Frank Jang at the Chinatown Photographic Society in San Francisco. As a visitor walks down the steps to the gallery space, he’s greeted by the buzz of people discussing photography. Bright lighting illuminates dozens of great photographs mounted, framed and arranged on the walls. Photographers are looking through their portfolios of work, giving each other advice. In a separate...
“Confucius Says” is an engaging novel about Cary, a Chinese American woman who takes in her aging parents largely because of the ancient cultural values and traditions expressed by Confucius, about filial piety and respect for elders. She has siblings who live far from northern Virginia where she lives, so she becomes the primary caregiver as the novel follows her parents’...
For my role as social media fellow for AARP's Asian American Community, I've had the pleasure of meeting, speaking with and writing about some exceptional people. Here's another in a series of pieces I'm cross-posting from the AARP AAPI Community Facebook page that I manage: Frances Kakugawa’s new book was perfectly timed, to be published in November for National Caregivers Month....
Dr. Charlotte Yeh in her AARP office, proudly holding her colorfully decorated cane.[/caption]
Note: As the Asian American Journalists Association AARP Fellow, I've been writing articles for the AARP.org website about AAPI themes but mostly work within the AARP AAPI Community's social media platforms on Facebook and Twitter. I'm starting to write profiles of AARP's AAPI volunteers and staff and post them to the AARP AAPI Community Facebook Page. This is the first profile I've posted, and because it's such a compelling story that I've decided to repurpose it here. If you find the story is valuable, please LIKE the Facebook page!
When Dr. Charlotte Yeh wrote a powerful article earlier this year in the Washington Post about shortcomings in emergency care, she subtly hinted at the conflicting cultural values that affected her that night two and a half years ago when she was hit by a car as she crossed a street.
She was taken to a nearby hospital’s emergency department, but wasn’t given the level of customer care she would have liked. And she’s an expert on the subject: Trained in surgery, Dr. Yeh was an emergency department physician and experienced healthcare administrator.
But she didn’t complain or raise questions with the doctors and nurses giving her care that night. Instead, she wrote in her Post column recalling that night that she wanted to be the “good patient.”
“The good patient in me wanted to please the doctor and saunter out of the room, but the real person in me was scared,” she wrote, even though in fact she wasn’t sure she could even stand and walk at all.
That phrase, “good patient,” comes up three times in her article, and is an echo of a deeply-felt Asian value that affects many immigrants in the United States, as well as generations of Asian Americans.
AARP's TEK team helped elderly Chinese at a senior center in Boston learn to use smartphones, and they were sending texts ad shooting selfies at the end of the session. [/caption]
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This was a fun photo booth at the AARP Member Convention in Boston, which promoted an upcoming PBS series about baby boomers sponsored by AARP. Nope, I'm not actually in the series...[/caption]As a journalist, I’ve been really lucky.
I started my career as a music critic and then a reporter, so I’ve always been able to write about pop culture – especially the pop culture of my generation, the baby boomers. Then when the Internet came along, I was able to move over to work almost exclusively in digital media, and these days I work in and speak about social media. And since I started writing my “Nikkei View” column and blog, I’ve been part of a growing chorus of Asian American voices (like the JACL's Pacific Citizen, which is about to re-launch its website after a two-year hiatus!) covering issues and stories that mainstream media frankly tends to ignore.
So I couldn’t believe my great fortune last month when I was named the 2014 Asian American Journalists Association’s AARP Social Media Fellow.
AARP, if you aren’t familiar with the organization, is the American Association of Retired People, whose members are 50 years old and older. That means that this year, the youngest baby boomers are turning 50 and can join AARP (the baby boom went from 1946 to 1964).
