The Road Less Traveled

Read More

Yellow Brotherhood

Yellow Brotherhood from Tadashi Nakamura on Vimeo.

Read More

Never Forget: Vincent Chin

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer

On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin joined friends for a bachelor party at the Fancy Pants strip club in Highland Park, Mich.

Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler supervisor, happened to be there with his stepson, Michael Nitz, who had been laid off.

Chin and Ebens got into an argument. A witness heard Ebens say, "It's because of you little [expletive] that we're out of work."

Anti-Japanese sentiment was running high in Michigan, where the car industry was reeling.

The argument escalated into a fight, which was broken up. Chin and his friends left. Ebens and Nitz, testimony showed, searched the neighborhood for Chin for nearly half an hour.

When they found him at a McDonald's, Ebens bashed Chin's leg with a Louisville Slugger. Nitz held the injured man, and Ebens smashed his head with the bat. As Chin lost consciousness, he spoke his last words: "It's not fair."

He died four days later.

Ebens and Nitz, originally charged with second-degree murder, were allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter. The judge sentenced them to three years' probation and a $3,000 fine.

"These weren't the kind of men you send to jail," Judge Charles Kaufman said then.

The sentence spurred demonstrations from New York to San Francisco. Asian lawyers and advocates demanded that the federal government intervene - and prosecutors charged the two men with violating Chin's civil rights.

Nitz was acquitted in the 1984 trial. Ebens was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. However, on appeal he won a new trial.

Because of publicity, the 1987 retrial was moved to Cincinnati. The jury found Ebens not guilty.

The result did not deliver justice, community advocates say, but it spawned other things: Legal processes changed in Michigan and elsewhere. Social-justice groups formed. People got involved - many would go on to lead their communities.

"When Vincent was killed," said Zia, the journalist, "there was really nothing."

Even the American Civil Liberties Union, the most liberal of legal advocates, was unsure if civil-rights law covered Chin, she said. Though he was a U.S. citizen, he had been born in China, then adopted from an orphanage there.

"There was a lot of conversation about, 'It's too bad, it's a tragedy, but . . . this law wasn't created for Chinese immigrants,' " Zia said. "Civil-rights law has changed because of the Vincent Chin case."

The protests that followed Chin's death sparked the creation of the modern Asian American civil-rights movement.

Until then, different ethnicities had fought solo battles, the Chinese against the exclusion laws, the Japanese against World War II internment. But Chin's killing provoked a pan-Asian response toward larger white society.

Read More

There's a little (or a lot of) Asian in all of us

I once knew a police cadet with an Italian last name. I won't mention his name here, but suffice it to say, it was a hard core Italian name because it rhymed with multiple strains of pastas: tortellini, linguini, fettucine. Anyway he was an American like myself, born and raised in the US. He related his ethnic background to be that of Northern Italian. I didn't know there was a difference between Northern Italians and Southern Italians, but when I looked at him I got a sense of what some of that difference might be. He was tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed and pink-skinned like a pig. He was far from the stereotypical dark-haired mobster guido image.

The funny thing was although his eyes were blue, they had a distinct Asiatic look to them. He related that he was teased in the past for having these Asian eyes and was called all sorts of derogatory names. But as far as he knew, he didn't have any Asian blood in him. He joked that if he did have some Asiatic blood, it was probably because the Mongols had invaded Eastern Europe and fucked the crap out of everybody.

But I had hung around enough Hapas (I dated a Hapa for many years) to sense that there might be some Asiatic blood in him. I'm no geneticist, but from what I can tell, Asian DNA is very dominant. You can usually tell from the eyes if someone has some Asian blood in them. And that trait is so dominant, that it will stay in your family tree for generations.

I mean look at the Gosselin kids. Jon Gosselin is hapa. His kids are a quarter Asian. I know, I know, you smartasses: you can't divide a person into halves or quarters by race. But I just want to illustrate a point: if you look at his kids, ALL OF THEM look Asian. Some of them don't even look Hapa, they just look 100% Asian.

I think everybody has got a little (or a lot) of Asian in them. I mean look at the celebrities below. I betcha someone in their family past had a bad case of yellow fever:


Leann Rimes




Leonardo DiCaprio




Captain Picard?




Colonel Sanders?!




And back to the lovely Leann Rimes




Anyway, back to dude with the last name that sounds like pasta. He could very well have Asiatic blood in him originating somewhere far back in his family tree. I read a book by Gavin Menzies called 1434:

"Two years ago, a Chinese Canadian scholar, Tai Peng Wang, discovered Chinese and Italian records showing beyond a doubt that Chinese delegations had reached Italy during the reigns of Zhu Di (1403 – 1425) and the Xuande Emperor (1426 – 1435)."

What's interesting is that Admiral Zheng He sailed a large fleet into the Mediterranean and met with the Italians and the Papacy. Zheng He served as ambassador for China, and he and his crew would exchange gifts and knowledge with the various Italian city-states. One of these unfortunate "gifts" were slaves. Hundreds of slaves were given as gifts to the Italian elite. I think there were enough of these slaves to have added some Asian DNA into the Northern Italian mix.

One other thing to mention is that sailors will be sailors. Once they're in port, they go out and explore the local "sights." Who knows? They might have infused a little bit of spice into the mix as well.

Read More

The Forgotten History of the Asiatic Fathers of America

So there was an interesting segment on the Coast to Coast radio broadcast. Host George Noory interviewed Charlotte Harris Rees, author of the book The Secret Maps of the Ancient World. Her father, Hendon Harris Jr., wrote the 1972 book The Asiatic Fathers of America. Both assert that the ancient Chinese had traveled back and forth from China to the Americas since 2250 BC. Much of their evidence is based ancient Chinese records and on maps that they've procured as well as ancient Chinese maps kept in museums and private collections all over the world.











Rees and her father are not the only ones to claim that the Chinese made regular trips between China and America. Many other researchers from the fields of archaelogy, anthropology, genetics, history and linguistics have come to the conclusion that the Chinese established a physical presence and a cultural influence in the Americas, long before Zheng He sailed with his fleet in 1421. Aside from genetic similarities, there are cultural similarities between the ancient Chinese and Native American/Meso-American cultures in their language, pottery, crafts, architecture and religious practices. Take a look at the facial characteristics of these jade masks and figurines from the Olmec civilization:










Chinese junks and ships have been found all over the Americas and not just on the West Coast. The most bizarre instance was when a Chinese junk was found when Washington D.C. was being dredged of its swampland prior to its founding as the capital:

A Chinese junk was found by early settlers buried in Great Dismal Swamp (L A R Clark); This story, we have found out, appeared in Coronet Magazine, p. 34, January, 1945: "…When the government took over the Swamp and dredged some of the ditches, strange looking hulks of ships were found sunk in her marshes. One, a large Chinese craft, had to be cut through. Sunk in her quagmires are the skeletons of other ships that now belong to the ages – all bearing silent testimony that Old Dismal’s rule stretches far down the corridors of time…"

Read More

Valor With Honor by Celtic

A new documentary about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team by Burt Takeuchi. The last surviving members tell their stories of what they experienced.

Website: Valor With Honor

Keep a watch out for the DVD release in 2010.

Read More

Forgotten Magic by Celtic

Official history has a funny way of neglecting to tell large chapters of our collective human story. If we only take enough time to read the text we are issued in whichever schools we fall into, and only enough interest to be able to leap through whatever hoop gets us a piece of paper that says ‘graduate’, we inevitably miss out on most of the best parts – and the most illuminating tracts. Finding real history requires more. Real history is akin to the gems buried deep in the dirt and rock of passing time, and we must dig for them. And dig with passion!

One of these nearly lost treasures is the story of Long Tack Sam, an internationally celebrated vaudeville star that you’ve probably never heard of. His story, fortunately for us, is collected by his great-granddaughter – Ann Marie Fleming. She has taken the time to dig through her family history and create a documentary called “The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam” which allows us to travel with him as he leaves China, marries an Austrian woman (Leopoldine) and eventually brings his art to North America. His contemporaries and colleagues included Laurel and Hardy, Houdini and the Marx Brothers among others.

You can purchase copies of the DVD at National Film Board of Canada website. A direct link to the page is here.

The official website for this story is located here.

An illustrated companion book is located here.

And finally, a small sample of the DVD located on YouTube:

Read More

Hiroshima Survivors

Read More

Greg Jue and the Asian American Movement

Here's a fascinating interview with Greg Jue on the origins of the Asian American Movement:

Read More

Paper Sons

Read More

One Day History Will Repeat Itself

A common theme in science fiction is that aliens will suddenly show up in front of our doorsteps one morning. The dramatic image of a gigantic and ominous spaceship looming above motionless taking up half the sky is used quite often. A recent example of this is the movie District 9:


Past examples of this dramatic device have been in the movie "Independence Day," where alien spaceships hover quietly over every major city on Earth before lasering the crap out of everyone like roaches:


And in the 1980's TV series "V," which is being remade and set to air in November:


The concept of alien spaceships popping up over every major city and looming eerily overhead was first introduced in the Arthur C. Clarke book Childhood's End:

"The humans' arms race is brought to a halt by the sudden appearance of mysterious spaceships above all the Earth's great cities. After a week of silence and increasing tension, the aliens, who become known as the Overlords, announce by world-wide broadcast that they have benign intentions and desire to help humanity but also that they will henceforth assume the minimum amount of control which will achieve their aims. As enforcers of peace, they bring salvation and life. They also bring the death of some dreams, as humanity is no longer completely independent and may not pursue certain scientific goals, such as space exploration."

Believe it or not, this dramatic type of "first contact" has happened in this manner before. Of course I'm not talking about aliens popping up and saying, "Howdy neighbor!"

I'm talking about human history. Japan was an isolated country, closed to the outside world, until one day...

"On July 8, 1853, residents of Uraga on the outskirts of Edo, the sprawling capital of feudal Japan, beheld an astonishing sight. Four foreign warships had entered their harbor under a cloud of black smoke, not a sail visible among them. They were, startled observers quickly learned, two coal-burning steamships towing two sloops under the command of a dour and imperious American. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry had arrived to force the long-secluded country to open its doors to the outside world."


Can you imagine if you were a Japanese fisherman who never left Japan and only knew of wooden fishing boats? You're heading out the door one morning, and you see ironclad monster ships spewing black fumes:

"OK, bye honey! I'm going to work... WHAT THE HELL?!"

Read More

News Flash from 1980: Asians Can Be Americans Too, Dumbass

Here's a public service announcement regarding Asian Americans from the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare from 1980. Almost as funny and nostalgic as KTVU's "I am proud to be a Chinese American" public service announcement.

Read More

Wen Ho Lee was just an Echo in History

So the Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology hits the shelves next week on April 15. Here's a reading of one of the stories in the book:



"In the story By the Time I Get to Arizona, a young man named Mason Wong learns that his father has been incarcerated and accused of spying on the United States. His father, Dr. Benjamin Wong, was a research scientist that helped develop a series of nanotechnology prototypes that gave people superhuman abilities. Mason is sent on a quest by his fathers partner, Dr. Malcolm Eady, to retrieve a weapon before it gets into the wrong hands.

"Peril was partially inspired by the real life case against Dr. Wen Ho Lee. In 1999, Lee, a Chinese American scientist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory was indicted on 59 counts of espionage, jailed in solitary confinement for several months, and released on time served after the government failed to prove its case against him. He was ultimately charged with one count of mishandling sensitive documents, while the other 58 counts were dropped. In the months leading up to Lee's indictment and release, several media organizations, and top federal officials, had made Lees name public, which exacerbated perceptions that the foreign-born Lee was a threat to national security."


Was Wen Ho Lee Just An Honest Mistake?

I actually had a reader email me regarding Bill Richardson stating, "Do you think his conviction of Wen Ho Lee could have been an honest mistake?"

Here's how I responded:

"An honest mistake? An honest mistake based on prejudice and racial profiling. Forget the fact that Wen Ho Lee immigrated to the US several decades ago and became a US citizen. Forget the fact Wen Ho Lee came from TAIWAN not China. Forget the fact that Wen Ho Lee was literally chained in solitary for 9 months, despite the fact he was a frail old man.

"Of all 59 counts against Wen Ho Lee, not one was espionage. They didn't have enough evidence to prosecute, and the FBI was hoping he would confess to something after being chained up in solitary for 9 months.

"Of all the counts against him, he pleaded guilty to illegal/unauthorized downloading of sensitive material. This downloading IS COMMON PRACTICE among people at the laboratory and among security agencies despite its prohibition under the law. In fact a former head of the CIA was convicted of illegal download around the same time as Wen Ho Lee and that didn't make any headlines.

"If there was a spy at the lab, he or she got away, because the FBI wasted valuable time and energy barking up the wrong tree based on faulty information and prejudice. Even the judge who oversaw the case realized that Richardson and the FBI had misled him and the public as to the validity of their case, and that's why he apologized to Lee."


Wen Ho Lee: An Echo in History

The Wen Ho Lee case is really just an echo of a previous case involving the U.S. government's false accusation of a Chinese American scientist. Ever hear of Tsien Hsue-Shen? Here's a Wikipedia entry on him:

"Tsien Hsue-shen (born December 11, 1911) is a scientist who was a major figure in the missile and space programs of both the United States and People's Republic of China...

"During the 1940s Tsien was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. During the Red Scare of the 1950's, the United States government accused Tsien of having communist sympathies. Tsien and his family were wrongfully imprisoned in an isolated island off of Los Angeles. Stripped of his security clearance, Tsien decided to go back to China.

"After being under house arrest for 5 years from 1950-55, Tsien was released in exchange for the return of US pilots captured during the Korean war. Notified by U.S. authorities that he was free to go, Tsien immediately arranged to go back to China in September of 1955... He returned to China and led the Chinese rocket program, and became known as the 'Father of Chinese Rocketry' (or 'King of Rocketry')."


In other words, Tsien Hsue-shen, a Chinese American scientist who helps the US develop its missile and space program, gets accused as a Communist. So for all his hard work and American patriotism, he and his family get placed under "house arrest" on an ISLAND off the coast of L.A. Then he gets deported back to China, where he essentially fathers the Chinese missile and space program.

Wow, the U.S. government really dropped the ball on that one. Anyway, Aviation Week named Tsien Hsue-shen their "Person of the Year" for 2007:

"China is now at the forefront of space exploration, with two key developments in 2007: a successful anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons test and a planetary mission," said Aviation Week & Space Technology Editor-in-Chief Anthony L. Velocci, Jr. "AVIATION WEEK's profile of Tsien discusses these aspects of China's space program in rich detail, and analyzes the far-ranging impact Tsien has had on the global aerospace industry -- indeed, the world -- at large."

"AVIATION WEEK recognizes Tsien as our Person of the Year for his unique contributions to aerospace science in both the U.S. and China -- two of the three nations to successfully develop their own manned space missions. His legacy of research and discovery resonates today," said Tom Henricks, President, AVIATION WEEK, and a former NASA astronaut.


Get Ready for More Echoes:

Read More

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I've written before about how Asians tend to overassimilate, since their ancestral cultures emphasize conformity. But of all the Asian ethnic groups in the United States, Japanese Americans are the ones who have assimilated the most. They have the greatest percentage of outmarriage of all the Asian American ethnic groups, and this is true for both men and women. Japanese Americans have married primarily white and Chinese Americans.

There are a number of reasons why their community is disappearing. Although the JA community has been in the US for a hundred years, it hasn't had a constant influx of immigrants, like the Chinese American or Filipino American communities. As a result, most Japanese Americans are third, fourth and fifth generation.

But a big factor in the assimilation of the JA community was, of course, World War II and the internment camps. Being marked as an enemy based on your eye shape had profound effects on the psyches of many Japanese Americans that have lasted generations later.

Prior to World War II, there was a huge Japanese American community on the West Coast. The relocation had removed this community, and when the war was over, the JA community dissipated across the United States. Very few returned to the West Coast.

In an effort to mitigate post-war animosity that would result when Japanese Americans were reintroduced back into mainstream society, the War Relocation Authority told the JA community three things:

1) Don't go back to the West Coast to live.
2) Don't cluster together.
3) Assimilate as much as possible and don't call attention to your Japanese heritage.

The trauma of internment had stripped the JA community of cultural pride and knowledge. When you don't have a proud cultural heritage to give you strength and perspective, then you're more prone to being influenced by the greater society, who may not have your needs in mind.

Read More

A trip into Angel Island's past

SOURCE: Mercury News

Don Lee was 11 years old and recovering from seasickness when the SS President Coolidge anchored in San Francisco Bay in the summer of 1939. He had spent weeks in the luxury liner's steerage on the voyage from Hong Kong, struggling to sleep beside the rumbling of the ship's engine.

His journey would soon take a frightening detour.

Immigration officials boarded the Coolidge, separated Lee from his grandfather and ferried the boy and several dozen other immigrants to Angel Island. Here, he was detained in a bunk room behind barbed wire, with frequent interruptions for interrogations about his family lineage and his tiny village in southern China.

"They asked me where did I live, and then they have a diagram of the house. Who's the closest neighbor? Who are your relatives?" recalled Lee, now 81, on a tour of the newly renovated Angel Island Immigration Station, a multimillion-dollar project. "It's designed to trip you up. The whole aim of the immigration system there was to reject. Instead of Ellis Island, which was to welcome you, it was really designed to discourage you."

Now, for the first time in more than three years, the public can catch a glimpse of what life was like for Lee and tens of thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other immigrants from Asia who passed through the Angel Island station from 1910 through the early 1940s.

Much has been lost: The administration building is gone, burned down along with most of its records in a 1940 fire. A row of staff cottages designed by architect Julia Morgan was destroyed long ago in a training exercise for Marin County firefighters. One of the four original palm trees died, and the old pier can't accept new boats.

But after this major renovation on the surviving detention barracks, park officials say they hope they have created a new and improved window into California's immigration history.

Oakland-based museum designer Daniel Quan helped chart the years-long project to turn the immigration station into a more effective and accessible learning tool.

"You start to paint a picture, much in the same way you might put a film together," Quan said. "You're trying to tell a story."

Like many Chinese immigrants who passed through Angel Island, Quan's father never told his children about his time there as a 13-year-old. After his death, Quan found his father's name, and records of his three-week detention, in government rolls.

The father never looked back at an experience seen as a stigma, spending a short time in school before going to work as a butcher's apprentice and beginning a new life.

Lee, who now lives in Concord, told a similar story.

On Angel Island, he would spend nights in a room full of bunks that was tucked into the slope of a wooded hill and surrounded by barbed wire. In the daytime, he said, the bright ceiling lights shone a harsh glow on the gloom that surrounded him, while illuminating the remnants of poems inscribed on the walls decades earlier.

He played with wooden blocks he brought with him on the voyage, or he took rare opportunities to breathe fresh air in a tiny, fenced-in outdoor recreation spot.

His detention lasted about three weeks, and then he settled into American life — so different from his tiny village in southern China. He would grow to enjoy the United States, learning English in its public schools, obtaining an engineering degree from the University of California-Berkeley, serving in the Army and raising a family here.

In the years after the Gold Rush and a demand for railroad labor sparked a huge wave of mid-19th-century Chinese immigration, race-tinged fears about job competition and assimilation fueled a growing anti-Chinese movement in state and federal politics and newspapers. Congress passed a law in 1882 to prohibit any more Chinese laborers.

That same year, a record 40,000 Chinese immigrants entered the United States as part of a rush to beat the ban before it took effect. By the late 1880s, the number of Chinese immigrants entering the country each year dropped to the double and triple digits. It would be another century, in the early 1980s, before annual Chinese immigration came close to and eventually surpassed the numbers reached before 1883.

Angel Island was not the first Bay Area facility designed to restrict Asian immigration, according to Robert Barde, the author of "Immigration at the Golden Gate" and deputy director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at UC-Berkeley. But it has become a vivid symbol of a 60-year era of exclusion because it is the only place where the buildings have survived.

Immigrants from Europe and elsewhere traveled through the island in smaller numbers, but their visits were typically much shorter and they slept and ate in separate sections.

Before the station's 1910 opening, detained immigrants were held in a cramped facility along the city's wharf, or sometimes in a floating prison of available merchant ships docked at the shore. The new island facility was at first seen as a major improvement, but was soon found to be a fire trap, with poor ventilation, terrible bathrooms, a lack of fresh water and intractable problems of bureaucratic graft.

Bard said that for today's Angel Island visitor, soaking in the bay views, "it doesn't seem like such a bad place. But you know that in the afternoon, you're going to leave. For a lot of people, they had no idea how long they were going to be there. I think that's what really weighed on people."

Despite significant hurdles, most of those who landed on Angel Island were able to stay in the country, Quan said. Those ordered deported appealed the rulings, and many appeals were eventually accepted. Government documents researched by Bard document how one Chinese woman, whose "alleged husband" was a legal immigrant, was detained for more than 600 days before the government finally let her free in San Francisco.

"There was no great calamity that happened as a result of these people immigrating," Quan said. "There was no real reason to go to those extremes."

State park officials say they hope the improved museum, when it becomes ready to again accommodate school, self-guided and group trips this spring, sparks interest from Bay Area residents, including descendants of the many immigrants who passed through the "Guardian of the Golden Gate."

Berkeley resident Buck Gee, a retired engineer, said that after his father's death, his family discovered a "cheat book" the immigrant had brought with him on the voyage to San Francisco. It was a sign that the father was most likely a "paper son," one who memorized invented details about his heritage so he could circumvent exclusionary laws. Like the Quan family, the Gees never discussed the island.

"There was shame, I think, some fear," Gee said. "The Chinese who came through Angel Island, they just wanted to bury it."

Gee helped lead a private tour of the state park last month for fellow members of the Silicon Valley-based Asia America MultiTechnology Association. Elizabeth Xu, making her first visit to the island with her husband and two young sons, was struck by the sorrow, but also by the literary skill reflected in the poems she read on the walls.

"He says it looks very pretty here but it's a cage for him," Xu said, interpreting one Chinese detainee's poem. "He felt that even though he's a very capable person, he couldn't do anything about the situation. He felt hopeless."

For most of her American life, Xu said she did not think twice about the Chinese immigrants who arrived decades ago. With few complications, she arrived from Beijing as an immigrant in 1990.

"It makes me really appreciate the generations before us," she said.

Read More

Jennifer 8 Lee and A Brief History of "Chinese" Food

Found this via Angry Asian Man via Racialicious. By the way, a great series documenting Chinese restaurants all over the world is one called Chinese Restaurant. You can check that out on the Link Channel.

Read More

Genghis Khan: The Greatest Pimp of All Time

"The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters"

- Genghis Khan



So according to Wikipedia, the wealthiest person by far (alive or dead) in all of human history was Genghis Khan. I don't know how they came up with these numbers, but this will give you an idea of how much richer Genghis was compared to everyone else ever:



Genghis Khan had a net worth of 713.2 billion dollars, over twice as much as the second wealthiest person of all time, J.D. Rockefeller, who had a networth of 318.3 billion dollars.



Can you imagine that? You got so much wealth, you can't rid of it fast enough. You conquer over half of the Eurasian continent. Nobody fucks with you, because you've got a reputation as the biggest badass of all time. AND you've got women of all ethnicities and race all over the known world.



Genghis Khan, you are the biggest Alpha Asian ever!

Read More