8Asians.com put me in its APA Spotlight feature last week. You can read the Q&A on the 8Asians blog. Some of the insights gleaned about me are that I’m no good in math, and I like dim sum.
With David Chiu joining the fray, San Francisco has three Asian Americans running for mayor, perhaps the most APA mayoral candidates for any American city outside of Hawaii. Read more…
Keni Styles stars in Bruce Lee XXX: A Porn Parody
I blogged at Hyphen magazine about a Bruce Lee porn parody that’s being produced. And while the pop icon probably is turning in his grave over being immortalized in an adult movie, the prospect does raise issues of race, sex and stereotypes, particularly of Asian American men.
“Bruce Lee XXX: A Porn Parody” stars Keni Styles, the only Asian male working in straight porn produced by major studios. Styles’s uniqueness in porn is similar to the dearth of Asian Americans in mainstream movies and TV: they’re stereotyped as unattractive or lacking audience appeal.
A few years ago I wrote about similar themes when UC Davis Asian American studies professor Darrell Hamamoto made a porn movie featuring an Asian American couple as a way of reclaiming Asian masculinity and the sexuality between Asian males and females that he say has been lost to Western colonization and stereotyping.
Read more in my post at Hyphen.
The San Francisco Examiner put David Chiu and Ed Lee on its Jan. 9 front page.
The “Asian Power” headline from the San Francisco Examiner encapsulates what’s happening in politics for Asian Americans, especially in San Francisco, where Ed Lee is about to become the first Asian American mayor. Read more…
Congratulations to former Congressman and cabinet secretary Norman Mineta, who is now part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.Mineta was a pioneer and part of the first wave of Asian Americans politicians to make an impact on our country.
“It is with great pride that we see Secretary Mineta’s remarkable story of leadership and service honored in the Portrait Gallery,” said Konrad Ng, director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, in a press release. “He represents the key roles that Asian Pacific Americans have played in US culture, history and politics.” Read more…
The NBA draft is tonight and Harvard’s Jeremy Lin probably won’t be picked, but could catch on with a team as a free agent.
The NBA draft only has two rounds, and most prognosticators don’t believe Lin will be chosen. He played against inferior competition in the Ivy League, and some scouts say that while he’s a great passer for a point guard, his offensive skills may not be ready for the NBA.
In this video, he discusses his workout with the Warriors, and here are some highlights of his college career.
If he hooks up with a team, Lin would be a rare Asian American pro athlete, which is why he has a lot of fans in the Asian American community. Lin wasn’t offered a scholarship from a big-time college program when he graduated from high school, and stereotypes about Asian Americans not being good athletes may have played a role, which he also discusses in this video. But he’s proven the detractors wrong with a nice career at Harvard and could make it to the pros.
This post is also on Hyphen magazine’s blog.
Sim and Tanveer Bhullar are 7-foot Indian brothers who are emerging as two of the top high school basketball players in the country.
There are few Asians or Asian Americans playing major college sports and even fewer South Asians at such a high level. And unlike Jeremy Lin, the brothers have recruiters at big-time college basketball programs salivating at the prospect of having one or both siblings on their teams. While Lin certainly has the skills, the Bhullars’ size sets them apart and makes them tantalizing NBA prospects.
Sim, 17, is 7-4 and 285 pounds. Tanveer, 15, is 7-2 and 265 pounds. Both grew up in Canada and now attend The Kiski School in Saltsburg, PA, near Pittsburgh. Their parents immigrated to Toronto from India and sent their sons to school in the United States to help them enhance their ball skills.
Wouldn’t it be cool if someday the Bhullar brothers and Lin were in the NBA together?
Daniel Dae Kim moves from "Lost" to a role in the new "Hawaii Five-0."
The new “Hawaii Five-0,” with Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, will feature two of the most high-profile roles for Asian Americans on TV this fall. Read more…
Goodwin Liu’s nomination to be a judge on the US Court Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has moved a step closer to fruition with the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to move it to the full-floor for debate. Read more…
Jake Shimabukuro's career took off after a YouTube video of him went viral.
Shimabukuro been called the Hendrix of Ukulele (or for you 80s heavy metal fans, the Yngwie of Ukulele, as former Hyphen Music Editor Todd Inoue described him). I sawShimabukuro play at Yoshi’s San Francisco on Monday night, and along with his mad ukulele skills, he had an engaging stage presence when telling the little back-stories to each song before performing it. Read more…
