Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

While I was at my parents' for the holidays, I spoke with a friend of the family who had been helping to take care of my grandmother until her death this spring. This woman -- with nearly grown kids -- had just finished college and was considering going on to grad school in hospital or healthcare administration.

With the US's largest generation ever -- baby boomers -- about to enter retirement age, geriatric health care is the biggest growth industry of our depressed moment. My friend had been getting cold-called all through December by graduate programs anxious to sign her up. It's looking very much like -- for an American of any age looking to get into healthcare -- the goose just started laying golden, golden eggs.

For an American-born, that is. Not so much for immigrants. Because one of the hangovers of the hysterically xenophobic and PATRIOT ACT-hobbled Bush era is a bottleneck on processing visas and work permits even for much-needed professionals in under-employed fields. Another hangover is continuing funding cuts for health care. This is a formula for disaster in geriatric health care, one in which wealthy Americans will compete with each other for substandard care, and middle class elderly will get left out entirely. Forget about the working class.

Caught in the middle of all of this is the Filipina nurse.

So. New Year, new Asian American president. New products. New TV shows. New parade. Woo hoo.

Yes, that's right, chicks 'n' chickens: I SAID "CHRISTMAS"! And I'm an atheist.

But that don't mean I don't love me some dead pine tree on a stick, hearing seasonal rock songs that might have been clever 25 years ago for the eighty-two-thousand-five-hundred-and-twelfth time, and drinking lactose-intoleration nog. Love that rum and cream, even if I come from a family in which the entire greatest generation was alcoholics so the entire baby boomer generation is afraid to heft one for the holidays. Too Much Information? NO IT'S NOT! IT'S CHRISTMAS!

Anent the season, the news is being softpedaled, I guess because that's how you sell a lot of stuff as a people, we're just optimistic that way. So I had to dig through a lot of "holiday" cheer, bad fusion recipes, and east-meets-west human "interest" stories to bring you the following paltry list of whatevers. Enjoy!

Via Broadsheet I saw this story about an Asian Canadian man who has invented a responsive android that can both do complex chores (including read to you), and also respond to touch (including telling you when it feels pain, and slapping you for touching its private parts.) Naturally, this bot is an Asian female and has breasts and a vagina ... even more interestingly, the inventor appears to be Vietnamese, but the bot is named "Aiko," a Japanese-sounding name.

This is gonna kill me.

One of my favorite TV shows of the past couple years has been Nickelodeon's anime-inflected cartoon drama Avatar: The Last Airbender. Although most of the names responsible for the show are not Asian names, the show takes place in an all-Asian-Pacific fantasy world that actually WORKS. The world is divided into nations modeled on Inuit, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Pacific Islander cultures. That means ALL of the characters are some kind of Asian Pacific. There are no other races/ethnicities.

Aside from this wonderful fact, the show is beautifully done. The music is good (if a little ching-chongy at times), the art starts out good and gets fantastic as the show goes on, and the stories are well-written and full of complex character development. It's really good work.

And then, I found out that M. Night Shyamalan had been tapped to direct a live action film of the series. How cool is that?

So the news this week that the main characters -- who are from Tibetan, Inuit, and Japanese-based cultures -- have been cast and are being played by white actors ... well it just stuck a knife in my heart. It's been done many times before: most notably in the recent casting of white actors to play the distinctly dark-toned characters  in Ursula le Guin's classic magical bildungsroman A Wizard of Earthsea.

But Avatar is different. It's not being adapted from a book. It's being adapted from a television show where the audience has already seen the characters' ethnicities -- and they are distinct, as you can see in the fan video above. Furthermore, the Avatar generation is less fussed about race, and more used to diversity. Casting Avatar all white is just so ... unnecessary.

Why? Why are they doing it? Argh!

I'm sending a letter.

Via.

Just for the fun, let's juxtapose two stories this week about Asians coming to California and dealing with land ownership.

The backdrop is the California Alien Land Law of 1913, a law repealed in 1952, which prohibited people ineligible for American citizenship, primarily Asians, from owning land. This was part of a raft of racist laws aimed at controlling Asian immigration, including barring Asian laborers from entry, and restriction of commercial fishing licenses to citizens.

One of the long-term consequences of this series of laws, which began with the Naturalization Act of 1790, was that Asians, although a substantial presence in the US since the mid-19th century, remained permanent foreigners -- literally alienated from the land -- in the American imagination. So, jumping ahead a century or two, how's this gonna play with 1) a conflict between government and squatter farmers, and 2) Chinese real estate carpetbaggers?

The bad news is that, no matter what a lickspittle striver you were this year, you might not get that bonus, 'cuz the economy sux.

The good news is that, by pretending to be a conscious aZn who only cares about kultcher, you can save money on gifts, AND out-virtue all your friends! Here's how!

Fighting words from Dr. Munawar A. Anees, whose appeal of his sodomy conviction in Malaysia was denied last month. Dr. Anees was caught in the crossfire 10 years ago between the two opposing forces of modernity in Malaysia, and bears this bizarre political scar as a result.