NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

A couple of months ago, when Erin gave a training workshop for young Asian Americans at the Rise Conference in Denver, she asked the assembled youths their ethnic backgrounds. One woman stod up and said she was Hmong. She said all hger life, she’s had to explain her heritage when people ask “What’s a Hmong? [...]

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Here’s a video that was coincidentally uploaded to YouTube by singer-songwriter David Choi, whose stuff I like very much, on June 23, just two days before Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop” suddenly and shockingly died. (It’s the third-listed link on You Tube when you search for “Michael Jackson.”) “Ben” is an unusual choice for [...]

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Vincent Chin was beaten with a baseball bat 27 years ago today in a Detroit suburb, and died four days later. At the time, I was three years out of art school, managing a paint store, and was a budding young rock critic writing for Denver’s alternative newspaper, Westword. I didn’t follow any news coverage [...]

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Erin Yoshimura and I started visualizAsian.com to interview Asian American Pacific Islander leaders and tell their stories to empower other AAPIs to follow in their footsteps. So far, it’s been an absolute blast. The website launched with a conversation with former Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta on May 21, and this week we spoke with [...]

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Consumer culture in Japan is where you’ll see the collision of Asian and American tastes. More than in the U.S., Japan is where East mashes West. You can get shrimp Filet-o-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s, or pizza with seaweed or squid, and spaghetti with salty plum sauce. So I supposes I shouldn’t be dismayed at the [...]

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I was born in Japan, so I can say this with a straight face: I’m becoming a born-again Japanese, and it’s kinda fun. For years now, Erin and I have thought of ourselves as Asian American first, and Japanese American second. Mostly, it’s because we’re interested in and feel a kinship with other Asian Americans, [...]

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When I posted the video yesterday, of a 1970s Calgon commercial that showed Asian Americans in a stereotypical role as laundry shop owners who used an “ancient Chinese secret” to get clothes cleaner, it was an homage to an earlier era when such stereotypes in pop culture were commonplace. I didn’t expect that one day [...]

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