WHAT'S NEW - July 2005

EDITORIALS
LEGACY OF BRUCE LEE
"Before Lee's time, Asian men had been largely depicted as emasculated and childlike — coolies, domestics, etc. — in American popular culture," said Hye Seung Chung, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. "Lee proved that the image of the Asian man can be tough, strong and sexy. However, the Bruce Lee craze of the 1970s created a new stereotype of the Asian man: namely, the martial artist, which still permeates in Hollywood cinema."

AMERICAN CINEMA
"American cinema is a reflection of its society," said Hye Seung Chung - a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. "When I taught a course on "Asians in American Film" at the University of Michigan this past winter, many of my students of Asian descent — all American-born — complained of how strangers — white Americans — would approach them and ask where they were born and how they say 'Hello' in their native tongue. In other words, many people in the United States still don't have a concept of Asian-Americans and treat them as foreigners."

GEORGE LUCAS' WORDS OF ADVICE
Lucas said he became a filmmaker not to become a powerful mogul, which he is, but because he simply loved movies. He said film students today are driven by different motivations. "Now it is a career move. People are looking to get a really good job. They love movies but the idea is that they want to make hit movies. Those of us who have success basically didn't care about any of that stuff."

AMERICAN CEO MISCONCEPTIONS OF ASIA
As far back as Marco Polo and even the Ancient Greeks, the West has considered "The Orient" to be a place of danger, exoticism, sensuality and intrigue. Those perceptions remain today. Even tame and safe Japan, which has among the lowest crime rates in the developed world, was called "The Wild, Wild East" in just one example of a recent headline in BusinessWeek. And China, in a recent Fortune Small Business headline, became "China: Dangerous Business." Casting Asia through this filter of "Asian Mystique," as a "dangerous" place that must be "conquered," sets up an us-vs.-them divide that keeps us in the West from fully understanding the subtleties of those markets.

CHINESE GROWTH MEAN CHANGE FOR U.S. WORKERS
CEOs and other top executives of Chinese companies have also lived less privileged lives than many of their American counterparts. Because of their own less privileged pasts, Chinese bosses expect such qualities as tenacity, loyalty, respect and frugality from employees in addition to hard work that Americans are not accustomed to. The more closely linked the U.S. and Chinese economies become, the more secure U.S.-China relations will be. "The more China advances economically, the more interconnected it is with the U.S.

Even with large-scale immigration and multiculturalism a fact of life in many western communities, and international contact increased by global travel, Asians - whether in their native countries or in the diaspora - are seen through a filter of "received cultural perceptions", reinvigorated by Hollywood and other media.

HIP-HOP UNLOCKS LITERARY CLASSICS
On the last day of class, he said, a girl walked up to his desk, shyly slid him a note, waved goodbye and quickly left. The note explained that she had been considering suicide until she read Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," with its admonition to "rage, rage against the dying of the light. If one poem can do that for a student, think of the power of a book."

WHERE DOES HIP-HOP END & GANG CULTURE BEGIN
On the last day of class, he said, a girl walked up to his desk, shyly slid him a note, waved goodbye and quickly left. The note explained that she had been considering suicide until she read Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," with its admonition to "rage, rage against the dying of the light. If one poem can do that for a student, think of the power of a book."

VIEW OF CHINESE IN 1912
We need the Chinese, but we do not need Chinatown in his present condition or location. The Chinese now have one of the best parts of town, and they have forfeited their right to it by their habits of life.

For more years than we care to recall, there has been politics in keeping the Chinese and their dens in an obnoxious condition. When the plague threatened to reach our shores if it did not actually reach them, as the greatest experts in the land declared it did, it became a supremely important precaution to clean and fumigate Chinatown.

Our local Board of Health, with a discretion that it would have been criminal not to have exercised under the circumstances, ordered a thorough cleansing of Chinatown.

"WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD"
"I didn't think that people would be this nervous," Andrea Wong, head of alternative programming at ABC, said before Wednesday's decision to ditch the show. "Because I really think it's such a positive show and such a good thing to put on TV and cause viewers to look at themselves, I'm surprised by the negative reaction to it."

SISTERS OF THE TRAVELING PANTS
Upon reading the first two paragraphs, which breezily compare the dungarees to a beloved dog that one would give away if one were moving to someplace like Korea, where people eat dogs.

But what gives those guys the right to decide what's offensive to another group? Who are they to say what hurts someone else's community, someone else's family, what wounds someone else's child?

What would I do if my little girl came home crying because some Shaq-worshipping kid on the playground -- as a joke -- pulled up his eyes at her and chanted, "Ching-chong Chinaman?"

The state of California, surplus-rich, had originally offered to fund it after initial $70,000. Nagano invited the innovative stage director Robert Wilson to create a theatrical vision with a budget that was to be in the millions - along with Ernest Fleischmann and composer Naomi Sekiya.

The original "Manzanar" project had its life abruptly interrupted when the state suddenly withdrew funding after the energy blackouts and other fiscal crises that transform it into a grass roots project with Philip Kan Gotanda brought into the project.

TREATMENT OF CHINESE AT ANGEL ISLAND
While being detained at Angel Island, the Chinese immigrants had encountered terrible experiences, such as going to take medical examinations and dealing with unreasonable, lengthen interrogation, all of worse than what they had expected before coming to America. Suffered from imprisonment, many Chinese immigrants expressed and released their feelings of anger with poems which were discovered on the barracks walls on Angel Island.

SUCCESS OF "THE CHINA BOYS"
At first (in the 19th Century), the Chinese were cheerfully welcomed as ''The China Boys,'' invited to official functions and praised for the quality of their work. The next thing they knew, the governor was denouncing them as avaricious ''coolies,'' whites were chasing them out of the mines and legislators were targeting them with punitive taxes.

STATE OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Jeff Chang stated at the June 20, 2005 Asian American Studies Commencement Speech the following: "As the great Glenn Omatsu reminds us, the fundamental practice of Asian American Studies is to build community. Building community goes beyond centering the self. It is about imagining what it takes to revere justice, to respect difference, to reduce hurt, to correct wrong, to nurture growth, and to discover joy. It is about activating and propagating these values within a conception of 'we' that continually expands, and is always concerned with caring for the least of us first."