NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

Erin and I have great respect for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders’ need to preserve our traditional heritages — they enrich our lives and help give us our sense of identity with the countries of our ancestors. I think too few young Asian Americans hold on to their ethnic heritage.
At the same time, we’re not [...]

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Erin and I have seen Barack Obama speak three times. We were at Invesco Field for the climactic speech he gave during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We were in the audience for his interview with CNN during the Unity Conference of journalists of color in Chicago in July. And, almost two years ago, [...]

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Update Nov 3: The Boulder Police Department now says there was apparently no knife involved in the assault against the Asian American as described below, but the victim was threatened with being “cut.” The police are also investigation another assult made the same night, Oct. 30: a gang rape of a woman by four men. [...]

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I wrote an article for Asian Avenue magazine, about mixed-race Asian American Pacific Islanders. The print edition, which is available at 500 locations around Denver, has lots of photos with it.
The article highlights some of the issues facing people of multiple racial heritage in general: the lack of acceptance by either side of [...]

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Asian American ad man and marketing guru Bill Imada comments on Ad Age’s lively “Big Tent” blog (he’s one of a group of contributors) about how the LPGA is requiring English language proficiency for foreign golfers on the LPGA tour.
For those of you who do not follow golf nor sporting news, LPGA leaders recently [...]

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Here are DNC-related “tweets” from my Twitter feed, which shows up in my Facebook updates and also in a widget on my blog pages. Some videos, too: Above, emcee Tamlyn Tomita (”Joy Luck Club,” “Come See the Paradise,” “Picture Bride,” Karate Kid II”) introduces Mee Moua, the historic first-ever Hmong American lawmaker, a state [...]

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Super Cr3w, the Las Vegas-based group of b-boys that includes Asian Americans, has won the top honors for the second season of producer Randy Jackson wildly popular show, “America’s Best Dance Crew,” on MTV. Congrats to the six-man group.
We took a break from incessant Olympics viewing to watch the live MTV season finale program [...]

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Saw this via Angry Asian Man (a daily must-read): Young Asian Americans are proving they can dance, and not just on MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew.”
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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Stereotypes sometimes are based on a kernel of truth, but they’re twisted and blown out of proportion and used out of context. Sometimes, stereotypes can even be “good” in that they’re not negative images. But trust me, a stereotype is still a stereotype. It’s a generalization that’s not universally true, and even the good ones [...]

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File this under “you’re too sensitive” if you want, but I think people of color notice these types of media mistakes because they reflect, deep-down, America’s lack of evolution on the diversity front.
From Gawker a few days ago: an MSNBC reporter described Spike Lee as “uppity” because of his back-and-forth spat with Clint Eastwood [...]

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The characters Harold and Kumar, played by APA actors John Cho and Kal Penn, are like embarassing uncles who fart in public and cuss and tell stupid jokes. In fact, in lots of ways, Harold and Kumar are stupid jokes.
But like those uncles, you have to embrace them when you see them, even though you [...]

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Dance MTV User =About Me= Video - video powered by Metacafe
We happened upon a two-hour special tonight for the final auditions before the second season debut of “America’s Best Dance Crew,” and got entranced by the amazing moves by the groups from all over the country that tried out for the series. These crews compete [...]

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As members of the Asian American Journalists Association, Erin and I will be attending the quadrennial UNITY conference in Chicago in July. I attended the last UNITY conference, which was held in 2004, and it was inspirational. It’s a combined convention of four national organizations that represent journalists of color: AAJA, the National Association of [...]

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Internet technology is such a great, rapidly evolving field, that we’re constantly being presented with new ways to tell stories — to do journalism. Who woulda thunk even just 10 years ago that the Internet would be many people’s main source of news and information? Who woulda predicted services such as Facebook, or Twitter, not [...]

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We just snuck out after a couple of hours of Denver’s annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration, an event sponsored by Colorado’s APA umbrella organization, Asian Roundtable. This free event has been going on for over a decade, and it’s held every May in a community auditorium at the Well Fargo Bank building in [...]

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The email below was sent today by David Chiu, a graduating senior at the University of Colorado. He’s been involved with a group of students, meeting with the CU administration since Feb. 18, when an ill-advised satire column titled “If It’s War that Asians Want, It’s War They’ll Get” was posted on the Campus Press [...]

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Bill Imada, founder and CEO of IW Group, a PR/Marketing firm, is part of a group blog at Advertising Age called “The Big Tent” that’s worth following. In this recent post, Bill writes about (and includes embedded videos of) TV commercials that include Asians and Asian Americans without using demeaning stereotypes.
Here are the ads [...]

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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 [...]

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Whenever I see an Asian on TV, either in a program or on a commercial, who’s the brunt of some comedic joke, my first reaction is to clench my stomach in anticipation of some personal embarrassment, as if the Asian on screen could easily be me.
But here’s a TV commercial that makes fun of [...]

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