I'm sitting cozily in my grandma's Tokyo apartment, eating very fat toast (it's a thing, here) and watching saucer-sized snowflakes falling. The snow is like a Californian's stereotype image of snow, thick and floaty and so impossibly large that if I were art-directing this scene, I'd have the crew ease up because it's unrealistic.
A couple thousand miles south of me though, things aren't so placid. If you own a TV or ears you know about the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that followed it. You might have heard that the epicenter was off the coast of Indonesia, and one of the hardest struck places was Aceh, a region close to my heart.
Continue reading "Wave after Wave"
Posted by jennifer at 6:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I hope everyone had Happy Holidays. I've been enjoying time with my family, even though I've been sick as a dog for the past week and a half. Turns out I had a cold that morphed into strep throat and an ear infection, and I contaminated most of my cousins. (Well, I don't take all the credit. My younger cousin Erika [Hyphen's Issue 5 "presidential candidate"] has been sick; the two of us have wreaked sickness upon the Ednalino cousins.)
I'm still sick, taking bootlegged pharmaceuticals (long story) to kill the bacteria. The hearing in my right ear is muffled and I feel a pain in the back of my head whenever I cough. But, hey, at least I'm not the only one who's sick!
Continue reading "Don't Tip at Victoria's Secret"
Posted by Audrey at 12:41 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
Back in Texas. Houston, my hometown. Everything, as always, is under construction. I can't remember a time when the giant concrete ribbon of freeways weren't torn up or haf built, pillars like cut-off trunks of trees reaching up to nowhere. There's lot of car decals here in the shape of yellow ribbons that say "Support our Troops."
Continue reading "Hungry in Houston"
Posted by melissa at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
How much do you really know about us Hyphen peeps through bloggery? Not much. So let’s get acquainted. A good team building exercise is to say your name and give the story behind what you’re wearing. I’m Todd. This is what I actually threw on and it reveals something (bad) about male journalists’ couture. From the ground up:
Continue reading "Outfit Check"
Posted by claire at 3:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Here's a book I think I should read...
Continue reading "But Why is it Made of Bamboo?"
Posted by jennifer at 11:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
That confuses me. What is sick about dogs? Dogs aren't normally sick. Whatever. In any case, those of you who are as sick as I am with this cough-y flu-ey thingy (this is how sick I am: I watched The Princess Diaries II twice. By CHOICE) might want a good laugh right about now, especially if you, like me, postponed Christmas shopping until this week and then had to spend the week at home moaning at low volume and occasionally giving a little whimper. Then again you might not want a laugh, considering the full, juicy bout of coughing a laugh might bring on. Your choice. Check it out: Top Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials.
Ho, ho, h-- *hack* ... *groof*
Posted by claire at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I’m actually finished Christmas shopping one whole week before the big day. OK, there’s a couple more to get but they’re cornered and I’m stalking them with my big game BastardCard. Just some scattered nieces and nephews (and wifey, yikes!) and that’s it. I survived the malls and lived to tell about it.
The number of nieces and nephews to buy gifts for grew exponentially this year. Suddenly we have to put on the perspective of a one-year-old. Will they find our picks joyful or just another drool absorber?
We had so much trouble finding appropriate toys that this year we gave up and settled on books.
Continue reading "Tikki Tikki Tembizzle"
Posted by claire at 4:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
USC assistant football coach Norm Chow was passed over for the head coach job at Stanford, a snub for a guy that has groomed a string of star quarterbacks, including Matt Leinart, this year's Heisman Trophy winner.
If there was an industry where Asian Americans are truly invisible, than it's big-time sports, such as college football. Hawaii-native Chow has an incredible coaching record as an offensive guru at Brigham Young University, North Carolina State and USC, which has been the No. 1-ranked college team in the country most of the past two years. Some of the quarterbacks Chow has tutored who have gone on to the NFL include Carson Palmer, Steve Young, Jim McMahon, and most likely, Leinart in the near future.
Chow would seem to be in line for any head coaching job out there, but it hasn't worked out that way. Having not been a head coach before may be hurting his chances, but if there was ever an "old boy's club," it would be big-time college sports, given the paltry number of black coaches.
Plenty of other assistant coaches without head coaching experience have been hired as the top guy, so let's hope Chow gets his opportunity soon.
Posted by harry at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Gross! I have a personal blog and I like to check my Statcounter once in a while, to see who's been reading it. I mostly check to see if I get weird Google (or other search engine) hits. This morning I got a hit for the search "filipina + pinay + asian beaver." Ay naku, bastos talaga! I've gotten other hits for similar searches, but "Asian beaver" downright makes me feel violated.
*Audrey angrily waves a tightly-balled fist in the air* Just because I am the O.G. ManilaSpice does NOT mean I'm down with Filipina online "penpal" or porn sites! HMPH!
Okay. Venting over. Anywaaay.
Last month I signed on to organize the main showcase of Directions in Sound, a three-day music (and music video) showcase presented by the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, for the fifth year in a row. Moreso than Hyphen, Directions in Sound is like my "baby." As I sat down the other day to send out emails soliciting DJs and other talent, I got sidetracked thinking about all the things I did to lead me to this.
Continue reading "Shibuya Roll Call"
Posted by Audrey at 3:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Haven't we all witnessed lame-ass tattoos in Asian languages, mostly on people who don't know the language in the first place? For your browsing amusement, I bring to you Hanzi Smatter, where users submit photos of such tattoos to a guy named Tian, who then posts on whether or not they actually mean anything. As Tian writes: "I have been a fan of the website Engrish.com for years. To my surprise, there is virtually no website existent for pointing out the faults in Westerners' interest of Eastern culture, especially the usage of Hanzi Chinese characters. As a Chinese American, I felt it was my duty and honor to educate the public about the misusage of Chinese characters." The results are somewhat unintentionally hilarious: witness such photographic evidence as the sorry sucker who got the Chinese word for "idiot" permanently etched on his flesh.
Posted by Lisa at 5:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This week marks the 67th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking. As we mourn the tragic suicide of Iris Chang, the Chinese American writer who focused the world's attention on those four grisly months of occupation in which at least 300,000 residents were tortured, raped, and murdered, take a look at this photo.
Continue reading "Forgetting to Remember"
Posted by jennifer at 10:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
I love Heeb! Heeb is my new boyfriend. Heeb is the bomb! only without all the radiation sickness and dying afterward. Heeb loves me too. Back off, bitches! Heeb is mine!
Continue reading "Heeb is my boyfriend!"
Posted by claire at 4:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
I got to see an advance screening of House of Flying Daggers this week. Zhang Yimou—the director of Hero, Ju Dou and tons of other great flicks—directs Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau in a gorgeous homage to wuxia cinema.
Continue reading "House of Flying Daggers"
Posted by claire at 12:20 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
I come from a family of Republicans, my older brother included. He and I are so different, it's amazing we come from the same gene pool. When I was a teenager, my brother listened to bad country music (there is good country out there) while I was just getting out of my punk rock phase. He became a Born Again Christian while I was exploring Tibetan Buddhism.
As far as politics go, even in my extended family I am a bit of a black sheep (my younger cousin J, excluded). The week before elections, I was down in Milpitas (for you non-Bay Areans, that is near San Jose) visiting my Auntie Baby (every Filipino has an Auntie Baby). As I was eating my fish and rice, she asked me (excuse the Filipino accent), "Who are you boting por, Kerry or Boose?" I already knew she'd probably go off on some diatribe about Kerry, so I diplomatically said, "I don't know. I never favored either candidate from the start, but I'm definitely not voting for Bush." Auntie Baby gave me a funny look then replied, "I'm going to bote por Boose. Dat Kerry, I don't like hees pace."
Continue reading "Asia Carrera For President!"
Posted by Audrey at 11:59 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Lately, Sandra Oh is everywhere. Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but her face popped out from Entertainment Weekly at me yesterday, a whole blurb devoted to her. A blurb! AND she's beating up a white dude with her purse in the trailer for Sideways, she was in that Under the Tuscan Sun film, and she's got a bumper crop of indie film releases coming up.
I'm actually a huge fan of lists (also tables and Venn diagrams)so here are my top seven reasons why Sandra Oh is cool.
Posted by jennifer at 12:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I really enjoyed this story by Annie Nakao that ran in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about a spoof on the recent geisha exhibit at the Asian Art Museum.
The posters for "Geisha: Beyond the painted smile" were plastered all over the Bay Area this summer. The image stared out from the side of buses and hung from San Francisco streetlamps. There was no way to avoid it. And it bugged the hell out of artist Scott Tadashi Tsuchitani.
Continue reading "Sensual Asian Women! Eastern Mystique!"
Posted by melissa at 11:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
An article I read this week, from the online edition of the British paper The Guardian, brought some recent news to a point for me. "No offence, but why are all white men so aggressive?", by British writer Gary Younge, "flips the script" on offensive questions to people of color by posing a series of similar questions to white Brits. Younge writes: "Sometimes ... questions can be so pregnant with assumptions that they are, arguably, better left unanswered. Not because they do not relate to important issues, but because they are so loaded with prejudice and crippled by ignorance, thoughtless in tone and reckless in content, that the manner in which they are put renders them incapable of addressing important issues. To engage with them would be to legitimise their bias. ... Those who ask the questions of others without interrogating themselves are effectively saying: this is our world, you're just living in it."
So what? I hear some people saying already. People talking is a problem? People having a cultural exchange is a problem? Surely you're not saying that there's any connection between asking someone where they're from and real racism? Actually, that's exactly what I'm about to say. This fight gets fought out on a daily basis in small encounters, in small questions put to people who stand out, by people who don't. The daily failure to recognize the subtext of such encounters underlines that subtext, justifies it, makes it solid and real.
Continue reading "Sticks and stones and bullets"
Posted by claire at 5:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I had to comment on this phenomenon heralding kimchi, rice and spam (KRaS) as Hyphen's official sustenance source. Can I specify adding fried egg to the equation? That’s the way I’ve been eating it since I knew how to cook for myself so when I first heard other staffers talking KRaS and omitting egg, I gave them a sideways look. It’s like only knowing meatloaf without onions and breadcrumbs. You GOTTA have egg or its incomplete. It ain’t wrong—I fish out the egg yolk in kimchi chigae and B. thinks I’m weird—but KRaS without egg sure ain’t right.
It used to be a morning meal, usually Sundays when there was some two-day old leftover rice in the pot, but it’s upgraded to dinner on those nights when real cooking is out of the question. KRaS&E is total peasant food but it does the job. Some protein (egg), some starch (rice), veggie (kimchi) and sodium (Spam). I’ll arrange it in a bowl, all decorative-like. Huge mound of steamed rice, slabs of fried Spam flared out around the bowl to resemble petals, and an over easy egg (or two) jiggling on top, like the capitulum of a springtime daisy, kimchi riding shotgun.
Continue reading "Egg Raid on Hyphen"
Posted by claire at 9:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
After spending six days in San Diego with my extended family for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I have come back obsessed with the musical variety shows that air on The Filipino Channel (or "TFC" for the already initiated). I mentioned TFC variety shows briefly in my post from last week. If my younger cousins didn't have the TV on MTV, Fuse or BET, then my aunties had it on TFC.
I watched so much TFC, I returned to the Bay Area wanting to get TFC at home (Melissa would love that), just so I can immerse myself in Tagalog and maybe learn to speak better by osmosis. Buddha help me, I can't remember the name of the fat, old, gay guy who's supposed to be the Filipino version of Simon from American Idol. (I don't know about you, but if I had to choose between getting a verbal beatdown from some ornery British guy or a Filipino queen, I'd go with Simon. It's hard to argue with a diva.)
But I digress.
Continue reading "Karaoke Culture"
Posted by Audrey at 9:11 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
Nice story on DJ and record producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day. It's great to see some coverage of the Bay Area's vibrant Asian American arts and music scene in the mainstream press. (Full disclosure: The Chronicle is my employer.)
Posted by harry at 1:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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