Alpha Asian

So a couple of nights ago, I was the guest host and moderator for the Big WoWo podcast. Byron, the blogger of Big WoWo, normally moderates these podcasts, but he wanted to debate with the guest, a controversial blogger who goes by the moniker the "Asian of Reason." The guy is... oh... I don't know... NUTS! He says he's a Chinese American student at Johns Hopkins University who believes in the concept of "human biodiversity." Sounds like a benign term, but HBD is essentially a neo- eugenics philosophy. Picture forced sterilizations, Gattaca and Brave New World. I looked through his blog to prep for the podcast, and I found some of his posts pretty funny. When I was talking to him during the podcast, I thought this guy was playing a character, like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. But I don't think what he is writing is satire. This guy believes in this stuff that he writes. This guy is one of those bizarre WTF Asians, like Mong...

Ok, I live out in the DC suburbs, Maryland to be exact. I get called by my brother while I'm at work here reviewing an affidavit, telling me I might have trouble going home after work because of a hostage situation in the Discovery Channel headquarters in downtown Silver Spring, MD. I live north of that area. Some Asian guy is holed up in there with hostages. Oh, great. Had to be an Asian guy. How nice. One of my college buddies is a senior vice president who works for Discovery. I'm thinking of who I can call, who do I know in the Montgomery County Maryland Police Department to get the 411. I know some MCPD guys on the task force but they're in narcotics. They wouldn't be involved in this hostage situation. I check the TV in the conference room at work. There are plenty of MCPD uniform rollers out there. I have to laugh because that's what patrol guys and gals do. If they hear something interesting coming in over the radio, they all want to jump in on it! Anyw...

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...