Posts by Tina
Tina Tsai, Ph.D. is a writer, teacher, and founder of The Literacy Guild LLC. She and her students write and publish their work. Her debut teen kung fu romance novel The Legend of Phoenix Mountain is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Arizona’s Immigration Law, Lewd Chinese Women, and API History
On August 24, 1874, California’s commissioner of immigration Rudolph Piotrowski found 22 women aboard the American Steamer Japan who looked suspicious because they were traveling without families. He called them lewd, ordered a payment of $500 dollars for each woman to disembark (keep in mind a horse was around $20 back then). When the payment demand was refused, he detained the women and ordered for them to be shipped back to China. A lawyer was [...] Continue »
How High Heels Are Today’s Foot-binding
When I read the article about Chinese foot-binding in the Los Angeles Times, I really found it highlighted the complexity of the practice of foot-binding. On the one hand it was a painful, dangerous, demeaning, and debilitating practice that women were coerced to engage in. On the other hand, it’s a historical tradition, an expression of conceptions of beauty from a certain human time and place, and a wealth of treasured shared experiences cherished by [...] Continue »
“Merantau” Indonesian Martial Arts Movie Review
In Merantau, Yuda (Iko Uwais), a young man from rural Indonesia trained in the martial art of silat harimau, heads off on a coming-of-age journey called a merantau. On his journey, he aims to go to the urban center of Jakarta and teach silat. After meeting orphans Adit (Yusuf Aulia) and Astri (Sisca Jessica), his path tangles inextricably with that of an underground slave trade ring, and his merantau quickly turns ugly. When watching martial [...] Continue »
The Taiwanese Who Wasn’t: Discovering The Origins Of My Language
My life was multilingual the minute I was born. During my infant years in Taiwan, I was surrounded by Taiwanese, Japanese, Hakkanese, and Mandarin Chinese. One of my first spoken sentences was “My butt is cold” which each word in the sentence in a different language. When I came to the US, English and Spanish were heavily added to that mix. So, as you can imagine, I sometimes confused one language for the other, and [...] Continue »
Rurouni Kenshin Live Action Movie Trailer
Back in the 90s, before internet streaming and the widespread availability of anime that is the reality in America today, I had to hunt down anime in specialty rental stores, trying hard to avoid shady ones, though often it was really hard to tell the difference. One series of anime that I couldn’t even wait for in rental stores and just had to order as soon as each episode was available on DVD delivery was [...] Continue »
Racism On The Playground
With April being National Poetry Month, spring is poetry season, and this spring, while reading through Childhood’s Favorites and Fairy Stories, an anthology collected back 1927 in New York, I found this little poem, “Foreign Children” by Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame): FOREIGN CHILDREN Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or Japanee, O! don’t you wish that you were me? You have seen the [...] Continue »
Naruto & Dragonball Now Available On Barnes & Noble Nook
It’s happened. I’m totally hooked on eBooks. I’m one of those book lovers that loves to sniff a new book before I read it, sighs at the sound of a page turning, and adores the solid and personal feel of a book in my hand. With the advent of eBooks, I tried to resist, fancying myself like Yomiko Readman from the anime Read or Die, living in an abandoned office building filled to the brim [...] Continue »
Jennifer Yuh Nelson Wins Annie Award for Kung Fu Panda 2
On Saturday, February 4th, 2012, Jennifer Yuh Nelson won the Annie Award for Best Director in a Feature Production with Kung Fu Panda 2. The Annie Award is basically the top award for animated films, and it’s not the only honor Nelson has attracted. She has won a previous Annie Award for story boarding for the first Kung Fu Panda film. Aside from being recognized as the top grossing female director ever with Kung Fu [...] Continue »
How Standardized Tests Stunt the Intellectual Growth of Asian American Students
Standardized testing was pretty much invented by the Chinese. As an American of Taiwanese and Chinese heritage, this means that standardized testing is part of my ethnic and ancestral heritage. The fact that Asian Americans tend to score better than everyone else on standardized tests is not news to anyone. I mean, after 5,000 years of test prep culture (there’s even a god of testing), it’s not really a surprise right? But what are the [...] Continue »
The Ruins of Calico’s Chinatown
In my research of Chinese Americans in the Old American West for my Cowboy Ninja book series, I’m digging up a lot of really interesting stuff, and here’s my latest find: the ruins of Calico’s Chinatown. Calico is a Californian silver mine ghost town, and it’s situated out between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, almost exactly at the halfway point between the two major cities, just north of where the city of Barstow is located. [...] Continue »
Bonnie Tsui & “The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns”
Bonnie Tsui’s book The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns is an analysis of the dynamics of Chinatown’s shifting population of immigrants of various Asian heritage origins, including the ones who are economically enticed to go back to their heritage countries. This book was covered on NPR. In the audio of Chinatown recorded in the NPR covereage, I even heard some Taiwanese/Fujianese spoken, and the book’s topic of study made me reflect on the role of [...] Continue »
“The Brady’s and the Dumb Chinaman” Dime Novel Review
In my research on Chinese Americans in the American Old West for a book series I’m writing, I came across a wonderful resource at Stanford University — digital collection of popular dime novels available online. [Editors Note: The book is also available to download for free as a Google eBook and for sale on Amazon.] Dime novels were basically the cheap pulp fiction popular mini-novels that were widespread in the Old West; they ranged from [...] Continue »
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Oct 14: (Seattle, WA) From Fields to Family: Asian Pacific Americans and Food
Mar 1: (Atlanta, GA) The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946
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May 24: (New York, NY) A Conversation with artists Arthur Ou, Hai Zhang, and Julie Quon in Conjunction with America through a Chinese Lens
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