80s New Wave and Vietnamese Americans

In yet another sign that I am WAY too old, the blog You Offend Me You Offend My Family writes about the 80s New Wave scene and how the Vietnamese American immigrants embraced it as their own. According to them, the music AND the fashion style is coming back. I still remember in my high school most of my Vietnamese and Chinese friends listening to the music, and having hair at least 6-8 inches off their forehead. Granted, their hairstyles were different from the Filipinos I knew who listened to more high energy, freestyle and hip hop and emulated the style and “hair bear” hairstyles. But I digress.

Personally, I’m waiting for the next great Asian American teen movie that is based in the late 80s/early 90s that features all the awesomeness of the fashion, the music, and the millions of cans of AquaNet that were used to keep everyone’s hair up–and which probably contributed to the depletion of the ozone layer. Of course, if someone does make this movie, I expect royalties for coming up with this. Mad royalties, bitches.

About Efren

Efren is a 30-something queer Filipino American guy living in San Francisco. In the past, he was a wanna-be academic even teaching in Asian American studies at San Francisco State, a wanna-be queer rights and HIV activist, and he used to "blog" when that meant spewing one's college student angst using a text editor on a terminal screen to write in a BBS or usenet back in the early 90s. For all his railing against the model minority myth, he's realized he's done something only a few people can claim--getting into UCSF twice, once for a PhD program in medical sociology which he left; and then for pharmacy school, where he'll be a member of the class of '13. He apologizes profusely for setting the bar unintentionally high for his cousins. blog twitter
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