So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we have yet another stereotype to be aware (or proud?) of: We’re cheaters!

Normally, this wouldn’t even register on my radar — ooh, straight Asian guys are having sex. yay — but then realizing how the stereotypes of Asian men have been since at least the 1960s, when apparently Asian men couldn’t have sex with anyone except themselves, it’s good to know that American women (read: middle-class white women) are finally acknowledging this basic fact: Straight Asian men are getting it on. WITH WOMEN. WHITE WOMEN. AND THEY CHEAT.

Of course, when you read the article, it’s painted with incredibly broad brushstrokes (“Asian” culture? Gag.), but it does point, however awkwardly, that straight male privilege is the same in nearly all parts of the globe.  Men are expected to be the breadwinners, work excessive hours to maintain their jobs and their families, and are lucky to see their wives/partners/etc. more than once a week, while having to deal with their stress by excessive drinking, womanizing, etc., because the workplace culture demands it.  And of course, if the writer is assuming this by dating ten or even twenty Asian men, that’s still not enough to make any generalizations.

At least it’s better than the assumption that Asian men are all docile little pussycats that would be the nearly-white men that these white women can take home to meet their (incredibly racist but overly polite to mention it) mothers.

So, to the original writer of that post: Asian men are still men. And some Asian men are douchebags and assholes who will cheat on your complacent white ass (like a certain Asian American man who’s been WAY overexposed who’s known for having eight kids.) And some Asian men are the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. You’ve just been unlucky to meet a whole slew of douchebags.

In a politically ugly–but unfortunately unsurprising–move, the Filipino government has threatened to tax every box sent to Filipino relief organizations in a blatant way to make money off this natural disaster which could ultimately bankrupt many of these groups.  Groups in New York and New Jersey here in the US have responded by trying to pressure the Filipino government and in the meantime have also threatened to send these boxes to the Philippines themselves to avoid the tax and to distribute these goods to the people who need it most.

My recommendation is to send money to reputable organizations like the Philippine Red Cross until this brouhaha settles down.  Personally, it’s one of many reasons why I consider the Filipino government so corrupt.

Even though George and his partner, Brad Altman, have been together for over 20 years, he noted that there are things that he never noticed in his partner until he studied his partner’s actions. (Seriously. There were things that I never noticed about my now-ex for years when we were together, like his penchant for using his large stuffed animals he bought for me to represent giant monsters when he went to play Dungeons & Dragons with his buddies. But I digress.)

But in all seriousness, the portrayal of Takei and Altman as just a normal married couple on television is something that I wouldn’t even fathom even 10 years ago.   It says volumes of how accepted same-sex couples have become in such a short amount of time. ‘Bout damn time, I think.

If you want to donate to the ongoing relief work caused by the storm, check out this blog post by the Age of Brillig, which lists ways to donate directly to the Philippine Red Cross.

And, no, contrary to popular belief, 8Asians.com is NOT the homepage for Joz’s cousin, though we are looking for hunky Asian male vloggers willing to bare their souls (though probably not much more — this ISN’T a porn blog, perverts) for a potential vlog. Hell, if Disgrasian can feature hot Asian chicks, why can’t we do the same for the boys?

Marie Claire, one of the more famous and respected beauty magazines out there, recently did a report called Erasing Ethnicity. The group of articles presented which while primarily focusing on people of color who wanted to become “beautiful” by appearing more “American”, does a great job for a mainstream magazine by asking more complex questions about people of color and the concept of beauty.  From the extreme plastic surgeries that people will do to become more beautiful (not just blepharoplasty, but calf shortening and leg lengthening), people of mixed ethnicity becoming more prominent and considered more beautiful, to straightening and bleaching one’s hair, to Japan’s Miss Universe being criticized for not being Japanese enough, the group of articles poses an interesting question: what determines standards of beauty–whiteness/American-ness or wealth?

On the one hand, again, the knee-jerk reaction appears to be that “beauty” is having features that are considered more white.  Personally, I’d like to argue that it’s “difference” in its various forms that’s considered more beautiful, which some argue is a product of sociology, and others biology.  Being different is seen as changing the gene pool, meaning that if one looks different and is successful he or she is more likely to survive in changing environments.   When I read the articles, I got the impression that it’s being able to have the disposable income to get the surgeries, to have the tanned skin, to become a few inches taller that makes the people who get these procedures beautiful, and not necessarily the end result.

That being said, I still think that many people of color haven’t really thought about this to any critical degree.  I remember getting into many arguments with my mom about why she didn’t want me to swim in the summer for fear of me being too dark.  Whenever I challenged her, asking, “So you think I’ll be black?” or “Do you really want me to be white?”,  my mom didn’t have the language to explain this, and she often waved me off, because she didn’t want to think about it.

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.

According to the blog posts, Sugawara admitted that close inspection of the box stated that the “crunch berries” weren’t actual berries, and the box itself states that it only contains cereal and never states that it contains anything called a “crunch berry”, nor could she explain why in the four years it took to file the claim that she couldn’t figure out that Crunch Berries contained no berries.

This wasn’t the first time that she had done this. Apparently, Sugawara had filed a similar suit against Kellogg’s Froot Loops because Froot Loops didn’t contain real, um, froot.

I fully expect her to file a suit against Nabisco’s Cheese Nips or Nestle’s Nips candy because they don’t contain… well, never mind.

It was announced by Ronald Takaki’s family that famous  Asian American historian committed suicide after a twenty year struggle with multiple sclerosis. You can read the obituary from the LA Times here.

Ron Takaki was a hero of mine when I first started taking Asian American studies in 1993, having read his famous textbook Strangers from a Different Shore,  one of the first widely distributed textbooks on Asian American history. I also used the text myself when I taught my own course in Asian American history at San Francisco State in 2000/2001. I also met him a few years ago at Eastwind Books in Berkeley when he was promoting his book Double Victory about the triumph of multiculturalism after World War II, and his humility and passion for learning about the oft-neglected histories of people of color inspired me.

Ron Takaki blazed a trail for many Asian Americanists and other people interested in American ethnic studies, teaching the first black history course in UCLA in the late 1960s. After he was dismissed by UCLA in the early 1970s, he moved to UC Berkeley where he wrote many books on Asian Americans, history and ethnic studies.  He also helped establish the first graduate and doctoral program in American ethnic studies in the United States at Cal, where many personal friends graduated and are now teaching all over the United States.

Unfortunately, a number of other pioneers in Asian American studies and culture have also passed away this past month, including Al Robles, a beloved San Francisco-based Filipino American poet best known for his book, Rappin’ with 10,000 Carabaos in the Dark; Richard Aoki, a Japanese American charter member of the  Black Panthers in the 1960s; and Him Mark Lai, an engineer turned historian who was instrumental in writing the first pieces on Chinese American history in the United States. While these people were not as well known on a national or international level as Takaki, all of them contributed immensely to the beginning and development of Asian American studies as a legitimate field of study who left us with an amazing legacy of activism in academia.

(via Angry Asian Man and Hyphen Magazine)

In a stunning revelation, the Committee of 100 just published a report about Chinese Americans and Asian Americans stating that Americans who aren’t Asian can’t tell us apart.  What’s interesting to note is that this group had done a similar study back in 2001 and found that the findings in 2009 were almost identical to the ones in 2001.

Among the surprising findings is that 74% of non-Asian American survey respondents believed that Asians comprise more than 8% of the American population, with 40% of those respondents believing that we are more than 16% of the American population.  We’re actually only 5% of the population.

Another incorrect belief is that 51% of respondents believed that 25% or less of the Asian American population is American born.  The correct percentage is only 30%.

It points to a classic theory in Asian American studies called the “perpetual foreigner”, which has its roots in an 1897 case of United States vs. Wong Kim Ark, where the judge ruling against a Chinese immigrant fighting to obtain naturalized American citizenship stated that Asians are “strangers in the land … incapable of assimilating.”  It’s a belief that has persisted today, and which was one of the reasonings behind many of the exclusion acts that prohibited Asian immigration before World War II, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and ultimately with Filipinos as well.  It also spurred the anti-miscegenation laws which prevented Asian men from marrying non-Asian women pre-World War II in a blatant attempt to remove Asians from the United States by stopping them from having legitimate children, with legislators knowing that the differential ratio between Asian men and women often was 15 to 1 or more in some places.

To help white Americans tell Chinese and Japanese Americans apart after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Time Magazine wrote an infamous article in 1941 entitled “How to Spot the Japs from the Chinese.”

Unfortunately, it seems non-Asian Americans still can’t tell us apart and they actually might need this article.

After North Korea fired a missile over South Korean and Japanese airspace, angering the United States, this far-right “Christian” blogger somehow manages to conflate geishas, “immoral sperm banks” and the attack on Pearl Harbor,  blaming this on the Chinese.  Mind you, Christwire is widely known as a satire website, but the reference hits home. And the Chinese were the ones trying to stop the North Koreans from doing this, lady.

Almost makes me wanna go wear my coolie hat, strap on a queue, and start singing “Turning Japanese” while cooking adobo just to confuse the hell out of everyone.

(Image via HOW TO SPOT A JAP (1942). Hat tip: Erin Skinner, via twitter)