Sabine 21 Mixed bb Philadelphia/DMV A side blog/project for examining identity politics as an Asian American, mostly trying to focus on representation(and lack of) and also a way to catalogue my growth and understanding of myself as an Asian American as I learn and understand more about AAPI communities and myself
Please don’t forget that Asian American immigration history exists and is being used as precedent for a lot of gross policies, like directly with Japanese Internment making the Trump Admin think Muslim Internment is an option. Don’t forget that even President Obama erased our immigration history in his farewell address when he compared immigrants of today to the Irish and German and Poles and said nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, South East Asian, Vietnamese, “waves” of immigrants literally imported to work the fields bc they would take a lower wage. Don’t forget about the refugees that fled the Vietnam and Korean and other wars and regime changes that came here to start from nothing and are now our nail salon jokes. Our history is full of disgusting immigration acts created by the US govt and they have the gall to pat us on the head and call us a model minority.
Don’t let them get away with it. History is supposed to teach us not to do bad things again.
THIS.
As I was saying a few days ago, my South Asian grandfather was denied a path to citizenship in the United States because of Asian exclusion. The law didn’t change until 1965.
When Sharon Chang tells her son that he is Asian and mixed-race, she's trying to help him understand what it means to be multiracial and a person of color in America.
“Those stories are about our history, not about being “white.” “White” is not an ethnic celebration, a food festival, or a heritage parade. It’s about having unearned power and privilege based on the way you look.”
Shoutout to Asians who:
- Cannot speak their parent’s native language
- Have been told they don’t “look asian”, or are “a bad asian”
- Whose achievements have been immediately invalidated “because you’re asian”
- Who come from biracial families
- That feel like they don’t fit the “standard” for their ethnicity
You guys are amazing, and 100% valid. Never forget that.
Weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz just became the first Filipino woman to win an Olympic medal!
When Hidilyn Diaz lifted 200 kilograms of steel iron, she also lifted the spirits of her home country.
Diaz, a three-time Olympic weightlifter, became the first Filipino woman to win an Olympic medal when she won the silver medal in the 53kg women’s weightlifting class on Sunday. Diaz’s silver medal win ended a 20-year Olympic medal drought for the Philippines.
The last Filipino to win an Olympic medal was Mansueto Velasco. Velasco won silver for men’s boxing in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.
But wait, it gets better. Diaz also achieved another cool first for the Philippines at the Olympics.
The winner of Glamour's 2016 essay contest shares a story of heartbreak and in-the-kitchen healing.
I’m so tired of white guys on TV telling me what to eat. I’m tired of Anthony Bourdain testing the waters of Korean cuisine to report back that, not only will our food not kill you, it actually tastes good. I don’t care how many times you’ve traveled to Thailand, I won’t listen to you—just like the white kids wouldn’t listen to me, the half-Korean girl, defending the red squid tentacles in my lunch box. The same kids who teased me relentlessly back then are the ones who now celebrate our cuisine as the Next Big Thing.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a small college town that was about 90 percent white. In my adolescence I hated being half Korean; I wanted people to stop asking, “Where are you really from?” I could barely speak the language and didn’t have any Asian friends. There was nothing about me that felt Korean—except when it came to food.
At home my mom always prepared a Korean dinner for herself and an American dinner for my dad. Despite the years he’d lived in Seoul, selling cars to the military and courting my mom at the Naija Hotel where she worked, my dad is still a white boy from Philadelphia.
So each night my mom prepared two meals. She’d steam broccoli and grill Dad’s salmon, while boiling jjigae and plating little side dishes known as banchan. When our rice cooker announced in its familiar robotic voice, “Your delicious white rice will be ready soon!” the three of us would sit down to a wondrous mash-up of East and West. I’d create true fusion one mouthful at a time, using chopsticks to eat strips of T-bone and codfish eggs drenched in sesame oil, all in one bite. I liked my baked potatoes with fermented chili paste, my dried cuttlefish with mayonnaise.
There’s a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it’s scalding. If it’s meant to be served fresh, it’s still moving. Stews are served in heavy stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach before your eyes. Cold noodle soups are served in bowls made of actual ice.
By my late teens my craving for Korean staples started to eclipse my desire for American ones. My stomach ached for al tang and kalguksu. On long family vacations, with no Korean restaurant in sight, my mom and I passed up hotel buffets in favor of microwaveable rice and roasted seaweed in our hotel room.
And when I lost my mother to a very sudden, brief, and painful fight with cancer two years ago, Korean food was my comfort food. She was diagnosed in 2014. That May she’d gone to the doctor for a stomachache only to learn she had a rare squamous cell carcinoma, stage four, and that it had spread. Our family was blindsided.
I moved back to Oregon to help my mother through chemotherapy; over the next four months, I watched her slowly disappear. The treatment took everything—her hair, her spirit, her appetite. It burned sores on her tongue. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of protein powders and tasteless porridge. I crushed Vicodin into ice cream.
Dinnertime was a calculation of calories, an argument to get anything down. The intensity of Korean flavors and spices became too much for her to stomach. She couldn’t even eat kimchi.
I began to shrink along with my mom, becoming so consumed with her health that I had no desire to eat. Over the course of her illness, I lost 15 pounds. After two rounds of chemo, she decided to discontinue treatment, and she died two months later.
As I struggled to make sense of the loss, my memories often turned to food. When I came home from college, my mom used to make galbi ssam, Korean short rib with lettuce wraps. She’d have marinated the meat two days before I’d even gotten on the plane, and she’d buy my favorite radish kimchi a week ahead to make sure it was perfectly fermented.
Then there were the childhood summers when she brought me to Seoul. Jet-lagged and sleepless, we’d snack on homemade banchan in the blue dark of Grandma’s humid kitchen while my relatives slept. My mom would whisper, “This is how I know you’re a true Korean.”
But my mom never taught me how to make Korean food. When I would call to ask how much water to use for rice, she’d always say, “Fill until it reaches the back of your hand.” When I’d beg for her galbi recipe, she gave me a haphazard ingredient list and approximate measurements and told me to just keep tasting it until it “tastes like Mom’s.”
After my mom died, I was so haunted by the trauma of her illness I worried I’d never remember her as the woman she had been: stylish and headstrong, always speaking her mind. When she appeared in my dreams, she was always sick.
Then I started cooking. When I first searched for Korean recipes, I found few resources, and I wasn’t about to trust Bobby Flay’s Korean taco monstrosity or his clumsy kimchi slaw. Then, among videos of oriental chicken salads, I found the Korean YouTube personality Maangchi. There she was, peeling the skin off an Asian pear just like my mom: in one long strip, index finger steadied on the back of the knife. She cut galbi with my mom’s ambidextrous precision: positioning the chopsticks in her right hand while snipping bite-size pieces with her left. A Korean woman uses kitchen scissors the way a warrior brandishes a weapon.
I’d been looking for a recipe for jatjuk, a porridge made from pine nuts and soaked rice. It’s a dish for the sick or elderly, and it was the first food I craved when my feelings of shock and loss finally made way for hunger.
I followed Maangchi’s instructions carefully: soaking the rice, breaking off the tips of the pine nuts. Memories of my mother emerged as I worked—the way she stood in front of her little red cutting board, the funny intonations of her speech.
For many, Julia Child is the hero who brought boeuf bourguignon into the era of the TV dinner. She showed home cooks how to scale the culinary mountain. Maangchi did this for me after my mom died. My kitchen filled with jars containing cabbage, cucumbers, and radishes in various stages of fermentation. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Never fall in love with anyone who doesn’t like kimchi; they’ll always smell it coming out of your pores.”
I’ve spent over a year cooking with Maangchi. Sometimes I pause and rewind to get the steps exactly right. Other times I’ll let my hands and taste buds take over from memory. My dishes are never exactly like my mom’s, but that’s OK—they’re still a delicious tribute. The more I learn, the closer I feel to her.
One night not long ago, I had a dream: I was watching my mother as she stuffed giant heads of Napa cabbage into earthenware jars.
She looked healthy and beautiful.
Michelle Zauner is a writer and musician in Brooklyn.
Asian-Americans from all over the internet are crowd-sourcing resources on anti-blackness for our communities. Use them to educate yourselves and your families.
Images from Oscars So Very Incredibly Racist: Investigating 88 Years Of Academy Awards For Acting [X]
Graphics Read:
East, South and Southeast Asian Representation in Academy Awards for Acting as of 2016
East, South or Southeast Asian actors have been nominated for Academy Awards for Acting 15 times. A diagram shows that: in 40% of films, the character was not East, Southeast, or South Asian; in 46% of films, the character and actor shared a common heritage or ethnic background; in 13% of films the character was Asian, but not of the same heritage or ethic background as the actor.
Nine (9) white actors have been nominated for playing East, Southeast or South Asian characters. Three (3) East, Southeast, or South Asian actors have won Academy Awards for acting: Miyoshi Umeki, Ben Kingsley, and Haing S. Ngor. Three (3) white actors have won Academy Awards for playing East or South Asian actors. Zero (0) actors of Korean descent have been nominated for Academy Awards for acting.
A diagram shows the number of East, South or Southeast Asian actors that have been nominated vs. the number that have won in four Academy categories. Two East, South or Southeast Asian actors have been nominated for Actor in a Lead Role, and one has won. One East, South, or Southeast Asian actor has been nominated for Actress in a Lead Role. Seven East, South, or Southeast Asian actors have been nominated for Actor in a Supporting Role, and one has won. Six East, South, or Southeast Asian actors have been nominated for Actress in a Supporting Role, and one has won.
Six (6) of the Asian roles nominated for Academy Awards for acting were in war-related movies. Five (5) films with majority-Asian casts have been nominated for Best Picture but not for any acting awards: “The Last Emperor,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,” “Life of Pi” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Four photos of Asian actors and descriptions of them are shown. Merie Oberon: now considered the first Asian-American actor to earn an Oscar nomination in 1935, Oberon passed as white and didn’t reveal her Indian heritage until a year before her death in 1973. Miyoshi Umeki: in 1957, this Japanese-American actress became the first East or Southeast Asian actor to win an Academy Award. She remains the only East or Southeast Asian woman to win an Oscar for acting. Haing S. Ngor: the only East, Southeast, or South Asian actor to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor or for a debut performance. In 1984 for “the Killing Fields.” Ben Kingsley: this British-Indian actor is the only East or South Asian actor to win an Oscar for Lead Actor, in 1982 for “Gandhi.”
When White American men are used by popular culture as standard bearers of masculinity, Asian Americans are forced to accept the racial hierarchy embedded in the discourse of American manhood. In effect, Asian American men are given a false choice: either we emulate White American notions of masculinity or accept the fact that we are not men. (p. 156)
Chinese American masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee.
J. Chan, 2001 (via khanos)
“December 2012: tens of thousands of people - women, men, families, young, old, rich, poor - come out onto the streets of towns and cities in india to protest the brutal gang rape and murder of a young medical student in delhi. For days and months, the protests refuse to die down. People demand change, action, commitment to the ideals of democracy and egalitarianism. And they refuse to be silenced. Soon, a new law is put in place. More and more people start to report incidents of sexual assault.
New conversations, new debates begin: is violence increasing? are we seeing more of it? was it previously invisible? what do indians really think about women? in this bold and brilliant collection of visual stories, fourteen young women respond to the activism and debates on the ground; they negotiate anger, fear, hope, resistance.
Created in a week long workshop, these stories talk to each other as they powerfully describe the fierce determination of the writers/artists to continue the battle for change.”
the first female chinese immigrant to america was a sixteen-year-old girl who was part of a cultural exhibit where she sat in a life-size diorama and people watched her eat with chopsticks while wearing silk clothes and that’s really all you need to know about the commodification of chinese women
By Marianne Jacquet. Luo Yang is a promising young photographer from Beijing living and working in Shanghai. Acclaimed by our local super nova Ai Wei Wei as a
Hollywood producers want Leonardo DiCaprio to play historic Muslim poet Rumi
A biopic about Rumi, the 13th century Muslim poet (born in present-day Afghanistan) is now in development. Producer Stephen Joel Brown told the Guardian they hope Leonardo DiCaprio will play Rumi. But wait it gets worse, they want another hugely famous white actor to play Shams of Tabriz, Rumi’s Iranian spiritual advisor.
An Asian person who is competing against white people, for an audience of white people, has to train for that opportunity like it’s the Olympics. An incredibly talented Asian actor might be considered for a leading role maybe once or twice in a lifetime. That’s a highly pressured situation. - Constance Wu.
Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be Ignored.
