OK, I had to post these two photos, in which Spanish athletes mock Chinese by pulling back their eyes to make them slanty — ha ha ha.
The first is a posed shot of of the Spanish Olympic basketball team. It was used in an ad in a Spanish newspaper, which calls into question not only the photographer, athletes and team management’s judgment, but also the national newspaper’s staff and management. The second photo is of the Spanish tennis team, celebrating after defeating the Chinese to go on to the Fed Cup finals earlier this year.
Man, I haven’t seen that done since I was in grade school — in the mid-1960s, when the expression was “enhanced” by the person sticking out his (or her, apparently) buck teeth and speaking in a heavy, phony Asian accent, saying crap like “ah-so!” and “herro, I solly, no tickee no laundoree.”
You’d think we’d moved past that kind of third-grade cruelty by now, but nope. Not in Spain, anyway.
What were they thinking? Are racial mocking stereotypes acceptable in Spain where they’re frowned upon here? Do Chinese athletes go around finding ways to mock Spanish athletes?
Widgets are cool, portable little online features that you can put onto websites easily by just copying a little bit of code into your page. I’m helping to get the word out about The Denver Post’s widget for coverage of the Democratic National Convention, coming up in a little over a week here in Denver.
It’s a simple way for sites to include syndicated content from outside sources, contained within a defined box or space. Think of all the different elements on a MyYahoo or iGoogle home page – those individual boxes of content are all widgets on the page. [Read more →]
I just got a surprising amount of respect for Hilton, who responded this week with this spoof to an ad by John McCain’s campaign criticizing Barack Obama for being too popular, and comparing him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton:
And this one is just a wonderful acknowledgement of Joe Cocker’s impenetrable mumbling. Yeah, it takes a boomer to really appreciate this clip, which is from Cocker’s 1969 performance at Woodstock. But for geezers like me, it’s a hoot. I was laughing uncontrollably at work today while watching this. (Thanks to my rockcrit pal John Morthland):
This cool video is performed by FarEast Movement but created by Wong Fu Productions, a trio of Chinese Americans from UC San Diego who started making cool content online in 2003 and now run the gamut from online videos and music to t-shirts for your back.
Cool track as well as dancing — MJ’s high, lonesome “hee-hee” comes in and out like some ghostly punctuation mark on the dancing, and it’s nice to see these dancers, who probably weren’t even born when “Thriller” came out in 1983, pulling out all those old-school moves.
A Chicago institution since 1949, Garrett Popcorn Shops make incredibly tasty cheese popcorn and incredibly crunchy-sweet caramel corn. And, they sell the two flavors as a “Mix” (the first mashup??) that’s a bagful of heaven. OK, somewhat expensive heaven, but hey, did you think the pearly gates would come cheap? [Read more →]
The Bagel is a boisterous, old-fashioned kosher deli in the Old Orchard Mall in Skokie, where Erin and I eat every time we visit Chicago. I always order an egg cream, a soda fountain fave from New York that I’ve never been able to order in Denver. Erin’s favorite is the Mish Mash, a gigantic bowl of chicken noodle soup with a huge matzoh ball floating in it, eclipsing a kreplach dumpling, rice and kashi. They also serve a delicious — if a tad on the dry side — homemade corned beef hash.
I wrote about my experience growing up eating at Benihana for special family occasions, and how in recent years, the restaurant only has one connection to being a Japanese eatery: its food. The staff at the one we go to, for instance, used to have one Japanese woman chef, which was a rarity in the entire company, but she’s been gone a couple of years now. The waitstaff and cooks are all non-Japanese, and as far as I can tell, the chefs are all Latino. They love to tell jokes about how they serve “Teri-juana” sauce (get it? Tijuana, teriyaki?).
They no longer are sent to Japan to train with master chefs like they used to decades ago. But they are all trained well as entertainers, and come up with some amazing tricks with their knives, throwing food around and catching the morsels. The food’s still good, which is why we go from time to time… probably once a year, if that. (YouTube has a lot of videos of dinners at Benihana, including the one above, of a birthday celebration. Most evenings at the restaurants are interrupted by the clatter of multiple birthday celebrations.)
The diners likewise are no longer Japanase or JA families. The diners are almost all white; a couple of weeks ago, we were the only Asians in the room. [Read more →]
Erin, our friend Joe Nguyen and I dined the other night at Korea House, a popular restaurant in Denver (actually, Aurora, the eastern suburb, where the Korean community is concentrated). The dinner was part of an arrangement by Korea House to advertise in Asian Avenue Magazine, and we were there to write a preview of the eatery.
We had the full spread of Korean barbecue — Bulgogi (marinated sliced beef), Calbi (marinated beef shirt rubs, cut off the bone) and Spicy Chicken — as well as some Soon Doobu (seafood tofu stew) and Bibimbab (meat and vegetables served with spicy sauce over rice). The food was good (I’ll post a link to the advertorial when it’s up) and the experience was fun. [Read more →]
I know some of my friends think of me as a gadget freak, but I only get crazed about a new toy every once in a while. iPods, for instance. Or digital cameras before that. Walkmans (Walkmen?) in the ’80s.
Here’s my newest gadget recommendation: We recently bought two Flip video cameras and we’re having a blast with them. I had checked out the Flip last year when they were first introduced — Costco sold them for a few weeks and then stopped carrying them.
Several months ago, our pal Bill Imada, founder of the IW Group media and advertising firm, held up a Flip after giving a presentation to the Colorado chapter of the National Association of Asian American Professionals, and told us we have to get one.
At Denver’s Cherry Blossom Festival in June, my brother Glenn Asakawa, a former photographer at The Denver Post now working for the University of Colorado, held up his Flip, and I was reminded that I wanted to get one. [Read more →]
It’s been a couple of weeks since the Japanese American National Museum’s national conference was held in Denver. Sorting through the many bits of video I took over the conference, which ran July 3-6, my favorite parts were the tribute to JA veterans on the Fourth of July, and the July 6 bus tour to Amache, the internment camp in southeast Colorado.
The conference brought a bevy of famous and not-so famous speakers and panelists (I moderated a panel on Hapas, mixed-race Americans who are the future of the JA community) to Denver’s nice new Hyatt right by the nice new Convention Center. The famous included the likes of actor George Takei, a superstar in the JA pantheon; Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawai’i), a Medal of Honor World War II veteran of the all-JA 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team; Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), who as a baby was interned at Amache with his family; former Congressman and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta; JA leaders and activists such as John Tateishi and Dale Minami; authors including mystery novelist Naomi Hirahara; Cynthia Kadohata, who writes books for pre-teens; and Uma Krishnaswami, who writes multicultural children’s books from a South Asian perspective.
The conference, which had the awkward and ungainly title but righteous theme of “Whose America? Who’s American?,” also brought more than 800 attendees and volunteers for the four-day span, meeting and greeting and learning about the history, present and future of not only Japanese Americans but also of Americans in general. One of the noteworthy speakers was Anan Ameri, the director of the Arab American National Museum, who spoke at a Plenary Session alongside JA scholars about internment, civil rights and the question of American identity posed in the conference title. [Read more →]
One of the dangerous things about finally having cable TV, is tuning in to HGTV. For one thing, the network gives Erin way too many ideas for projects for us to tackle around the house. For another, it reveals my lack of ability to do most of the do-it-yourself projects that show up on the network’s programs.
What we noticed tonight, after several hours, was how diverse the network is with its shows’ hosts — especially the number of Asian Americans.
First we watched Hong Kong-born Vern Yip in “Deserving Design,” sort of a scaled-down version of the ABC hit show “Extreme Makeover Home Edition,” in which Yip, a doctor-to-be turned architect and designer, does makeovers of parts of a home for someone who deserves it. In this show, he helped a woman with cancer redo her kitchen and bedroom. [Read more →]
The brouhaha was sparked by Vietnamese American cousins Hue and Cindy Vo, who were co-valedictorians at Ellender High School’s graduation in Houma, Louisiana. Cindy Vo spoke one sentence in Vietnamese dedicated to her parents, who don’t speak fluent English, from the podium.
“Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh,” she said, and explained to her English-speaking classmates that the sentence roughly translates as “always be your own person.”
Her cousin Hue gave more of her speech in Vietnamese, but again, the point was to pay homage to her parents.
At least one member of Terrebonne Parish school district, Rickie Pitre, took offense to the Vietnamese passages, and he says that all graduation speeches should be given in solely English, or that passages can be paraphrased in foreign languages — but only after they’re spoken first in English. [Read more →]
It’s been a busy start to the conference organized by the Japanese American National Museum. We worked from home, setting up media coverage including sending a reporter and photographer from The Denver Post on a bus trip to Amache, the WWII internment camp in southeast Colorado. The result this morning is a powerful, well-written A-1 — front page — story by Jordan Dresser, with photos by Helen Richardson (kudos to the DenverPost.com staff, who added a couple of the extra photos from the print edition onto the online story).
Last night Erin and I attended our first official conference event, because Erin wasn’t feeling 100% during the day. We went to a reception for the conference at the home of Kazuaki Kubo, and mingled with Denver’s Japanese American leadership, and the likes of former JANM Executive Director Irene Hirano (who recently married Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawai’i, who wasn’t at the reception but will be at the conference today for the veteran’s salute), former Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta and actor/JANM President George Takei. [Read more →]
The JANM conference that starts today in Denver has a whole bunch of interesting and important panels, workshops and discussions. I’m moderating one on Saturday, about Hapas — mixed-race Asian Americans. But some of the most powerful parts of the conference will be the ones that bring people together with their past.
Today and Sunday, caravans of buses will be taking conference attendees to southeast Colorado, to the Amache concentration camp near the town of Granada (the official name of the camp was Granada Relocation Center) where more than 7,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.
Erin and I will be hosting one of the buses on Sunday. The day will begin at 6am and we’ll return in the evening — the drive to the camp takes about 3 1/2 hours through desolate eastern plains terrain.
I’ll blog about the trip afterwards, but I wanted to share a couple of links about Amache: [Read more →]
Considering that many — if not most — Asians are allergic to alcohol, it’s amazing how much the culture of alcohol is part of society in Japan. I guess it’s the same all over the world, but since I’m very allergic to alcohol, I’m just out of the loop when it comes to booze.
You’re probably familiar with the nightly practice of businessmen going out with their fellow “salarymen” after work and dining and drinking themselves into a stupor before trudging home to the families they hardly see. I can sip half a glass of beer and I turn bright red and splotchy, my eyes glow in the dark and I get dizzy as hell. It was hard to go out drinking in high school when my face gave myself away whenever I stumbled home and mom was up waiting for me. I guess if I were with co-workers who were all equally red, I wouldn’t have been so self-conscious.
Anyway, I recently came across what looked like a cool soft drink at Pacific Mercantile, the Japanese grocery store in downtown Denver, and I realized that Japan’s alcohol culture starts earlier than I thought, and in insidious ways.
I saw a display for bottles of a drink called “Kodomo no Nomimono,” with a cute retro 1930s illustration of a child on the label, and the words, which translate as “Children’s Drink” written out in hiragana, the simplified alphabet that’s familiar to Japanese school kids.
The bottles were on sale — buy one, get one free — so I bought one to try, and got one for my friend Jordan, the “Energy Examiner” for Examiner.com. He wrote about Kodomo no Nomimono, and found to his shock that the stuff is marketed as a beer for kids by its manufacturer, Sangaria, the makers of the popular lemonade-flavored pop, Ramune. [Read more →]
Erin and I are helping out the conference, and one of Erin’s main projects has been contacting and inviting Colorado Japanese American veterans to the conference’s Welcome Ceremony on July 4, during which the vets will be honored for their service. Many of them are elderly veterans of the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, who fought in Europe during WWII even though many of them had family members living behind barbed wire in U.S. concentration camps.
These men, as well as their lesser-known Pacific campaign counterparts, the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) who fought in the Pacific, for the country that imprisoned them at the start of the war just to prove their patriotism, remain today the most highly-decorated combat unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history. In one celebrated battle, the men of the 442nd, whose motto was “Go for Broke!,” suffered over 800 casualties to save 211 men of a Texas “Lost Battalion” in the Vosges mountains of France towards the end of the war.
It should be a moving tribute to these men, and the veterans will include both Hawai’i Sen. Daniel Inouye, who lost an arm as a member of the 442nd, and former Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who served in the Army during the 1950s.
They’ll join over two dozen Colorado veterans as well as JA veterans from all over the country who are attending the conference. [Read more →]
Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be first in news priority, and that journalists shouldn’t think that they work for newsPAPER companies, but instead NEWS companies. Maybe, coming from an august writer like Leonard Pitts, a world-class columnist at the Miami Herald, this idea will start to sink in with those of you who still have ink in your veins.
He sounds like speeches and conversations I heard going on a decade ago, but better late than never, I say:
We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary.
So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.
Growing up, I didn’t think much about it, but seeing old Westerns now, it’s amazing to me that movies got away with casting white people in the roles of American Indians or Mexicans — almost always as “bad guys.”
Seeing these movies today, you could tell they’re not ethnic actors, and could almost see the smudges from the makeup smeared over their faces and hands. It wasn’t any more sophisticated than the blackface makeup white actors wore to play African American roles in silent movies or the early talkies, wide-eyed, shiny black visages like masks, singing about “mammy.” You don’t see that any more, at least, not with blacks and Latinos.
Hollywood also has a long and tiresome tradition of “yellowface” — having Caucasian actors portray ethnic Asian roles. And, unfortunately, you can still see that on the big screen today.
The most famous early examples of yellowface are the various actors from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff to Peter Sellers who played the evil, inscrutable Fu Manchu; Oland and Sidney Toler as the detective Charlie Chan in a series of hit movies; and the German-born, diminutive Peter Lorre as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in another string of movies.
Even the great Katharine Hepburn, one of my favorite actresses, put on yellowface, to play a Chinese woman in the 1944 movie “Dragon Seed.” [Read more →]
The study found that because Asians are not all high-achieving academic wiz-kids, and that the diversity of the Asian communities (we’re not just Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, but also Laotian, Hmong, Cambodian, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and so on) and the range of generations from first-generation immigrants with poor English skills to fourth, fifth or sixth generations of Americans, leads to a reality that’s less modeled and more uneven. Not all Asian Americans go into the top Ivy-League schools, either: a growing number is opting to go to community colleges instead of major universities.
The article quotes CU professor Daryl Maeda, an assistant professor of ethnic studies:
Another part of the “model minority myth” — that Asian-American students should perform well in science, technology, engineering and math fields — also can be unfair to students, Maeda said.
“Some are great at music or English,” Maeda said. “And if they don’t live up to the model minority myth it puts an extra pressure on them, giving them the idea that they somehow aren’t good enough in their endeavors.”
It’s been a couple of weeks, but congratulations are in order for Amanda Igaki, the winner of the “Miss Asian American Colorado” pageant held in Denver May 31.
Now, before you recoil at the thought of a beauty pageant, rest assured that this pageant, organized by a crew of young people led by the energetic and entrepreneurial Annie Guo, whose family publishes Asian Avenue Magazine, was not a traditional beauty pageant. The most obvious proof that this wasn’t a typical pageant was the lack of a swimsuit competition.
In fact, although Igaki was crowned “Miss Asian American Colorado” at the end of the four-hour event (which felt much shorter because it was so interesting), it didn’t feel like a competition between the 26 contestants at all. These women had become close friends, like a small, tight sorority. [Read more →]
The most famous early examples of yellowface are the various actors from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff to Peter Sellers who played the evil, inscrutable Fu Manchu; Oland and Sidney Toler as the detective Charlie Chan in a series of hit movies; and the German-born, diminutive Peter Lorre as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in another string of movies. 
