Alpha Asian

Recently a UC Berkeley student named Kay interviewed me for a research project on representations of Asians/Asian Americans on reality TV shows.  She was nice enough to provide me with a transcript of our interview: Kay: Well, to begin, I really want to thank you for taking the time to interview with me. Again, like I said, this interview will be about 45 minutes to an hour long, so I really do thank you.  My topic is gendered representations of Asian Americans and Asians in reality TV shows.  For this assignment, we are asked to interview someone who can provide insight into our topic. After the interview, we reflect on it and provide any new insight that we might find and list the pros and cons of the research method. So, that’s the reason why I would like to interview you.  James: Can I ask you a question? Kay: I’m sorry?           James: Can I ask you a question? Kay: Yes, of course! James: How did you find out about my blog? K...

Thanks to AMR for this blast from the past.

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...

I love watching reality game shows. There are some really crazy shows with some crazy premises ("Hole in the Wall" comes to mind), but most have one thing in common: how much punishment can you endure for a prolonged period of time? As a whole, Asian Americans have done very well in reality game shows. The most famous is Survivor winner Yul Kwon , but there are other prominent Asian American Survivors, such as Yau-Man Chan from Survivor Fiji , the most beloved competitor from the series: "An atypical Survivor contestant, he achieved much success through his knowledge and utilization of basic physics. This was evident from the first episode. After the repeated efforts of much more muscular contestants, he was the only one able to open a box of supplies the tribe received. "While others had used various brute force methods to open the box, Chan simply dropped it on its corner onto a rock, opening it immediately. In this way he was also able to beat younger, fit...