Alpha Asian

Well, I watched most of the game today. The kids from Waipahu, Hawaii lost a hard fought baseball game, 4-1, to the kids from Japan. Team Hawaii had played 5 games in 5 days, all elimination games and they had come back from deficits to win their games. Today, they ran out of gas. I was pulling hard for the kids from Hawaii and I was thinking how funny it was for the kids from both teams to look across the field and see other kids who look just like them or very similar. Obviously, Hawaii has a big Asian population and one that is quite mixed. The team had a lot of Japanese-American kids or Polynesian kids and it was good to see them do well, they had a great tournament, so congratulations to them. I can only hope some of these talented kids can go on and pursue their athletic dreams and reach the highest levels of their potential if they so desire. They will be the next generation of Alpha Asians. I have to admit, though, that ---especially in the '70's---, I always wante...

  Propaganda never sounded so good, comrades!

So after 7 months on maternity leave, my wife is going back to work. To facilitate this transition, I'm taking off work for a month. That's right: I get to be Mr. Mom/ Rice Daddy for 30 days, give or take. Now this may seem like a vacation, but quite frankly these past few months, work has been my vacation from home. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy my time with my daughter, but a lot of that time is work and at this stage it’s very repetitive. My wife described it as being in a situation like Groundhog Day (the Bill Murray movie), but it’s compressed into a 4 hour cycle: Baby wakes up, feed baby, burp baby, play with baby, change diaper, put baby to sleep, repeat. You learn to spend your time wisely. Once you lay your baby down to sleep, you may only have a half hour window to whatever it is you need to do, and do it quietly so as not to wake her up. Plus you really can't do too much of your own stuff, if your baby is a bit on the fussy side. You hav...

Sometimes when my wife and I travel, we take note of the local Chinese community. No matter where you go in the world, there is always a Chinese restaurant . As a Chinese American, I'm always curious as to how life is for other overseas Chinese . My parents are prime examples of the wide and varied range of the Chinese Diaspora: my father grew up in Kentucky, my mother was born and raised in India before moving to Hong Kong. A great book to read on this very topic is Sons of the Yellow Emperor by Lynn Pan. As someone who majored in Ethnic Studies and minored in Asian American Studies, I found this book to be an excellent complement to Asian American history books. In fact I would say I enjoyed this book much more than Ron Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore or Sucheng Chan's Asian Americans: An Interpretive History . Sons of the Yellow Emperor is more focused in that it concentrates solely on the Chinese, but at the same time it is far more global in it...