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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection.

In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His columns and articles have appeared in Out, Martha Stewart Living, Garden Design, TimeOut/NY and Bookforum. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

He blogs at Koreanish.

And he did us a favor and shuffled… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

Ed Lin came through from New York to East Meets West Bookstore on Friday night to read from his new novel, This is a Bust, published by Kaya press in December of 2007. Read more

Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Terry Park

Terry Park is the coolest, and only, Korean from Utah you’ll ever meet. As with most Utahns, he loves the Jazz, snowboarding, and camping. Unlike most Utahns, he’s not Mormon, but he loves him some green jello.

He’s currently a PhD student in the Cultural Studies program at UC Davis and a TA in the Asian American Studies program. For today, his research project looks at the ways in which the Korean DMZ, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, and Tule Lake Internment Camp combine both Cold War and War on Terror discourses to produce the Korean/Asian American as an “enemy alien.” Before this academic nonsense, he was a performance artist. At Vassar College, he co-founded Unbound, a progressive, multi-racial performance group. In New York, he studied under Anna Deavere Smith, co-founded the Sulu Series, a monthly Asian American talent showcase, and performed his semi-autobiographical, multimedia solo show “38th Parallels” with the Pan Asian Repertory Theater. As an activist, he was the international coordinator of BASE21.org, the first English-language online progressive media network in Korea, and visited North Korea last summer as part of a Korean-American peace delegation.

More info at www.geocities.com/juche68

Read on for the shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

Some Jewish kids still trying
Some white kids trying too
But millions of real American kids don’t have a clue
Right here on the lot
We got the answer
A product guaranteed to satisfy …

Korean parents for sale
You say you need a little discipline
Someone to whip you into shape
They’ll be strict but they’ll be fair

Look at the numbers
That’s all I ask
Who’s at the head of every class?
You really think they’re smarter than you are
They just work their asses off
Their parents make them do it …

Over the weekend, I started reading about this new song by Randy Newman (Jewish, not at all Korean) extolling the virtues of Korean parents.  I am more than a little wary of the song, especially since Newman claims that the music is “stereotypically Asian.”  What the heck does that mean?

I just feel like this kind of stuff feeds into popular conceptions of the model minority stereotype, objectifies Asian Americans,  homogenizes the Asian American experience in general, and continues to pave the way for people who are not Asian American to talk about our experiences AND to make fun of satirize us.

What do you think?

Every now and then, in my spare time, I like to browse the University of Washington news. It is kind of like how I continue to read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer online even though I haven’t lived in Seattle for a long time. I’m a nostalgic kind of guy, so that’s probably the reason why I do it. One day, maybe I’ll start reading the Boston Globe to find out about local news (which I think is important), but that day has not yet come.

I was browsing the news and came across this article entitled “Asians who immigrated to U.S. before age 25 have poorer mental health than older immigrants.”

The article claims that Asian immigrants who come to the United States before age 25 “attain higher levels of education and income than their older counterparts.” However, on average, they are more likely to be depressed or have anxiety. This leads me to make a couple of conclusions:

• Maybe having higher income and education has little to do with future happiness. (Though this study says that money can buy happiness. And so does this one.)
• The act of emigrating from one country to another as a child can have a detrimental effect on future mental health. (Maybe this explains my own personal insanity and instability… moving from Canada to the United States has to count for something!)

Of course, I’m no sociologist. Read more

Tags: News, social expectations.

Readers of this blog know that I have a not-so-secret crush on Bruce Lee. Last time, I wrote to mark his birthday. Today, I write to mark his death. On Sunday, July 20, 1973, Bruce Lee died. So, that makes it 35 years since he died. (Yay for subtraction!)

Most people are familiar with Lee’s physical prowess. For example, Lee’s fists were certainly much faster than Ichiro is on the base pads. Come to think of it, that’s actually a pretty bad comparison. His speed was more comparable to a Dice-K fastball. What is not as well known is Lee’s love and interest in philosophy. He studied philosophy for awhile at the University of Washington. To reveal more about Lee’s multi-faceted life, his family hopes to open a new Bruce Lee museum (to be known as the Bruce Lee Action Museum or BLAM) in the city of (where else?) Seattle.

While reading this article in the Seattle P-I, I was amazed to learn that he once used the basement of the Ho Ho Seafood Restaurant as his first training studio. Wow! That’s like my favorite Chinese restaurant in the International District. For real. I kid you not. I ate there many times. Ho Ho may not have the fancy décor, but it does have delicious, fully satisfying Chinese food. In fact, I’m salivating right now thinking about their stir-fried clams in black bean sauce. I’ve always liked their steamed oysters on the half-shell too.

Along with these fascinating bits about his life, the new museum is supposed to share more about his ideas on philosophy and how he developed his own martial art.

Unfortunately, to build a museum costs lots of money, so the Seattle Art Museum is hosting a three-day celebration of Bruce Lee’s life to raise some money for the museum. For more information, check out the Bruce Lee Foundation.

Tags: Arts and Culture, News.

The Two Warriors rolled into town last Friday and they killed it. They filled the store with incredible stories about love, about peace, about poetry. In our hot little bookstore on a summer night in Boston, Mark and Harry brought their passionate voices and uplifting words.

Giles started the night off with a piece about basketball and family. Next up were several people new to the open mic. I am grateful to Febo for bringing his youth group from UTec (United Teen Equity Center) to share their words. Luis, Junior, Jose, Christian, thanks for sharing your poetry. Getting up and sharing a piece is always difficult, but this group was as smooth as any.

Read more

Tags: Open Mic, Recap.

Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Theresa Vu of Magnetic North

Theresa Vu is a female emcee with no need for the “female” qualifier. Known for her sharp delivery and no-nonsense rhymes, Tvu has performed nationwide and turned heads from rap superstar Nelly to renowned civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama. She is one half of highly-touted Magnetic North, a duo who consistently ranks among MySpace’s top 10 unsigned hip hop bands in New York. She is also a nerd who was sorely tempted to hack the shuffle algorithm in order to ensure that no embarrassing songs crept into her playlist.

Get more info at magnetichiphop.com and myspace.com/magnetichiphop.

And now we shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.