8 Asians

Superstition and fortune telling has a long history in Chinese culture. I’ve written about some of my family’s own experiences with a fortune teller in The Chopstick Story with regard to how an aunt and and an uncle of mine were given away for adoption due to the predictions of a fortune teller. Some have questioned how my grandmother could have so strongly believed the predictions of a fortune teller to give away her own [...] Continue »

While most of us are aware there’s a new healthcare law coming, there’s probably few among the non-native speakers of English that really understand how it affects them. That’s why it’s so important the presentation titled “The Health Care Law and You” has been translated into 10 different Asian languages. This resource has been translated by the Office of Public Engagement at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services into the following languages: Chinese, Tagalog, [...] Continue »

The topic of speaking with an accent (or without one) isn’t new to 8Asians). I talked about my own experiences of how others had their own preconceptions of who I was based on how I spoke in this 8Asians article. PRI (Public Radio International), recently tackled a similar topic, with regard to how convincing an actor could make a fake accent, and whether they could do it well enough to convince a native they too [...] Continue »

A new study by the Economic Policy Institute shows that Asian Americans had poverty rates significantly higher than the white population in 2011. After adjusting for cost of living differences between regions (since most Asians live in large expensive cities in the west or east coast), Asian Americans had a poverty rate of 16.1% compared with 10.4% of whites. This shouldn’t be a surprise given 8Asians has already reported on Asian Americans being more adversely [...] Continue »

Life is hard enough as an Asian. Not all of us can get perfect SAT  scores, graduate from medical school, or trick out a Honda Civic. The pressure to embrace our culture remains, but sometimes, we just don’t want to. How To Be A Bad Asian is an ongoing series of personal essays  by the 8Asians writers about what sets us apart from the API community,  how we deal with the stereotypes that we put upon [...] Continue »

Being gay and Asian means hiding a part of yourself from many in your life, and this is especially true in Asian countries compared with those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the United States or Canada. Times have changed, and it’s probably easier now in the United States than it’s ever been before to be both gay and Asian (the way to be a truly bad Asian). But in countries like [...] Continue »

A new study from Nielsen reveals that the influence of ads on social media sites, varies greatly between ethnicities, and it turns out Asian Americans are most likely to respond to ads they see on sites like Facebook. Nielsen rated each ethnicity (Hispanic, White, African American, Asian American) and the actions they took after seeing a social ad (Shared Ads, Liked Ads, Purchased Products). In every case, Asian Americans took more action in response to [...] Continue »

This time of year, for those who do not celebrate Christmas, and those who do not have family to celebrate Christmas with, there’s always the question of where you can go to eat on Christmas day, and traditionally that answer has been Chinese restaurants, many of which remain open for the Christmas holiday. Even my own family has gone to a Chinese restaurant for Christmas, when we didn’t want to have to cook a large [...] Continue »

Anyone familiar with Asian culture already knows about the gender imbalance going on in many Asian countries, that there’s statistically more boys in countries like China and India, than there are girls, where there’s a cultural bias for having boys. So it was rather a surprise when this article from a Korean newspaper Korea JoongAng Daily came across the 8Asians email list, stating that there’s now a preference for baby girls instead of boys in [...] Continue »

There’s an interesting letter circulating the internet on Dear Prudence’s advice column. Dear Prudence is one of those Dear Abby/Ann Landers columns, on manners and morals, and this particular letter comes from a Caucasian husband married to an East Asian wife who is infertile. Given that she can’t have a baby, he wants to know if it’s okay to ask his wife to select an egg donor who is also Caucasian so that they can [...] Continue »

Taiwan becomes the 37th country to be allowed visa-free travel to the United States. Taiwanese can now visit the U.S. without having to apply for a visa, after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Taiwan’s addition to the U.S. visa-waiver program starting on November 1, 2012. Preapproved, low-risk travelers from Taiwan can travel to the U.S. for tourism or business for up to 90 days without a visa. Taiwan is the fifth Asian country to [...] Continue »

A Ohio State University student posted a picture of a woman with facial hair wearing a turban to Reddit in mid-September of 2012 with the caption “I’m not sure what to conclude from this.” That posting led to varied responses from teasing to others condemning the posting as being in poor taste, and stating unacceptable to post pictures of people without their permission. This story though has a happy ending. It turned out that the [...] Continue »