Though many of my friends were lucky enough to receive tickets for Michael Jackson’s Memorial at Staples Center, I was just grateful to have a job where I could work from home and avoid getting on any roads until it was all over. I brought my laptop into my TV room and worked with the Memorial playing in the background.
While there were many heartfelt speeches and performances, my attention was piqued three distinct times:
1) Al Sharpton mentions Asians!
Al said, “It was Michael Jackson who brought Blacks & Whites & Asians & Latinos together. It was Michael Jackson that made us sing We are the World.” Whoo! It’s not just about being black or white… there are other colors, too!
2) Asian-looking woman singing “We Are The World” and “Heal the World.”
Because the performers for “We Are the World” and “Heal the World” were not identified in the handouts at the Staples Center, a lot of people were wondering who this mystery singer was. Rolling Stone later revealed her identity as Judith Hill, a Pasadena, California-based vocalist who was to be one of the backup singers for Jackson’s This Is It! concerts at London’s O2 Arena. And, yes, it turns out this woman is indeed partly-Asian, her bio says: “Judith was born in Los Angeles and raised in a family of musicians. Her mother is an immigrant from Japan who met her father in a funk band in the 1970s.” (Check her myspace!) I thought she did an amazing job, especially considering that she and many of the other performers on stage were actually rehearsing with Michael just two weeks ago for the shows in London. This must have been a very emotional time for them, as well.
3) Paris Jackson’s heartfelt words of love for her Dad
Ok, so this one had no Asian connection, but having lost my father three years ago, I know how painful it is to lose someone you love like that. There is nothing quite like being Daddy’s Little Girl. And little Paris, who had the eyes of the world on her, was so very brave to speak from the heart in front of all those people like that.
Photo of Judith Hill from her website: http://judithhillmusic.com
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Death is a big business. It’s probably one of the few industries not really affected by the recession, but it’s also a business looking for new ways to grow and Asian-Americans seem to be an ideal target market. Cemeteries are developing Asian themed graveyards and building funeral homes with an Asian appearance. Minnesota Public Radio recently profiled one such cemetery in Minneapolis. In order to attract Asian families, the new “Garden of Eternal Peace” at Sunset Cemetery in Minneapolis uses feng shui principles, such as a large tree surrounded by a river rocks intended to simulate the flow of water.
In case you didn’t realize how big a business death is, the Minneapolis-based cemetery offers pagoda shaped granite headstone markers starting in price at $5,000 ranging up to $25,000. It’s estimated the average cost of a funeral in the United States ranges from $12,000 to $15,000.
In San Jose, CA, Oak Hill Cemetery completed building their Sunshine Chapel (referred to by their staff as the Asian Chapel) a couple of years ago. The chapel has special ventilation systems for incense burning and an attached kitchen for preparing food offerings. Oak Hill, interestingly enough is also the oldest cemetery in California and has a historical Chinese cemetery on its grounds and also features a separate Japanese garden.
Unfortunately, death and funerals is also something I’m relatively familiar with. My parents wanted made sure their death was the one thing their kids didn’t have to worry about. As immigrants to the U.S. in 1971, my parents didn’t have much money, but they still chose to buy a burial plot a few years after arriving. For 15 years, they paid $10 a month in an installment plan and eventually paid in full for a burial plot on Long Island.
In 2001, when my parents retired, they moved to California to be close to their kids. Soon after my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and I found myself with the task of having to find a new final resting place for my dad. We had settled in California and none of the family had any intention of going back to Long Island. I happened across Oak Hill Cemetery by chance, and located four burial plots with good feng shui on a slope with the hill to their back, facing a road that curves in the right direction. I purchased four plots facing the Japanese garden. My dad passed away less than a week later, and we put one of the plots to use much sooner than any of us had originally anticipated. My mom passed away 3 years later, and for her funeral we took advantage of the “Asian” chapel.
I take some comfort in knowing their final resting place has good feng shui and a view of something Asian. And being the Chinese person that I am, I also have my final burial place next to my parents, so my daughter won’t have to worry about my final resting place. Now if I can only figure out what to do with the burial plots on Long Island.
Shopping With GASP!
It was sitting in the middle of a packed theatre in downtown Toronto that I noticed racist jokes aren’t just funny to white people.
Fu-gen, Asian Canadian Theatre Company operating out of Toronto has recently produced some plays that are a bit questionable in their reproduction of East-Asian/Asian-Canadian stereotypes. Brown Balls features three Asian men complaining about their lack of luck with white women while fawning over their technogadgets. Banana Boys is a similar plot, reliant on the effeminizing gaze of white stereotypes of Asian males, the play propping itself up with homophobic jokes/innuendos and failing to speak to any Asian male sense of self-worth, or pride in the beauty of Asian women. As if there isn’t anything else for Asian-Canadians to make plays about.
The crowd around me? 50% Asian males. Howling in laughter. Cheering at the recognition of a common stereotype.
But why?
Some theories on the phenomenon of Asians’ fondness for stereotypes of themselves:
- It’s funny. When we tell the joke, we aren’t only the butt but the comedian (too bad the joke is still on us)
- Being funny is cool (and its not often we think of ourselves as cool)
- Craving for recognition: as poet Ishle Park put it, “Where are our Martins? Our Malcolms? All we have are fathers with thick tongues.” We don’t see ourselves in the popular imagination, pop culture or otherwise. No strong figures we can rally around and be proud of. So when we see something we recognize that other people recognize as Asian, we embrace it as one of our own children (only it wasn’t ours, it was the child of that white kid in the schoolyard who beat us up everyday for being Asian).
- We don’t recognize our strong figures as strong figures, or the things that aren’t the butt of a joke that we have as Asians which we can be proud of.
This is not all bad news, however. Because there seems to be such an absence of the Asian-American/Asian-Canadian persona in popular imagination, this gives us the room to start promoting people who we feel are deserving of this kind of recognition. Right now, we have the power to shape how Asians are seen in North America. We don’t have to take what was given to us.
Happy Canada Day and 4th of July Everyone! Hope everyone is BBQ-d out!
This episode plays all new music from One Two, Girl’s Generation and Karen Mok. Plus listen for your chance to win a POP 88 T-Shirt in our prize giveaway contest.
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- Intergenerational / Interdisciplinary Writers Lab Final Public Reading – A unique literary workshop for emerging writers with two of SF’s oldest interdisciplinary arts organizations; twelve selected students will participate in workshops led by accomplished writers and artists, attend special exhibitions and performances, have the opportunity to perform/read work at a public event, and be published in online anthology. (7/8, San Francisco: More info here.)
- Stand Up for APAture – Featuring hoboFish improv, Kamikaze Theory, stand-up comedians Josef Anolin and Edwin Li, plus musical parodies by Alexander Shen. Proceeds benefit Kearny Street Workshop’s 11th annual APAture festival. (7/11, San Francisco: More info here.)
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| Mike Kim | ||||
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The Daily Show had Mike Kim, author of Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World’s Most Repressive Country as a guest this week; Kim discusses his experience as the founder of the non-governmental organization Crossing Borders helping North Koreans escape through China to freedom. His story of the plight of the North Koreans is pretty compelling.
Kim’s efforts are not without great danger to himself; Current.tv’s reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling were captured in their effort to report about North Korean escapees on the Chinese-North Korean border. Euna and Laura are still imprisoned after being sentenced to twelve years of hard labor after a North Korean court found them guilty of “illegally” entering the country. Unfortunately, the two reporters are diplomatic pawns being used by North Korea as the country pursues its nuclear and missile ambitions.
While Americans slather on ketchup on their burgers and hotdogs during the July 4th weekend, they might not know that ketchup’s origins are from Asia. This article talks about ketchup’s origin as a sauce from Indonesia, its eventual use of tomatoes (it didn’t start out using tomatoes), and how it grew to be so popular. It’s a fascinating story – ketchup reached American via Britain via the Dutch on its path from Asia. After tomato canning companies began make ketchup from tomato waste products, it became so cheap that most people stopped ketchup at home and from ingredients other than tomatoes.
The article also mentions other ketchups, such as banana ketchup from the Philippines pictured here. We have a lot of this stuff in my house, and I like the spicy version best. It’s great with embotido and with scrambled eggs or omelettes.
I find it engaging to look at how food from Asia and other parts of the world influence and are transformed here in the United States. What other sauces could have a similar popularity as ketchup? While Americans, on average, are said to eat 32 ounces of ketchup a year, there has been talk that salsa is more popular than ketchup. This article from the Wall Street Journal claims that while salsa sales revenue are larger than ketchup, ketchup still outsells salsa in terms of units. Another Asian style sauce with potential is Sriracha, developed as a David Tran’s take on a traditional Asian sauce from Sriracha Thailand. Sriracha is another popular condiment in my house, and I have been to cooking classes where professional chefs used it to open up flavor. It makes me wonder what the next “hot” sauce from Asia will be!
Hat tip to John on the pointer to the Sriracha article.
OMG! I can finally sleep now that I am certain Russell, the cute kid in Disney/Pixar’s Up, is in fact Asian. I mean, just look at the colour scripts for the film — Pixar was sensitive enough to have foreseen debates around Russell’s background and provided us confused and lost Asians with these handy colour scripts. Because we all know that those 45 degree, upward lines in place of eyes are codes for “Asian.”
All those online debates about Russell’s ethnic background can end now. After these scripts, there cannot be any more debate. The verdict is clear: Russell is one of us.
(thanks to Jun’s post on 8asian’s tumblr)
Starcraft — a real-time strategy video game that was created by the same publishers as World of Warcraft — has been around since 1998, and while us American gamers have given up the game for the greener pastures of raids and PVP Battlefields, don’t tell that to the Koreans, where professional players and teams participate in matches, earn sponsorships, and compete in televised tournaments with appropriately screaming announcers, never mind the game has last longer than most marriages.
And if you live in San Francisco, you too can hire a hardcore Korean Starcraft player for only twenty five dollars an hour! I’m not just being a stereotyping asshole either; his Craigslist ad is actually titled “Starcraft lessons from authentic Korean.” For only $200-$350, you can learn everything from basic Starcraft resource building to telling someone to “QUIT QQ” in basic Korean. And lest you think that ByunTae is being somewhat ironic that a couple hundred dollars worth of lessons will lead to “Korean girls [being] intrigued that you’re such a good Starcraft player,” this CBC documentary available on YouTube points out that, yes, professional Starcraft players do have female fan clubs. Groupies for playing Starcraft? Gives the term Zerg Rush a whole new meaning.
(Flickr photo credit — and apologies — to brad_bechtel)
Shi Pei Pu, the inspiration of David Henry Hwang‘s acclaimed play, M. Butterfly, was reported by the New York Times to have died recently at the age of 70 years in Paris.
Shi Pei Pu and his lover, Bernard Bouriscot, an accountant working for the French embassy in Beijing, were convicted by France in the mid 1980s for espionage after Bouriscot was caught giving French documents to the Chinese after the Chinese government found out about the affair between the two men. According to Shi, however, Bouriscot was led to believe that Shi was actually female first by claiming that he was actually a woman forced to live as a boy by his family. Later as the affair became sexual, Shi kept up the charade by hiding his genitalia and always having sex with Bouriscot in the dark, even showing Bouriscot a 4 year-old boy who Shi claimed to be their son. Bouriscot and Shi were both arrested for espionage by the French when Bouriscot tried to bring Shi to France even though Bouriscot openly had a male partner. Howvever after Bouriscot learned in prison that Shi was actually male and had deceived him for decades, he attempted suicide. Bouriscot has lived as a laughingstock ever since, especially since people have wondered, “How could he not know his lover was male for decades?”
Hwang takes this bizarre story in M. Butterfly as a way to explore various themes that have always been dominant in Asian American literature: the exoticizing of Asia to Europe and the US, otherwise known as Orientalism; gender roles and expectations of both Asian American men and women; and finally it was one of the first Asian American literature pieces to openly talk about queerness. Hwang brilliantly turns the question of, “How can Bouriscot not know that his lover was male?” on its head, and fires back to the audience, “Does it really matter if his lover was male?” It also explores the question of what white men are falling for when they take Asian lovers, male or female: are they falling for their lovers because of who they are, or is it because of what they represent?
I’ve always loved reading the play, and it was one of the first pieces of literature I taught when I taught Asian American literature at UCSB and SFSU back in the day because it explores these questions so brilliantly. Unfortunately, the movie is something that’s always given me headaches. I have heard that the DVD of this movie just came out, so I’ll have to see if I can actually watch this movie without getting a headache or throwing the DVD out the window.
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