January 14, 2006

• I just saw The Book of Daniel.  Yea, the show that’s been getting a lot of bad rap because the family is apparently too
  dysfunctional.  Ok maybe that is true, but that’s not a bad
  thing.  The show is very interesting with a lot of twists
  throughout the show, enough to make me see it again next Friday.

  
  The actors and actresses do a good job playing the parts.  The
  Asian guy, Ivan Shaw, is a great character and seems like a big step up on asian
  representation in the media…well, for the guys at least.  I’m
  glad they writers decided to put him together with a white girl instead
  of a traditional same race girl.  Yep, asian guys can get white girls .

  Psh, like her —>

  Anyways, go check this show out!  Hopefully it doesnt get cancelled because it is pretty entertaining.

  ——————–
  This is a great article.  Please check out some of the excerpts below.

  From the Times article on being Asian-American:

  On initial assimilation:
  Asians was different from the Jews, Irish and Italians who had landed
  earlier. The Asian immigrants’ distinctive physiognomy may have made it
  more difficult for them to blend in, but at the same time, their high
  education and skill levels allowed them quicker entrée into the middle
  class. Instead of clustering tightly in urban ethnic enclaves, they
  spread out into suburbia, where they were often isolated.

  On “model minority”:
  The inspiration for the notion of the “model minority,” the
  generation’s members have been most recognized for their high academic
  achievements, a reflection of their parents’ drive for a certain kind
  of success. But that is only part of their story. Shuttling between two
  worlds—and seeming to fit into neither—many felt as if “they had no
  community,” says Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American novelist who has
  written about this generation’s journey. “They had to create
  themselves.” In doing so, they have updated the old immigrant story and
  forged a new Asian-American identity, not wholly recognizable in any of
  their parents’ native lands but, in its hybrid nature, vibrantly
  American.

  On “forever foreigners”:
  Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an
  equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call “forever
  foreigners.” Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like “No,
  where are you really from?” As a teenager in the affluent and
  overwhelmingly white Chicago suburb of Riverwoods, Ill, Vanessa DeGuia,
  now 26, endured incident after incident that made her aware that others
  regarded her as foreign, despite how her birth certificate read. One
  classmate told her, “You’re my brown friend. You’re so exotic.” Another
  came over for dinner, took a bite of a Filipino egg roll made by
  Vanessa’s mom, spat it out and asked if it was made of dog. “I never
  felt like I belonged,” DeGuia says. “Though I was born in this country
  and English was my first language, I was always seen as a foreigner.”

  On belonging:
  For kids—who by nature desperately want to belong—the feeling of
  alienation can be so painful that they will do almost anything to make
  it go away, to fit in. For years, Mark Hong, 31, shunned the only other
  Asian kid he knew in Davenport, Iowa, and hung out with the popular—and
  other than him, entirely white—crowd at school: the jocks. “I repelled
  anything that was Asian because it represented everything that was not
  cool at the time. Asians did kung fu and worked at Asian restaurants,”
  he explains. That his Korean-born dad was actually an engineer at
  Caterpillar had no effect on Hong’s teenage mind, which was focused on
  one goal: “I wanted to be cool.”

  On “cultural awakening”:
  “he social awakening often kindles a cultural one. Once in the return
  part of the curve, many Asian Americans go from downplaying their
  differences to highlighting them. In fourth grade, Akira Heshiki, who
  grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, dropped out of the Japanese-language
  school she attended each Saturday because she didn’t feel Japanese.
  Instead she treasured the moments when her high school classmates told
  her, “I always forget you’re Japanese.” But once at Oregon’s Reed
  College, where more than 10% of the students were Asian American, she
  began to embrace her heritage.”

  On relationships:
  Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, a novel about Indian immigrants
  and their U.S.-born son, has observed the struggles of Asian Americans
  like Chang up close. “Asian kids are not just choosing a different way
  of doing things,” she says. “They’re choosing an entirely different
  [cultural] vocabulary. They’re dealing with oil and water.” Nowhere is
  that incompatibility more deeply felt than in romance. Most
  Asian-immigrant parents encourage their children to find partners of
  the same ethnicity, and many of the kids see the advantages of doing
  so. As June Kim, a Korean-American copywriter in Philadelphia who is
  engaged to another Korean American, Shane Kim, sees it, “there are
  certain things you don’t have to explain—cultural nuances, how our
  families work, our roles within our families.”

  How very true…

  Check out the rest here:  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1147177-1,00.html

  • 11:41 am
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