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...

It's the end of April. Do you know why this month is important in American history? It's the 36th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of US involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam war was such a nexus for the internal struggles and cultural changes the US was suffering through. The entire 1960's seemed to have been a real cultural turning point that would have ripple effects around the world. But what's interesting is that there's not much mention of the anniversary anymore in the media. There was for the 25th anniversary, little mention for it's 30th, and now it seems as it's now been relegated to the dustbin of history. I remember it every April because my father was one of the last ones evacuated from the roof of the US Embassy. He was stationed there from 1974-75 with the "US Agency for International Development" (read between the lines). I was just a little kid then, not really understanding the full impact that my father and othe...

I’m surrounded by political news everywhere I go. I can’t avoid hearing about it; I’m at ground zero for this stuff, being in the nation’s capitol metro area. I’ve heard a lot of crap from the right and the left, but the conservatives have really become something unrecognizable from the conservatives of yesteryear. There are no more moderates. Instead, you have extremists and manipulators of fringe elements. The biggest manipulator and biggest joke in all of this has been Donald Trump. He is the biggest, narcissistic clown concerning the recent birther issue and about China. First, let’s start with China, shall we? All I’ve heard from him, in his “thinking about running” for the GOP presidential nominee is his constant whining about and vilifying of China. Trump has accused China of “stealing” manufacturing jobs from the US. Okay, so that has nothing to do with the big corporations moving jobs overseas? Oh, and of interest as well, is that while he demagogues against the Chinese, a lot...

From Wikipedia: The 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Japanese: 第442連隊戦闘団) of the United States Army, was an all Japanese Americans unit. They fought primarily in Europe during World War II.[2] The families of many of its soldiers were subject to internment. The 442nd was a self-sufficient fighting force, and fought with uncommon distinction in Italy, southern France, and Germany. The unit became the most highly decorated regiment in the history of the United States armed forces, including 21 Medal of Honor recipients. The motto of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was “Go for Broke.”

So my family and I were getting lunch at Sizzler's the other day. Yes, Sizzler's. Because Sizzler's has a great lunch menu with an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Buffets are great when you're eating out with kids. Anyway, we noticed a family at the register in front of us. The parents were ordering, and the little girl kept interrupting to say she didn't want cheese on her burger. The parents weren't really listening to their daughter, because they were ordering, so they shushed her. There's an interesting book from Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success . In this book Gladwell argues that children from a middle class background have an edge over children from poorer backgrounds, because middle class children develop a sense of entitlement. The word entitlement has a very negative connotation. People picture spoiled trust fund brats who constantly whine and demand. But according to Gladwell, middle class children are "taught how to i...