Instead of remaining a citizen of China, I willingly became an ox.
I intended to come to America to earn a living.
The western styled building are lofty; but I have not the luck to live in them.
How was anyone to know that my dwelling place would be a prison
This poem, translated here, talks about the life of one man who passed through Angel Island. Poems like these were found carved into the walls of barracks housing the immigrants detained there. The documentary Carved in Silence tells the story of those immigrants. The book, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, contains translations of the poems found so far.
With Angel Island newly open after three years, this Mercury News article describes the renovations, some history, and the reactions of visitors. I knew some things about Angel Island, but the article points out some facts that are new to me, such as the fact that Indian immigrants also got stuck there. Also, I was struck by the comments of some visitors about the literary skill of some of the anonymous poets.
I have never been there but always wanted to go. These renovations, reopening, and its history put Angel Island on my must visit list for this summer.
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- Model Minorities in Reality TV: The Amazing Race’s Tammy & Victor Jih: The token Asian team on The Amazing Race this season are attractive sibling lawyers, and you’re sitting at home watching them eating a bag of potato chips.
- Random Asian Guy Does 100 Dances with 100 Songs in 100 Locations: I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.
- Racist E-Mail Circulates About Dartmouth’s President-Elect: a follow-up half hearted apology form e-mail doesn’t make him any less of a douchebag in our eyes, personally.
- Cute 4 Year Old Pitches Windows for Microsoft: She’s a PC, she’s four and a half, and she can ssh into your freaking network.
- POP 88 #29 – Exclusive POP 88 T-Shirts Have Arrived!: Our sister podcast, POP 88 has the best K-Pop music.
- Asian Americans and Mistaken Identity: White folks think we all look the same, but shh – we kinda think they all look alike too!
Shopping With GASP!
I’m sure most of you lovely readers have seen the infamous YouTube clip of the woman from Hong Kong who went bat-shit crazy after missing her flight:
Now comes the sequel: Hong Kong woman goes bat-shit crazy after finding out she can’t have shark fin soup (thanks very much to Campusfork as well as YvesPaul for providing the link). Given that the sharks that go into making shark fin soup are being overfished, I think this video should provide another example of why we shouldn’t eat shark fin soup anyway:
I don’t think any further commentary from me is needed.
One of the pleasures of living in Silicon Valley is seeing the interplay of many different cultures and watching how they mix and combine. A fascinating meld of art and culture has happened between Salsa and Indian Music. Giju John is a Silicon Valley engineer by day and salsa dancer and Indian music performer by night. I am learning salsa dancing myself, and when I saw this guy practice dancing (just practice, mind you), my jaw just dropped. More interestingly, he has put out an album of Indian music where he mixes salsa music with Indian pop. In this video from the album, he dances up a storm.
India has a number of salsa studios now. Another sign of the influence of salsa is that Jai Ho, the ending song from Slumdog Millionaire, has parts in Spanish. Did anyone else notice that?
You’ll notice from the video that lots of other kinds of Asian-Americans are into salsa dancing. I have seen Vietnamese-Americans fusing salsa dancing styles with their own Vietnamese music, and at salsa clubs, I have seen lots of Asian Americans enjoying themselves.
Salsa dancing is really a lot fun, and I recommend it highly. Not only is it enjoyable, but it’s great exercise too!
A friend of mine was nice enough to invite me to a VIP screening at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood of “Tokyo!” (not to be confused for “Tokyo Sonata“) last week which was sponsored by (among other orgs) Sapporo beer. I mention this first because, even though I don’t drink, I was initially tempted into going because I heard that there was going to be free beer. This is out of character for me, but it turned out to be a good thing that I went because the movie, which should have been the motivating factor for me going, turned out to be great.
Tokyo! is really three short movies in one — a triptych — each set in Tokyo and directed by visionary directors from around the world: Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Léos Carax (The Lovers on the Bridge), and Bong Joon-ho (The Host). Ok, well, maybe not “around the world” so much as “two French directors and a South Korean,” but the results are some really interesting takes of different aspects of the dynamic city that is Tokyo.
I’m glad I didn’t know anything about the movie because I had no expectations for the film going into it. So I’ll give you my mini review without giving anything away.
The movie presents three different but compelling stories and visions set in Tokyo which border on the surreal and outright bizarre, but not so weird to leave you totally confused. Each piece was visually-appealing in its own way.
My favorite was the third piece (Shaking Tokyo) by Bong Joon-ho, followed closely by the first piece (Interior Design) by Michel Gondry. I was particularly intrigued and touched by the hikikomori main character in Shaking Tokyo. Ayako Fujitani, who plays a half of a young couple who is moving to and settling in Tokyo, is great in Interior Design.
The middle piece (Merde) by Léos Carax is appropriately named (Merde is French for “shit”); it begins with a highly entertaining opening scene and goes downhill from there.
Despite a somewhat negative opinion of the middle piece, I still found it fairly compelling (I didn’t fall asleep and I was mad tired) and worth watching. If you’ve seen “Tokyo!,” I’d love to know what you thought of it.
Presented by Liberation Entertainment and Vitagraph Films, the film already opened in New York and Chicago (limited engagements), but it opens in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose on 3/20, and in other cities such as Washington, D.C. (3/27), San Diego and Philadelphia (4/10), Columbus, OH (4/24). (Updated Screening Schedule)
Incidentally, both “Tokyo!” and “Tokyo Sonata” will be screened at SFIAAFF this year, but I know that “Tokyo!” is already sold out.
Not to worry, Bay Area folks… 8Asians is doing a ticket giveaway!
TICKET GIVEAWAY FOR SAN FRANCISCO OPENING!
Courtesy of Landmark Theatres, 8Asians is giving away a free pair of tickets for Opening Night 3/20 in SF (Landmark’s Lumiere Theatre) or Berkeley (Landmark’s Shattuck Theatre)!
All you have to do is to leave a comment with your preferred location and one lucky winner will be selected to go!
(Contest will be closed at 11:59pm on Tuesday night, 3/17)
Selected engagement information is located after the jump.
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You know that you’ve walked into a different world when the Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs named three models as their new ambassadors of cute. That’s right. You heard me.
Kawaii Taishi.
Misako Aoki, Yu Kimura and Shizuka Fujioka represent the respective Lolita, punk, and schoolgirl fashions. Interestingly enough, it seems that unless you actually have had a liking to these niche fashions, you wouldn’t understand how to describe them very well as seen in the Reuters article on the announcement. While anime and manga have influences in some harajuku fashions, the school girl outfit stems from beyond there (heck, we also have that here in the States) while Lolita itself runs many different subsets from shirorori, kurorori, gurorori, to punk. The term EGL [ elegant gothic lolita ] was created by Malice Mizer’s guitarist, Mana and is usually for an older generation of lolitas which is more streamlined with the kuro style.
What’s amusing to myself is that while this is fairly commonplace in Japan, especially in the Harajuku district, the rest of the world is really seeing it for perhaps the first time. Thus the entire relations to dolls for lolita, instead of what the genre intended which was Victorian nobility. The punk style is one that is different than here in the United States mainly because it’s more about fashion than a statement. In Harajuku, the only thing that really takes the entirety of anime and manga influences are the cosplay costumes.
I believe that overall this sub-culture of the younger generation in an effort to be radically different for the more conservative older generation will perhaps inspire similar feelings globally. It’s not so much of a diplomatic move as much as a show of teenage rebellion much like the styles of the eighties for Americans with the big hair and tight leather pants.
I recently wrote about the French auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s artworks which included two Chinese bronze animal heads from a collection of twelve which were looted in the 19th century from the old Summer Palace in Beijing by French and British forces. I also commented that the whereabouts of seven of the original twelve zodiac heads are known. The remaining five are still lost as far as we know.
News comes today that the missing dragon’s head may be in Taiwan.
Wellington Wang, a well-known local art collector, told the TVBS news channel he was contacted by a businessman who claimed to have the bronze dragon’s head and was initially looking to auction it. … The dragon’s head could be more valuable than the rabbit and rat … due to its highly symbolic status in Chinese culture, the newspaper said, quoting another local antique collector.
It’s a well known fact that the dragon symbol from the Chinese zodiac is one of the most revered. The year of the dragon is considered an extremely lucky year in which to have a child and births always increase in a dragon year.
It should be no surprise that I have two cousins born in the year of the dragon. Both of their parents planned for their kids to be born that year in an effort to give their kids the best luck possible. Chinese superstition runs deep in my family and dragons are no exception. With so much faith in dragons, recovering the dragon’s head would be a tremendous boon to Chinese morale after the results of the recent auction.
There’s no confirmation yet the dragon’s head has been found, but I hope this news report is indeed true and we can at last know where one more missing piece of this treasure is, and at some point reunite all the pieces of the “Water Clock” fountain.
You can probably tell by now that I’ve become a big fan of PBS’s Charlie Rose lately; last week Charlie Rose interviewed Dr. Steven Chu, our country’s latest Secretary of Energy. If you are interested in America’s energy future, this is a must watch.
My father was a child of two worlds, he was born in China and moved to Taiwan when he was 8 years old. He left relatives behind in mainland China, yet still had much of his family in Taiwan. With good reason, he kept a foot in both worlds, and made it his goal to make it back to mainland China. He was able to do so in 1980 by creating a study-abroad program at Hofstra University where he taught for most of his life.
While my dad approved of many of the advances that China has made in the last half century, there was one that always bothered him, and that was the use of simplified characters. While he understood its necessity, he also thought it was travesty to the art form that Chinese call the written word.
James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic, published a piece this week on Chinese characters and the recommendation this year at the CPPCC to change the simplified written form back to the traditional form. There are a few reasons outlined in the article for this move back, but the one I found most interesting was that technology was making it easier to use traditional characters. Simplified characters were introduced to make learning and writing Chinese easy, but advances in computers and cell phones have made writing complex characters effortless. The argument is that with these new tools, China should be able to easily go back to traditional characters.
My dad would have applauded this recommendation. He loved the history behind Chinese characters, and when he taught Chinese and Chinese Literature, he always explained the history behind the character. He would draw each character on the chalkboard and make them look like the pictograph they represented, much like the scroll pictured above. The moon would appear as a moon, and he’d explain how it transformed over time to be the character we have today. He’d talk about how characters would be added to together to form new pictures; new meanings; and new words. He’d just get that spark in his eye and you’d know this meant a lot to him. I just wish he had lived long enough to hear that China was considering going back to his beloved Chinese characters.
So in the spirit of trying something new, we’re going to do something that a lot of other blogs do and have an open comments thread; that means that so long as you abide by the comments policy of not being a complete douchebag, you can talk about whatever you want; America’s Next Dance Crew, Interracial Relationships, what happened if people from America’s Next Dance Crew HAD interracial relationships, whatever.
Here’s a really question to start things off, which you’re free to change: How do you like the 8Asians.com so far?
(Flickr photo credit: mckaysavage)
We wrote about milliner Luke Song when everyone went wild over Aretha Franklin’s adorable hat at President Obama’s inauguration ceremony, and over a month later, it looks like he and his hat aren’t going fading from the spotlight anytime soon.
The New York Times followed up with the Detroit-based South Korean hat maker, who says that orders for Aretha’s infamous cap haven’t slowed down.
[T]he hat’s creator, Luke Song, has more than 5,000 orders for the spring version of the Aretha Hat (he declines to make a replica of the actual model), available in a variety of pastel colors and selling for $179 apiece.
And what about the original wool felt hat that Franklin wore on the historical day? It’s going straight to the Smithsonian Institute before settling down for a spot in President Obama’s library.
The article goes on to describe Song’s adventure from choosing an impromptu career in hat-making after studying art at Parson’s, despite the dying art of millinery–though I’m hoping that the hat’s popularity will spark an interest in this industry.
Has there ever been any other hat to make such a statement in recent history? I’m not just talking about the fashion world, because even the Internet had too much fun with Song’s creation.
So thank you, Mr. Song, for creating a new pop culture icon. I’ve been obsessed with this hat since day one (but not to the point where I’d actually spend $179 for one) because there was something so charming and daring about donning a big bedazzled bow on national TV. Let’s be honest, thanks to this one guy, Franklin has never looked more fashionable…and I’m not exaggerating.
I happened to catch the tail end of “Talk of the Nation” on NPR while I was in my car this week. The segment was titled “Hands of My Father“, and was an interview with Myron Uhlberg, the author of the book of the same name. While this story was not specific to Asians, I thought many Asians of immigrant parents would relate to one story talked about on the radio segment.
Myron Uhlberg was born the hearing son to a deaf mother and father during the Great Depression and he relates his experiences in his book. During the radio show, a woman called in who was also hearing and the daughter of deaf parents to relay a story of when she was six years old and her parents took her to the bank to have her help them open a bank account. She had to use sign language and act as the translator, and found herself a six year old trying to explain terms she didn’t understand, like compound interest using her limited sign language vocabulary.
Listening to this radio show brought me to tears, partly because my emotions are already raw from the recent loss of my mother, partly because it brought memories of all the times in my life I’ve had to act as translator for my mother. For me, it started at a young age as well, and I remember my mother asking me to explain what a cashier had asked, to read a menu at a restaurant, and various other daily tasks. I also remember difficult translation tasks, where there was so much more that needed to be conveyed, and I couldn’t find the words to convey that specific message. I know today that for a child of that age, asking them to be the translator, puts them in an impossible situation. But I don’t blame my mom, I know she always had our best interests at heart.
My mom moved to the U.S. when she was 30, never having gained fluency in English. So her kids were her translators. Although I was the middle child I was the first to be fluent in English and frequent translator. I always felt guilty about leaving home for college wondering how my mom would get by. But my mom was always stronger than I gave her credit for. By the time I was an adult my mother had mastered her own self-confidence and enough English to navigate her own way in American society.
I can’t imagine being put in the same situation myself, being dropped in a world where you don’t speak the language and you have to rely on your children to get basic errands done. It took a lot of courage for my mom to live in the U.S. and I have to give her a lot of credit for all her successes.
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