8 Asians

For those who are regular listeners of my podcast, POP88 or listen to me Monday evenings on SRC at omgkpop would know I’m a regular viewer of Global Talk Show, aka ChitChat with Beautiful Ladies. It’s basically an informal round table discussion with twenty female foreigners living, working, and going to school in South Korea. Their perspectives are offset with five Korean celebrity guests. I enjoy watching it because while a bit cheesy, it’s also fun and sometimes insightful.

In this particular episode, instead of the five Korean celebrities, they invited seven foreign men to discuss topics such as: “Foreign men are considered more attractive in Korea,” “Is it easier for foreigners to get into Korean universities?” and more — more along the lines of social intricacies and preconceived notions. Be prepared for some outrageous stereotypes and a lot of fighting words back and forth. (The best part is one of the ladies defining LBH — “Loser Back Home.”)

The show is available with full English subtitles. My fave is Alberto from Italy and Poh from Malaysia (rowr) but I regularly watch the show for Dominique from Quebec, Dongling from China, Cristina from Italy and Taru from Finland.

The rest of the episode is available after the jump if you’ve got an hour or so to kill.
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For most people, there’s little concern if our chicken meat has some pork or say some beef mixed in. But for some groups of Asians that would be an entirely different matter. Most people are already aware that Indians of the Hindu faith do not eat beef. But there’s also an entire class of Chinese Buddhists who do not eat beef as well. This appears to be a common trait especially in Buddhists of Chinese descent who live in south Asia. My own mother (and her sisters) adhered to that practice living in Taiwan. While she insisted her kids eat beef (for the protein), she herself never touched it.

So imagine my surprise when I learned this week that Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is selling Kentucky Grilled Chicken (KGC) that’s made with beef. While 8Asians has already complained about racial stereotyping in KGC commercials, this brings KFC down to a whole new level. Many unsuspecting Asians for whom eating beef is against their religion and beliefs, probably won’t realize they’re eating beef when they eat KFC’s new offering of chicken. My mother, when she was alive occasionally ate at KFC, and would be likely a victim of eating beef if she had the chance to try KGC.

For those that are concerned, KFC lists the ingredients of their products on their website. It turns out, KGC isn’t the only product with beef. The chicken pot pie also contains beef. So if you’re not eating beef, you may want to stay away from these chicken offerings at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I may have been disappointed after watching Kimbo Slice fight on The Ultimate Fighter, but I didn’t have to wait long to watch another fight — this news segment on a fight between an Asian and Black woman on a MUNI bus in San Francisco. [EDITORS NOTE: This is a censored version of the YouTube fight -- the original version is here.]

Apparently, the Chinese lady tells people on the bus that all she wanted to do was sit down, but the other lady refuses to move her bag from the other seat and does not let the Chinese lady sit down. (Ironically, the first thing I thought of was Rosa Parks.) An argument breaks out, with the Black woman woman throwing the first punch and the Asian woman retaliating — unleashing fists pounding on the head and drop kicks! All this over a seat? I’ve had to use public transportation on a everyday basis before, and I can understand that it can be uncomfortable sitting next to strangers, but if I ever felt like I didn’t want to have to sit next to anyone, I would of have simply stood up and gave my seat away.

I don’t know what’s worse –the fight or other people actually not reporting the fight. It had to take another Asian lady to break up the two women, while another man yells to the Chinese lady in the fight, “BEAT HER! BEAT HER!” According to the news and other people who have commented about this video, there’s already been numerous fights on the bus including fights that involved the bus drivers; even the man who uploaded the video mentions that he was previously attacked on the bus as well.

For those who just want to laugh at all this, there’s been several video responses by Youtubers that you can check out:  Chonny portraying the Chinese lady and responding to the fight, Peter Chao warning people not to mess with old Chinese ladies, Yahsoldier1’s video explaining how people of color use slang, and AdrienChen625’s response featuring “hitmanbreakeroftheye” singing to BOOM BOOM POW.  

Over at Sina and Chinasmack, people are reacting to the remarks from English naturalist, nature photographer, BBC television presenter and author Chris Packham when he said that humans should not spend vast amounts of money to protect giant pandas, but rather let them naturally die off.

In fact, he says, “I would eat the last panda if I could have all the money we have spent on panda conservation put back on the table for me to do more sensible things with.”

Packham’s reasoning:

An ex-carnivore bamboo muncher unfortunately ends up in the most populated place on earth. Its food predictably all dies with disastrous regularity and its digestive system is poorly adapted to its diet. It’s slow to reproduce, tastes good, but in a blind strike of evolutionary luck it is plump, cute and cuddly. That is from an anthropological point of view. So given only the latter in the formative days of conservation the pioneers choose it as a symbol and begin to investigate its conservation. Panda porn, or the lack of it, made us all giggle in the sixties and seventies and gradually the fat pied ones became greater than the sum of the sense in keeping them alive. But having spent so much it’s very difficult to stop. We are now spending millions and millions of dollars on a loser which lives in a country being stormed by the whole worlds greedy despite its horrible politics. It’s Catch 22 for Pandas and we’re caught by the credit cards despite our very own desperate credit crisis. So I say stop, save our relatively paltry funds for cases where we can make a real difference, because that’s our job. [full story]

About the giant panda, Packham says, “It’s got everything going against it. Furthermore, it’s gone down an evolutionary bottleneck where we could just let it go.” And of course, tons of money gets spent on “charismatic animals” which are virtually unsavable, while other species — like insects and rodents — or entire habitats are left to die.

He’s got a lot of good points — if people weren’t spending so much money to save them, these fuzzy animals would probably have already gone extinct on its own. And, he is even in alignment with the WWF on a lot of the points… except for the “letting pandas go extinct” part, of course. Then again, the case for saving the panda could be used as a vehicle to save panda habitats — bamboo forests — which are also facing destruction. What do you think?

As for me, I’m just looking for an excuse to write about pandas so I can link back to this post and awesome image about a PANDA ATTACK!!!

* I didn’t know how to categorize this post, so I put it in “Food & Drink” since Packham talked about eating pandas. To quote Moye: why you bite me?? ;_;

(Flickr photo credit, with apologies: fujikinoko)

As far back as I can remember, kimchi (김치) has had a role in my daily diet. Our family ate it with every meal and perhaps it was this constant presence that made me unaware of the aroma that came with the dish. It wasn’t until I was in college, when kimchi didn’t have such a big role in my diet, that I began to notice the unavoidably pungent scent that accompanies the dish.

There really is no good way to escape the smell. Even if you’re not consuming it, the scent will overpower you (unless you’re used to it, of course). As much as I enjoy the staple in Korean cuisine, I have to admit that the smell can be quite overwhelming. Now there is someone who promises the taste without the pungent scent. Kim Soon-ja of South Korea has created a freeze-dried kimchi that is absent of the odor that many may find offensive.

I admit that kimchi has a strong scent, but as a person who has a love-love relationship with food, I have come to appreciate the total experience of whatever I am consuming. And for better or worse, scent is a great big part of the whole food-ing experience. The same goes for my enjoyment of kimchi each time I consume it – the scent is part of the whole package. Maybe for some, the lack of scent will open them up to trying it, taking it to more places and so on. But I’d much rather have the kimchi as is, with the pungent scent and all.

Writing about kimchi has me feigning it now. Better go visit the mother so I can get a new batch of home-made goodness!

(Flickr photo credit: Nagyman, used under Creative Commons license)

Honda has developed a new personal mobility technology, U3-X. It is a compact experimental device that fits comfortably between the riders legs, to provide free movement in all directions just as in human walking forward, backward, side-to-side, and diagonally.

Lest one assumes that this is for lazy, fat-assed Americans, this prototype is actually addressing a coming need in Japan, one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world, and concerns about how the elderly get around. It can stand upright unaided and the rider sits on it as they would a stool, with their feet on footrests. The unicycle maintains its balance as it scoots around at (slow) speeds of up to 3.7mph.

The U3-X, shaped liked the number eight with a wheel at the bottom and seat at the top, was unveiled [Thursday] to reporters in Japan. The wheel comprises a series of smaller motorised wheels within a larger one, which enables the rider to manoeuvre sideways as well as forwards and backwards by leaning their body in the direction they want to go. [full story with another video]

Let’s face it. I love this thing because it’s shaped like the number 8! But unlike the Segway, which I thought was uber cool when I first saw it, I don’t feel like it’s a toy I’d buy for the fun of it. I guess if I had mobility issues, something like this would be a godsend, so Honda will continue research and development of the device including experiments in a real-world environment to verify the practicality of the device.

h/t: John

We brought you the news of dangerous Panda attacks in China, but this weekend we learned that Japan faces their own threat from four legged barbarian of their own.

Nine tourists  at a rest stop in Nyukawa, a small mountain town, were seriously injured by a hungry black bear yesterday. The animal terrorized visitors on a bus until a hunter managed to shoot it dead in a souvenir shop.

No one suffered life-threatening injuries in the attack, which lasted about an hour, reports said.

A photograph from the scene showed the bear mauling a prone person in a parking lot while a man attempted to scare it off.

Thanks to the advancement of 21st century technology, footage of the BEAR ATTACK (caps required) were soon found online (posted above). And yes, the bear was only 4 feet tall. Cue jokes about how short Asian people are….here.

Though bear attacks are rare, we hope that future tourists will understand the importance of being prepared for crazy animal onslaughts when traveling to the Land of the Rising Sun. With ninjas all over the place, it’s scary to think how quickly and dangerously these deadly animals approach to their enemies.