Alpha Asian

So I just finished another book. This time it was Don Lee's Yellow . I got to say that I love this book!  In fact, I would say of all of the Asian American lit books, Yellow is my favorite, HANDS DOWN. Yellow is a collection of short stories, most of them set in Rosarita Bay, a fictional coastal town near San Francisco. As I was reading Lee's description of Rosarita Bay, I thought to myself, "Sounds like Half Moon Bay," which is 2 towns over from where I live. But there are hardly any Asians in Half Moon Bay. Lee's fictional Rosarita Bay, however, is a hick town with an unusually high percentage of overachieving Asian Americans for its small population. You've got lawyers, doctors, world famous artists and writers living in this sleepy town. It's like the TV show "Twin Peaks," but filled with Asian people. And yet most of these overachieving characters don't have any issues related to their Asian identity. Sure, they have issues. But

I've been reading a lot of books lately, and I just finished David Mura's Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity . It's about the author David Mura and his sexual escapades throughout the years. He and his wife had an open relationship for several years, and he writes about his sexual addiction and how his early experiences and issues with race and identity contributed to his addiction to white women. As I was reading his book,  I thought to myself: 1) How the hell did he get his wife to tolerate his bullshit and all his extramarital affairs? 2) Boy is she one patient and forgiving woman to allow him to publish his sexcapades and expose their marital problems. The first half of the book is a bit tedious. He goes over the experiences of his grandparents and parents before, during and after internment. But even though the first half of the book was boring, it showed how historical trauma of a group can leave its impact on a individ

So I thought I'd kick a dead horse long after it had been beaten senseless by every offended AA blogger out there. I'm referring of course to Wesley Yang's incendiary article Paper Tigers , which beats down and exploits the hell out of another dead horse Tiger parenting . Originally I had no intention of commenting on Yang's article, because: 1) It was too damn long. 11 PAGES for God's sake! 2) I'm too busy parenting my tiger cub. But I recently listened to a podcast with Wesley Yang and Jeff Yang where Wesley makes some pretty compelling points about the flaws of Tiger parenting. Wesley comes off much better in the podcast than in his article, so I don't know if his article was edited to grab as much attention as possible and piss people off the way Amy Chua's article was engineered to be an idea virus on steroids. It's funny that Asian Americans were pissed off with Chua and her fascist style of parenting, and then were pissed off at Y