My 3 year old daughter used to yell “Stop Daddy”, whenever I talked to my mom in Chinese. She didn’t like feeling like she was left out of the conversation, and she let us know in no uncertain terms. It was partly my fault she never learned to speak Chinese, as her other parent is a Caucasian, English-only speaker. If she was going to learn it was going to require my talking to her in Chinese, which never happened often enough.
So obviously it touched a nerve when fellow 8asians blogger, Ernie sent me this article titled “Our Child Only Speaks English and It’s Okay”. I have to commend Bonnie Gray (the Chinese American author of the article) for being able to rationalize the decision to not teach her child Chinese in addition to English.
For us it wasn’t so much a decision, but a matter of fate. We had always wanted our daughter to be bilingual, and we thought it would happen because both my parents lived with us. So I told my parents to speak only Chinese to my daughter, and we parents stuck to English, as my Mandarin was only so-so anyway, with Taiwanese being the language I was fluent in (the reasons behind that are another story for another time).
My dad passed away when our daughter was only 9 months old, but that wasn’t a surprise to us, as his failing health was the reason they moved in with us. What we didn’t expect was that my mom would decline in health, and spend less time with our daughter than anticipated.
One sad part of all of this is our daughter is finally at the age where she’s interested in learning Chinese, and my attempts to teach her broken Mandarin aren’t going very far. I have some solace in that I’m not alone in this phenomenon of English-only children, as another fellow 8asians blogger Jeff sent me a link to an article he wrote about his kids growing up but not learning Tagalog.
What bothers me most of all though, is that I feel not knowing Chinese will distance my daughter from many of her wonderful relatives who still live in Taiwan and China. I tell myself, it’s my job to make sure she meets them all when she gets a little older, and I just hope I keep my promise to her.
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California Assemblyman Ted Lieu officially announced his bid to run for attorney general in 2010. According to his campaign biography, he’s ridiculously qualified, in only the way that an Asian American model minority could be:
“Elected to the California Legislature in 2005, Assembly member Ted Lieu has ascended to a key leadership post as Chair of the powerful Assembly Rules Committee. Dedicated to his country, Assembly member Lieu holds the rank of Major in the United States Air Force Reserves and served on active duty for four years as a member of the JAG Corps as a military prosecutor. Prior to his election to the State Assembly, Assembly member Lieu was a civil litigator. He also served on the Torrance City Council and the City’s Environmental Quality & Energy Conservation Commission. He graduated with a B.S. and B.A. from Stanford University, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and received four American Jurisprudence awards. He is married to Betty Chim, a former Deputy Attorney General, and has two rambunctious children, Brennan and Austin.”
Not only is current San Francisco City Attorney Kamala Harris a potential contender, but Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly is rumored to run as well. But Lieu has the upper hand in fundraising, having announced that he’s raised over $1 million and has $350k cash on hand.
But what exactly what does the California Attorney General do? According to the California State Constitution, the officer’s duty is to ensure that “the laws of the state are uniformly and adequately enforced” — in other words, he’s the chief law prosecutor. Best of luck to Ted!
Shopping With GASP!
With all the music talk on this blog lately on Kollaboration, you would think that the only music to come from an Asian looking face is based out of Los Angeles. But pop music blog ArjanWrites.com recently featured a post (with a free MP3 download!) of singer-songwriter and Korean adoptee Mayda, and I won’t lie; sometimes I want to hear a different sound that isn’t a R&B cover or a sweet little acoustic guitar ballad. And without a doubt, this is a different sound. (Mayda is from St. Paul, Minnesota, and you can hear the funk influences on her tracks, as subtle as they are. “Minneapolis Funk” doesn’t have its own last.fm tag for nothing.)
Her MySpace page gives a good idea of her music and her album The Stereotype EP is available via iTunes, but the best way to describe her song H.L.L.R — available for download here — is “a soulful voice that kinda sounds like Robyn but not really with an acoustic guitar some kinda electronic drum track that’s hard to explain but hella good.” But then again, that’s why I have a day job and am not writing for Billboard Magazine.
After the American Musical Theater of San Jose declared bankruptcy in early December, there remained some hope that Avenue Q would still make it’s Northern California Bay Area debut in San Jose. But this week’s news declared that the touring production of the musical has been scuttled for the Bay Area.
If you don’t know much about Avenue Q, you should know it’s a Tony award winning musical based on Sesame Street-like puppet characters interacting with human characters, for an adult audience. The musical covers adult topics like racism, pornography and homosexuality, so it’s really not a kid friendly show. The cast features one Asian character named “Christmas Eve” who is a Japanese immigrant trying to find work in Koreatown, but speaks no Korean. She’s engaged to the character Brian, an out-of-work Jewish comedian. Christmas Eve was played by Ann Harada, using a heavy Japanese accent in the original production.
The musical also features songs like “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist“, and uses not only the character of Christmas Eve to discuss racism, but uses racism against Monsters (e.g. Cookie Monster, parodied in Avenue Q by the character Trekkie Monster) as well.
It’s a major disappointment the Bay Area won’t be graced with this production. Those of us looking forward to the musical will have to wait a little longer or travel to Sacramento, the nearest venue that will have the touring production.
Boston’s very first Asian-American city councilor Sam Yoon, elected just four years ago, has made it official and is running for mayor of Boston. I had the chance to meet Yoon for the first time back in April 2006 at the first AAPI Democratic Leadership Summit as well as a Bay Area fund raising dinner. Yoon had been making the rounds around the country raising money and discussing the possibility of being mayor, but made it official this past weekend as reported by The Boston Globe:
Yoon’s candidacy will face significant obstacles, not least of which is fund-raising. Yoon had $140,000 on hand at the end of January, campaign finance reports show while [current] Menino commands a war chest of about $1.4 million … But the ground-breaking potential for his run is likely to give more attention to his campaign than would normally be afforded to a two-term councilor seeking the job. Yoon would be the city’s first non-white mayor. Several black candidates have run unsuccessfully for the office.”
As far as I know, if Yoon is elected he will be the first Asian American mayor of a major U.S. city in the continental United States (former Governor of Washington state Gary Locke was never a mayor of a city.) Just by running, Yoon will be making history as he did when he was the first Asian American to run for Boston city council and later winning. Best of luck to Yoon – he’ll need it, given the current mayor’s war chest. If you’d like to support Yoon’s bid, please visit his campaign site. (Disclaimer: I’ve contributed to Yoon’s campaigns in the past.)
Like most of the girls around me, I spent a good number of my youthful years daydreaming about my wedding day. It was filled with beautiful things and loved ones. It involved a wonderful dress and yummy food. And of course, it involved the man of my dreams. In those daydreams, the MOMD — man of my dreams — was a tall, burly Asian man with dark hair and almond shaped eyes; he would look at me with love in his eyes as I would look at him. I was surrounded by Asians, and I always thought I’d marry an Asian guy.
But fast-forward many years and insert influences of American TV with the rise in popularity of the geeky, nice guy with characters like Ed from Ed, Ben from Knocked-Up, Jim from The Office, and Chuck from Chuck. This is not an exhaustive list, but it sure helped catapult geeky guys from the geeky pool into the hottie pool.
Needless to say, those nice and geeky characters I enjoyed on screen have turned this gal, who always thought she’d marry Asian, into a gal who desires a tall, geeky, white man to replace the tall, burly Asian man of her daydreams. But it makes me wonder… does this make me a traitor?
As the University of California attempts to increase the diversity of its undergraduate student body by including more Latinos and blacks without violating the terms laid out in Proposition 209 that eliminated affirmative action in California public institutions, a novel solution has been proposed: eliminate the SAT subject exams as an admissions requirement. Considering that UC has also attempted in the past to eliminate the more popular SAT reasoning test to much controversy, on the surface it appears to be an easy compromise since fewer students take the SAT subject exams anyway, saving them and their families time and money in preparing and studying for these exams.
However, the Journal of Higher Education reports that this would have an unintentional effect: significantly decreasing the numbers of Asian Americans admitted, increasing the number of white students, while making virtually no difference in the number of black and Latino admits. In a statement used to justify this shift in policy, UCSF epidemiologist Mary Croughan does a backhanded compliment to Asian Americans, essentially stating that if Asian American students hadn’t done so well in these exams, they wouldn’t be affected so much.
As someone who actually did benefit from UC’s affirmative action policy when I went to college in the early 1990s (at the time, Filipino Americans were the only Asian Americans to be considered for affirmative action in the UC system), I saw the immediate effects of what happened after 209 passed. At my school, UC Riverside, there was always a sizable cohort of Filipinos in my classes, but by the time I went to grad school at UC Santa Barbara, the numbers of Filipino undergraduates across all UCs decreased substantially. I wasn’t alone in this observation: a report noted that UC Berkeley’s law school admitted no Filipinos the year after Prop 209 passed. Also, applications to UC’s graduate and professional schools from blacks, Latinos and Filipinos also decreased significantly, and even now, this has not yet recovered to pre-209 levels.
At the same time, I believe that the affirmative action policy pre-209 was flawed. If the University of California had the time, resources and money, they would do better to take a look at socioeconomic status along with race and ethnicity, gender, etc., if they really wanted a more diverse student body, rather than just looking at test scores.
(Flickr photo credit: Bernt Rostad)
Not only is the US and world economy in the crapper, but the state of California is in a real financial mess. California State Controller John Chiang has taken on Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger before, but now Chiang has a lot of tough decisions to make with the current fiscal crises going on:
“The 46-year-old Mr. Chiang (pronounced CHUNG), a Democrat elected in 2006 to a four-year term, oversees the state’s nearly depleted reserves, which need an infusion of money through a revamped budget. Gov. Schwarzenegger and state legislators have missed a self-imposed Feb. 1 deadline to balance the budget, which is expected to have a $42 billion shortfall by mid-2010. … Mr. Chiang’s profile has risen as lawmakers haggle. Last week he delayed, for 30 days, more than $3 billion in tax refunds, welfare checks and other payments to keep the state from running out of cash this month.”
The state legislature and Governor helped create California’s budget crises by signing in the state budget 85 days late in October, putting the state $15 billion in the red; tax revenue shortfalls surely helped contribute to the rest of the projected $42+ billion in debt. Hopefully, Chiang can manage through this financial crisis for all of Californians’ sake.
Wicked, the smash Broadway musical, which started life in a pre-production run in San Francisco in 2003 at the Curran theater, is finally back in San Francisco at the Orpheum Theater. The return to San Francisco brings with it a nice surprise, and that’s Deedee Magno (who is of Filipino descent), playing Nessarose. If you watch any mainstream media you’re already aware of how few parts Asians (and most minorities) get in movies, musicals and plays.
It’s especially a nice touch when a role that doesn’t call for an Asian actor gets filled with an Asian actor, especially since roles that are written for Asians quite often get filled with Caucasian mainstream actors, as witnessed by the controversy surrounding Miss Saigon, when the role of the Engineer (Tran Van Dinh) went to Jonathan Pryce.
I was lucky enough to see the production of Wicked on the first of February, and it met and exceeded all of my expectations. I will admit that I have been a fan of musicals ever since I saw Yul Brenner in the 1979 production of The King and I on Broadway.
Since I’m on the discussion of Broadway musicals, I also want to give a special kudos to Phylicia Rashad who starred on Broadway as the witch in the production of Into the Woods in 1988. She had the tenacity to convince the producers to cast an African American woman not only in the role of the witch, but as one of the step-sisters as well. It made for a memorable show, and one I was proud to have seen live on stage.
So if you get a chance, go see Wicked, it’s worth it if you have an affinity for musicals.
Charlie Rose’s interviews are low key, insightful, deep and lengthy; not your usual Hollywood elite trying to pitch their latest movie in five minutes or less (although I do enjoy that as well.) This past week, Rose interviewed Taiwanese American Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia. Depending on what you do for a living, you may not have heard of Nvidia – they’re a Silicon Valley-based company that develops computer graphics chips.
I had the chance to hear Huang speak at Stanford a few years back; he’s down-to-earth and approachable. I asked Huang about the perceived glass ceiling in corporate America for Asian Americans and what we could do to break the ceiling. His advice: to be authentic, be true to yourself and be yourself. I wasn’t too sure if I was totally convinced at what he said, but his advice was emphasized by a column by former GE CEO Jack Welch, emphasizing that “the critical component of success is authenticity.”
You can see Huang being authentic and true to himself and true to the mission he sees Nvidia’s role in the future of computing in this video. Last fall, The New York Times also did a great profile on Huang as well as Nvidia, their new efforts around Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), and the coming war for the soul of the computer with Intel.
BIG NEWS — I’m now syndicated with Soompi Radio Club! You can now listen and chat along with other listeners over at the IRC @ Rizon Network channel #soompi.radio. I’ll update this post once I know the time slot.
In this episode, the latest from Gackt, T and a “Then and Now” set featuring Jewelry.
You can still enter to win tickets for yourself and a guest to attend Kollaboration 9 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Newly added to the contest is an exclusive POP 88 T-shirt.
Also, join the POP 88 community at Ning to enter for our monthly member giveaway.
So what’s been up with BoA, anyway? Our favorite Korean Pop Star that speaks fluent Japanese is now living in Los Angeles, watching Gossip Girl and doing some local interviews in an attempt to cross-over into the American music industry and, well, to become American as quickly as goddamn possible. Does she have a noticeable accent? Sure. But so does Shakira and Tokio Hotel, and somehow the ground hasn’t opened up and swallowed them whole, so hopefully the media — and god help us, the American public — can look beyond that. Maybe.
But besides a performance the side stage at KIIS-FM’s Jingle Ball, we haven’t heard much from her. This might change however, as it’s just been announced that BoA will perform at the previously blogged about Kollaboration 9 event in Los Angeles. (Have we mentioned that we have FREE passes to give away until Valentines day? No? Well, there you go.)
Don’t get me wrong, folks, I’m a big fan BoA. But all fans of Asian pop music have their reasons why Asian music hasn’t crossed over successfully, and people e-mail me from time to time with their armchair-A&R-guy suggestions. Take this e-mail from Autumn Reign, a music producer from Vancouver, for example:
I gotta agree with you that if I were apart of BoA’s promo team.. I def would not remix her with an AutoTune flo rida track! I really didn’t get that whole trance techno remix either..
I think personally, in order for her to reach a level of success in America, she really has to hit the mixtape scene… Get her music in the hands of real music lovers first.. Then hit mainstream America.
Or you can promote her through the gay market; there’s nothing gays love more than an ass-kicking, hip-hop dancing Asian girl. (Unbelievably, I type that sentence without a trace of sarcasm. DEAR SM ENTERTAINMENT: DON’T LET THE GAYS SCARE YOU. GAYS ARE YOUR INDUSTRY GOLDMINE. Also, anime attendees. <3, Ernie.)
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