(Flickr photo credit: Bobster1985)
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It’s rare that you get to read about women successfully scaling the peaks of the Himalayas. Less than a year ago, a group of 10 Nepali women climbed to the top of Mount Everest to celebrate the achievements of women all over the world, all while battling avalanches, low oxygen levels, sub-zero temperatures and herds of Yetis. (Okay, I made that last part up. I don’t think Yetis travel in herds.)
This week, the Everest Women of Nepal have announced that they will be traveling around the world to speak at schools about their treacherous expedition in order “to teach and inspire children, with topics of gender equality, women’s empowerment and global warming among the top priorities.”
Take that, Bear Grylls!
It’s truly inspiring to hear their story and their focus on female empowerment. I’ve always viewed feats like mountain-climbing to be limited to the non-Asian communities due to all the publicity and legends around celebrities like Edmund Hillary or Jon Krakauer (despite the fact that they were always guided by some sherpa–how come they never got any recognition? They climbed the mountains, too!). But am I surprised that the first female-only group to climb the Himalayas was made up of Nepalis? Or that the very first woman to reach the top of Mount Everest was Japanese?
Definitely not, and it only gives me further proof that Asian women kick SERIOUS ASS.
Shopping With GASP!
Everyone’s favorite lefty newsblog came out with a fun little poll: “Who’s The White House’s Hottest?”
One of the hotties in the running is 25-year old bachelor Eugene Kang, special assistant to Obama and political activist. Kang is also noted as one of Obama’s golfing buddy, even vacationing with him in Hawaii. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he ran for a second Ward seat on the Ann Arbor City Council in 2005 at the age of 21. Good thing he lost; he snagged an even better job.
With so much attention going to the three Asian American cabinet members (Gary Locke, Steve Chu, and Eric Shinseki) in the United Colors of Benetton advertisement that is the Obama administration, it’s nice that someone’s paying attention to the guy with a more behind-the-scenes job.
From Granta.com comes a beautifully written piece by Alexander Chee on his father, which is actually a series of recollections on authors and their fathers. I don’t think there’s anything more that needs to be said by me since I’d just give it away. Just read it.
It made me wonder how I’d write about my own dad. Given that he is unusually taciturn, even for Asian American dads–I’ve gotten used to having whole conversations where his only responses were nuanced grunts that seemed to convey more meanings than him actually speaking full sentences to me, I’d probably write more about that. In fact, I know he needs my help if he actually needs to talk to me, as in, have a conversation. I think that’s how his marriage to my mom lasted for so long–and how I have an apparently hyperacute sense of intuition and reading body language, since I look at those cues more than anything when having a conversation with anyone. Having a conversation with my dad otherwise can be pretty infuriating if you don’t pick up those signals.
(Hat tip: Christine, via twitter)
When I was growing up, my dad liked to talk about how Americans and Asians thought differently. He always referred to it as right brain versus left brain thinking. As an immigrant he of course had Asian thinking, while his three children who grew up in America, had American thinking. As a scholar, my dad had even gotten to the point of writing a reflective book about it, but never got it published before he passed away.
Apparently, scientists have also been pursuing this as a real difference between the ways Asian (Eastern) brains and Western brains process information. A recent article discusses this phenomenon and started by discussing researcher Richard Nisbett from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a study he did in 2001. A short explanation from the article:
East Asians tending to group things according to how they relate to each other and Americans tending to rely on shared features. When shown pictures of a chicken, a cow and some grass, and asked to decide which two objects belong most closely together, for example, most American kids choose the chicken and cow, since they are both animals, while Taiwanese children tend to group the cow and the grass together because one eats the other …
Westerners appear to perceive the world in an analytic way, narrowing their focus onto prominent objects, lumping them into categories and examining them through logic. Easterners take a more holistic view: they are more likely to consider an object’s context and analyse it through its changing relationships with its environment.
This sets an interesting stage, one that many of us already assume as true, which is that Asians think differently and process differently than Westerners. But what’s interesting is the same article goes on to disprove this theory, saying we’re really more alike than we’re different. That our context actually affects the way we think. Asians think holistically because we tend to be in group settings, but Westerners tend to be individualistic. The article then discusses a study using “priming”, making an Asian test subject think about individualistic tasks (e.g. playing singles tennis), and found that afterwards, the person thought and processed with a more individualistic style, showing any person can think either way.
Here’s the conclusion:
Clearly, the dichotomy between holistic eastern and analytical western thinking is more blurred than the stereotypes suggest. … We all flip between different modes of thought depending on social context… What is clear is that the minds of east Asians, Americans or any other group are not wired differently. We are all capable of both analytic and holistic thought.
So maybe we weren’t as different in the way we think as my dad believed. And that’s also what’s been going through my mind these past few months, reflecting on the loss of both my parents. As much as I had conflicts with my dad, as I get older, I find myself doing things I know he would do, thinking about things the way he would. I know I’m not turning into my dad, and I have some comfort in knowing we’re not as different as I once thought we were.
For all the alarmists out there that media is contributing to the blight of interracial White Guy/Asian Girl relationship, y’all are gonna love this Chinese soy sauce commercial, which involves — yes, you guessed it — a boy and a girl who meet in a supermarket, feed each other braised pork and onion rings dipped in delicious Kim Ve Wong soy sauce, then magically age ten to fifteen years in the same clothes and house, still feeding each other said braised pork and onion rings.
No, I don’t really understand either. The tale of soy-sauce braised courtship is display in the bottom in Chinese and was translated by food blog Serious Eats, and with the blog entry comes with some pretty hilariously snarky comments on their side:
winkyj: “Whatever, her mom would never introduce her to a white guy.”
redzerostar: “i love you, chinese girlfriend who cooks for me.” “i love you too, zak efron, let me feed you onion rings.” mm i could totally eat an onion ring dipped in juice now.
In any case, the Kim Ve Wong commercials remind me a lot of the controversial-with-my-friends Golidlock’s commercials that ran on the International Channels a couple of years ago, where Filipino bakery chain Goldilocks tells you to spend all your life moments with their delicious baked goods; so long as your husband is a white guy. But even more outrageous: who would serve onion rings with braised pork belly? That’s the travesty in my eyes.
(Hat tip: Stan)
Okay, so Utada’s 2004 English only album Exodus didn’t do so great. Besides a brief club hit for her first single Devil Inside, the album reminded people more of Bjork than of the mega-popstar sound that people expect from her string of Japanese albums — Utada herself called Exodus experimental electronica in a recent audio interview she did with the Gossip Girls.
But all that’s about to change — in theory, since we know how hard it is from anyone Asian to break out in US Radio — with her upcoming album This Is The One, to be released in March. Gone are the Easy Breezy videos where she’s dolled up in a bikini and a see-through tarp in a rainstorm, to be replaced with a Great Gatsby-esque video for her lead-in single, Come Back to Me.
While the song itself is kinda lackluster for me — me and mid-tempo ballads have never gotten along — you’ll want to check out her iLike page, where there is an audio track of another single, the weirdly titled Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence – FYI. If the intro of the song sounds familiar, it’s because it samples Watergate’s Heart of Asia, also known as “that fucking song you danced to until 9am when you went to that underground rave in 2001.” If you told me my favorite J-Pop artist would come out with a mainstream song that samples a trance anthem that still gives me Ecstasy flashbacks to this day, I would have hid under a desk and cried. But the single is actually really, really good — enough for me to make the whole album a definite download when it comes out in a couple of weeks.
(Hat tip: Slant Eye for the Round Eye)
The 27th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is starting this week, from March 12th to the 22nd, and the San Francisco Chronicle does a preview and reviews some of films; I have attended the film festival almost every year I’ve lived in the Bay Area and the films have been fantastic overall.
I’ve already been to a sneak preview of Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority about former Congresswoman Patsy Mink, the first woman of color to ever be elected to Congress and co-authored Title IX. If anyone is interested in politics and the topic of Asian Americans running for public office, I highly recommend you to see this film — I was overwhelmed and inspired by her efforts to overcome societal gender and ethnic barriers.
On this blog we often talk about diversity and state our expectations that white Americans try to get to know us beyond stereotypes and preconceived notions. The Daughter’s high school, which is about half Asian and a third white, sent out a notice that they were having a ”Hoedown” as the annual father-daughter event, complete with horse-shoe tossing and line dancing. I knew that this was my chance to go beyond my comfortable Asian-American neighborhood and try to get to know white people and their culture beyond my own stereotypes and preconceived notions. The Daughter was game, so I sent in the RSVP. These Asian-Americans were going to a hoedown!
(credit Scott Beale - Laughing Squid)
First, what to wear. Jeans would be good, but what else? I don’t have cowboy boots. I don’t have Western wear or flannel shirts — I’m more of a T-shirt/button-down kind of guy. A denim shirt did the trick (a button-down denim shirt). The Daughter wore jeans, a T-shirt and a bandana. Oh well, close enough.
When we arrived, I had the opportunity to meet The Daughter’s white friends (none of her Asian friends went). They were playing country music, and one of The Daughter’s friends said that this is the music that she listens to. A real live country music listener — I don’t meet any of those where I live! Some of the other fathers wore cowboy hats and boots, and it looked like they actually wear them on real occasions and not as a costume for an event. These white folk seem like nice people.
The line dancing was fun, and I caught on a lot faster than The Daughter. We did the “Elvira” line dance, which was really close to the “Electric Slide” I had done at countless Filipino parties (what is it about the Electric Slide and Filipinos, anyway?). I sucked at horse shoes. I was better at the Hoop Toss — toss a hoop around a cow’s head to win raffle tickets — because I took advantage of my inner Asian Engineer geek nature. I observed how the hoops bounced off the cow’s head (and resulted in no prize), so I got lower to the ground when I tossed the hoops, reduced the amount of bounce and made my daughter proud by winning those raffle tickets.
Some irony about hoedowns: you’d think it was mostly a “white thing” but Wikipedia claims that the origin of hoedowns was with African Americans. And many of the Hispanic dads looked pretty comfortable in cowboy boots and hats, which are common in parts of Mexico.
Overall, The Daughter and I enjoyed the experience. It seemed only fair that we should attend a more white-oriented event, as her school’s dances are always DJ’ed by Filipinos that play the urban music favored by most of the Asian girls. Silicon Valley and California have no ethnic majority and eventually the same will be true for the U.S. If we are all going to get along, we’ll need to get out of our comfort zone and explore other cultures, even if it means going to a hoedown!
This weekend I went to Hoboken for their St. Patrick’s Day Parade. St. Patrick’s Day in Hoboken is basically an excuse for everyone to get very drunk and celebrate in public; its telling that when someone asked my Irish Catholic friends and I who St. Patrick was, none of us had any idea, so I answered, “I think him and Jesus were best friends or something.” It was a lot of fun.
As my friends and I went to various parties, the crowd was young, fratty — never before have I seen so many dudes wearing short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts — and extremely white. In fact, I would have been willing to bet that I was the only Asian person in a 10 block radius.
This changed when at one party another Asian guy strolled in. I didn’t notice him until some random white guy came up to me and said, “Yo, now there’s two of you here…You Asians have to fight each other!” To which, I responded something equally absurd: “Yeah, we’re like the movie Highlander. I take down other Asians to absorb their souls.” He laughed, and the two of us shared a beer.
But I spent some time reflecting on this exchange today, and I’m feeling a little weird about it, because it fits in with a pattern of non overt but still racist remarks that I’ve encountered my entire life, and I’ve never been sure how to react to them; one thing I hear sometimes is, “Rob, you are the coolest Asian person I know,” or its slightly more demeaning variant, “Rob, you are the only cool Asian person I know.”
Is that a compliment or an insult? And what does it say about the lens through which people view their friendship with me? The first time a friend said that to me I was moderately pleased, because I thought it signified his willingness to engage with and think past his existing racial boundaries. Now, however, I am beginning to think that the opposite is true – that he and others still view Asian people the same way, but they see me as some sort of weird anomaly and thus not really even Asian at all. Sometimes I get direct confirmation of this, as when one of my friends told me less than a week ago that, “for an Asian person, you don’t act very Asian.”
What to make of all this? After all, these people are my friends, and the fact that they seem to have negative racial stereotypes about my ethnic group doesn’t make me care about them any less, or want to stop associating with them. But that doesn’t mean that I like when this happens, or that I’m okay with the stereotypes.
And more importantly, how do we change this? I argued in a previous post that assimilation is important, and that we need to resist the urge to self segregate. I’ve always lived by that belief, in part because I see it as being my small way of contributing to the cause of Asian Americana, but mostly because it’s always been more natural for me to associate with people outside of a racial filter. But if all I’ve accomplished is gotten myself labeled token white, then either I haven’t done a very good job, or there aren’t enough other Asian people doing the same thing. I don’t know the answer, but I’m interested in all of your thoughts.
(Flickr photo credit: r0sss)
While catching up on my twitter feeds, I noticed a rather interesting article from rayfilwong‘s blog, Campusfork: UC Berkeley students protest Panda Express. Apparently a group of 40 students last week protested after Panda Express expressed interest in setting up a restaurant on campus, though given the take from SFGate and the Daily Californian, there was no one unifying reason why there was so much hubbub over this. Varying reasons such as it being a chain and thus less likely to be willing to negotiate for healthier/vegetarian food options, to the amusing comment that “people can already eat cheap, indigestible Americanized Chinese food on campus,” were brought up. The issue of authenticity is something I find rather curious and a moot point, but that’s a topic for another post.
The lack of a unifying protest that would be a rallying point against Panda Express (which by the way is run by a Chinese American family down in LA) weakens the argument against a Panda Express at Berkeley, and the reputation that Berkeley protests everything simply for the sake of protesting doesn’t help either. Panda Express was already willing to provide healthier alternatives for the Cal campus, and they are leasing a space that apparently is notorious for being impossible to rent out, so honestly it seems like a win-win situation for everyone involved.
And I’m a little partial to the orange chicken, even though it used to be a lot better when I was in college when they actually put in the dried orange peel in the chicken. But I digress.
(Flickr photo credit: illinoisoases)
The Senate is currently debating a $410 billion funding bill intended to allow smooth functioning of the Federal government through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. Senator John McCain has consistently campaigned against earmarks, also better known as “pork”iIn the funding bill, and both Republicans and Democrats have a number of earmarks that total about $8 billion dollars.
McCain — who has confessed to being a computer illiterate — has recently joined the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting this past week to single out projects he deems unworthy of funding — including $237,500 for expansion of the the Japanese-American Museum in San Jose, California.
Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Mike Honda, secured the funding to help the museum, which has raised $50,000 privately but lost a $600,000 state grant to California’s budget woes; construction has been halted for lack of funds. Honda has been tweeting back at McCain, with tweets like “Jap. Museum boost tourism (thus jobs) in SJ Japantown, last of 3 authentic US Japantowns. Zoe & I proudly supported its funding.” Understandably, Honda and Lofgren are trying to keep their constituents happy by bringing any federal funding to their region.
But personally, I do not know what the proper avenue for funding for the Japanese-American Museum in Japantown should be; maybe the shortfall in funding should have been part of the Obama economic stimulus plan, as this would allow for the continued construction and final completion of the Museum and continue to keep the project on track as well as people employed. And frankly, I am sick of the over-hype of Twitter and that computer illiterate politicians like John McCain are joining in on the action.
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