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.

It was a great run. Before becoming editor in chief, I was a staff editor for about four years. It never ceases to amaze me that the great work produced is all done by volunteers with virtually no budget. It’s definitely a labor of love for us. OK, I guess it’s not “us” any more. Hard to let go after eight years even though my stress level has dropped about 100 levels.

Really, though, it was a good stress being part of something special. I’ll miss it, but Hyphen’s in good shape, and maybe even better shape, without me. Thanks again to all the volunteers, and the readers, who’ve stuck with Hyphen.

“It’s never happened, as far as we know,” said Andrew Hong, communications associate for the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that tracks and promotes Asian Pacific American participation in politics.

Chiu, currently the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, joins city Assessor  Phil Ting and state Senator  Leland Yee as the three Asian Americans vying to succeed  Ed Lee , who was appointed in November as the city’s  first Asian American mayor but has said he will not run for a full term.

Read the full post at Hyphen magazine’s blog.

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.

Lee, the city administrator, is set to be named interim mayor Tuesday if the SF Board of Supervisors votes him in as expected after a week of  political maneuvering.

David Chiu was re-elected chair of the SF Board of Supervisors on Saturday after speculation that had him at various times being named interim mayor himself or the pick to  replace SF District Attorney Kamala Harris, another Asian American who took the oath as the newly elected California attorney general last week.

Read the full post at Hyphenmagazine.com

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.

The Food section will hold true to Melissa’s other goal of covering food from a social justice angle, which influences much of what Hyphen does.

In her  introduction to the new section, Food Editor Nina Kahori Fallenbaum references  Michael Pollan and his book,  The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for raising awareness about farming, food, politics and how they are thoroughly intertwined. His work provides a model for how we hope to cover the subject.

“Food is a real link to our heritage, so we should be the ones to craft the storyline about how Asian food became hybridized in the United States,” Nina says.

We’re open to suggestions for our Food section. Contact Nina if you have ideas about what to cover.

The rest of the Inside/Out Issue takes a look at what it means to be on the inside yet the outside, to occupy the foreground yet the background. Stories to look out for include a feature on the relevance of  Asian American museums, how Asian American basketball hotshot and NBA prospect  Jeremy Lin is still just a regular guy, the new face of the “outsider” enclave in  Las Vegas’ Chinatown, and the sassy stories of an all-Asian drag queen troupe, the  Rice Rockettes.

We’ve also got stories on  Asian American actors finding work as non-Asian characters, Asian American authors writing non-Asian American stories (and the best Asian American characters written by non-Asians) and a feature on a topic that is both ubiquitous in American politics and rarely discussed at Asian American dinner tables —  abortion.

And you won’t want to miss a moving First Person  essay by Aly Morita on the life and career of her father,  Pat, the actor best known for his Academy Award-nominated role as Mr. Miyagi in  The Karate Kid.

The cover model is Mr. Hyphen  Pahole Sookkasikon, who shows a side of himself that no one has ever seen.

In addition to the  Afro-Asian jung recipe, the new Food section illustrates the  science of the wok, and we learn about the issues facing restaurant workers in a fascinating conversation with  Bonnie Kwon of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Washington, DC.

This post is also on Hyphen magazine’s blog.

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.