Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Word is getting out that author and Asian American historian Ronald Takaki has passed away. Not many details but we'll keep you updated.

UPDATE: Dewey St. Germaine of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley, confirms that Takaki passed away Tuesday. And here is UC Berkeley's press release

A celebration of the life of historian Him Mark Lai will be held June 20 in San Francisco. Lai, known as the dean of Chinese American history, died May 21. He was 83.

• Every so often when I'm in Southern California, we take the drive out from Los Angeles proper to the eastern suburbs, and when the exit signs for Rosemead pop up, I always think of Sriracha hot sauce and wished I was the guy who came up with that gold mine.
  

The Rosemead-based company's stuff is in restaurants everywhere, and it was christened with an article in the New York Times this week that's being linked to all over Facebook and the Web.

• Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, a study released this week shows that Asian Americans are few and far between in the corporate board rooms and executive offices of Silicon Valley companies.

Asian Americans make up more than a third of the work force at some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies but only about 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area's 25 largest companies, the report says.

Hyphen's own Lisa Lee was honored by our old friend Angry Asian Man on his 30 Under 30 list of influential Asian Americans.

Angry Asian Man picked Lisa, Hyphen's publisher, "Because she's making sure Asian Americans have a voice in print."

Lisa has energized Hyphen since taking over as publisher in 2007. Our circulation has grown, our partnerships and community involvement have grown, our website has been redesigned and our blog is more vibrant than ever. 

With the new Star Trek movie coming out on Friday, it seems appropriate to revisit Hyphen's interview with John Cho and our look at racial stereotypes in the Trek universe from The Spaces Issue.

Hyphen's Family Issue is at the printer and will hit newsstands and mailboxes soon. Here's a little behind-the-scenes look at the cover shoot, which featured Mr. Hyphen Aristotle Garcia, his 105-year-old grandmother and several other family members.

The headlines say Asian Americans are angry over changes to the University of California's admissions policy. Why? Because the new standards may reduce the number of Asian Americans students, who currently make up 40 percent of the undergraduates at UC's nine campuses.

A big thanks to everyone who came out to Hyphen's sixth anniversary party on Friday night at Club Six. We had a great crowd, great music, great fashion show and great cake.

St. Jin-Tao Wow."

Film adaptations of comic books are a dime a dozen in Hollywood these days, with a track record that suggests studios are pumping out more Batman Forevers than Dark Knights. But what happens when your task is to bring the words of history's most acclaimed graphic novel -- and one of Time magazine's 100 greatest novels of all time -- to the big screen?

Enter Alex Tse, a San Francisco native who is the co-screenwriter of the much-anticipated Watchmen adaptation, which opened last week to the tune of $55 million. Tse first came onto the scene as the writer of 2004's multiethnic crime drama, Sucker Free City, directed by Spike Lee. Now with the success of Watchmen, he's in demand but still making time to return to his roots. Hyphen caught up with Tse before his visit to the 2009 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival to learn about his climb from a kid in journalism camp to bona fide Hollywood screenwriter.

Read the interview in our web features area and comeback here if you have a comment. (Unfortunately, our publishing system doesn't allow commenting on articles.)