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Why I love the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival

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Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai at CDBF 2011It struck me towards the end of the first day of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival that the clash of cultures I had just witnessed perfectly encapsulates why I’ve been a volunteer for this event since it was started in 2001.

(Full disclosure: Last year, my partner Erin Yoshimura took on the role as executive director of the festival, after volunteering from the beginning. I help out with media, the website and emceeing on the main stage.)

As the first day of the two-day event came to a close, the main stage lineup included a sampling of performers from the festival’s very popular Cultural Unity stage, a showcase of Colorado’s diverse hip-hop community.

The hip-hop sampler was fantastic – and showed why their stage is always so jammed that you can barely see through the crowds surrounding the tent, especially when the dancers are spinning on the ground.

The elevated main stage offered an eye-popping view for the audience, most of whom hadn’t gone by the Cultural Unity area before. The performance was a 20-minute introduction to the artistic principles and driving aesthetics of hip-hop culture, starting with naked rhythm from a conga drum, then showing the evolution of the rhythm into the DJ’s scratching with turntables and vinyl records.

Then the B-boys and B-girls assembled around the stage in a half-circle took turns strutting their stuff to the rhythmic riffing, spinning, flipping and contorting their bodies into unbelievably elastic poses and leaving the audience agog.

The set emphasized the multicultural appeal of hip-hop and pointed out how the performers on stage with him ran the ethnic gamut: Asian, Caucasian, African American, Latino.

Following the Cultural Unity sampler, which drew a huge crowd to the stage, most of the audience stayed for the Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai, a group of women from Okinawa who preserve the traditional dances of Okinawa, a culture that’s distinct from Japan.
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Oodles of noodles: Ramen has quietly become hip in Colorado

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The Miso Lobster Ramen is the ultimate dish at Bones, the non-Asian noodle house in Denver.

Erin and I have always been wistfully jealous of our friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for lots of reasons but not least the fact that they can eat killer ramen any night of the week. We have our fave ramen-yas in both San Francisco’s Japantown and LA’s Little Tokyo (“ya” means “shop”). There’s also great ramen to be had on the East Coast — I’ve slurped up wonderful noodles and steamy broth in New York City’s funky little “Japantown” district on the lower East side

In Denver, for many years we had only one ramen-ya: Oshima Ramen, which was good (albeit pricey) when it opened about a decade ago, and has over the past few years become increasingly dirtier and greasier, and the ramen less special and more bland. As it went downhill, it gave us less and less reason to drive all the way across town for a sad bowl of noodles. Some people (including some food critics who don’t know better) think it’s “the real thing” but uh, sorry.

So Erin and I have made it a holy mission to find good ramen without flying to the coast, and some brave Japanese restaurants have met the challenge just in the past year or so.

The best we’ve found in the area is Okole Maluna, a Hawai’ian restaurant an hour north of Denver in the tiny eastern plains town of Windsor, whose owners serve a killer Saimin (Hawai’ian-style ramen). There’s a very good, very authentic ramen served in a little take-out food court in Boulder called Bento Zanmai. Although it’a a bit unorthodox, the miso-ginger ramen served at the late Hisashi “Brian” Takimoto’s East Colfax restaurant, Taki’s, is very good. And now, even the fast-foody Kokoro is serving ramen (but at only one location, on 6th and Broadway, and only after 4 pm). We keep hearing about a Korean-run Japanese restaurant in Longmont that we haven’t made it to. But as you can see, we’re willing to drive for a good bowl of ramen, so we’ll get there eventually.

Imagine our surprise, then, to find that there’s been a veritable explosion of ramen happening right under our nose (is that a triple mixed metaphor?) — and that it’s not ramen made by Asians! Continue reading →

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC in Denver

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We were lucky enough to get a couple of tickets to Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech that capped off the Democratic National Convention at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High. We got there late afternoon and sweated though hours of speakers like Al Gore, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden, and entertainers including Stevie Wonder, Sheryl Crow and Michael McDonald. The crowd went wild when Obama hit the stage, and his speech sent an electric charge through the 84,000 people in the stadium. The evening ended with fireworks, confetti and lots of applause.

Asian Americans at the Democratic National Convention

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Actress Tamlyn Tomita speaks bout her support for APIAVote, a non-profit organization that promotes Asian Americans’ involvement in politics, especially getting AAPIs to vote.

Erin and I have been busy all week, running around to various Asian American Pacific Islander events during the Democratic National Convention. Denver’s all dolled up and feeling like a real city, and it all culminates with tonight’s acceptance speech by Barack Obama.

We were fortunate to be given a pair of tickets to the main event (by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, whom I happened to run into on the downtown 16th Street Mall — I’ve known him for years, from before his political career, when he opened Wynkoop Brewing Co., the first brewpub in Colorado). So I’ll post a report later tonight or tomorrow about the speech.

We’re not delegates or involved in the local Democratic party organization. but we are very involved in the local AAPI community, so we ended up participating in some cool events that are part of the DNC, like an Asian American Summit and an AAPI Caucus, during which issues affecting the AAPI community and ways to organize and get AAPIs incolved in politics were discussed. I was also honored to be one of the emcees for an APIAVote Gala, along with actress Tamlyn Tomita and former CNN and CBS anchor Joie Chen (who, I found out, is half Chinese and half Japanese). Erin went to more events than I did, volunteering at a luncheon and breakfast during the week.

Anyway, here are a handful of videos from the week that have to do with the AAPI community. Enjoy!
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Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper: Rock star treatment on the 16th St. mall

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I ran into Denver’s Mayor John Hickenlooper a cpuple of days ago on my way to the dwntown bus station after work. He was being mobbed by people who wanted to shake his hand and pose for photos with him. It was amusing because I’ve known John for a long time — almost 25 years! — from back when he was a struggling ex-geologist in the oil industry just opening a restaurant. That restaurant — the Wynkoop Brewing Company — was the first microbrewery in Colorado, and set a trend in brewpubs that exploded nationwide. He still looks slightly embarrassed when he gets mobbed like this.

Today the city of Denver announced that the fundraising for the DNC, which had been the topic of much derision when the host committee came up short of projections a few months ago, had in fact raised more then $10 million above the goal. Good for John — he’ll be a rock star in the national Democratic Party’s eyes too.


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