Alpha Asian

January 21st, 2010 has been declared National Angel Island Day to reflect on and recognize the 100 year history of the island involving Asian immigration to America. Located in the San Francisco Bay, the island contains the remaining structures of the Angel Island Immigration Station - the Western counterpart of Ellis Island - where many of the Asian people hoping to find opportunities between 1910 and 1940 were detained - sometimes for years. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had a direct effect on many of the hopeful immigrants from China especially. This particular act caused the creation of "paper-sons" as immigrants tried to claim children they were not related to in order to help more of their people through the difficult immigration process. There are American families today who are still affected by the secret of being descended from a paper-son (or daughter) - people who bear family names that are not actually their own. Once scheduled for demolition to make way f...

   Good advice, just in time for Chinese New Year.

Young girls in Thailand tag team an American man who thought they were hookers

So here's an interesting piece about the Italianization of Japan . Goldsea writer H.Y Nahm talks about how Japan is heading down the same road as Italy with regards to cultural and economic stagnation: In the American mind Japan is slipping rapidly down the slippery slope of cultural and economic senescence that transformed Ancient Rome into modern Italy — a once vigorous people long smothered in too much sauce. A place you go to on vacation, not on business. A place you rhapsodize with words like quaint, beautiful, charming, atmospheric, instead of dynamic, industrious, thrilling. There’s more than spurious analogies for this supposition of Japan’s decline as an economic powerhouse and poetic decay into a great tourist destination. A nation that prides itself on its homogeneity, racial purity, conformity, has no rough, vigorous stock from which to draw the fuel for propulsion back up into the ranks of world powers. Japan has no porous borders across which large numbers of dete...

Here's a funny look at how Valentine's Day has made its way into China. Thanks to Bitter Sweet Asian for this one.