Hyphen's new print edition is on newsstands now.
After four years as editor in chief of Hyphen magazine, I announced my retirement in the Editor’s Note of The Survival Issue, which just came out. You can read the Editor’s Note on Hyphen’s website. Read more…
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…
Food and Asian Americans are irrevocably linked. Much of this is due to chop suey imagery forged by the likes of TV chef Martin Yan or the perceived exoticness of Asian food and the explosion of fusion cuisine.
Because of this, many of the stereotypes about Asian Americans come from food. It’s one of the reasons Founding Editor Melissa Hung proclaimed Hyphen would never publish a recipe or cover food in a way that doesn’t uphold Hyphen’s ideals.
Well, we broke her rule about recipes a few issues back with our story about sustainable seafood practices. And, we have another for Afro-Asian jung in the new Food section that debuts in The Inside/Out Issue of Hyphen, which will be out soon. Subscribe or look for it at a newsstand near you.
Interesting tidbit from a New York Times story about a study of interracial college roommates: Those who roomed with Asian Americans became more prejudiced.
The Times article focused mostly on black-white relationships but this paragraph caught my eye:
Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves
Read the full post and join the discussion on Hyphen magazine’s blog.
