CAAMFest 2024 Returns May 9-19: Shining Light on Asian American Stories

Posted on April 23, 2024 by John

The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) recently announced its fully in-person program for CAAMFest 2024, which will take place May 9-19, 2024 in San Francisco and Oakland. This year’s festival will include over 35 programs that will spotlight film, food, music, and ideas.

Last year, the opening night film was Joy Ride. This year, the opening night film will be the documentary, Admissions Granted:

“In the run-up to the landmark Supreme Court case pitting Asian American plaintiffs against Harvard University, controversial legal strategist Edward Blum took direct aim at dismantling affirmative action, energizing activists on both sides. Admissions Granted tracks the case’s emotional, high-stakes journey to the Supreme Court. Directors Hao Wu (76 Days and 2022 CAAM Mentor) and Miao Wang (CAAM-Funded Beijing Taxi) weave interviews, news archive, and verité footage to produce an honest and hard look at the complexity of the affirmative action debate, revealing the divisions within the Asian American community and our nation’s increasing polarization on matters of race and inclusion.

Expected Guests in Attendance: Directors Hao Wu and Miao Wang”

The Opening Night film screening will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre—followed by the Gala at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Screenings will take place at SFMOMA, the Roxie and the Great Star Theater. The Centerpiece Documentary, Centerpiece Narrative, and SF Closing Night presentations will take place at SFMOMA. The festival will wrap up at New Parkway Theater in Oakland, for a day of screenings and a collaboration with the People’s Kitchen Collective. This year’s food and music programs will be held at various restaurants and venues, including Damansara restaurant and the Yerba Buena Gardens. 

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AI Image Generators have problems with Asian Male White Female Relationships

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Jeff

As AI technology becomes more advanced, the technology can mimic human capabilities.  In addition, AI technology can mimic human biases, as a particular AI image generator has been reported by Mia Sato on The Verge to have problems generating images of couples with Asian Males White Females.  That particular type of couple (aka AMWF) doesn’t seem to happen as often as the reverse, as has been discussed on our site many times. Technology evolves quickly, so I decided to it out for myself as well as try out another AI Image Generator. Note that all of the pictures in this post were generated on April 15, 2024.

The AI image generator in question comes from Meta and can be found at imagine.meta.com.  The above picture is what I got when I tried “asian man with white wife” as a prompt.  Apparently “asian woman with white male” can be conceived but the reverse cannot not. The image generator gave a number of choices, and all of them wrong in the same way. It made me wonder how other prompts would do as well as another AI image generator.

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Taiwanese CEOs: Jerry Yang

Posted on April 18, 2024 by High School Voices

By Travis Yen

From modest origins in Taipei, Taiwan, Jerry Yang rose to become a visionary entrepreneur and industry trendsetter, co-founding one of the internet’s pioneering enterprises. His narrative serves as a tribute to tenacity, inventiveness, and the revolutionary potential of the digital era.

Yang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 6, 1968. His early years were influenced by the vibrant cultural landscape and swift economic growth of his own country. Yang was raised in a middle-class home and showed a prodigious mind and a love of learning. His childhood taught him the virtues of perseverance, hard effort, and determination—qualities that would guide him in all of his future pursuits.

Yang traveled to the United States in order to pursue his academic goals, enrolling at Stanford University. He met fellow student David Filo at Stanford, where they struck up a connection that would eventually lead to their ground-breaking partnership. Yang has the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully traverse the rapidly evolving field of technology thanks to his education in electrical engineering and computer science.

Driven by their mutual curiosity and spirit of entrepreneurship, Yang and Filo co-founded Yahoo! in 1994, a web directory that would completely change how people accessed the internet for information.  Yahoo! developed into a comprehensive platform including search, email, news, and more as the internet grew quickly. As Yahoo! became a household name and a symbol of the promise of the internet, Yang’s position as Chief Yahoo catapulted him into the forefront of the dot-com era.
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Averie Bishop: First Asian American Miss Texas and Candidate for Texas House District 112

Posted on April 15, 2024 by High School Voices

By Angelina Chiang

I stumbled across Avery Bishop during my senior year of high school, and after reading about her interests and accomplishments, she quickly became a role model due to our similar interests.

Averie Bishop grew up in a rural neighborhood in Texas, where she struggled to fit in with her classmates and feel represented by the leaders of her community. Despite these obstacles, Bishop’s drive allowed her to excel academically. After high school, she went on to attend Southern Methodist University, where she graduated with a 4.0, and then studied and graduated from the SMU Dedman School of Law, the first in her family to do so. During her time in law school, Bishop’s passion for advocacy and community service led her to run for Miss Texas 2022. Her platform focused on the goals of helping children feel at home through policy writing, diversity and inclusion in school programs, and digital representation. After a year of hard work and advocacy, Bishop became the first ever Asian American to win Miss Texas.

Now at 27 years old, in addition to being a former Miss Texas and a first-generation law school graduate, she is also an author, the founder of a non-profit organization, an influencer with 1 million supporters across all platforms, and current political candidate for Texas House District 112.

Her campaign platform includes the goals of ​​protecting Texas youth in public schools, ensuring economic and job prosperity for everybody, fighting for affordable and accessible healthcare, combating climate change, and establishing an efficient immigration process.

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Pew Research Report: Discrimination Experiences Shape Most Asian Americans’ Lives

Posted on April 14, 2024 by High School Voices

 

By Angelina Chiang

In the recent study conducted in 2023 by PEW Research about ongoing racism towards Asians and Asian Americans, there was clear and evident data that show how discriminatory attitudes and behaviors are still ongoing, despite many efforts to promote inclusivity and increase awareness on this matter. Discrimination against many Asian Americans can take on multiple forms–they are not confined to individual incidents.

Discrimination against Asian Americans in the United States has been long-standing throughout history. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the denial of naturalized U.S. citizenship until the 1940s, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and targeted racism towards South Asians following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Asian Americans have consistently faced prejudice and exclusion. Whether or not Asian Americans were born in America, they are often being perceived as outsiders.

The outbreak of the Coronavirus in 2020 has led to a concerning rise in discrimination and violence against Asian Americans. In the same research conducted by Pew Research, a survey in 2021 revealed that one-third of English-speaking Asian adults expressed fear of being threatened or physically attacked. An immigrant Korean woman in her early 50s, who claimed that, “It seems that they [white people] can’t distinguish between Korean and Chinese and think that we are from Asia and the onset of COVID-19 is our fault. This is something that can happen to all of us,” The experiences of individuals highlight the lasting presence of racism in our society and the need for education and empathy towards Asian American communities.

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Review of Netflix Japan’s “Our Secret Diary”

Posted on April 13, 2024 by tinabot

Directed by Kentaro Takemura, the main character of Japanese teen romance movie Our Secret Diary, high schooler Nozomi Kuroda (Hiyori Sakurada), is your classic Japanese shy girl next door who also adorably happens to be a bit of a closet metal head. Following all the cliches of Japanese teen love stories, this one starts off with Nozomi receiving a love confession note in her desk from a popular boy in school, Jun Setoyama (Fumiya Takahashi), and being both timid and prudent, she agrees to correspond with him to get to know him better as friends before considering going out with him. As they exchange messages in a notebook, she soon finds out that his confession note was actually intended for her best friend, not her, but it’s too late–she’s already started to develop feelings for him.

Fair warning before I begin my analysis of the film: I watched it entirely in Japanese with no English subtitles while still being an intermediate level language learner, but I estimate I understood at least 75% of the story. I chose a simple teen romance specifically expecting a predictable plot and not too much vocabulary out of my range of comprehension precisely because I watched this 2023 film on Netflix in Japan, where English subs weren’t even an option.

Needless to say, I had very low expectations. This bubble gum genre in any culture or language is usually rife with outlandish, eye-rolling extremes, the challenge of language learning the only thing I expected to be engaging. The first sign that this film might be a cut above the rest was, right at the start, some skillful editing to present some pieces of the story in non-chronological order, strategically building suspense and giving the plot momentum moving forward, a technique that served to effectively enhance the reveals in the end.

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Amanda Nguyen and Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights

Posted on April 12, 2024 by High School Voices

By Angelina Chiang

Amanda Nguyen is a well-known figure in the field of sexual assault advocacy. As the CEO and founder of Rise, a non-profit organization that focuses on supporting survivors and changing laws to protect their rights, she dedicates her life to protecting millions of girls and women around the world. 

Nguyen herself is a survivor of rape and claims the most difficult part of what happened was not the rape itself, but how she was treated by the justice system after. She found that the justice system was not protecting individuals and carrying out justice but rather retraumatizing survivors and denying them basic rights. In response, she founded Rise in 2014, a nonprofit organization that provides support and resources to survivors and works to pass laws to better protect their rights.

With the help of Nguyen, volunteers, and legislators, Congress unanimously passed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights in 2016. The law guarantees basic rights to survivors of sexual assault, such as the right to have their rape kit expenses (up to $2,000) paid for and preserved for the duration of the entire investigation. Rise has additionally passed 65 laws and one United Nations resolution, helping more than 100 million people. 

Nguyen’s work with Rise has gained widespread recognition. She has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Time’s 100 Next list, and many more. Her strong and ongoing advocacy has not only changed laws but has also changed lives, giving survivors hope and a sense of empowerment. Through her work with Rise, Nguyen has shown that you can take your trauma and turn it into something positive to help others.

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Pew Research Center: Asian Americans & Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation

Posted on April 10, 2024 by John

The Pew Research Center recently published a report, Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation, and to no surprise to me, Asians Americans overwhelmingly skew more Democratic than Republican. As the report states:

“The balance of partisan association among Asian voters has changed little over the last few years.”

There have been more recent reports than Asian Americans are becoming more independent or even a little bit Republican, but not a major shift that one can see. In the nineties, many Asian Americans were Republicans or Independents.

What is interesting to see is in the context of the larger picture when it comes to partisanship:

As also noted in the report, college educated Asian Americans are even more Democratic leaning:

“Two-thirds of Asian voters with a college degree align with the Democratic Party; 31% associate with the Republican Party. The partisan balance among Asian voters with a college degree has remained largely the same over our last two decades of surveys. (Asian American voters without a college degree are a smaller group, and sample sizes do not allow for reporting trends among this group.)”

Given 2024 is a presidential election year, I’m sure we’ll be reading more and more about the Asian American electorate, especially as to how we might be the swing vote in certain states, like in Georgia.

 

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Leanne Wong: Student, Entrepreneur, and Possible Olympic Gymnast

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Jeff

1) Pre-med student 2) business owner 3) college gymnast trying to make it into the Olympics – Leanne Wong is all three! I first learned about her story from this ESPN article. She is an elite level gymnast, having achieved the “gym slam,” which is a perfect score in all four major artistic gymnastic events at least once her in career. In addition, she is a pre-med student athlete at the University of Florida who simultaneously runs a business selling Gymnastics oriented bows, leotards, and T-Shirts!

Wong has the goal of making the US Olympics Team, which will be tough this year. The level of competition for the team will be very high, with former champions Sunisa Lee, Gabby Douglas, and Simone Biles working to get on the team.  She is taking a different approach than most other college gymnastics by staying in college and competing with her college team.

It’s not just the number of things she does that is amazing but the depth and quality of her work.  Selling over 10,000 bows, Wong has made enough money from her business and sponsorships to buy a house and a Tesla. In the ESPN article, her mother says that she wants to buy another house that is close to campus to rent out to generate income. On top of that, she has even co-written a book with her mother called My Journey:  Trust the Process.

Wong is looking to compete at the US Classic Event in May, where she can qualify for the US Gymnastics championship to determine who gets to present the US for the Paris Olympics. We will be following to see how this amazing young woman’s story develops.

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Is Ube becoming Ubiquitous?

Posted on April 6, 2024 by Jeff

A few years ago, I asked “Has Filipino Food Arrived?” and mentioned that ube is starting to appear in many places. In the shopping areas, grocery, and restaurants that I frequent, ube is already very well established. One could argue that my sampling is biased by the fact that I live in an Asian ethnoburb, but when I heard a DJ on the radio talking about going to Ube Fest this coming Sunday, I definitely think ube has arrived – or better yet, become “ube-quitous!”

It is present in more places than just Asian venues. Sure, there is an Ube Cheesecake from Uncle Tetsu and an Ube Ice Cream at Somisomi, both Asian oriented food chains. I recently got ube croissants at a bakery in our San Jose’s Little Saigon.  But when I mentioned ube to someone who is living in Alabama, she mentioned that her nieces like Trader Joe’s Ube Mochi Pancakes.  Ube has popped up recently in Real Simple magazine and even on Martha Stewart’s website.

Of course, not everything purple that is claimed to be ube is really ube. Sometimes what is touted as ube may be made with artificial flavoring and food coloring. Ube is not the same as purple sweet potatoes or is not the same as taro.

Ube Fest promises to have items like ube salsa, ube, cookies, and ube kettle corn. You can purchase tickets here for the April 7, 12:00-5:00 PM festival.  If you can’t make that event, “Yum Yams” will also celebrate ube on May 18, 2024.

(photo credit: Remi Tournebize licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

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Traveling Japan: Sakura Season at Nagoya’s Yamasaki River Kanae Bridge

Posted on April 5, 2024 by tinabot

‘Tis the hanami (flower viewing) season in Japan again, and I thought I’d share one of my favorite sakura stroll experiences in Japan. While the famous spots are often in popular tourist destinations like Tokyo and Kyoto, one thing I realized the first time I experienced spring in Japan is there is quite literally sakura trees everywhere. You’ll especially see this riding trains with views of cities and countryside zipping by, sudden spots of gorgeous streams of glistening water or peacefully paved paths lined with trees exploding in pink and white, large patches of flowers on the hills flowing down into the neighborhoods below, a burst of blossom randomly here and there in someone’s yard or at the entrance of a factory or lining the outskirts of a school. They plant them all over, since there’s a lot of love for these flowering trees in Japan, a love that has spilled over into the rest of the world, with many yearning to experience strolling under the gentle pink petals falling like snow.

There are different ways to enjoy the sakura season. There’s the classic picnic under the blooms with friends or coworkers, often on blue tarp or sitting on a red cloth covered bench eating some sweets paired with tea. You can also just be walking to work, school, or the train station and happen upon a lone blooming tree or a stretch of street lined with them. Some more epic experiences include cruising under flowers on a boat down a river canal, riding through clouds of pink blossoms on a picturesque old train, swooping by them on an amusement park ride, or getting to a spot where you can view the trees in full bloom with a breathtaking backdrop view of the sparkling ocean filled with smaller islands under a cumulous cloud painted sky.


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Filipina American Basketball Player Kayla Padilla makes it to the NCAA Elite 8

Posted on April 1, 2024 by Jeff

(photo credit: Katie Chin/USC Athletics)

It seemed strange yet very cool to see an Asian American woman basketball player in a NCAA Division 1  game televised on national television.  It was not just any game – USC guard Kayla Padilla was playing in a NCAA tournament sweet 16 game! I found about her when my brother forwarded me an ESPN article on how an Ivy League rule gave Kayla and two other former Ivy league players a chance to play on a team in a top level conference.

If her name sounds familiar, we have written about her in this article on Gonzaga basketball players Kayleigh and Kaylynne Truong.  Kaylynne Truong had written about her experiences in an article in The Sideline Post, a platform founded by then Penn Basketball player Kayla Padilla. You might be wondering how a four year player at Penn now starts at USC. The ESPN article explains that because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, NCAA athletics received an extra year of eligibility.  But because the Ivy League does not permit graduate students to play, Padilla and other Ivy league players transferred to USC to play as graduate students. She had to make an adjustment, moving from a primary scorer to more of a playmaker and also taking on key defensive roles, but she wanted to expand her game and do what it took for her new team to win:

One of the biggest things that drew me here was that I knew the expectation was that my role was going to be different. I knew I wasn’t going to be doing what I did at Penn here. But I think the expectation was to just come here and fulfill a role and just contribute in any way I can to win. … I communicated that I was ready to do anything as long as I could be a part of a winning team and make an impact and contribute in some impactful way.

USC’s Elite 8 game vs UCONN is scheduled for 6:15 PM PDT on Monday April 1 and televised on ESPN.

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