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.
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.
Where’s the freak’n torch? I took some time off to make my way up to San Francisco to attend the historic San Francisco 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch relay, parking in Chinatown and walked to Justin Herman Plaza, where the closing ceremonies were supposed to take place. There was a big television screen where the organizers showed the torch being lit and then the Olympic torch runner soon disappeared… and later learned that the “Torch leaves San Francisco after surprise route designed to thwart protesters:”
“Some protesters caught up to the run along its surprise route, but most stayed at Justin Herman Plaza, where a closing ceremony was planned. That ceremony was canceled in lieu of a quieter affair at San Francisco International Airport. The torch is expected to leave for Buenos Aires on a China Airways flight. The torch was originally scheduled to head from McCovey Cove along the waterfront to Fisherman’s Wharf and back to Justin Herman Plaza. But after an opening ceremony, the torch was instead driven from McCovey Cove to Van Ness Avenue, where pairs of runners – buffered by dozens of police officers – carried it north to Bay Street and Marina Boulevard and onto Doyle Drive near the Golden Gate Bridge. That route was originally discounted by city officials as being too high profile. The torch finally headed out of the city around 3:30 p.m. and arrived at the airport at 4:15 p.m.”
The San Francisco Chronicle then reports about how many people were disappointed. Well, I definitely was! But I am sure a lot of other people were a LOT more disappointed than I was – since I had read and heard that lots of supporters (as well as protesters) had arrived early to get their places along the parade route.
When I got there, I have to say, that clearly something was not right. As there were areas where one could cross the Embarcadero to get to the other side of the street. But in the street itself, there were a ton of people walking along either carrying signs supporting China or protesting against China – for a free Tibet, for Darfur, for a free Burma, etc… I only saw a small group of supporters for Taiwan. Also, later, the couple of helicopters in the air moved away from the Embarcadero, so I knew something was up, and later checked on my mobile phone, that the route had indeed moved. There was a band at the plaza that kept on playing which kept things festive and people were yelling in support of or against China every so often, so it didn’t feel like people were board. Here is a video clip that I took at the plaza:
There is a great quote in the article by San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin:
“Gavin Newsom runs San Francisco the way the premier of China runs his country – secrecy, lies, misinformation, lack of transparency and manipulating the populace,” Peskin said. “He misled supporters and opponents of the run. People brought their families and their children, and (mayoral officials) hatched a cynical plan to please the Bush State Department and the Chinese government because of the incredible influence of money. “He did it so China can report they had a great torch run,” Peskin said. “It’s the worst kind of government – government by deceit and misinformation.””
To be honest, I really don’t have an opinion on SF Mayor Gavin Newson, but I was fairly disappointed. While waiting to see if the torch would arrive for the closing ceremonies, I was interviewed by a local non-English television station, KMTP-TV (“Channel 32”) – by a Chinese reporter. I basically said that I was there to both support the Olympics and protest against the Chinese Communist government (and not against the Chinese people) – but basically, I was just enjoying a beautiful day and taking photos & videos. I’ve been to an Olympics before – the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and I have to say, the Olympic spirit is truly an experience you never forget (which may sound kind of cheesy, but it is true).
I have to imagine that overall, a lot of people were very disappointed that the original torch route was not followed. Had London and Paris had not been such disasters, the original route would have been taken. To be honest, I think things would have been fine if the original route was taken. For the most part, everyone at the torch relay was pretty civil. I only saw a few instances where some people were yelling at each other.
“Everyone who turned out should feel cheated. Along the Embarcadero route, Beijing’s backers and the groups opposed to China’s policies in Tibet, Burma and Darfur didn’t get a glimpse of the flaming torch. Casual observers who wanted to take in the torch’s only North American stop were likewise left out. In effect, the event was canceled. This was San Francisco’s chance to show how it respects and handles vigorous political dissent. It is also the hub of a region with great pride in its Olympic alliances. Thousands gathered to see the torch and express their passions, positive and negative, about the upcoming Games. Regrettably, our city leaders chose to run away from them.”
Paul Koontz, who was the first VP of marketing at Netscape, gets the once in a lifetime opportunity to go visit North Korea…. with his two kids. He presents a satirical point of view, which is very refreshing, also the anecdotal aspect of this presentation points out many serious problems with infrastructure, propaganda and the self-promoting regime that has been in power.
Today is the 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch Relay in San Francisco – and possibly one of the largest protests in San Francisco history? Some headlines from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:
If you follow the “web 2.0” world, TechCrunch is a “must read” and I caught their blog posting “Baidu Loves Barack, I’m Sure He’s Thrilled” and saw that on Baidu’s front page today, they have a cartoon of Barack Obama, along with a (Democratic) donkey.
Apparently Baidu does this “person of the month” feature since this past November and selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. Okay, but why an American politician running for president? Are there that many people in China interested in Obama? It’s not like the Chinese can vote in America, let alone in China! There’s that media bias against Hillary Clinton – LOL.
In the latest episode of 60 Minutes (Sunday, April 6, 2008), the weekly investigative news show does a segment on China’s Sovereign-Wealth Fund, which has about $200 billion in assets, in “China Investment An Open Book? Sovereign-Wealth Fund’s President Promises Transparency“. According to Wikipedia, “a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a state-owned fund composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property or other financial instruments.” As much as one might want to hate and fear China, this segment reminds me a lot of “the Japanese are buying America” syndrome that was feared in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, which of course, was severely overstated.
“The protesters, two men and a woman, scaled the cables around 10:30 a.m., and unfurled two banners around 11:20 a.m. One banner read, “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 08,” a play on the official slogan of this year’s Olympic Games, “One World, One Dream.” The other read simply, “Free Tibet.” The protesters also hung two Tibetan flags. The activists used climbing gear to reach a spot 150 feet over the roadway and 370 feet above the water. They rappelled down about 1 p.m. and were arrested by California Highway Patrol officers. Iron workers will remove the banners and flags, authorities said. California Highway Patrol spokeswoman Mary Ziegenbein said police detained another four activists who did not scale the cables. Bridge manager Kary Witt said cameras are trained on the span, but that authorities at first hadn’t realized that protesters were about to climb the cables because they wore “ordinary” clothing and pushed a baby stroller. Their “Team Tibet” T-shirts were covered, and their banners and climbing gear were disguised by the stroller, he said.”
I think this type of protesting is a whole lot better than interrupting the torch relay itself. If you haven’t read or heard the protests that had gone on in London yesterday and in Paris today for the Olympic torch relay, it makes me really wonder how chaotic things are going to be on Wednesday in San Francisco! I really do hope that any demonstrations will be respectful to the torch bearers. I know the protesters are against the Chinese government, and not the Chinese people… but I am not so sure the Chinese really understand this.
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!).
The 80-20 Initiative is one that claims to want to pull all asian americans as a swing block for voting and is nonpartisan and… well… yadda yadda. That’s great and all, and I’m glad they’re looking to have Asians vote. Sweet stuff. But, it really bothers me when people like this gained my information from who knows where and start spamming me with political things that I didn’t sign up for. (In case you’re wondering why 80-20 is not linked, I don’t find it right in my mind to actually provide linkback to organizations that operate in this mannerism. Why provide them free SEO love?).
Funniest part of this? I haven’t used the email that they’re sending to since 1997. Huh?
A quick search leads me to believe this isn’t the first time this has happened. Apparently there are othersthat aregetting these spam emails.
Having been a technical consultant for nonprofits and having advised a friend that is currently run a campaign, I can tell you that buying email lists with asian names doesn’t constitute support nor does it really make me want to give any money to your organization. In fact, it makes me seriously wary of the supposed “good will” behind this organization in itself. Maybe it’s just me.
I’ll also point out that it seems that my email had already denoted the address as spam, and I’ve looked it up and found that there are some major blacklists that have also added this particular domain to their distributions. Anyone else receive these messages? Perhaps there are supporters out there that would like to comment on why these types of tactics are even used?
In today’s Front Page, The San Francisco Chronicle writes about “S.F. Asians fret over insult to Olympic torch.” If you haven’t been hiding under a rock the past month, you know that the 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch relay will be coming to San Francisco this Wednesday, April 9th – the only appearance in North America. With the recent crackdowns in Tibet by the Chinese government, there have been increasing calls for nations to boycott or protest in some manner (i.e. not attend for the opening ceremonies). Continue reading →
I think you can figure out where this blog posting is going to go with a title like Smart vs. cool: Culture, race and ethnicity in Silicon Valley schools, as written in today’s San Jose Mercury News. California, and especially the San Francisco Bay Area, is a racially diverse region. Within Silicon Valley, there are a lot of Asian-Americans, as well as white, Latino and to a lesser extent, African-Americans:
After years of tiptoeing around racial issues for fear of invoking stereotypes, California educators are now looking squarely at how ethnicity and culture shape achievement and attitudes toward school…The Mercury News interviewed dozens of students from varying backgrounds to examine the “racial achievement gap” and a delicate question that underlies it: Why do so many kids – especially Latinos – believe “school is uncool.” The Harvard study didn’t break out the attitudes of Asian-American students, but interviews with local students indicate that many Asians think classmates must be smart – but not act smart – to be popular.
The San Jose Mercury News article attempts to describe the different factors that apply to the peer pressures of different ethnic groups regarding academic achievement. Regarding Asian-Americans, local educators attribute academic success as “cool” as part of the “Confucian values on education, obligation to family and high parental expectations.”
According to the article, parents of all ethnic groups generally have high expectations of their kids, but the actual definition of “success” varies, where getting a C or better might be considered success for one ethnic group. One Taiwanese-American student described how her parents continued to be competitive, not only with students in at San Jose’s Evergreen – which is 46 percent Asian – but at Asian-Americans students at high-scoring high schools in Palo Alto, Cupertino and Sunnyvale. This brings back memories of my parents asking why I couldn’t get better grades, even though I was getting A’s (i.e. what about A+’s ?).
The article goes on to describe some of the efforts to combat the “stigma” of “acting white” and academic achievement amongst Latinos and African-Americans.
I was on Facebook when I noticed that a friend of mine had become a “fan” of “Vincent Who?” and I thought to myself, “What is this all about?”
Vincent Who? is a new documentary about Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American who was brutally murdered in Detroit in 1982 in a case of mistaken identity at the height of anti-Japanese sentiment. More than twenty-five years later, the documentary “Vincent Who?” revisits the case and its effect on the leading Asian-American community activists of today and the future leaders of tomorrow:
“Interviewees and speakers include Helen Zia (leading activist during the Chin case), Stewart Kwoh (Founder & Executive Director, Asian Pacific American Legal Center), Judy Chu (Chair, California State Board of Equalization), Mike Eng (California State Assemblyman), Renee Tajima-Pena (Producer & Director, WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?), Frank Wu (Dean, Wayne State University Law School), Janet Yang (Producer, THE JOY LUCK CLUB), Justin Lin (Director, BETTER LUCK TOMORROW) …[and many other prominent Asian-Americans.]
If you happen to be in Chicago on April 19th, you can catch a sneak preview of the film during the Asian American Film Showcase: Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State Street, Chicago, Illinois, 5:30 PM. Here is a trailer for the documentary:
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