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She’s one of the most recognizable Japanese faces in the world, and I think we’d all agree that she is super, super cute. Now, at age 32, she’s breaking into high-fashion modeling for luxury brands.
No, she’s not Utada. It’s not Ayumi either. I’m talking about the famous Miss Hello Kitty.
In the current issue of the Japanese edition of Vogue magazine, Hello Kitty gets decked out in Dior’s new fall and winter designs, strutting her stuff while posing in Paris.
Cute factor aside, it’s interesting to guess what this says about Dior’s marketing strategy in Asia – a market obsessed and fanatically loyal to big brands. Unlike the US or Europe where the luxury goods market is dominated by the middle-aged upper class, Asia’s high-fashion consumer market consists largely of young, 20-something, brand-obsessed women. I suppose these are the same women who would know and love Hello Kitty.
This is the first time in history that the Christian Dior brand has used a cartoon character to model an entire fashion line. Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck – eat your heart out.
2 Comments | Posted in: Lifestyles
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I’ve never been on a cruise before (unless you count “The Love Boat” 
), nor has my mother (she’s been wanting to go on one for a while.) Well, it looks like a lot of Asians haven’t gone either. From the Wall Street Journal article, “Cruise Operators Target Asian Travelers, Pitching Short Trips From Local Ports,” it sounds like there is a huge opportunity for cruise companies in Asia:
“Although Asia accounted for less than 5% of the global cruise market last year, the number of Asians taking cruises annually will swell to 1.5 million by 2010, up 40% from 2005, according to a forecast by Ocean Shipping Consultants Ltd. That’s faster growth than the 30% rise expected over the period in the more mature North American market, which had about 9.3 million cruise passengers in 2005…Teddy Tsang, a 48-year-old publishing plant manager in Hong Kong, took a four-day cruise on the Rhapsody in February with his wife and daughter after seeing “a lot of newspaper ads” in local Chinese-language papers touting the company’s cruises and hearing recommendations from friends. His only previous cruise on a gambling ship had left him unimpressed. “I went a few times to the casino, but I didn’t want to spend the whole day gambling,” he says. But after the latest cruise, which cost around $385 per person, he enthused about a dinner of herb-crusted cod with saffron-champagne sauce and the staff’s swift delivery of extra towels to his cabin.”
One of my mother’s friend’s family has gone on quite a few cruises. I wonder - how common is it for Asian Americans to go on cruises? To be honest, I really don’t know that many people who have gone on cruises. If you’ve gone on a cruise - where did you go? And did you have fun? I’m always seeing those Royal Caribbean tv commercials and have always wondered if people have as much fun as the commercials make out cruises to be (of course, you never see an Asian Americans in those commercials…that’s an untapped market - especially for all those Asians and Asian Americans who like to gamble. :-).
No Comments | Posted in: Lifestyles, Observations
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When I saw this “lucky Dragon” phone. I about dropped my jaw. First three words that came out were: “Are you serious?”
In hindsight, I probably should have gone with “Are you silly-us?” but all jokes aside, this mobile phone was just too outrageous. And anyone that bought this phone based on the fact that it did have anything to do with feng shui would have another thing coming.
The problem I had with this device, is that the designer was trying to tie a Chinese practice, with a technological device and throw in some Chinese cultural items (like the “8″ charm) in there to boot just to make it look fantastic. Except the fact that I don’t see how a bling dragon was actually going to make the phone sit flat, and how it would exactly “activate good chi every time you make or receive a phone call.” Maybe I was on vacation the day the industry was taught how to activate good chi through a cellular device.
In any case, the red phone itself seemed pretty basic, but I’ll take Crave’s word for it since I haven’t actually touched one. Perhaps it’s not a bad idea that it’s only being released as an exclusive item in Malaysia. Maybe it’s just me, but all this red wouldn’t really make me smell any green.
Photo Credit: (Crave Asia)
6 Comments | Posted in: Lifestyles, Technology, WTF
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I meant to blog about this L.A. Times story on Zhao yan feng, a University Instructor from mainland China selected by the college board and the Chinese language council to teach Chinese to high school students. In South Central Los Angeles.
Have you ever watched a horror movie, where the best friend of the heroine is walking through a darkened parking lot by herself? And you scream “NO, DON’T GO THROUGH THE PARKING LOT” but you know she can’t hear you, because she’s going to get slaughtered anyway?
Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel about this.
Truth is, I didn’t go to school in South Central L.A. but I DID take a Chinese language class in high school, taught by a guy in a very similar situation. And we treated him like shit. Except to our teacher, most of us were Asian - taking the class because we thought it would be an easy “A.” It was, but we still ended up playing cards, gossiping and mouthing off in the back of the class anyway. I’m sure he thought we were the good kids gone bad, and god help us if he ever had a kid, because I’m sure he would have put him in a private Chinese school.
It almost feels like an afterthought that of COURSE the educational systems between the United States and China would be completely different, but I’ve seen and heard the stories before; eager teachers hoping to make a difference in society, yet slowly becoming disenfranchised and some of them dropping out in the middle of the year completely. The article tries to end on a bittersweet note, focusing on students that took him seriously, but I can’t help but feel like it’d be a worthless cause, only because I’ve lived it.
4 Comments | Posted in: Lifestyles, Observations
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Did any of you have a television in your bedroom while growing up as a kid? I didn’t, and in general, wasn’t too interested in having one in my room. Recently, the University of Minnesota School of Public Health published their research finding and discovered, to no surprise, ” Study ties bedroom TV to unhealthy habits in teens:”
“Girls with a bedroom television reported getting less vigorous exercise — 1.8 hours per week compared to 2.5 hours for girls without a TV. They also ate fewer vegetables, drank more sweetened beverages and ate meals with their family less often, the researchers said. Boys with a bedroom TV reported having a lower grade point average than boys without one, as well as eating less fruit and having fewer family meals, the researchers said… Among black teens, 82 percent reported having a bedroom TV, compared to 66 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of whites and 39 percent of Asian Americans.”
Well, that is not too surprising. When I was growing up, we only had one television, and that was in the family room. And of course, my parents were always complaining to my brother and I that we watched too much television. My brother and I did share a computer in his bedroom (but we didn’t have the Internet back then where kids today do). Did you grow up with a TV or computer in your room? Were your parents strict about the amount of television they let you watch?
3 Comments | Posted in: Lifestyles, Observations
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OH MY GOD… what an INCREDIBLE way to waste 5 hours of my life. Maybe its because I’m wayyy too young, but I remember waiting for my parents to fall asleep and then sneaking to the living room to watch Saturday Night Live! and not being able to wake up for church the next day because I couldn’t stop laughing. Ahhhhhhh, those were the days… But I digress.
Nerve.com and IFC.com teamed up to create the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time. And please take my advice and DO NOT watch this at work, if you have chores, and ESPECIALLY if you have a 12 page paper on “guerrilla architecture” to write thats due in 28 hours, *sigh* But once again, I digress.
OBEY! WATCH IT!
1 Comment | Posted in: Entertainment, Lifestyles
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So a couple of days ago, I gave a lecture for a good friend’s class in SFSU’s Asian American Studies Department on HIV/AIDS and the queer API men’s community. It brought up a lot of interesting memories, since I used to teach and lecture about the history and sociology of queer Asian American men in grad school, and it’s something that I haven’t really touched or thought about in ages since I made my dad really happy, er, left sociology grad school and decided to try to get into pharmacy school to improve people’s health outcomes more directly (and make more money doing it) .
Going through my notes and old bookmarked websites that I used for my research to prepare for this lecture, I came across a site that I hadn’t really been on in years, called downelink.com, a social networking site originally designed by and for queer Asians to date each other. The website’s based on the term “downe”, an expression first used by Asian men who wanted to date each other, but didn’t necessarily identify as gay/bi/queer/whatever in the mid-1990s, on AOL chat (that shows you how old I am, AND how long I’ve been involved in the community). Downe was more commonly used by West Coast (SF and LA) queer Asian men in their 20s at the time, who identified more strongly as queer men of color, rather than with the mainstream gay white men’s community, and who saw each other as friends and potential lovers, rather than rivals to date white men.
Downe isn’t the same thing as the down-low, another term used to vilify closeted queer men of color (usually black men) but that’s another thing entirely.
I remember being curious and interested as the term became popular among the queer Asian youth that I would hang out with a few years ago. I started to see it as a way to define young queer Asian men who refused to identify with the mainstream gay white culture whose emphasis on expressing individuality at the expense of one’s family and cultural identity was being actively rejected. Those who identified as downe wanted to integrate one’s sexuality with one’s ethnic/racial identity, and that ultimately identifying as being into the same sex/gender didn’t automatically mean rejecting one’s Asian-ness, and that those who identified as downe were mostly queer Asian men who wanted to date (and hook up) with each other.
Of course, now that downelink.com has been bought by Logo, I’m not exactly sure how progressive this term is anymore. Even now, as the term’s become more popularized among queer Asians, it seems that downe has now become interchangeable with using gay or bi. The site itself is now mostly populated by young queer people of color (according to one blog, 72% of all users are Asian, African American or Latino), mostly Asian/Pacific Islander men and women, and seems to be one of the few spaces out there that actually exist for these people to really meet that’s not like MySpace or Facebook.
However, talking to a guy who’s doing his master’s thesis at SFSU on the term downe and the young queer Filipino American men’s community, he said that he couldn’t pinpoint a common agreeable definition . “Ask 5 people what downe means, and you’ll get 5 different answers,” he said.
So to all my fellow queer folk who read this, what DOES downe mean? Is the term even relevant to the community? I’ve always felt more comfortable using “queer” to define myself, but downe seems to have been milked for all its worth (especially if the downelink website was bought by an MTV affiliate!).
17 Comments | Posted in: LGBT, Lifestyles, Observations
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Caution: Strong Asian Women Cursing…
Swagger+Articulate speech+Loud Cursing = SEXY!!!!!!!!
11 Comments | Posted in: Discrimination, Lifestyles
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