Posts by Tim
I'm a Chinese/Taiwanese-American, born in Taiwan, raised on Long Island, went to college in Philadelphia, tried Wall Street and then moved to the California Bay Area to work in high tech in 1990. I'm a recent dad and husband. Other adjectives that describe me include: son, brother, geek, DIYer, manager, teacher, tinkerer, amateur horologist, gay, and occasional couch potato. I write for about 5 different blogs including 8Asians. When not doing anything else, I like to challenge people's preconceived notions of who I should be.

ING recently published a new study on retirement readiness in different racial communities. Asian Americans had mixed results in the study. There are some positive results. Asian Americans overall had saved the most for retirement, $81,000 in an employee sponsored retirement plan (versus $69,000 for the population in general). Not surprising, Asian Americans are more likely to contribute to a employee sponsored retirement plan, with 81% saying they contribute (compared to 75% of the overall [...] Continue »

This past Monday, January 23, 2012 marked the arrival of the Chinese/Vietnamese/Asian Pacific Lunar New Year, the Year of the Dragon. The new year brings with it some well-known and some not so well-known side effects. It’s already pretty common knowledge that the Year of the Dragon means more births in the Asian and Asian American community, as a child born in the Year of the Dragon is considered auspicious and will have good luck. [...] Continue »
Japanese-American Minoru Ohye celebrated his 86th birthday Monday with his only brother after traveling to Japan for a reunion with him. The brothers were born in Sacramento, but sent back to Japan to live with different families after they dad died in a fishing accident. Ohye’s brother, Hiroshi Kamimura, 84, was adopted by a Japanese family and grew up in Kyoto. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, a welfare service organization for U.S. veterans, placed Ohye [...] Continue »

If you’ve ever been to Japan you should already be familiar with the “bidet toilet seat,” an all-in-one toilet seat that has a heated water spray and often also a heated seat as well as an air dryer. These bidet toilet seats, also referred to as “washlets,” are common in almost every hotel and office in Japan, and emerging in many higher-end hotels throughout Asia. In America, while high-end and luxury homes and hotels may [...] Continue »

If you’ve lived around Asian American immigrant households, especially Chinese ones, you’re already familiar with one side effect this has in the kitchen: There’s grease everywhere. It builds up over time, and it seems like no matter how much you clean, you can’t get rid of it. At my parent’s house as I was growing up it seemed like our whole kitchen was coated in it. Eventually I left my parent’s house and found my [...] Continue »

A new study examining almost 40,000 auto accidents from 2002-2006, where children were injured, determined that Asian Americans were most likely to have their child restrained, either with a seat belt or child seat, with 59.3% of Asian American children involved in auto accidents actually having used restraints, compared with an overall rate of 47.5 percent of child accident patients who were restrained. Of black patients, 39.5 percent were restrained at the time of the [...] Continue »

The Immigrant Learning Center (ILC) has released a report examining the issues related to children of immigrants growing up in immigrant entrepreneurial families. The study focused on the children of U.S. immigrant entrepreneurs, specifically Asian American and Latino graduate and professional students. Study participants grew up in households in the U.S. The main common shared experience among the study participants was their immigrant entrepreneur parents and their experiences growing up around the family business. Both [...] Continue »

I first joined the bone marrow donor registry in the early nineties, after reading about a Chinese boy with leukemia who was looking for a match. Back then (and still the case now), Asian donors were rare, and finding a match if you are of Asian ethnicity or hapa unlikely. It’s almost 20 years later after I joined the registry, and while the issues around bone marrow donation haven’t changed much, the available methods to [...] Continue »

If you’re familiar with the controversial children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, the idea of “gay” penguins raising a baby penguin isn’t surprising. And Tango Makes Three was based on the real-life story of two male chinstrap penguins at the New York Central Park Zoo, who became loving partners, and were eventually given a their own egg (one that was abandoned by another penguin couple) to hatch and raise. Two new African male penguins in [...] Continue »

The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (the first new edition in ten years) included a definition for “anchor baby,” which brought immediate criticism from immigrant communities, for not also labeling it as an offensive term. A child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members [...] Continue »
With a new court ruling overturning the ban on payment for bone marrow donation, at least one California non-profit has already indicated they will offer up to $3000 per donor, at least at first to minorities and people of mixed race background. Ethnic minorities tend to be the hardest to find matches for, including those of Asian and mixed-Asian background. This change comes about because of new ways to do bone marrow donation that are [...] Continue »

India is one of those countries where there’s a serious imbalance between males and females, where the number of male babies seems to outstrip that of females every year, even with laws against gender selection. The birth this week of one little girl in India may help change attitudes and even the gender imbalance in India.