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LATEST NEWS FOR AUGUST 2002

Our invitation is extended to discover various Asian American leaders listed below, information on our past victories and the many great things that are presently happening in our communities.

Read about the following in our August edition:

For an upcoming article, we are seeking your views on your choices from the Asian/Asian Pacific American communities of the most successful, prominent and high-profiled example of the following

  • Actor/Actress
  • Film Producer/Director
  • Landmark Film
  • Musicians/Artist
  • Community Leader
  • Politicians
  • Athlete
  • Pioneer (Actor/Actress)

Click HERE to share your choices and the reasons behind your respective choices.

YOUR MUSICAL INPUT IS NEEDED as we seek identify the best songs from our music artists.

Click HERE to have your opinion heard on the following music groups:

  • Regine Velasquez (pop)
  • Second Wind (r&b)
  • Francis Kim (folk rock)
  • Gorillaz (hip-hop)
  • String Cheese Incident (jam band)
  • Junoon (rock)
  • A Mei (Asian Pop)
  • Moulann (Pop)
  • Rachael Lampa (CCM)
  • RiverMaya (OPM)
  • SuperChick (CCM)
  • Vanessa Mae (International Pop)
  • Aiko Star (Pinoy Rock)
  • N.E.R.D. (Hip-Hop)
  • Jenny Choi (Folk/Pop)

Click HERE on your views if people would come to a Hollywood night club showcasing prominent Asian Pacific American music artists.


FEATURED ARTISTS & LEADERS

Ben Fong-Torres

BEN FONG-TORRES

Ben Fong-Torres is a widely acclaimed and successful rock journalist, whose career started at The Rolling Stone in 1968.

Before his stint at the Rolling Stone, he had worked for Pacific Telephone’s employee magazine, East West (a bilingual Bay Area Chinatown newspaper.

After the Rolling Stone in 1981, he has written for numerous publications such as Esquire, GQ, Parade, Playboy, Gavin, Sports Illustrated, Travel & Leisure, American Film, TV Guide, Harper’s Bazaar, San Francisco Chronicle and California Business.

His Rolling Stone interview subjects included Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, the Jackson 5, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Paul Simon, the Grateful Dead, Ike & Tina Turner, Diane Keaton, and Steve Martin.

He wrote the main biographies and anthologies for various publications. They include People Magazine’s tributes (Jerry Garcia & Frank Sinatra), Rolling Stones’ anthologies (The Motown Album: The Sound of Young America, Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons, The American’s Search for Identity, Chink!: Studies in Ethnic Prejudice and two college textbooks.

Some of the books he wrote include Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll, The Rice Room: From Number Two Son to Rock and Roll, The Hits Just Keep On Coming: The History of Top 40 Radio

His radio stints include KQED-FM’s host on their weekly arts program, weekend DJ on KSAN from 1970 to 1979 and writing/narrating a syndicated radio special, San Francisco: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, which won a Billboard Award for Broadcast Excellence.

Fong-Torres was portrayed as himself in Cameron Crowe's movie "Almost Famous." Terry Chen was the actor that portrayed him in the movie.

Ben Fong-Torres found that being one of the very few Asians in his field to be an advantage. Most artists welcomed that they were facing a Chinese guy or an Asian American. His reputation often made the situation a moot issue.

His strict Chinese upbringing was really more the feeling of responsibility to be a part of the family business, such as his family’s restaurant business. His parents didn’t expressed a great disappointment because of his interest in journalism was very evident. He stated that “our parents instilled in us a work ethic, a sense of responsibility and loyalty to the family, and to our culture.”

In 1999, Ben joined myplay.com, a music site on the Internet, as Editorial Director. He also began contributing articles to AsianConnections.com and is vice president of content at Collabrys Inc, a company that specializes in brand marketing.

Ben Fong-Torres was born in Alameda, California, in 1945, and raised in Oakland's Chinatown, where his parents owned a restaurant. Fong Kwok Shen (father) came to the US in 1921 and Soo Hoo Tui Wing (aka Connie) arrived in 1940. Barry, his brother, died at a young age. Ben attended San Francisco State College from 1962 through 1966, majored in Radio-TV-Film and served as a reporter and editor of the campus daily. “And, as Dianne, my wife, will ruefully agree, I ain’t no businessperson, either.”

Yeh Ling-Ling

YEH LING-LING

Yeh Ling-Ling is the Executive Director of Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable American (DASA).

Ms. Yeh believes that a highly overpopulated and divided America will hurt all legal residents, U.S. and foreign born. She holds a strong belief that sprawl, gridlock, overburdened infrastructure and rising ethnic tensions cannot be solved without also addressing rapid population growth, driven mainly by record levels of immigration. Her conclusions were as the result of 10 years of working for immigration law firms helping people immigrate to the United States and a subject of debate among other immigration experts.

About 100 of her articles and opinion pieces have appeared in many US publications such as LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, Asian American Policy Review of Harvard University, Minority Politics, Chicago Tribune, Newark Star Ledger, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Times, Union-Leader, Sun Sentinel, New York Newsday, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, San Diego Union-Tribune and USA Today Magazine.

An opinion piece by Ms. Yeh has been reprinted in a college text book, “California Dreams and Realities: Reading for Critical Thinkers and Writers.” Excerpts of her article, “Legal Immigration Must Be Curbed, Too” from USA Today magazine was reprinted in the national Sixth Edition of Prentice Hall Literature, “The American Experience.”

Yeh Ling-Ling has appeared on approximately 300 talk shows. Asian Week published a positive cover story about her work in the February 17, 2000, issue. Jonathan Alter of Newsweek wrote a column about her on MSNBC on 8/17/2001 entitled: “Immigration: Worth a Second Look.” She has also been on a number of immigration panels, such as those sponsored by Lewis & Clark College in Oregon and World Forum of Silicon Valley.

Ms. Yeh is a naturalized citizen, since 1980 (at the age of 27), and born in Vietnam of affluent Chinese parents. She was educated in Cambodia and Taiwan and graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Her parents later died in the killing fields of Cambodia, when the Communist Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot took over in 1975.

DASA Yeh Ling-Ling's organization DASA

Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable American (DASA)’s Mission Statement

Most of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and many immigrants are assets to this country. However, rapid population growth in the U.S., driven in large part by record high levels of immigration, is adversely impacting America's environment, workers, infrastructure, social coherence and the quality of life of residents of all racial backgrounds. Current rates of immigration also hurt minorities and earlier immigrants the most.

Despite our differences in racial, ethnic, religious and political backgrounds, supporters of Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America are committed to working together to educate residents on the consequences of population growth and the benefits of population stabilization.

DASA's Platform

DASA supports replacement-level fertility (an average of 2 children per family) and replacement-level immigration (no more than 200,000 immigrants per year, including refugees). This would lead to U.S. population stabilization.

DASA supports a race-blind, country-blind U.S. immigration policy. DASA also supports efforts to stabilize world population and improve living conditions world-wide.

Regarding Legal Immigration:

  • Legal immigration should be limited to spouses and unmarried children under 18 of U.S. citizens and non-citizen legal immigrants, individuals who are personally persecuted as defined by the Immigration Act of 1980, and highly skilled labor certified by the U.S. Department of Labor to be in shortage in the U.S.
  • Non-citizen legal immigrants should be denied all welfare benefits, cash and non-cash, except emergency medical care.

    Regarding Illegal Immigration:

  • All illegal aliens should be expeditiously deported, except those who are spouses of U.S. citizens;
  • All illegal aliens should be denied all public services except emergency medical care;
  • Children born in the U.S. of illegal immigrants should be denied automatic U.S. citizenship.

    Regarding Naturalization:

  • Only legal immigrants who have demonstrated working knowledge of English and have met all requirements for naturalization can become U.S. citizens.

    Gene Kan

    GENE KAN

    Gene Kan was a peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer extraordinaire before his death on June 29, 2002 at the age of 25.

    This Fullerton (a Southern California city) native’s professional life revolved around developing new ways to share information easily and quickly.

    A soft-spoken person, of Chinese descent, had a talent for coining phrases (as evident by many his interviews with the media) that cut neatly through technical complexities. This ability to translate complicated technology into easily understandable terms quickly led to his becoming the unofficial spokesman for Gnutella in particular, and for file-sharing applications in general.

    He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last June, advising the recording industry that "the toothpaste is already out of the tube," and it would be best to adjust their businesses to the new reality of file sharing, as opposed to trying to ban it.

    Kan helped write an early version of Gnutella designed to work on the Unix operating system. He was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application Gnutella, which enables users to search for and transfer files from computer to computer that thousands of people use Gnutella to swap files.

    In June 2000, Kan started Burlingame-based InfraSearch Inc., a peer-to-peer search engine technology (based on Gnutella’s technology) company that attracted high-profile investors that allowed any connected device on a network -- from cell phones and wireless PDAs to PCs and servers -- to communicate, collaborate and share information. Sun acquired InfraSearch in 2001 for $10 million.

    Kan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He was lso an aficionado of fast cars and street racing.


  •       OUR GOALS

    The purpose of this section is the following:
    OPPORTUNITY
    to discover more about our dreams
    UNDERSTANDING
    our fears and our hopes and
    UNCOVERING
    invaluable and missing information


    APA & MEDIA NEWS

    ASIAN AMERICAN MUSIC SHOWCASE

    Music groups from Japan, Tampa (Florida), Houston (Texas), San Francisco (California) and Southern California come together in an Asian American Music Showcase entitled "The Dragon's Roar!"

    Performing artists include MeYou (rap), Ill Again (hip-hop/funk), Bad Candie (rock), TitoFelix (Pinoy Rock) and CreAsian (rock)at the Hollywood nightclub "Live at 56." Click HERE for more info.

    NOTORIOUS C.H.O.

    The freewheeling, iconoclastic comedy routines within the "Notorious C.H.O." is a filmed version of the show that begins with backstage interviews with her parents and ends with a tale about her mother falling off a camel she didn't want to ride in the first place.

    Cho admits to her constant longing to be white till her late teens, where she realized it wasn't gonna happen. Then her consciousness was raised. In her teens, her feeling of racial inferiority "turned completely around and became this fierce pride, into like being angry about it." She then learned to use it in her comedy.

    UPCOMING ASIAN STLE MAGAZINE IN ENGLISH

    Danielle Chang and Todd Leong are currently working with Lisa Ling (of ABC's The View) to create an English speaking Asian lifestyle magazine. The project is currently in development.

    URBAN ARCHITECTURE 606 TOUR

    Chicago hip-hop groups Primeridian, Typical Cats, the Pacifics, DJ Presyce and others are bringing their hard-hitting music throughout the US while bringing awareness of issues that are important to them. Click “above” for more info.

    ASIAN ACTORS IN AMERICAN ROLES
    The Lincoln Center Festival featured Amon Miyamoto’s, a popular Tokyo choreographer and stage director, “Pacific Overtures” production created with John Weidman's book and Sondheim's lyrics translated into Japanese that included an outright Japanese sensibility. This extended to an all-Asian cast (including the American roles), men impersonating women (as in traditional Japanese theater) and the allusions in the score to classical Japanese court music.

    Sondheim has said he loves this production, calling it a combination of Peter Brook and Jerome Robbins. Miyamoto's concept is often theatrically brilliant, his cast highly accomplished and the production far more sophisticated than the coarse special effects typical of today's Broadway musical.

    YOUTHS DENIED ACCESS TO NEARBY SCHOOLS

    Many Asian youths are denied admission to some of San Francisco's best schools that are located streets away from their home to commute an hour to an inferior school across town where they’ve been enrolled by a computer.

    This new shift has rekindled charges that Asian Americans, the majority group at many top schools, are forced to shoulder the weight of integrating and strengthening the city's troubled public schools. Asian Americans have renewed charges that they are victims of their own academic success.

    Leland Yee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has a proposal of splitting the city school district in half. Many fear that this is an attempt to create two separate and unequal school districts--in loose terms, one for Asians and whites, the other for blacks and Latinos.

    Yee, a shoot-from-the-lip child psychologist who emigrated from China at age 3 and a child of ‘60’s protest, says he's merely trying to reduce red tape and make one of the largest school districts in California more responsive to parents and children.

    Yee's region, near Golden Gate Park, is known as the Sunset and is populated largely by Asian American families.

    Many Asian American parents believe the school district is shuffling their children around to boost test scores at bad schools and make the district eligible for more grant money. School administrators deny that.

    Asians and Pacific Islanders make up 35% of San Francisco and 50% of the school district.

    This San Francisco district placed a racial quota system, capping any one ethnic group at either 40% or 45% of a student body, depending on the school.

    Asian Americans became the majority in many schools, as many whites began moving to the suburbs or placing their children in private schools. As a result, some Asian Americans were having trouble getting into their neighborhood schools.

    In 1999, Chinese American families filed a lawsuit claiming that racial balancing violated their rights. San Francisco agreed to stop using race to place students in classrooms. Instead of quotas, school administrators began relying on other factors to place students, including test scores and a broad definition of "merit"--community service, family income and "ability to overcome hardship."

    PUFFY AMI YUMI BRINGS BACK “CUTE”

    Puffy Ami Yumi, the adorable female singing duo, is a vertically integrated industry unto itself in its native country, with variety shows, toys and countless print and TV ads driving the sales of its records and feeding the ravenous appetites of American cutie-pie pop fans.

    At L.A.’s Spaceland, Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura played guileless music steeped in the buoyant tunefulness and steely synthesizers of late '70s New Wave with its 5 piece back-up band with their vocals sang in unison.

    As a reviewer stated, “It was like watching the coolest kids in high school commandeer a pep rally.”

    STATE OF ASIAN CHURCHES

    Asian churches in America have undergone tremendous change over the years, as time and demographics have presented to many Asian churches the unique challenges of ministering to people of Asian heritage who are at different degrees of acculturation.

    The same issues that perplex other pastors and church leaders, such as conflicting tastes in worship music/styles, relevant preaching and programming, take on even greater complexity when you add language barriers and Americanization factors.

    Logos Evangelical Seminary will be discussing these issues in their September 14, 2002 Talk Show entitled “The Journey of Asian Churches in America: A Look Back with an Eye Towards the Future" at Evergreen Baptist Church.

    The participants are as follows:
    Moderators:

    Speaker:
    • Timothy Tseng - Ass. Prof. @ American Bapt. Seminary of the West
    Panelists:

    For further info, contact the event organizers: Dr. Anthony So or Alina Hsiao

    HAWAIIAN MUSIC EVENT

    Daniel Ho and Friends (Skyler Blue - Denise Tajiri and Siena Lee, Faith Rivera, Steve Billman, Randy Drake and members of Kilauea) brought together the “Sounds of the Pacific.” This event combined contemporary jazz with elements of blues, pop, contemporary vocals and Hawaiian slack key guitar. The event was produced in the Japanese American Theater on July 19, 2002.

    This award-winning artist is best known as the leader, keyboardist, and composer for the contemporary jazz group, Kilauea. Ho¹s collaboration with slack key master George Kahumoku, Jr. that garnered Hawaii¹s coveted Na Hoku Hanohano award.

    DEATH OF GENE KAN

    Kan, peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer extraordinaire, died on June 29. His professional life revolved around developing new ways to share information easily and quickly.

    Kan died as a result of an accident, according to a statement released Monday by his employer, Sun Microsystems Inc. At the request of his family, no other details of his June 29 death were being released, Sun officials said. Until his death Kan worked for Sun as a consultant on the connected search project, now known as Project JXTA.

    Kan's suicide was not completely unexpected, according to some of his friends, in light of his hard-fought battle against depression exacerbated by personal problems.

    Kan's suicide was not completely unexpected, according to some of his friends. They had hoped Kan was winning his hard-fought battle against depression exacerbated by personal problems.

    VIETNAMESE AMERICANS RUNNING FOR OFFICE
    Two prominent Vietnamese-American activists, long-time residents of Maryland, are running for public office. Tommy Le is a candidate for the 2002 Montgomery County School Board, and Nguyen Minh Chau for the state House of Delegates, District 17. The two have been active in civic affairs in their own community for over 20 years

    Tommy Le is an engineer by profession and a former teacher in a vocational and technical school. He is currently program manager with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and has been consistently involved in school and community activities.

    Nguyen Minh Chau, who aspires to the Maryland House of Delegates, is a familiar figure on the social and civic scene. She is a fourth-term elected Council member for the town of Garrett Park, and a representative of the Maryland Municipal League (MML) and the Garrett Park Elementary School. Ms. Chau is also president and owner of NiMic Corporation, and a business executive with over 25 years experience in surveys, market research, information processing and management consulting.

    MINORITY WOMEN ADVANCING IN MANAGEMENT
    Women of color in executive-level and managerial positions are receiving promotions and pay raises and building the types of informal networks that could help them to progress up the corporate ladder, a new study by Catalyst - a New York-based research organization has found.

    The study "Women of Color in Corporate Management: Three Years Later" is based on follow-up surveys with 368 of the 1,735 women who participated in a 1999 report entitled "Women of Color in Corporate Management."

    The latest study found that since the 1999 report, 57 percent of black, Asian American and Hispanic women surveyed were promoted at least once. The participants' salaries also increased an average of 40 percent in the three-year period between the surveys. Only one percent of those surveyed reported any downward moves.

    White women make up 86 percent of female managers, while blacks make up just 7 percent, Hispanics 5 percent and Asian Americans 2.5 percent.

    IMMIGRATION NEEDS TO STOP
    Yeh Ling-Ling (Executive Director of Diversity Alliance for A Sustainable America) thinks this would be a good day to pull up the welcome mat. She believes that is it time to seal the borders and stop virtually all immigration.

    She advocates that schools should explore the backgrounds of their students and bar any whose parents are in this country illegally. In addition, children of illegal immigrants who are born in the United States should not automatically be granted U.S. citizenship and illegal immigrants should receive no health care unless it is an absolute emergency. She feels that all citizens should be required to carry tamperproof national identification cards.

    Yeh believes that Mexico wants to take over Arizona, with other parts of the American Southwest.

    To support her controversial view, she distributes a 2-year-old newspaper interview with a professor of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico. He believes that six Mexican states will join with California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and southern Colorado to form a new Hispanic republic through the gradual infusion of Hispanics into the political processes of the U.S. states with the support of the Mexican government. (Click HERE for the entire article.

    HOTLINES FOR ASIAN IMMIGRANTS
    The toll-free hotline, the Asian Language Legal Intake Project, use their language skills and background immigration experiences to add resonance to their advice.

    With the counselors’ fluent Vietnamese and Mandarin, they help people understand their eligibility for Medi-Cal and food stamps, assist elderly women find places to live and advise abused women how they can stay in the country while staying away from their husbands.

    The project links four legal service organizations in Los Angeles and Orange counties--the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Neighborhood Legal Services and the Legal Aid Society of Orange County.

    Callers dial (800) 267-7395 for Vietnamese-language assistance or (800) 520-2356 for Mandarin. Plans are to expand the effort to include Korean and Khmer, the main Cambodian language, by 2003.

    More than 1.5 million Asians and Pacific Islanders now live in the two counties. Many have little or no English skills.

    QUEST FOR COLOR ON TV FAILS AGAIN
    More than two years after the four major networks promised to increase minority representation in their prime-time lineups, the recently unveiled fall TV schedule reflects no minority leads in their new programs.

    Only two of the 26 new fall series on the four major networks feature a minority in a leading role, and both of those will air back-to-back Wednesdays on Fox ("Cedric the Entertainer Presents" and "Fastlane").

    The coalition is urging key corporate sponsors of CBS - General Motors, Proctor & Gamble, Pfizer, Philip Morris, among others - to pressure the network to increase diversity - since they have fallen to last place.

    KOREAN YOUTHS ARE IN HAGWONS
    Korean American parents have been enrolling students in hagwons to give them an academic advantage. Tutorial programs now include sports, activities.

    Hagwons (tutorial schools) offer summer and after-school programs is an age-old tradition in Korea where most children attend some sort of extracurricular academic program.

    There are more that 100 academic hagwons in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

    Those schools' monthly charges range from $300 for after-school programs to $700 for full-day summer classes, sports, SAT preparation, math/science classes and recreation.

    The students, primary graders mostly, study for three hours in the mornings in small groups. After lunch, about half opt to stay for field trips and other nonacademic activities like tennis and skating lessons.

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