According to the U.S. Food Safety News Chinese honeymakers are disguising the origin of their honey by shipping it to other Asian nations including Vietnam, Malaysia, and India, in order to smuggle it to the United States. What’s worse is that the honey from China may contain lead, an antibiotic chloramphenicol–used to stop a bacterial epidemic that was killing tens of millions of bees, and much of the honey made in China isn’t honey at all. “Chinese brokers…mix sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery, barley malt sweetener, and other additives…” Just yesterday, it was also reported that the vinegar in China contained antifreeze and killed eleven people and hospitalized 120 people. What other fake and tainted products can China come up with next? — Mary
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APA Spotlight is a weekly interview of Asian Pacific Islander Americans (APIA) community leaders. It is a spotlight on individuals who have dedicated their careers to issues surrounding the APIA community with the goal of bringing much deserved recognition to their work and cause(s).
Michael Matsuda is founder and president of the Martial Arts History Museum, an Asian cultural museum focusing on Asian art, tradition and history in connection with Asian forms of martial arts. Founded in 1999, it is a non-profit organization and first of its kind in the world.
Michael is recognized as a nationally respected historian of Asian martial arts in America. He was founder and publisher of Martial Art Magazine and contributing editor for numerous publications for the last 20 years. An author of four books on the martial arts, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2004. His career encompasses his role as production head for a variety of magazines as well as manager of the media department for Blue Cross of California and California Federal Bank producing their commercials and media programs.
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“Many look at outsourcing as the ultimate evil in the U.S., but its beauty may lie in how it redistributes wealth globally. In fact, the continuous wage increases by Western companies to pay its workers in developing markets actually helps close the wealth gap between the two to levels not seen since before the Industrial Revolution. There are now one of two inevitable outcomes for many who’re having a harder time in America: Either move to a developing market and take a white-collar job (with a lower cost of living but potentially greater quality of life), or become employed locally by a foreign company from a country that we’ve historically deemed to be economically inferior.” — Rahat
This week, Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and current Republican presidential candidate was in California campaigning to reach out to the Asian American community:
Newt Gingrich has determined that the Asian vote will help win him the Republican primaries, so he headed to California to lock it up. He’ll host a series of meetings with Thai, Korean and Chinese community leaders in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, put together with the help of Michelle Steel, a Korean-American who’s vice chair of the California State Board of Equalization. … This new appeal to Asian voters arrives in the middle of a West Coast campaign swing that will take him to Hollywood and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library for screenings of his documentaries, then to Hawaii. But it’s also part of the campaign’s larger effort to broaden its appeal to new demographics.
By Brian
The cover article, “The Flight From Marriage,” in the August 20th 2011 edition of The Economist is about the decline of marriage in Asia. Looking beyond the usual pontification that the magazine embarks on and past the slant of ‘minority damsel in distress’, I think there may be something there that everyone who actually desires marriage and believes in gender equality can learn from.
In a nutshell from the article, marriage data in Asia indicates that more Asian women are choosing to marry later or not at all. This is mainly due to improved education and financial independence for women. There are also traditional expectations women have of ‘marrying up’, and pressure being the primary homemaker as well as maintaining a career. ‘Marrying up’ means marrying a man who is superior to the woman in financial and social status.
“A young Indian-American is now challenging established norms in an audacious bid to win a seat in the U.S House of Representatives. Ranjit Gill, a law student at University of California in Berkeley is just 24 (he’d have crossed the qualifying age by election day), but he’s drummed up a war chest of nearly $ 500,000, the third-highest in the country for a Republican challenger, forcing the party leadership and political pundits to take notice. If Gill can pull it off, he will be the youngest U.S Congressman since 1797.” Surprisingly – or maybe not, given American politics – Gill has downplayed his Sikh upbringing and the monetary contributions from the Sikh community.
If you look closely enough at the numbers in a new Pew research report, Twenty to One, you’ll find that Asian American households have dropped from having the highest median household wealth in 2005, having lost 54% of their assets by 2009 during the “Great Recession” (by contrast white households lost 16%). In the report, the actual numbers show that for Asian American households, “net worth fell from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009″. This decline should be no surprise, given recent news reports that Asian Americans (and Asian American seniors) are harder hit by the recession.
Ken Jeong was promoting The Hangover 2 in South Korea last week, marking his first visit to his parent’s homeland since 1986. Jeong was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in North Carolina. In this English-language interview in the Korean Times, Jeong talks about how his comedic acting career took fruit despite his medical training and education.
A few weeks ago, I was alerted to an online store, Eyewear Envy, an online eyeglass store that specializes in frames that fit Asian faces. The shop is run by Katherine Manalo, OD, an optometrist who graduated from UC Berkeley’s optometry school, and is now based in Texas. She’s also a fellow Filipino healthcare professional, so of course I had to talk to her. Also, being your stereotypical nearsighted Asian American geek who also happens to love glasses–I do have about 7 pairs!–I was interested in knowing more about her.
What was the inspiration behind starting Eyewear Envy?
My mission in creating Eyewear Envy is really to make it easier for Asians to find glasses that fit comfortably and look stylish, particularly plastic frames. Like a lot of people, I have been wearing glasses since I was really young and still remember how difficult it was selecting a frame every time I had to get new glasses much less ones with any style (see photo). Frame styles have definitely improved since then, but in my experience it is still a challenge to find frames that fit an Asian face properly. I was on a mission to find a ”perfect” plastic frame in Hong Kong earlier this year, and even there I could only find one or two that fit well. The culmination of that trip plus my previous failed searches inspired me to start the company.
Food for thought from the New York Times: The Chinese Premier is meeting with US counterparts and talking as if the US economic smackdown is just a passing phase. Amusingly, this carries a little bit of bias, considering that the Chinese actually own the majority of United States debt and thus wouldn’t want a collapse of US economics since that would make their debt worthless.
[Author's note: Although I am employed by the Japanese American National Museum, this article should not be construed as coming from the National Museum. Instead, this article is my personal opinion and should be taken as such.]
Over the last month, I have posted articles about my grandfather and what happened to him during the Second World War. Much of my grandfather’s story was not unique. Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were illegally incarcerated during the war, their only crime was looking like the enemy. The majority of those incarcerated were American citizens.
When most people refer to where the Japanese American were held, they use the term: internment camp. But the term is not only inaccurate but also hides what they really were: concentration camps.
Before you get angry or offended, let me explain.
I co-founded a web development agency several years ago with a Filipino American buddy of mine. While talking about some industry news one day, he wondered out loud why there weren’t more Filipino American entrepreneurs. “I read about Chinese American, Taiwanese American, Japanese American, and Vietnamese American entrepreneurs in the news all the time. But I have yet to see any Filipino Americans.”
We latched onto this topic and did a few Google searches. Perhaps this was our own ignorance and there are plenty out there that just haven’t made it into the general business news. But our searches were fruitless. We found plenty of Filipino entrepreneurs in the Philippines, but no Filipino American entrepreneurs. Though we started our searches in the high tech industries, we expanded them to include restaurant owners and shopkeepers, anyone who owned his/her own business, such as this article referred to me by 8Asian’s very own Jeff.
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