8 Asians

The judge dismissed the law suit against USC brought by the parents of the two Chinese students who were shot dead last April near campus. “The suit had been brought by the parents of Ying Wu and Ming Qu, two electrical engineering graduate students from China who were gunned down in an off-campus neighborhood last April during what police believe is was a botched robbery. The shootings shook the USC student body and generated discussion [...] Continue »

Do you live on planet Earth and have a poetic streak? Well, here’s the chance of a lifetime, even if you are a terrible poet. Write up a haiku poem to Mars, submit it to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), and voilà, your name will be on a DVD flying to Mars with the MAVEN. If you’re one of the top three that win the public vote, your whole haiku poem will [...] Continue »

CBS2 investigative reporter David Goldstein broke a story about The City of Los Angeles Department of Public Works producing a controversial video depicting Asians with taxpayer money. The video, shot at the Japanese Garden at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, showed a non-Asian man dressed as a geisha girl who talked with a mock Japanese accent. “The Japanese water park is a beautiful, beautiful site, with blooming, blooming lotus and water lilies,” [...] Continue »

From the Daily Caller: Two chinese girls were killed Thursday after eating poisoned yogurt that had been planted by the owner of a rival kindergarten. The owner confessed to adding rat poison to the yogurt before leaving it on the side of the road along with school notebooks, reports the BBC.  It doesn’t really need to said or pointed out that this is horrible. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. When reputation or [...] 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 »

On April 16, 2013, fraternity Lambda Theta Delta (LTD), UC Irvine’s first and largest Asian American interest fraternity, posted a video which showed one of the members appearing in blackface (around the 0:55 mark). Julianne Hing of Colorlines says, “the video includes four Asian-American men dancing to Justin Timberlake’s Suit and Tie to promote the spring induction of the fraternity’s new recruits. One man in blackface plays the part of Jay-Z. It is the very [...] Continue »

By Betty Chen We’re well past April first now, which is both a day for April Fools’ and the national college notification date. Some of my friends received good news, some bad. But what I really want to talk about is what happened after I was accepted. Magically, after the flurry of decisions at the end of April, I went from an over-represented minority they didn’t need any more of to being one of those [...] Continue »

In the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion about college admissions at “elite” universities, especially after The Myth of American Meritocracy – How corrupt are Ivy League admissions? was published in The American Conservative and a follow-up by the New York Times on Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota. The Cornell Daily Sun had a recent piece discussing the issue: “A.T. Miller, vice provost for academic diversity, said that in [...] Continue »

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Last month, Tina had blogged about Michelle Rhee and her distaste for Rhee’s maniacal focus focus on standardized testing. I think I had first heard of Rhee when she graced the cover of Time Magazine back in 2008 and learned in that article that Rhee was selected by Washington, D.C. Mayor’s at that time, Adrian Fenty, named her chancellor of the school system – even though she had no [...] Continue »

Like many people, I first saw Michelle Rhee on the cover of Time, standing in front of a blackboard holding a broom. As an Asian American woman educator myself, you can imagine I almost got whiplash turning my head sharply back to confirm what I just saw. I picked up the article, read it, sighed and shook my head. After being appointed Chancellor of the school district, this Korean heritage American educator went into the [...] Continue »

After Number Two Son played in a basketball tournament that had a team from California School for the Deaf (CSD), I was immediately intrigued when I saw this video by Tama Irie from Silicon Valley De-Bug.  The video features Easter Fa’afiti,  a deaf Samoan American who played basketball at Gallaudet University.  Asian American Pacific Islanders often talk about having to deal with different worlds, but Fa’afiti has one more world than most to deal with.  [...] Continue »

EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last few days, the Asian American websphere has been buzzing about two possibly related incidents at UCLA which campus police are investigating as hate crimes. This was submitted by a Cornell student in response to the first incident. –Joz By Kyle Chang This is most disappointing because it reminds me that even in college campuses where students are becoming “educated,” racism like this still exists (remember Alexandra Wallace’s rant?). What’s even [...] Continue »