, Current TV.

The point of the public writing is to re-focus the narrative from their experience being captured (though they cover that as well) but on the story they were chasing in the first place when they were captured: The desperate plight of refugees escaping North Korea into China.

We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors, women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages. Now our guide, a Korean Chinese man who often worked for foreign journalists, had brought us to the Tumen River to document a well-used trafficking route and chronicle how the smuggling operations worked.

Their investigation took them into North Korea, but only for a very short time — less than a minute, they say — but the consequences were dire, and they wonder if they’d been set up by an informant. Continue reading →

Ang Lee’s take on Woodstock doesn’t compare to the original movie on DVD. Bummer, man.

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The poster for the original Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in 1969I’m a big fan of Ang Lee, the Taiwan-born director of such terrific films as “The Wedding Banquet,” “Eat Drink Man Woman,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain.”

He glides effortlessly between cultures, putting Chinese values to celluloid in one movie and reflecting America in the next. He also switches genres easily, from comedy to period pieces to drama to action.

He’s had one certifiable dud in my opinion: his take on “The Hulk.” Now, I think there are two.

Erin and I were sadly disappointed when we went to see “Taking Woodstock,” Lee’s take on the 1969 music festival that stands today as an iconic milestone of the rock era and baby boom generation.

It’s a nostalgic look back at Woodstock, the rock festival held between Aug. 15-17, 1969 in upstate New York. It’s become iconic of the era because of the 1970 hit documentary film “Woodstock” and Joni Mitchell’s song of the same name (which was a #11 hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and a lesser hit version by Mathews Southern Comfort). The song enshrined the number of people who flocked to the three-day concert: “half a million strong,” probably taken from early news reports, but the turnout was probably closer to 300,000. Still an impressive number of attendees for what came to define the rock generation’s tribalist instincts.

Michael Lang from the original Woodstock festival
Michael Lang riding his motorcycle around the original festival, captured in the “Woodstock” DVD.

Mamie Gummer as Tisha, Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang and Demetri Martin as Elliott Teichberg in director Ang Lee
Jonathan Groff playing Michael Lang in Ang Lee’s fictionalized Woodstock weekend, along with Mamie Gummer as Tisha and Demetri Martin as Elliott Teichberg.

In Lee’s misty-eyed look back at 40 years ago, all the surfaces are polished just right. In an early scene, the black-and-white TV in young Elliott Teichberg’s parents’ rundown motel in White Lake, a hamlet in the town of Bethel, New York, shows the July 20, 1969 Apollo moon landing, just a few weeks before the big rock show. The characters have the right hair, the right clothes, even the right hats (check out the mysterious and pointless character Tisha, and the woman who’s captured in Woodstock documentary footage with the real Michael Lang). The cars, of course, are spot-on from that model year and before, right down to the hippie-decorated VW vans.

Lee even includes several signature shots from the Woodstock doc, with his fictionalized spin. As Jake rides with a motorcycle cop through the traffic jam to get to the concert site, they pass a group of nuns who are being filmed by “Woodstock” director Michael Wadleigh’s crew and one nun flashes a peace sign. Later, Elliott walks past a row of porta-potties where a film crew is interviewing the guy who’s cleaning them out. He also spends some time sliding in the mud, another re-creation of a classic scene from the concert. These touchstone scenes from the original movie are fun to catch in the context of Lee’s movie.

What’s completely missing from “Taking Woodstock” is an understanding of and appreciation for — hell, even baldfaced nostalgia for — the music that drew the hundreds of thousands to the festival in the first place. Continue reading →

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

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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 →

Paramount offers apology for racism in “The Goods”

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Sometimes, protesting works. It took about a week of buzz on the blogosphere to get the attention of Paramount Studios for the obnoxious racism disguised as satire in the trailer for the comedy starring Jeremy Piven, “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard.”

The scene shows car salesmen worked up by the thought of Pearl Harbor being attacked by the Japanese and chanting “never again,” until they all pounce on an Asian character in the film. Piven’s character then tries to make light of the hate crime by trying to blame the Asian.

It’s a clumsy reprise of anti-Japanese sentiment from 70 years ago, with a scary flashback of the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers who thought he was Japanese (he wasn’t) and somehow directly responsible for them losing their jobs.

Well, enough outrage over this scene built thanks to coverage from Asian American blogs including Minority Militant, Angry Asian Man and 8Asians, that the JACL released a statement expressing outrage a couple of days ago, and several national organizations announced a protest yesterday. (There were also letters of protest sent around by individuals like actor Ken Narasaki and Soji Kashiwagi.)

The protest was held yesterday, and though I haven’t noticed if national mainstream media had picked up on the issue, Paramount has heeded the protest. A little while ago, I received this email from JACL:

PARAMOUNT APOLOGISES TO THE JACL

Los Angeles — The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the nation’s largest and oldest Asian American civil rights and community advocacy organization, welcomed Paramount Pictures’ apology for “racially demeaning language” in its recently released film, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. Continue reading →

Karmic returns: McDonald’s in Japan launches ad campaign with nerd American

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McDonalds has started using this nerdy American in its ad campaign.

Turnabout is fair play, right? It’s karma. In Japanese, it’s a bachi coming back — basically, you reap what you sow. McDonald’s in Japan has started using a laughable nerd who doesn’t have a clue in its ads, mangling Japanese, looking all uptight in glasses and ill-fitting khakis. You’d think it’s how an Asian would be cast in American commercials… and in fact, Asians have been portrayed this way, many times.

Except this is a goofy white guy in Japan.

The women over at Disgrasian posted about the campaign (I love that they’re part of the Huffington Post crew, don’t you?), and gave the right slant on it (sorry, couldn’t resist) by including this graphic of Asians portrayed in US mainstream media:

Asians portrayed in American pop culture.Here’s the caption from Disgrasian. Clockwise from top left: Wacky Hiro Nakamura from Heroes, Wacky Engrish-Speaking Kentucky Fried Chicken-Grilled Chicken Lovers, I Survived a Japanese Game Show’s Wacky Host Rome Kanda, Wacky Engrish-Speaking Six Flags Guy.

It’s easy to chuckle over this, but this kind of stereotyping and treatment of foreigners in Japan is no laughing matter.

There’s a lot of racism in Japan — I guess it would seem like reverse racism to us here in the US of A — including lots of instances of foreigners banned from businesses a la the segregation years here.

There’s a movement in Japan to fight such institutionalized racism, and one of its leaders is a European American professor in Sapporo, David Aldwinkle, who married a Japanese woman and changed his name to Arudou Debito (the Japanized pronunciation of his English name). I’ve followed his battles for years on his website and email newsletters. He’s taken on local governments as well as businesses, and he’s posted the text of a letter sent by a group he works with, to the McDonald’s corporation, over the new ad campaign.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a spokesman for products in Japanese ads campaigns.What’s odd about this ad campaign is that the Japanese in the past have sort of worshiped Westerners as spokespeople for their ad campaigns. I remember seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed as a samurai for a ramen company, and Hollywood stars such as Mickey Rourke (OK, this was a while ago, before he crashed and came back) have been plastered all over Japan to peddle cigarettes — something unimaginable here.

Maybe the use of a nerd as the image of an American reflects Japanese culture coming to grips with its obsession with all things American.

Or maybe it’s just a reflection of the country’s innate racism showing a little more publicly than it has in the past. It’ll be interesting to see if McDonald’s backs down.