Have you ever noticed a third floor door opening into the air? Useless pipes or poles jutting out from the sidewalk or the sides of buildings? Join KSW and a group of performing artists for a bus tour to discover some of these overlooked Thomassons around SF. This unique tour will feature local artists including Allan Manalo, Philip Huang, Anthem Salgado, Kennedy Kabasares, Adderly Bigelow, Christina Miglino, Dennis Rodis, Rob Trinidad and others, doing a variety of on-site interpretive acts ranging from dance to comedy to aerial performance. Afterwards, you will see your everyday surroundings in a whole new way.
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“Listen to the Silence” is Stanford’s annual Asian American community issues conference organized by the Asian American Students’ Association (AASA). “Listen to the Silence” started in 1995 out of the need to increase visibility of Asian American issues and to educate both those in and outside of the community about the real conditions of the Asian American community. The conference goals have since expanded to include the empowerment of Asian American students to take direct action to improve their communities and work towards social justice. This year marks the 14th Anniversary of “Listen to the Silence,” which will be held in January 2010.
Shopping With GASP!
In 1995, one of the most shocking cases of modern day slavery unfolded in Los Angeles’ backyard. 72 garment workers were discovered in an El Monte compound living in captivity and under squalid conditions, producing clothing for such major labels as Anchor Blue, Clio, and B.U.M. A majority of these garment workers were of Thai descent.
According to statistics from the Department of Justice, more than half of confirmed labor trafficking victims in 2007-2008 were of Asian descent. More than half of all trafficking victims are U.S. citizens.
Modern day slavery and trafficking fuels an underground economy that goes unnoticed to many. Victims generally labor in the garment, toy manufacturing, agricultural, and sex industries as well as serve in households cleaning homes or providing childcare to the families of their slaveholders. Every year, at least 17,000 people are trafficked in the U.S., with the majority of victims consisting of women and children. Los Angeles serves as one of three main points of entry.
As part of an effort to utilize the arts to raise awareness about this seldom discussed issue in the Asian Pacific Islander American community, East West Players (EWP) and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) are presenting a special event this Thursday evening that is free and open to the public:
Excerpts from: THE GIRLS FROM AFAR by Libby Emmons, a staged reading directed by Jeff Liu
Featuring:
Dante Basco (Hook, Take the Lead)
Fran de Leon (Dogeaters at the Kirk Douglas Theatre)
James Kyson Lee (NBC’s Heroes)
Camille Mana (UPN’s One on One)
Tamlyn Tomita (The Karate Kid II, The Joy Luck Club).Thursday, January 21, 2010
7:30 PM – show
Panel Discussion & Reception to follow
Tateuchi Democracy Forum in the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy
(Across the parking lot at East West Players next to the Japanese American National Museum)
111 N. Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
RSVP to (213) 625-7000 or on Facebook
This is just one of several events for CAST’s monthlong From Slavery to Freedom” campaign.
Of the many people affected by the recession, some not typically thought about are Indian Americans. Just a few years ago, Indian Americans were lauded for their success in the hotel and motel industry, owning 43% of all hotels and motels in the United States in 2007 according to this USA Today article. With the recession and technologies like video conference cutting back on travel, this article from Khabar (also posted here at New American Media) says that many Indian Americans have had to downsize their American Dream during the current recession. “You are asking me about my American Dream?” asks hotel owner Vimal Kumar Kolappa incredulously. “Right now it’s so bad that if you survive, that itself is fulfillment of a dream.”
Other businesses are being affected, such as the Haven Trust Bank, a bank started by Gujarati pioneers of the hotel industry that was shut down by federal regulators late last year. American United Bank, started just a couple years back by Indian Americans, was shutdown last October.
Closer to my Silicon Valley home, the NAZ 8 theaters in Fremont have shutdown. These theaters showing Indians movies once did 16,000 customers a week during the tech boom but are lucky to have that many customers a month. The theaters will be taken over by Big Cinemas, India’s largest movie theatre chain, which also owns theaters in nearby San Jose.
While it may be difficult to feel much sympathy for owners of hotels, banks, and theaters (many of the commenters of the article at New America Media certainly don’t have any sympathy – more like antipathy), Indian American seniors have been harder hit. Some Indian American taxi drivers, already suffering from high gas prices, ridership drops, and reduced shifts, who have seen up to 30% reduction in their income. Seema Agnani, Director of Chhaya CDC, a housing non-profit group for South Asians in New York, says that many Indian Americans have fallen for loan modification scams. While Indian Americans are often thought of having high incomes, they are all over the economic spectrum and suffer from the recession like everyone else.
Celebrate Asian Heritage with the Warriors as they take on Yi Jianlian and the New Jersey Nets. A portion of each ticket purchase will be donated to San Francisco Hep B Free – a citywide effort to screen and vaccinate all Asian and Pacific Islanders for hepatitis B, which affects 1 in 10 APIs.
The trial for California’s Proposition 8 is in full swing, and even though you can’t watch the taping right now, rest assured that there is a fair deal of Asian and Asian American representation on both sides. On one side, the testimony of witness Helen Zia, an author who has previously written on Asian American Civil Rights and Wen Ho Lee, were thrown anti-gay slurs when campaigning against the measure with her partner.
On the other side, Dr. William Tam, a driving force to get Asian churches in the suburban areas to hold pro-Prop 8 rallies, hoping “to convince Asian-Americans that gay marriage will encourage more children to experiment with the gay lifestyle and that the lifestyle comes with all kinds of disease.” (ALL KINDS, folks! Like syphilis! And leprosy!) He has since been asked to be excused from the Prop 8 trials, for fear of his and his families life. I obviously don’t have much sympathy for the guy, but what do I know? I’m just “encouraging children to experiment with the gay lifestyle.”
There may not be many APIs that play college basketball, let alone in the NBA, but when it comes to football, Pacific Islanders – specifically – American Samoans – are a powerhouse. According to this past Sunday’s story on 60 Minutes, there are more NFL players that come from American Samoa (a groups of islands located in the South Pacific) than any other place in America; there are currently more than thirty Samoans in the NFL with another 200-plus playing Division I college football. And get this – the total population of American Samoa is around 65,000! You could fit the whole population of American Samoa in an average NFL stadium.
American Samoans on average are physically big, but have a certain speed and agility not normally found in others of similar size. However, besides the strong work ethic and discipline, I didn’t quite understand what made American Samoans such natural football players. Or maybe because that 80% of the U.S. territory’s economy is based on canning, one of the only real ways to get a decent education is for those to excel in football.
If you’ve been on Facebook in the last couple of months, then you might have been inundated with requests to vote in Chase’s Community Giving Facebook Campaign. With financial resources drying up for many organizations, this campaign has been a rare opportunity for non-profit orgs to come by cold, hard cash by simply leveraging their social media muscles.
I have been supporting the Center for the Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) in this campaign, since I feel that their “big idea” has the greatest potential for immediate impact on those who are living in Los Angeles, right now. CPAF was founded to help address domestic violence and sexual assault in the Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Up to 60% of Asian and Pacific American women experience domestic or sexual abuse in their lifetime, and are the least likely to report the abuse. Since the economic downturn in 2008, domestic violence has been on the rise. With cutbacks in state funding, non-profits like CPAF are forced to turn away more callers trying to flee a violent home.
CPAF proposes to fund a multilingual call center (beyond Asian languages) to support emergency shelters and rape crisis centers to stretch their resources to serve more survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. Currently, each of the 20 domestic violence shelters and 6 rape crisis centers in Los Angeles County run their own 24 hour hotlines. One joint hotline would benefit everyone, but the resources to plan for and develop a sustainable joint hotline do not exist. If CPAF receives the Chase dollars, it will invest in developing the technological and programmatic infrastructure to handle crisis calls for all partnering agencies, in over 30 languages, at CPAF’s Multi-Lingual Call Center. CPAF will also extend the hotline services to include ONLINE CHAT to make services more accessible to survivors. CPAF will also establish VIDEO CONFERENCING capacity at partnering agencies, which will allow bilingual staff based in CPAF’s Call Center to provide multi-lingual services throughout Los Angeles County. Materials, including multi-media productions in various languages, will be collected and developed to be shared with partnering agencies and larger community through an ONLINE LIBRARY.
All that said, the Asian American community has been banding together in this campaign to get folks online and to VoteCPAF.org! This is significant in terms of community organizing because it is probably the largest and most effective grassroots online effort done by the Asian American community– one which has gotten big names from different fields together behind one cause. A series of PSAs have been released on YouTube, and I’ll be unleashing them on 8Asians, until the voting ends 3 days from now. You’ve been warned.
I hope that you’ll not only give CPAF your vote, but also ask your friends and families to vote, too. This is really the first campaign of this type on Facebook and if Asian Americans can show their strength online, then the win won’t just be for CPAF, but it will be a huge win for us all.
This video features Danny Cho as Kim Jong Il folllowing up on his “eHarmony” video and tells us how much he loves women– asking us not to “violence women domestically or internationally.” It’s a funny video with a a serious message.
There are only 3 days left to vote in this campaign, so definitely check VoteCPAF.org and send this video far & wide!
And as an added bonus, OUTTAKES! (WARNING: For mature audiences only)
LA Times is reporting that the Peoples Republic of China is replacing the popular movie Avatar on 1,826 movie screens, “made at the urging of propaganda officials who are concerned that Avatar is taking too much market share from Chinese films and drawing unwanted attention to the sensitive issue of forced evictions” — the movies will be replaced with a biography of Confucius. Which is a shame, you know? Because now, Chinese people will never have the opportunity to watch Avatar again. Oh wait, no, never mind.
The San Diego Asian Film Foundation (SDAFF) is proud to announce its 2010 call for entries. SDAFF will celebrate its 11th annual film festival season to an estimated audience of more than 18,000 during 8 days of film, panels, and exciting special events.
The San Diego Asian Film Festival is competitive, seeking entries in the following categories: narrative feature, narrative short, documentary feature, documentary short, and animation. An independent jury selects winners in each category, along with the Grand Jury award, which are announced at the Festival’s Gala Awards Night on Saturday, October 23, 2010. Festival programmers also select a first-time filmmaker to receive the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award, which is accompanied by a $1,000 prize.
Films/videos submitted must be directed or principally acted by an artist of Asian or Pacific Islander descent; or whose subject matter relates to Asian or Pacific Islander culture.
· Early Deadline: April 30, 2009 ($25 Submission Fee)
· Late Deadline: June 11, 2009 ($40 Submission Fee)
The 11th San Diego Asian Film Festival is schedule for October 21-28, 2010 at the Mission Valley UltraStar Cinemas at Hazard Center. All rules, entry forms, application, and festival info can be found online at www.sdaff.org. The San Diego Asian Film Festival is an event of the San Diego Asian Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting audiences with the Human Experience through the Pan-Asian media arts.
The Center for the Pacific Asian Family is a non profit organization that seeks to prevent and end domestic violence within the API community, which has some of the most common cases, but are the least vocal about it. This shouldn’t be happening.
CPAF is now part of a major Chase Community Giving Contest on Facebook, and having soared through the first round, is currently in the running for a $1 million grant. Over 100 members of the API creative community agreed to appear in a series of videos supporting Center for the Pacific Asian Family. Shot by an entirely volunteer crew, they dedicate these videos to the victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, their families. Please vote: it only takes a couple of seconds, but with a couple of clicks on a website you probably already use, could bring huge resources for a non-profit benefiting both the Asian American community and victims of domestic violence.
By Mandy
I’m 100% Korean. But a lot of people – mostly Asians, in fact – mistake me for being half-white.
To be honest, my gut reaction is glee. Half-Asian girls are always gorgeous, so being mistaken for one – to me – implies that maybe I, too, fall into this category of attractive females. But beyond my momentary glee, I wonder why I take this occasional misidentification as such a compliment: Do I simply like being thought of as pretty by association, or is it something more ideologically fraught?
Indeed, I have somewhat atypical physical traits for an Asian person: my eyelids are double-folded, I am relatively tall, and my hair is a mass of natural curls. I like these qualities not because they enhance my appearance, but more for their way of making me a little more effortlessly unique.
But what does “unique” mean in this context? By “unique” do I really mean “non-Asian?” Because I am pleased by my physical characteristics, which are often seen as being more Western, am I then affirming how Western aesthetics are an underlying ideal standard of beauty? And when it comes to physically identifying ethnicity, can differences from the norm be seen as harmless uniqueness, or does it subconsciously become an exercise in examining racial features (that might not even be inherent) and/or racial desirability?
Now that I live in Japan, I frequently see all sorts of made-up Japanese women with chemically altered hair and bug-eyed color contacts. But I don’t think these women are trying to mimic another race – though, since it is Japan, there are always extremes like the ganguro Tokyo girls who, as the word literally implies, wear blackface. Rather, the majority probably just want to enhance their appearance by straying from the brown-eyed, black-haired norm of Asian ethnicity. (Ironically, like most other “deviant” aesthetic trends this leads to the normalization of the once different-looking people, who all end up looking the same. And then it becomes a whole new norm that people are compelled to follow; but that is another issue.) Perhaps then a tangential but relevant question is how the “aesthetic norm” can be challenged and reaffirmed by conflicting (and racially-charged?) notions of beauty.
Likewise, I have had a strange history with my appearance. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, my eyes were very asymmetrical. My left eye was “Asian,” almond-shaped with a single lid; while my right eye was rounder with a more well-defined double lid, which I nicknamed the “White eye” (for its Caucasian-style eyelid). I would spend hours in front of the mirror tugging at my eyelids, futilely pining for symmetry with either “ethnicity”. Then, about six years ago, my Asian eye inexplicably acquired a second fold and has stayed that way ever since. Similarly, my straight hair turned wavy by the end of high school, and some time during college I acquired unstoppable ringlets.
Though I like the odd changes in my appearance, I don’t consciously equate these changes with looking more Caucasian, per se. I like looking “normal” – having two symmetrical-looking eyes – but “unique” – my eyes are not the usual “Asian” ones. Interestingly, living in Asia made me realize that my standards of “normality” are undeniably skewed by having grown up in American Whiteness; I thought my uneven eyes and pre-orthodontic snaggletooth were just plain freakish, but I see people with these characteristics quite frequently in Japan. Here, then, it seems rather “normal” and maybe even trendy. Still, this idea of fitting into a norm, whatever it may be, but being “positively” different from it is alluded to once again.
I discussed this topic with my best friend, who happens to be mixed race, and she brought up a simple but very true point: discourse aside, it can be somewhat of a “primal thrill” to be seen as a different race from what you actually are. There is certainly an element of this unexplainable rush that draws me to the idea that I might look half-White; having always felt physically (and socially, though my “privilege” has confused that) separate from Whiteness, it can be fun to not only “trick” people with my apparently elusive ethnicity but maybe even look good – really, have you ever seen an unattractive half-Asian girl? – in the process.
ABOUT MANDY: Mandy is currently living in Japan. And yes, she’s tried natto; it’s all right.
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APA Events
Feb 9: (Los Angeles, CA) East West Players presents THREE YEAR SWIM CLUB
Feb 9: (Los Angeles, CA) OR (Orphan Relief): China Care Bruin’s 4th Annual Awareness Night
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Feb 16: Adam WarRock and Kirby Krackle: West Cost Tour Dates!!!
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