October 15, 2009
Wow. Wow. Wow. It's a triple play. It's a hat trick. It's an Asian American trinity, sort of.
Erin and I have booked three killer guests for our visualizAsian.com series of interviews in the AAPI Empowerment Series:
Next Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 6 pm PT we'll speak to filmmaker Lane Nishikawa of "Only the Brave," an independent movie about the Japanese American soldiers who fought during World War II that will be released nationwide on Veteran's Day;
On Tuesday, Nov. 10, we'll spend an hour getting to know Phil Yu, the man behind the must-read news site about Asian Americans, AngryAsianMan.com;
And on Tuesday, Nov. 17, we'll meet Lac Su, the author of a powerful new memoir, "I Love Yous Are for White People."
Just saw this TV commercial for Priceline, and it made us bust out laughing. We've seen Kenny Choi in all kinds of roles from soldier to gangster to doctor, but never a mild-mannered husband doing a dead-on impression of William Shatner: ...
Hiroshi Watanabe as Jimmy and Nae as his sister Aiko in director Dave Boyle's independent film "White on Rice."
Erin and I attended a screening tonight of a new movie, "White on Rice," sponsored by Denver's Asian Avenue Magazine at the Starz Film Center, and thoroughly enjoyed the film. It's a sweet romantic comedy about an affable doofus of a Japanese man, 40-year-old Hajime "Jimmy" Beppu, who leaves Japan when his wife divorces him, and moves in with his sister and her husband and son in America. A hapless loser, Jimmy's reduced (when he's not living in a park or in his company's broom closet) to sharing his young nephew's bunk bed and pining after his brother-in-law's niece Ramona, who also moves in with the family.
"White on Rice" pokes gentle fun at Japanese cultural values and personalities (the gruff, the clowny, the servile) but does it with respect, never lowering itself down to parody or worse, stereotype.
The movie's chockfull of Asian Americans in addition to the rich portrayals of the Japanese characters: Jimmy's employer,a customer service company, has several Asian Americans, including Jimmy's friend Tim, played by James Kyson Lee of "Heroes" fame, who ends up being Ramona's love interest, thwarting Jimmy's obsession. The ensemble cast, which includes Hiroshi Watanabe as Jimmy, Japanese actress Nae as Jimmy's sister Aiko, Mio Takada as Aiko's husband, Lynn Chen (viewers may recognize her from "Saving Face") as Ramona, and very young Justin Kwong as the strange and wonderfully straight-faced kid Bob.
The cast is mostly Asian and Asian American. Almost half the dialogue is in Japanese with subtitles. And, the co-writer and director, Dave Boyle, is a 27-year-old Mormon Caucasian from Provo, Utah.
"Yeah, that's always the first question people ask," he said tonight after the screening. "So, what's with the white guy making a movie about Asians?"
Note that I said Asian Americans, not Asians. The great thing about Kylie and the new faces of Asian American Pacific Islanders on the small screen is that they have my face, and my voice -- which is to say, they don't have accents and clearly aren't foreigners.
I should add here that I have nothing against recent immigrants and first-generation Asian Americans. They are the rich soil in which our identity is deeply rooted, and whether you're Japanese American, Korean American, Chinese American, Vietnamese American, Cambodian, Indian, Thai, Laotian, Hmong, whatever, we owe the immigrants who endured hardships to leave their country to start new lives in the U.S. a salute of thanks for making it possible for us to be who we are today. We're the sum total of our ethnic cultural values and the freedom and experience of growing up in America.
Anyway, my point: My fellow AAPI bloggers have been pointing out how many Asian Americans are showing up in TV shows in roles where they don't have to act as foreigners, but are allowed to be Americans of Asian heritage. And those heritages don't even have to be part of the plot.
Sure, there are still roles that cast Asian Americans as foreigners.
"Lost" features Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim as Jin-Soo and Sun Hwa Kwon, Koreans who began the show cast as the most foreign of the castaways. Masi Oka's Hiro Nakamura character in "Heroes" is Japanese and he has an accent, but he's still a leading character, and so is Korean American actor James Kyson Lee (whose phonetic pronunciation of Japanese still amazes me) and his character, Ando Masahashi. So their Asian culture is very much part of their narrative.
But look at the list of Asian American actors you can dial in to see this season, whose roles could have been filled by someone of any ethnicity:
I've seen emails criss-crossing the Internet, and a couple of blogs mentioning this, but I just got an email directly from UT-Texas asking for help, so I thought I should post about this. Dr. Eun-Ok Im (left), an internationally known expert in cross-cultural women’s health issues at the University of Texas at Austin, needs subjects for a health study -- and you don't need to live in Austin to participate.
Dr. Im is conducting an Internet study on the physical activity attitudes among diverse ethnic groups of middle-aged women (40-60 Y/O). She needs Asian American women to sign up so that her study can provide a more complete data sample. "Furthermore, Asian American women’s opinions and experiences are very imperative," the email asking for help notes, "and cannot be neglected because the Asian American population is expanding very quickly in America."
Interested women can click to the eMAPA (ethnic Specific Midlife Women's Attitude Toward Physical Activity) website and fill out a survey. Each survey takes about 30 minutes.
Each participant will be reimbursed with a $10 gift certificate. The survey will begin by asking a series of eligibility questions. If you are in-eligible you will be notified.
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!
I realize that when I point out how something as seemingly benign as the "won ton" font bugs me, readers might think I'm being petty and overly sensitive. But I hope those readers will respect my opinion if something does piss me off. Plus, I hope everyone can understand why certain things are just plain offensive to Asian Americans, not as a result of over-sensitivity but simply because they're racist stereotypes.
One of them is the "ching-chong' accent that comes out of the http://www.funvidapps.com/Site/LuckyFortune.html">Lucky Fortune iPhone app, which Apple has approved for its iPhone App Store while they turn down other apps.
Both Jennifer 8 Lee's Fortune Cookie Chronicles blog and Gawker have pointed out that this app is racially offensive. The Gawker post includes a video of the app in action.
It's a cute idea at first: You break open a fortune cookie, and hear one of a series of pre-recorded fortunes.
The problem is the voice that reads the fortune is a fake Chinese accent -- the kind I've heard all my childhood and even as an adult, when a racist taunts me. "Go back where you came from, Jap/Chink/Nip/Gook," go the echoes in my head today.Asian Americans call it a "ching-chong" sound, a phony rendition of what a white person think is the sound of Chinese.
