“Asian American” implies a fusion between Asian and American, and this performance by Luna Lee of the Steely Dan classic Do it Again, is definitely a cross-cultural fusion. She plays the song on the Korean gayageum. I am reminded of songs from the band Hiroshima and their use of the Japanese koto.
Links to Luna Lee’s music and how to support her are here. Hat tip to Open Culture’s sharing of this performance.
Earlier this month, Love in Taipei premiered on Paramount+ on August 10th. I’ve been behind on my blogging, but wanted to let everyone know about some things about the movie, including a free promo code to see it, a review, and a Q&A session held in San Francisco that I attended (warning – spoilers in the Q&A).
Promo Code
Love is Taipei is available on Paramount+ streaming service. If you don’t have that service, you can watch it on Paramount+ with the one month free promo code: TAIPEI. This offer is good until 9/10. Note that the normal free trial is only for a week. If you’re already subscribed, you can click here to start the film.
Review
Overall, for a streaming film aimed for the Young Adult (“YA”) audience, I enjoyed this romantic drama adapted from the best selling book, Loveboat, Taipei. In contrast, a friend of mine, who also went on the actual Love Boat like I did, thought that there was more drama in an episode of Saved by the Bell than in the film. As stated on Parmount Plus, the plot of the film is:
“A young woman’s cultural immersion program in Taiwan turns out to be a liberating free-for-all known as “Loveboat” where unexpected romance leads her to question her future. Based on the best-selling book “Loveboat, Taipei” by Abigail Hing Wen.”
I never got around to reading Loveboat, Taipei, as I don’t think I’ve read any fiction since college … so I couldn’t exactly tell you what the differences are, except from this review:
“When she wrote her bestselling YA novel “Loveboat, Taipei,” Bay Area author Abigail Hing Wen met her audience where they were, detailing the delightful summer debauchery of Taiwanese American teens. Sure, there’s earnest self-discovery and cultural exploration as her characters take in their ancestral homeland, but there’s also sex, racy photo shoots, backstabbing and reconciliation.
Now adapted as a film, the most risque thing to happen in the novel’s story onscreen just might be a closed-mouth kiss. And it’s a shame, because this is one absolutely gorgeous cast.”
I’m assuming the decision was made due to audience considerations. Personally, I think I would have enjoyed the racier version! What I did love was that Love in Taipei was actually filmed in Taiwan. Taipei is a character in the film, very much like how Singapore was in Crazy Rich Asians. I think Taipei and Taiwan are underated vacation destinations for most Americans, so I’m more than happy to see when they can get highlighted in popular culture or in the news.
In any case, the main character, Ever Wong (Ashley Liao) does a lot of self reflection during her stay in Taiwan and meets two very different young men who relate to her challenges differenty — Boy Wonder Rick Woo (Ross Butler) and troublemaker Xavier Yeh (Nico Hiraga). There isn’t a lot of drama, but the characters are relateable. I thought that the lead actors all did an excellent job, especially Ashley Liao – her first leading role. If you liked To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, you should enjoy Loveboat, Taipei – and audiences seemed to have enjoyed the film as well, with an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.
WARNING – Spoilers in Video below!
The Wife, my Brother-in-law (BIL), and I were watching Only Murders in the Building when we were blown away the showstopper duet of Meryl Streep and Ashley Park. Having never seen Emily in Paris and having not known about her musical theatre and Broadway background, I was pleasantly stunned that Ashley Park could sing so incredibly well. So for those you who like myself didn’t know that or having only seen her in Joy Ride, I thought I would share.
In addition to the performing abilities of Meryl Streep and Ashley Park, one additional reason that the song is so good is that it was created by professional broadway professionals Sara Bareilles, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul. The show has made the song available for streaming.
I am looking forward to more wonderful musical performances in the series, which has been weaving Broadway themes together with a murder mystery. Only Murders in the Building streams on Hulu and drops a new episode every Tuesday.
(graph credit: by Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel, © 2023)
While Harvard is being sued by for its legacy admissions policy, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows that Asian applicants to a set of highly selective colleges have a 28% disadvantage compared to white applicants. The paper breaks down Asian admissions into three subgroup categories: East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. South Asians were found to have an even higher disadvantage of 49%.
The authors attribute the disadvantage to legacy admissions and an apparent bias against Asian applicants from areas with large numbers of Asian applicants. The effects of the legacy admission advantage is visible in the graph above. While this graph shows groupings by test scores, the author did comparisons of students with similar sets of test scores, grades, and extracurriculars.
I know that selective colleges seek geographical diversity, and I suspect that this works against Asian Americans applying from states with many Asian Americans such as California, Texas, and Washington. Figure 3 in the paper shows this. I also wonder if Asian American parents will use this data to apply to selective colleges from states with small Asian American populations such as North and South Dakota.
I have gone over the results of the paper at a very high level. I think that the way it disaggregates Asian Americans is timely and revealing. The actual paper has much more detail.
The American Heart Association reported on a recent paper describing how Asian American diets can be tuned to prevent heart disease and diabetes. An important point that the paper makes make is that understanding the diets of each Asian ethnic group is key in order to improve them. Dr. Latha Palaniappan says that her patients are often asked to fill out food surveys based on an American diet:
Her Asian patients were going to nutritionists and being told to not eat foods such as hamburgers, fries or mayonnaise. “The patients would say, ‘Oh, well, I don’t eat those things anyway.’ And they would go back to eating their samosa (fried pastries stuffed with anything from meat to chocolate), jalebi (a syrupy dessert) and fried foods and not connecting that those, also, were not healthy for their heart or their blood vessels.”
The report goes into detail about specific strengths and weakness of different Asian Ethnic groups by region. It doesn’t advocate that everyone turn to the Mediterranean diet, but suggests how Asian American diets can be tuned to improve them. For example, South Asian diets could benefit from adding more vegetables to stews.
You can read the paper at the American Heart Association Journal Circulation.
I had the great honor and pleasure of interviewing Randall Park as he visited San Francisco as part of his directorial debut to promote his upcoming film, Shortcomings, released by Sony Picture Classics and coming to a theater near you on Friday, August 4th. Shortcomings premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah earlier this year and currently holds an 80% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes.
As I told Randall, I’ve been following him since I ever noticed him in a Wells Fargo commercial back in 2008, which eventually became a regular series which I called Asian American Commercial Watch. This was followed up by The People I’ve Slept With (which was written by former 8Asians blogger Koji Steven Sakai), The Interview, Always Be My Maybe, his work in the MCU as Jimmy Woo, and UCLA’s 2023 commencement address. I forgot to mention what Randall is probably most known for – Fresh Off The Boat! I had mentioned I had interviewed Hudson Yang and his father Jeff Yang, who I first met a long time ago back in the mid-90s.
Interviewing Randall was my first time interviewing a well known actor (and now film director!), but he was so down-to-earth that I felt very comfortable talking to him. My only concern was that I was asking meaningful questions around his directorial debut on Shortcomings. Please view above or click on this link to watch!
https://youtu.be/uBGTJqYuV_w
I first met author Abigail Hing Wen at her book launch event of her Young Adult novel “Loveboat, Taipei” in Menlo Park, California. As a producer (one of many), on the documentary “Love Boat: Taiwan,” I had a great interest on the subject matter. I bought the novel to support Wen’s efforts, but to be honest, I never got around to reading it. After college, I don’t think I’ve read any work of fiction. Still, I am super excited to watch the film adaptation of the book, “Love In Taipei”:
“Based on the best-selling book “Loveboat, Taipei” by Abigail Hing Wen, LOVE IN TAIPEI tells the story of the young American Ever Wong, whose summer takes an unexpected turn when her parents surprise her with a trip to Taipei for a cultural immersion program. Ever is surprised to discover that she hasn’t signed up for homework and history lessons, but instead for a summer-long free-for-all the locals and other students call “Loveboat.” And it quickly lives up to its name when Ever finds herself trying not to fall for two attractive but wildly different boys who are vying for her attention, while at the same time finding the courage to defy her parents’ high expectations and pursue her true passion: dancing.
The film directed by Arvin Chen (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?), which stars Ashley Liao (Physical), Ross Butler (Shazam! Fury of the Gods), Nico Hiraga (Booksmart) and Chelsea Zhang (Titans), will premiere this summer exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. and Canada on Thursday, August 10, also coming to the service in the UK, Australia, Latin America, Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and South Korea.”
I am excited that the film was shot on location in Taipei, not like Vancouver, where many films often are. I will try to interview Abigail in the near future and am delighted to get a sneak peak next week!
I had heard girls like me don’t cry a number of times on the radio, but when the DJ said that the singer went to Newark Memorial High School (where I went to high school), I was immediately intrigued. After I saw that the singer was named thuy, I decided to check out who this singer was. thuy actually did go to my high school, and she is an emerging Asian American pop performer to watch and to listen to.
In many ways, her story is like a lot of Asian American performing artists. She always had a love for music but went with her family’s desire for her to go into the medical field, majoring in Biopsychology at UC Santa Barbara. After working a number of medical jobs, she decided to pursue her passion full time. Her parents wondered if she would go back to physician assistant school after this “phase.” I am reminded of the story of Simu Liu working as an accountant. According to Billboard, girls like me don’t cry peaked at 9 on the Vietnamese charts and 39 in New Zealand, and it is getting airplay in the US now. A look at her Spotify numbers shows that her songs have been streamed tens of millions of times.
thuy is currently opening for singer Ella Mai on her Heart on My Sleeve Tour and will next be performing in that tour on August 19 and 20, 2023 in Sacramento. You can see her music web site at site at thuymusic.com.
(photo credit: musiegeek licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
I have run a number of Asian American history talks and events for an Employee Resource Group (ERG) in my company, and a common responses from my fellow employees is that they had no idea about much of the history that was being presented. I have to confess that I often also had no idea about much that history. My fellow employees and I am not alone. A recent Pew Research Center study found that most Asian Americans admit that they are not well informed about Asian American History.
Across Asian American groups as a whole, 24% said that they had little knowledge of Asian American history, while 24% said that they were well informed. Some 37% said that they learned about Asian American history in college, and 33% learned about it from K-12 schools. This data was part of a larger study on shared Asian American experiences and identity.
While we often write about notable people, we rarely talk about their families, much less talk about them from the viewpoint of their families. That is one reason that I found a particular StoryCorps story so interesting. We hear about Larry Itliong from the viewpoint of his son Johnny, who was remembers when Larry Itliong did notable labor work.
In many ways we are lucky to have this viewpoint. The fact that Larry Itliong had children was more an exception than the rule. Immigration and anti-miscegenation laws in the US during the majority of the 20th century tremendously diminished the chances of Filipino Farm workers of having families. Johnny’s voice cracks when he recalls the farm workers who died alone and unaccompanied by family members.
StoryCorps is a great resource for recording and preserving oral histories. I have recorded my parents’ stories, and I encourage people to do the same.
Photo credit: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
We have talked about Asian Americans who have died for their country during military service, and the identification of the remains of Wing O. Hom adds another to that list. Hom, from Boston, was killed in action in Italy during World War II. Anthropological and DNA analyses were used to identify his body, which was buried at the Sicily-Rome American cemetary in Nettuna, Italy.
I was surprised to learn that there is an entire agency, called the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), that tries to identify missing military personnel. Here is the profile it has on Hom. The Sons of Liberty Museum also tracks Missing in Action (MIA) military personnel going back as far as WWI. I looked around its list (time consuming as there are a lot of MIAs) and found a number of MIA Asian Americans.
Hom will bere buried in Brooklyn, New York on October 11, 2023.
After losing its affirmative action case in the US Supreme Court, Harvard is seeing one of its last bastions of affirmative action – legacy admissions – become the target of a lawsuit. Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the civil rights lawsuit on behalf of three organizations, the Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network. These groups charge that Harvard is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Michael Kippins from Lawyers for Civil Rights says the following:
Harvard’s practice of giving a leg-up to the children of wealthy donors and alumni – who have done nothing to deserve it – must end. This preferential treatment overwhelmingly goes to white applicants and harms efforts to diversify. Particularly in light of last week’s decision from the Supreme Court, it is imperative that the federal government act now to eliminate this unfair barrier that systematically disadvantages students of color.
Interestingly enough, this is one point where the liberals and conservatives (including those from Students for Fair Admissions, who sued Harvard and won) can agree. Legacy admissions started as a way to keep down the number of Jewish students at Ivy League Colleges. The lawsuit says that almost 70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and legacies are 6 times more likely to be admitted than regular applicants. Legacies made up 28% of Harvard’s class of 2019.
Even if legacies as a privileged category is elminated, there are a few other remaining preferred admissions categories. These include the children of faculty and staff, those on the dean’s interest list (donors), and athletes. This paper concludes that removing various combinations of these preferences would signficantly change the racial mix at Harvard, typically to the benefit of Asian Americans.
Elite universities like Harvard say that legacy and donor admits are help with fundraising and maintain academic quality. Other selective and academically excellent schools have gotten rid of legacy admissions and still manage to raise funds. Another argument in favor of legacies is that the number of nonwhite legacies will increase over time. The numbers cited above show the disproportionate impact that legacies currently have. This article sums up a lot of the arguments that pro-legacy universities makes and debunks them.
The lawsuit asks the US Department of Education to investigate Harvard for Title VI violations. It also asks the department to declare legacy and donor practices illegal. You can read the text of the filed complaint here.
Asian American Commercial Watch: Liberty Mutual Insurance’s ‘First Word | Truth Tellers’
In a Post-Apocalyptic Zombie World, Asian American Man Gets White Girl
Asian Guys and that One Long Pinky Fingernail
Do Asians Have Body Hair?
A Guide To A Buddhist/Chinese/American Funeral
Review of Netflix Japan’s “Our Secret Diary”
Internet Page Reveals How to Talk Dirty in Tagalog
Asian American Frozen Foods: Trader Joe’s Korean Style Beef Short Ribs
