Tag Archives: jeff yang

Donate to put “Beyond the Bad & the Ugly” conference streamed online

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Here’s a conference I wish I could attend, but my schedule and budget don’t allow a weekend trip to LA on Saturday, March 23. Organized by the tireless Jeff Yang, who has a long history as a chronicler of Asian America and is currently a columnist for the Wall Street Journal covering AAPI topics in his perfectly titled “Tao Jones” blog, “Beyond the Bad & the Ugly” is a first-ever summit on Asian American stereotypes.

shattered-coverIt’s also a kickoff for the “Shattered” tour, a book-signing tour featuring Yang and various collaborators including Parry Shen, Keith Chow, Jerry Ma and others. The team have published “Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology,” a second volume and sequel to “Secret Identities,” the first anthology of comics starring Asian American superheroes, and written and drawn by Asian Americans.

The theme of “Shattered”/”Secret Identities” fits with “Beyond the Bad & the Ugly” because the comics are all about dispelling the wimpy stereotype of Asians in American pop consciousness, and pointing out that Asians are missing from the superhero pantheon. (Note: Stan Lee seems to have gotten the hint; he’s created a new superhero who’s Chinese named The Annihilator.)

Riffing off the comics anthology and the stereotype theme, Yang has assembled an awesome lineup of panels and speakers (see below for the schedule), and the day-long confab promises to be an empowering affair for all who attend.

For those of us who don’t live in La-La Land, and can’t afford to ever-increasing airfares (I’m starting to hate you, Frontier — a flight that used to cost a hair over $300 now costs over $1000!), Yang is trying to set up online livestreaming of the panels and is trying to raise money for the cameras and personnel through IndieGoGo: “Put Beyond the Bad & The Ugly Online!”
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Jeff Yang in WSJ deconstructs “model minority” & “New Jews” stereotypes of Asian Americans

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Gil Asakawa cowboy

This is me, being a typical American kid in the early ’60s … in Tokyo, Japan where my family lived at the time.

The “model minority” myth applied to Asian Americans has been a persistent trope since the phrase’s first use in 1965 by a sociologist in a New York Times column that used it to face off Japanese Americans against African Americans.

The not-so-subtle underlying message was, look at this Asian minority, they went through hell during World War II (the imprisonment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps) and faced racism for most of a century, yet they work hard, don’t complain and succeed as students and employees.

In contrast, of course, blacks were marching and protesting and causing white America a whole bunch of angst at the time by demanding equality and fair treatment.

The model minority canard pops up every decade in mainstream media, like an insane cultural Wack-a-Mole game. In 1997 TIME magazine ran a story about “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids” with a group of young AAPI student overachievers beaming from the cover. Every once in a while, a story or report acknowledges the lie of the myth: In 2008, a New York University study did just that.

But then some other report adds fuel to the mythic fire. Earlier this summer, the Pew Research Center published a much-hyped report titled “The Rise of Asian Americans,” that concluded that Asian Americans are now “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” That study caused a lot of discussion in the AAPI blogosphere, and disappointed me, because I generally think Pew’s demographic studies are unassailably pure. This tie, I felt Pew swallowed the Kool-Aid and found evidence that bolstered that view without working very hard to dig deeper.

Now, the idea of Asians excelling in academics is back in the news with the Supreme Court’s review of Affirmative Action in the “Fisher Vs. University of Texas at Austin” case.

And this week, the Wall Street Journal posted a commentary by Lee Siegel, “The Rise of the Tiger Nation” that not only ascribes to the model minority notion, but picks up another theme that’s been aired on occasion: That Asians are the new Jews.
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Next up on visualizAsian: Meet Jeff Yang, editor of “Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology” & Bernard Chang, “Superman” artist

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Jeff Yang visualizAsian is back for November with a killer fun live conversation, an hour with Jeff Yang and Bernard Chang on the role of superheroes and comics, and why there aren’t many Asian American superheroes.

The chat will be Tuesday, Nov. 16 at 7 pm PT, 10 pm ET, and if you haven’t registered for a visualizAsian call before, you can sign up in a jiffy.

These two guys are eminently qualified to speak about Asian Americans as well as comic books and superheroes:
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Iron Man, Marvel-ous superheroes and Asian Americans

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I wanted to grow up to be a Marvel comics artist

Once upon a time, I went to art school. And although I graduated with a completely useless (career-wise, anyway) BFA in Painting, I chose art school because once upon a time, I wanted to work for Marvel Comics. Real bad. See above.

When I was a kid, I loved Marvel’s lineup of superheroes because they had all-too-human frailties when they weren’t busting up crime in their empowered alter-egos. Spider-man, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil, The Mighty Thor, The Avengers, The X-Men… I collected ’em all. I also had a few issues of Superman and Batman and other DC comics lying around, but I wasn’t a DC fanatic. I was, however, card-carrying member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, the fan club started in 1964. I had posters (Thor against a psychedelic rainbow in black light in my room looked very cool), stickers, notepads and lots and lots of comics. I had a comic-fan penpal in Australia that I still think about now and then. And, I wrote letters to Marvel about every other month in the hopes of having one of my missives published. Alas, none of them ever ran.

I also drew comics. I wish I’d kept some of them, with dialogue, panels and all. They sucked of course, but they were drawn with the complete self-absorption of of a pre-teen, and that passion eventually turned into some bit of talent, enough to get me into Pratt Institute in New York… a few steps closer to Marvel than high school in Denver. The rest, as they say, is history.

Punk rock, college radio, guitar, big ol’ canvases, The Village and New York’s many distractions distracted me away from my commercial art career, and I eventually ended up a writer — go figger — much to my tuition-paying parents’ chagrin. Besides, my too-Japanese mom decided to eliminate my brother and my clutter when we went off to college, and threw out anything of consequence from our childhoods… including my remaining boxes of comics.

But I still have a soft spot for superheroes, especially ones of the Marvel variety.

So it’s been great over the past decade to watch the Merry Marvel Marching parade of comic-bound characters spring to glorious computer-animated life on the movie screen, with each new movie taking advantage of ever cooler, ever newer technology to create the best special effects ever. Of all of these, I have to say that I’ve enjoyed the smart, funny spectacularly entertaining Iron Man movies best. Continue reading →