I met the affable, energetic Andrea Lwin last fall at the Banana conference of Asian American bloggers (Banana II details coming soon!). At the time, she had just launched "Slanted," a comedic web series based on her one-woman show of the same name, about an Asian American actresses' struggles to make her mark in Hollywood. I know, not a...
Mention August 6 to most Americans, young or old, and my guess is you'll get a blank stare. "What about August 6?" Mention Hiroshima and you might get a second blank stare. Most Americans can't name the date that the first atomic bomb was dropped, Aug. 6 1945 on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped, on the southern port city of Nagasaki. Today is the 65th anniversary of that bombing, August 9.
Tens of thousands of civilians were killed instantly in both bombings, some leaving just shadows like stationary, permanent ghosts on walls next to where they had been standing. But because of the raging fires caused in the blasts' aftermath, and the deadly radiation poisoning from the black rain fallout that followed, up to 166,000 people in Hiroshima, and 80,000 in Nagasaki were killed within a few months. People who survived the blast suffered injuries, burns and deformities; some are still dying today from cancers that lay dormant for decades.
In Japan, the atomic bombings are national tragedies that are commemorated to this day, much like we probably will commemorate 9/11, fifty years from now.
But here in the United States, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have over the years become historical factoids, questions on tests, for most people. Sure, there are recent Japanese immigrants and U.S. anti-war activists who remember and mark the anniversaries, but for most Americans -- even, I'm afraid, most Japanese Americans -- there isn't much thought given to the devastation suffered by either of those cities so long ago and far away.
With Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month about to end, I thought I'd write a bit about the terms we choose to describe our identity. Like other ethnic groups, the labels we use for ourselves seems to be always evolving. Hispanic evolves into Latino; Negro to Black to African American; Native American to American Indian. Asian Americans are sometimes called Asian Pacific Americans, sometimes Asian Pacific islander American, and sometimes Asian American Pacific islander. These labels lead to a crazy bowl of alphabet soup acronyms: AA, APA, APIA, AAPI.
I choose to say (and write) "Asian American" most of the time, but say "Asian American Pacific Islander" and use the acronym AAPI for formal references. Although organizations such as APIA Vote and APAs for Progress helped get Asian Americans involved in the political process, President Obama and the White House prefers AAPI, as in "Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month." (Note that the poster shown here, from East Tennessee State University, calls it "Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.")
Earlier this month at an AAPI Heritage Month event sponsored by the Colorado Asian Roundtable, our friend emcee Kim Nguyen stumbled on "Asian American Pacific Islander" and I had to snicker. It's a mouthful, all right, especially when you say it over and over into a microphone. And even just saying "AAPI" repeatedly gets to feeling odd, as if the letters lose all meaning upon repetition.
As it happens, we may be on the cusp of a change in how we identify ourselves anyway.
The Sacramento Bee the other day ran an interesting story that proposes that "Asian American" is fading off like the term "Oriental" before it.
"As Sacramento's growing Asian immigrant communities celebrated Sunday's Pacific Rim Street Fest, a growing number note that Asian American isn't a race and said they choose to identify by their ethnicity," the article stated. The excellent (required reading) group blog 8Asians picked up on the SacBee's story and expanded upon its theme of ethnic Balkanization.
Asian Americans are increasingly identifying more by their specific culture and ethnicity, and not so much as a larger, racially-linked group.
Like a lot of social change, this may be a generational swing.
I hate to say it, but that "Model Minority" stereotype is based on reality sometimes. Some young Asian Americans are just darned smart, hard-working good students. Take Sunmee Huh, a 16-year-old Maryland teenager, for instance. Last year, she noticed her grandfather struggling to use a search engine, and had she an idea. She decided to build her own search engine, designed for older, tired eyes, so her grandfather could search the Web for information easily, without straining to read the text or messing with his browser to make the type larger.
She started with the most popular search engine, Google, and used its backend programming to drive her version. She then enlisted the graphic arts help of her younger (!) sister Dahlia to make everything look nice, called the search engine Good50.
In the process she made it super easy to change font size as well as background color (the black background, she explains in Good50's About Us page, is a "high contrast" version to help people with poor vision that also happens to use less energy to display, so it's a "green" option).
"Designed with the public's health in mind, Good50 has pre-set the search box to a larger size and gives the option to adjust to a larger font in the search results," the About Us page explains. "These features of Good50 will reduce eye strain and help to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS). Some possible symptoms of CVS include headaches, dry and/or red eyes, fatigue, double vision, and neck or back pain."
Although she's reaching out for publicity top spread the word about Good50, Sunmee isn't in it for the money. She has Google ads on the search engine but refused to add the "sponsored links" that are often at the top of Google search results, figuring those ads are just confusing for Internet newbies -- and her grandfather.
And, she also pledged to donate at least 5 cents for every 50 visits to the search engine, from the Google advertising revenue she collects. In April, she made her first donation: $50 to the Red Cross for Haiti relief. In May, she sent a $100 donation to Meals on Wheels.
Margaret Kasahara was almost half an hour late to the opening reception of her first Denver solo exhibit, at the Sandra Phillips Gallery along the Arts District on Santa Fe Drive. Her fans, friends and collectors milled around soaking in the art on the wall, and made chit-chat until she entered, flustered from being stuck in traffic on this rainy spring evening.
The Colorado Springs-based painter began making the rounds, and one acquaintance made slight of the fact that she was late -- it's no big deal, she told Margaret, who gave a wan smile in return. "No, I bet she's mortified," I said. "Japanese are supposed to be early to things. It's in our DNA."
I wondered if I had offended her by saying it, but the quip fit the exhibit -- Kasahara's work is a statement of her very Japaneseness, her Asian values on display in colorful two dimensions.
Besides, tardiness didn't matter. Late or not, her opening was a hit, with a big crowd in spite of the lousy wet weather. The space is small, and her main pieces are 4 feet by 4 feet square, so there's only room for 13 works in the gallery. But that's enough to give you a scope of Kasahara's ability with oil paint (and oil paint sticks) as well as her wit and clever vision, which infuses statements about race and identity in an engaging package of pop art and yes, politics, even though in her artist's statement Kasahara says she's not a particularly political 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.
Erin and I are thrilled to announce the next call in our visualizAsian.com AAPI Empowerment Series, with Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara, whose fourth Mas Arai mystery, "Blood Hina," was recently released. The Edgars, by the way, are the prestigious annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the best in mystery writing. I fell in love with Hirahara's ability to effortlessly capture...
