Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Inception, Christopher Nolan's intricately plotted tale of corporate espionage in the not-so-distant future, has been one of the summer's most hotly anticipated films since the beginning of its deliberately obfuscatory marketing campaign.

The heated race for South Carolina’s governership turned racist when State Senator Jake Knotts referred to Representative Nikki Haley as an “[expletive] raghead.” He later attempted to rectify his slur by saying he didn’t mean the expletive. As for “raghead?” Senator Knotts defended the word by arguing, “We need a good Christian to be our governer. […] We’re at war over there.”

The governor of Arizona legislated the nation’s most aggressive assault on undocumented immigration. Immigrants in the state must now carry legal documents at all times or risk detainment, arrest, and deportation.

 

It's been a momentous few months since my last post here on Hyphen. Our site has undergone a pretty stunning redesign. Three of the NCAA's four number one seeds have been eliminated from March Madness. Only slightly more important: last week, the House and Senate approved a budget reconciliation bill that utterly overhauled the nation's health care insurance system.

It's something that strikes me, just how briefly we've been here. My father remembers, however bare that memory may be, the year when Emanuel Celler, Philip Hart, and Ted Kennedy pushed through legislation abolishing the use of preferential quotas in determining immigration rights. That year, the trickle of immigrants from Asia turned into a flood.

Last Friday, the wrestler Umaga died. He was found by his wife, unconscious and with a bloody nose, after suffering a heart attack in his sleep. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died, still unconscious, of a second heart attack. He was 36.

When my mother drives, she wears a plastic visor that juts out like the back of Darth Vader's helmet. Her friends wear gloves that unravel to the elbow and giant white windbreakers in 80-degree weather. My sister used to tell me how jealous she was when I came home, scorched brown from hours of basketball in my friends' driveways, and my parents would ask her: "Why would you want to get any darker? You'd look like a black girl."

In the terrible 1998 remake of the Japanese monster-flick Godzilla, the mayor of New York is an arrogant buffoon who nearly dooms the city. The rumor? The character -- Mayor Ebert -- is a stab at the movie critic Roger, who has blasted Emmerich in the past for an overreliance on special effects and spectacle, at the expense of character development and plot. Consider the opening paragraph from this, his review of Emmerich's 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow. Anyway, I have a feeling that, upon watching the trailer for Emmerich's upcoming film 2012, Roger Ebert and I had the same reaction: not this shit again.

It's probably ill-advised for me, as Hyphen's newest-minted blogger, to make this first sentence a critical one -- but I think it's fair to say that our vetting process needs a rehaul. It was a bit too easy for me to hoodwink everyone into thinking I could write intelligently about Asian America, when really I have no idea what Asian America is -- or, more accurately, where Asian America ends.

It's difficult, for instance, to locate in its borders the story of Christopher and Noriko Savoie. Rather than try to recap it all here, I'll point you to CNN's incipient report, as well as a post more sympathetic to Noriko at another blog.