Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | race
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April 16, 2008

Here's a video produced by Annie Guo, a Denver journalist and entrepreneur who is editor of Asian Avenue magazine, a pretty solid monthly publication, for a website she and other young APA activists have created called In-Solidarity.com. This is an Asian community response to the "satire" published by the University of Colorado's Campus Press Web site back in February, in which a white student columnist wrote, "If it's war the Asians want, it's war they'll get." The column provoked a firestorm of protest from APA and other students, not just at CU but also other area colleges, and from the Asian community at large. Guo and her In-Solidarity compatriots were part of an immediate response team that joined with CU's Asian Pacific American community. The furor was covered by the local TV stations and mainstream print media. CU apologized and the public pretty much put the incident in the past, which is what the CU administration wants to happen.
April 13, 2008

I missed this NPR report a couple of weeks ago, about the impact of the character Long Duk Dong from the 1980s hit movie, "16 Candles." I had heard a promo for the report while driving but got home before it came on. I finally went back to check it out and it's worth hearing. The link to the report is at the top of the page; the text on the page is the report's transcript. Be sure to check out the extra interview clip with Gedde Watanabe, the Japanese American actor who played "the Donger" -- he doesn't really have a clue, unfortunately. And check out the comic that's included, "Donger and Me."
December 21, 2006

Note: The blog I just posted got me to thinking about a column I wrote way back in the day, before blogs were a twinkle in some developer's eye, about Asians on TV. It's posted in the archives of my Nikkeiview site, but I thought I'd re-post it here. I wrote this after seeing the final "Seinfeld" episode. Like a zillion other people across the country, I tuned in to the final episode of "Seinfeld," and I gotta say, I was only mildly impressed. Oh, I liked the show whenever I caught it, but I was a casual viewer, so the nasty humor that the characters reveled in didn't connect with me the way they may have for diehard fans. What the show did, especially with its segments making fun of foreigners, was get me thinking about Asian faces on TV. As a Japanese-American kid enchanted by American popular culture of the 1960s, it never occurred to me growing up that there were very few people like me on the shows I watched for hours on end.
December 19, 2006

Erin and I attended a networking event tonight of a new organization forming in Denver, the Colorado Chapter of the National Association of Asian American Professionals, and had a great time with a spirited group of Asian Americans. We saw some familiar faces, but Erin and I were delighted to find that we didn't know most of the attendees -- it's nice to see new (and young) Asians adding their voices to the APA community. During the meeting, which was held in a hip and popular Cherry Creek sushi bar named Hapa, one of the women asked Erin if she was Chinese, and didn't believe it when Erin replied she was Japanese American. Then the woman looked at me and asked if I was mixed, or hapa (a Hawaiian word for half-white which started out as a derogatory, but is now widely used and accepted). I explained I'm full Japanese -- my dad was born in Hawai'i but he was full Japanese, and my mom is from Japan.
December 15, 2006

I guess the upside is that some non-Asians have now learned (we hope) that saying "ching-chong, ching-chong" as a way of mocking Asian languages is offensive to Asian Americans. The downside is that many non-Asians are probably still left thinking that all Asian languages sound alike (they don't). And, Rosie O'Donnell probably skated from any further repercussions from this stupid gaffe by giving her on-camera "non-apology apology." It's just another typical example of someone brushing off responsibility by putting the blame of being offensive on the people who were offended ("I'm sorry you/they were offended"). I wish she'd just said, which she almost did when she admitted she didn't know about Asian Americans growing up hearing "ching-chong" as a racist taunt, that she was sorry she said it, period. Anyway, here's the video, care of YouTube:
December 13, 2006

Asians traditionally don't speak up about injustices -- it's the "don't bring attention to yourself," "don't complain, it'll cause trouble" syndrome. But more and more, Asian Americans are different. So when Rosie O'Donnell mocked the sound of the Chinese language a week ago on "The View," the Asian American Journalists Association's New York chapter e-mail list began a spirited conversation, with most members outraged and demanding an apology and some cautioning that O'Donnell hadn't gone on a racist "rant" like Michael Richards, and that it was a poor attempt at humor. I wasn't laughing. Like many Asian Americans, I was familiar with that "ching-chong, ching-chong" sound, from when I was taunted by European-American kids telling me to go back where I came from. That sound makes my gut clench as much as a punch. (Click here for the video on YouTube.)
October 5, 2006

muckeyrooney-mryunioshiAudrey Hepburn, one of the great, classic actresses of Hollywood of the '50s and '60s, may have died in 1993, but she's alive and well in American pop culture. Her name, and the 1961 film with which her face is most associated, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and coincidentally, a TV series' plot later that week involved three women dressed as Hepburn's character from "Tiffany's," Holly Golightly, robbing a bank with her trademark sunglasses hiding their identity. This week, The Gap began airing a pretty cool TV commercial that takes a Hepburn dance sequence from her 1957 musical co-starring Fred Astaire, "Funny Face," and sets her moves to AC-DC's "Back in Black." The commercial is pushing the retailer's new line of skinny black pants. Hepburn's character, a Greenwich Village beatnik who becomes a Paris model, is wearing hip skinny black pants in the dance scene.