8Asians is a collaborative online publication that features original, diverse commentary by Asians from around the world on issues that affect our community. Established 2006.
Hip Hop culture happens to be one of the many avenues Filipino-Americans have taken to and identify with. It only seems natural to host an benefit that revolves around the Hip Hop culture for the people of the Philippines who have been affected by Typhoon Ondoy.
The Individual Collective Gallery of Vallejo, CA. holds an event called Open Session Saturdays, happening the second and fourth Saturday of each month. Each OSS event consists of live painting, open mic, musical performances, rapping cyphers. I’ve been fortunate enough to witness impromptu jam sessions and to photograph the event a few times.
This upcoming Saturday, the IC Gallery is kind enough to collaborate with a few people to host a benefit for the communities in the Philippines affected by Typhoon Ondoy, aka Typhoon Ketsana. If there is a OSS event to go check out, it’s this one.
For more information, please read the information on the flier or click this link.
I caught this on the news the other night and was happy to see U.S. Army Specialist Johnny Nguyen returning to his home in San Jose for the first time since being injured and being greeted by friends and family, as well as sixty Patriot Guard Riders.
Johnny was in his second tour in Iraq since January and in June was injured when a road side bomb exploded. Doctors had to amputate his leg and he has been recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio ever since. Johnny was home tonight for Thanksgiving and will return for further treatment and rehabilitation.
Rarely do we see Asian Americans serving in the armed forces, so it’s always great to see Americans such as Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki, Baldwin Yen, or another local hero and former Mayor of Sunnyvale, California Otto Lee serving our country. Best of luck, Johnny Nguyen! Thank you for your sacrifice for our country.
This is rellenong manok, a chicken stuffed with a meatloaf-like filling. Like I say here, I really love all things rellenong, especially with banana ketchup. It’s already had chunks taken out of it because we were late to the party. I can’t help being late – it’s in my genes I think! Already there at the party were my parents, The Wife’s parents, lots of in-laws, and assorted boyfriends. My niece’s boyfriend’s parents were even there, and I am told that they were anxious to try Filipino food (they are white). We definitely were ready for them.
Citibank has been advertising their 2.75% Certificate of Deposit, via this commercial featuring an older Asian American man playing and having fun with his dog along with cheerful music playing in the background. I guess Citibank thinks 2.75% CD is a reason to smile more, but 2.75% is pathetically low for an investment, but it’s better than LOSING money after this past year’s financial debacle.
Having served spent some time in the South Bay, people would know that Campbell, California is a sleepy suburb of already sleepy metropolitan San Jose, California. Not much happens in Campbell — wasn’t someone from Sugar Ray from there? — but this is something interesting: SFist is reporting that 26 year old vice-mayor Evan Low is “expected to be selected by the city council to serve as mayor.” Not only would this make him the youngest Asian-American mayor in the United States, but it would make him the youngest openly gay mayor in the United States. Better be careful not to hit on the wrong guy at Tinker’s Damn; your garbage may never be picked up again.
Ming Tsai was pretty funny in parts of the interview:
I had a couple rules growing up: Be anything you want, as long as it’s a doctor, lawyer, engineer. Get any grades you want, as long as they’re straight A’s. And marry anyone you want, if they’re Asian that’d be even better. I’m 0 for 3, not even close.”
Kind of your stereotypical Asian American parents pressuring their kids, but I got the basically the same rules. He also mentioned that while growing up in Dayton, Ohio for 18 years – “Chinatown was when had the other 3 Chinese families over for dinner. Our house was Chinatown.” which cracked me up, since that was basically how I felt while growing up in Western Massachusetts as well.
As Thanksgiving approaches and my extended family tries to figure out what to prepare, I have been thinking about how my Thanksgivings when I was growing up were a fusion of Asian and American. Turkey and white rice. Cranberries and lumpia. Along that line of thinking, three Asian American perspectives on Thanksgiving caught my eye. First, this post by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang talks about how her family used to try to imitate traditional Thanksgiving meals and how Thanksgiving became more meaningful and more tasty when they began to create their own multicultural traditions. Second, I really like this post by Eric Nakamura, of Giant Robot fame, on one of his Thanksgivings, which mixes sashimi and turkey. The pictures are mouth watering! The third perspective comes from SSH…Thanks-Givin.. Thanksgiving, an essay by Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. He talks about his very first Thanksgiving after arriving from Vietnam and what Thanksgiving now means to him.
How do you as Asian Americans celebrate Thanksgiving? As a strictly American holiday? Do you fuse Asian and American elements like sashimi and turkey? Do you not celebrate it at all?
The film will feature six newcomers for the lead roles. Shooting will occur in Shanghai and the film is scheduled for a summer 2010 release. Chen Shizheng, considered an unusual choice because he is better known as a stage director, will direct the film. Disney’s annoucement of this new film production comes on the heels of the announcement of a new Disney theme park in Shanghai.
The original High School Musical film was released in 2006, airing in 30 languages and over 100 countries.
I’ve had a soft spot for the story of Mulan, ever since we had a sonogram in 2004 that showed our impending child was going to be a girl. I kept my eyes out for any Chinese cultural items that would be a positive Asian female role model for our daughter-to-be, and that included of course the Disney version of Mulan, and its associated toys. But I was never satisfied with that version and started searching for other versions of Mulan and found there are quite a few animated versions, including The Legend of Mulan and The Secret of Mulan, both of which I acquired for my daughter, but was disappointed in their overall quality.
I was excited to hear the story of Mulan is being told again, and this time from a Chinese filmmaker. Under the direction of Jingle Ma and with Zhao Wei in the leading role, the movie about the female warrior releases to cinemas starting Friday in China.
Although this version is not a children’s animation (it’s a romantic drama – a Chinese war epic), I’m glad to see there’s another version for my daughter, at least for when she’s much older. In case you’re not familiar with the tale of Mulan, the actual story is traced back to a poem told during the Tang Dynasty, around 600 AD, called The Ballad of Mulan. Mulan takes her aging father’s place in the army, disguising the fact that she is female. She goes on to become a hero in the war. It’ll be interesting to see if this version of the film receives any positive reviews and is worth adding to our Mulan collection when it’s released on DVD.
Last night I watched the 2007 documentary “The Axe in the Attic,” which followed the film’s makers, Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, to New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina. The pair embarked on a road trip following the trails of evacuees, going to cities within a hundred miles of the Lower 9th Ward to as far as Ohio and Texas, interviewing people. The evacuees’ insights were really illuminating in demonstrating the ways race, class, and gender intertwine in unraveling how the devastation of the Gulf Coast reflected on the unequal relationship between the federal government and certain groups of its citizens.
One white evacuee shared a story about white FEMA employees coming up to him and making racist remarks towards African Americans as if he would agree. He frankly shared his discomfort with the remarks, adding more to the glaring truth that the levees broke down in areas populated by mostly poor people of color and the grossly inadequate response by the government to aid its citizens. Listening to people talk about being faced at gunpoint in attempting to leave the city, witnessing people die, and wearing clothes soaked in chemicals to the point their skin burned really opened up my perspective on Katrina and my work here in Cambodia.
I am currently studying the impact of Typhoon Ketsana in two Cambodian provinces, Stung Treng and Ratanakiri. Ketsana caused unprecedented damage affecting rice and crop yields. People had to leave their homes. Animals were lost, property was damaged, and there were 3 deaths. Disease has spread due to unsanitary water and families have been facing food insufficiency and malnourishment. As I attempt to craft a study of how much damage has been done in the northeast part of the country, I thought about FEMA and the disaster response during Katrina. One evacuee in the film had to wait a whole year to receive aid. She left New Orleans to stay with family in Texas. I felt there were so many parallels between the experiences of Katrina survivors and the refugees from this country. Hurricane Katrina caused the largest internal migration in US history paralleling the movement of Khmers to the Thai-Cambodian border seeking food and shelter as well as the global dispersion to Western countries. The FEMA trailer parks resembled modern day refugee camps and illustrated to me the accuracy in viewing communities of color as the “third world” in the United States. Helps me to situate myself in having some sense of global responsibility and connect Cambodia, still a new place to me, with the people and issues I care about at home.
Gil Asakawa of Nikkei View as well as visualizasian.comhas a great report about BANANA, the Asian American blogger round-up at USC this weekend, and there’s not really much I can disagree with him with. Was this first-ever roundtable of Asian-Asian content publishers from around the country a little rough around the edges? Sure. But gauging from some of the intense and complex topics and questions in the Q&A panel, the dialogue is still necessary, and it needs to continue. Hey, dialogue, isn’t that what 8Asians is all about? And besides, it was a great opportunity to meet other bloggers — who knew Angry Asian Man was so handsome?
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Hip Hop culture happens to be one of the many avenues Filipino-Americans have taken to and identify with. It only seems natural to host an benefit that revolves around the Hip Hop culture for the people of the Philippines who have been affected by Typhoon Ondoy.
I’m not too into the fashion model industry, but it still broke my heart over the news last week that 
