- Time to be terrified, angry Asian men! 1 in 7 new U.S. marriages are interracial or interethnic.
- The other Arizona battle: A new law makes ethnic studies classes illegal. (CS Monitor)
- China’s Growing middle class is getting fatter. (PBS)
- Indian American gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley is called a Raghead, but makes the SC Governor run-off.
- 50% of all motels in the US are now owned by people of Indian origin; 70% of those have the name Patel. (NYT)
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One of big online shopping sites in China, taobao.com, reports that male bras, imported from Japan, are a hot item. In Japan, they are apparently a hot seller (as you can see in the video), even for the steep price of $30 per bra. The bras are apparently popular with cross dressers and metrosexuals who need to support sagging male pectorals, also known as manboobs or moobs. Thin men who want to beef up their chest are also said to be customers. Interesting trend, especially as a school in Chinese is trying to make boys more masculine.
There was a request on the internal 8asians e-mail list that I post a picture of myself in a man bra, but some felt that me in a bra would be far too disturbing an image.
Shopping With GASP!
Anyone who grew up a child of Chinese immigrants can probably relate to the embarrassment of having to use medicines that aren’t commonplace in American society, especially those that leave an unmistakable odor. Just this week, the smell from Chinese medicinal herbs on board United flight 972 caused the plane to undergo a delay for a second security check, once a flight attendant caught a whiff of the herbs (which she described as a toxic chemical smell) in a carry-on bag. The owners of the bag containing the herbs were an elderly Chinese couple. They were not charged and the plane eventually made its way to its final destination of Chicago.
While I’ve never experienced anything that embarrassing due to Chinese medicines, I’ve had my share of history and ridicule for using wan-jian-you (tiger balm); seirogan (a creosote based laxative); and salonpas (pain relieving patch). All of these produced a highly distinct odor and were immediately noticed by my non-Chinese classmates during my school years. To store these medicines, I’ve often put them in double ziploc bags, but usually even that doesn’t do much to contain the odor.
As offensive as the smell is of many of these medicines, I still rely on them to get the job done. I just haven’t found any American medicines that are as effective at producing results as my Asian medicine standbys. So I guess I will continue to offend others with my unmistakable odor.
I’m sure there are other equally offensive Asian medicines out there, and plenty of stories to go with them. Lucky for me, while my smell may have offended others, I never stopped a plane from leaving for its destination.
Has China’s one-child policy made parents too overprotective — to the point that their boys are spoiled and causing them to be “sissies?” This is one of the reasons why Qinlinglu Elementary School in Zhengzhou, Henan province, has started a new initiative called ‘Looking for a Real Man’ encourages boys to act more like… well.. boys.
As part of this the youngsters are taught how to act more masculine and must take an oath swearing to act like ‘real men’, reports the Dahe Daily.
Wang Jianhua, who has been teaching at the school for 14 years, says he has noticed that boys have become “more and more girly.”
In contrast, he says the girls at the school are becoming wilder and wilder. [full story]
I want to know what these lessons involve: Fighting? General mischief and misbehavior? Medical exams to be sure they are have the correct proportions of frogs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails?
I think they’re wasting their time on this initiative. Everyone knows the way to “man up” is to listen and learn carefully* from the songs of Disney’s Mulan:
Be a man
We must be swift as the coursing river
Be a man
With all the force of a great typhoon
Be a man
With all the strength of a raging fire
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon
(From I’ll Make a Man Out of You)
* Extra man points if you also sing and do your own choreography.
(h/t: ProfessorEric)
Back in April, Prudential Financial published a report titled “Asian Americans on the Road to Retirement (.pdf)”. Perhaps the report was a bit self-serving to get more Asian Americans interested in financial planning – specifically with Prudential Financial. But this got me thinking as to how Asian Americans learn how to earn, save, invest and spend.
Of course, people are mostly shaped by their parents. Certainly, my relationship with money was shaped that way. I think my parents’ generation generally grew up in relatively poor and emerging countries, such as Taiwan in the 50’s and 60’s, so there was not much wealth or much of a social safety net to rely on. I think this resulted in being frugal and saving for the future being ingrained in my parents.
I grew up in a pretty middle class family. My parents’ biggest financial concerns, beyond the monthly mortgage and daily living expenses, was saving for college for my brother and I, as well as for their retirement. My father was especially frugal. We really didn’t go on any big vacations (our biggest was driving from Massachusetts to Orlando and back to visit Disney World & EPCOT center the year that EPCOT opened). I recall every month, my father recording in a notebook, the expenses in various categories – like one would do in Quicken or track on Mint.com.
My Aunt in Pennsylvania was a successful realtor and had several rental properties. Our family co-invested in a duplex and had our Aunt handle all the details. I’m not sure we ever made a huge amount of money, since that market in North-Western Pennsylvania never really appreciated much.
I recall every quarter, we’d get Exxon’s (now ExxonMobile) publication The Lamp. I asked why my father invested in Exxon. He felt that the world always needed oil and that it was a safe investment. Plus, Exxon had a DRIP – Dividend Reinvestment Plan, so investing for the long-term was easy and didn’t require a broker and any commission charges. Working for a college, my father had his retirement savings similar to a 401k in TIAA-CREF. I always had an interest in business and stocks, and even subscribed and read BusinessWeek and Fortune and even read Fidelity Investments’ Peter Lynch’s “One Up on Wall Street.”
In college, I’d save up my summer jobs’ earnings for my expenses for college for the coming year, so I never really had money to save or invest in afterwards. Graduating with over $17,000 in college loans ($25,000 in 2009 dollars), I was lucky to find a job towards the tail end of the early 1990s recession, started paying off my student loans and then started to save and invest.
Only after college did I start investing in an IRA, and later in a 401k. I also started learning more about stock investments early on in 1993 on AOL via The Motley Fool, an early pioneer in online communities about stock investing.
I’ve always managed my own stock investments, retirement and savings, mostly because that is the only way I’ve known how and probably a bit of ego – i.e. I should be smart enough to do my own investing and savings (and hopefully outperform the market!). Amongst my peers, I really don’t know anybody that has enlisted a financial planner or wealth manager. But after reviewing the Prudential Financial report, that got me thinking as to whether or not I should. According to the report, only 18% of Asian Americans, out of a pre-screened sample size of 656 between the ages of 25 and 65 with a household income of $50,000 or more, are currently using a financial professional).
As in any professional services practice, referrals are a key pipeline – such as looking for a doctor, lawyer, accountant or tax advisor. Only in the past few years, have I gotten to know a financial advisor or planner here or there. A while ago Ernie Tan at WTDirect had reached out to 8Asians to educate and inform our readers about different savings and investment options.
I’m sure I’ll take financial planning more seriously if I ever get married and especially if I am raising a family. I wonder if others have felt though that growing up Asian American has affected and influenced your thoughts on saving and planning versus your non-Asian American peers? In general, I think the children of immigrants have always had a certain level of frugality, hard work and savings mentality that pervades across most Americans immigrant experiences, let alone Asian American ones.
(Flickr photo credit: Alan Cleaver)
I received an email recently from Dr. Nami Kim and the Asian North American Religion, Culture and Society Group (ANARCS) asking people to sign the following petition for Dr. Jane Iwamura who was recently denied tenure at USC:
Jane Iwamura is Assistant Professor of Religion and American Studies at the University of Southern California. In May of 2010 she was denied tenure. Dr. Iwamura is not only an award winning teacher, she is also a nationally recognized scholar of Asian American religions, race, and popular culture. [...] As scholars with expertise in Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Religion, and Popular Culture, we contend that her work is of exceptional value and that she has made an important impact on these fields. As such, we strongly support a reconsideration of Dr. Iwamura’s case. Jane Iwamura deserves tenure at USC.
Please consider signing this petition and helping her in her appeal process; an incredible woman and scholar, and it would be such a loss to the APA community to not have her making waves in the Academy.
Good news for So You Think You Can Dance fans, because Alex Wong is back! A gifted ballet dancer who most recently performed with the Miami City Ballet as a soloist, he initially auditioned in Season 5 but had to leave due to his contractual obligations with MCB. He is back on the show, and sadly not listed on the MCB website anymore. Hopefully, Alex will return to Miami but he wowed the judges in his audition with the solo above yesterday.
I hope Alex’s audition highlights the talent that spills out of the pores of ballet dancers everywhere and that male ballet dancers aren’t just feminine princes on stage anymore. Ballet dancers like him are incredibly athletic, beautiful, strong, (and sexy, in my opinion) and their talents extend easily to many other dance forms.
Ballet dancers historically have come oh-so-close to winning in past seasons SYTYCD. Danny Tidwell, being the most obvious example, was an amazing dancer, but as the season went on, adjectives such as “aloof”, “cold”, “proud”, “unemotional” were tossed around by the judges. I hope Alex can win them over this season. He definitely has my vote.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Spilling Fields – Vietnamese Fisherman | ||||
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Last night on The Daily Show, Olivia Munn from G4′s Attack of the Show debuted as the show’s newest “Senior Asian Correspondent.” She attempts to report on the plight of the Vietnamese fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico in a segment titled, “The Spilling Fields – Vietnamese Fisherman,” until all the other correspondents show up to fight over who gets to be the latest Senior Asian Correspondent. Aasif Mandvi especially has an issue with this. Jon describes Olivia as of Vietnamese descent, which surprised me, considering her Wikipedia profile says she is Chinese and German-Irish. Her faux Vietnamese is pretty decent though.
I love food; no, no, I really LOVE food. It’s a relationship that has been sacred and intimate and enjoyable. I scoff at canned soups and instant anything.
But, somewhere in my genetic makeup is a deep love for instant ramen.
I blame my Dad for this; I grew up sneaking instant ramen into my belly as often as I can. I had to hide it from the Mother who frowned upon the horror that is instant ramen. She would go on and on about how bad it was and how it’s going to ruin my health. I would have a sassy comeback and ignore her and I happily slurped through my bowl of instant goodness. I love it so much, I even have my own little method of cooking it.
This is the reason I would never show my Mother this article on students who have ate instant foods increasing their risk of getting chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Oh, the gloating she would do and the triumph she would feel knowing that her nagging has been true all along. She would never be silenced in saying over and over again how instant ramen consumption really does have negative and horrible affects on one’s health.
So I was chit-chatting with my beautiful blond wife and talking about the children that mixed couples would have. If you think about it, any features such as blue eyes and blond hair would be pretty much eradicated by the dominant genes. But here’s the rub of it: maybe it wouldn’t? After all, even Time magazine had an article way back in 2001 about the “Eurasian Invasion”. If that trend holds true, there definitely could be some recessive characteristics that show up again.
If you think about how brunettes have married blonds in Caucasians, the only thing that might happen is that the recessive traits would pop back up a few generations down. This should also hold true also with the multi-racial couples–which brings me to another point.
Did the Japanese know something that we didn’t know? If you look at every single RPG, or anything designed by Squaresoft in the 1990s and Square Enix in the 2000s, the main character designs that seem to have Asian features but with genetic traits from Caucasians. Now whether or not anime and manga carry these looks from a popular design style, or they have some time travel device, I couldn’t tell ya.
Digging deeper, we find that this breaks into racial theory on gaming and the anime genres that have been viewed from a number of angles. Some say that the Japanese are secretly admiring certain Caucasian features:
When most foreigners look at manga for the first time today and see characters with huge saucer eyes, lanky legs, and what appears to be blonde hair, they often want to know why there are so many “Caucasian” people in the stories. When told that most of these characters are not “Caucasians” but “Japanese,” they are flabbergasted (Dreamland 60).
Others believe that it’s just a fantasy driven perception in which each race will see themselves overall in the animation. But why get all edumacated about it? What I do know is this: my grandchildren could perhaps look like Tifa Lockhart and and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy. And that thought is just so dang cool.
Next time you try to steal someone’s bag while riding a moped in China*, re-think your actions: are the contents of this purse worth being hunted down and beaten with pieces of furniture by a hoard of people? Probably not. It was an ugly handbag to begin with.
Also, check out the “hilarious” comments over at Geekologie. It’s 2010 and people are still saying “Me rove you rong time?”
* Note: I’m just assuming that it’s China. I could totally be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s not Japan. There aren’t enough schoolgirl uniforms.
This looks straight out of a plot from a mediocre CBS drama, but nope, it’s absolutely true: earlier this week, male Asian porn star Herbert Wong (Porn name: Tom Dong) was killed in a “samurai-style sword attack” by a fellow porn-star Steven Hill (Porn name: Steven Driver) at a fetish porn studio in Southern California, as reported by the LA Weekly. The killer — who is still at-large — was known to be friends with the victim, where they appeared on this DVD cover box together. (No, we’re not going to link to the uncensored image; you guys read blogs, therefore you know how to use Google.) As for a motive:
Hill had been sleeping on a couch at the porn warehouse, and had been updating the adult based website as well as acting in a few movies. Police said Hill was asked to move out a few weeks earlier.
“[Hill] wasn’t performing up to standards and a few weeks ago he was told he would have to leave,” said LAPD detective Joel Price. “They weren’t happy with his product and he had been given a date of [June 2] to leave… He knew today was the day he had to be gone.”
On one hand: this is sad. Someone lost their life over this. Two other people are in the hospital. And straight Asian male porn stars are like endangered Yangtze River dolphins: we don’t really know how many of them there are, but we only know of three or four, one of them is now dead and we’ve already blogged the last known occurrence.
On the flip side: Really, LAPD detective Joel Price? “Happy with his product?” Liiiike… his webmaster skills? His acting abilities? His penis? Did you, like, start high-fiving the rest of your buddies in the office after releasing out the statement? Because this Asian-American blogger is trying to take his job of reblogging shit seriously, and all I can really think of is, “He couldn’t perform up to standards folks; the key word here is UP! HEY-YO!”
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