boston progress radio

Congratulations Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat, for being the first-ever API head coach in the NBA!

You have a lot of work to do. Your team sucks dude. Sorry.

But it got me thinking, I know a lot of folks think Yao Ming was the first Asian NBA player, but he was third in a run of three from China, the first of which was Wang Zhi Zhi. The other - Mengke Bateer - ended up the first Asian player to win an NBA championship, when he did so as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. Around this time, there was Japanese-born Yuta Tabuse who played for the Phoenix Suns for about half a dozen games before he was bounced. (Much love to the Milwaukee Bucks’s Yi Jianlian, who was having an inconsistent, but generally ill rookie year before injury took him out for the end of it.

But anyway, many of us don’t realize there was an Asian American in the NBA before all of them. Oh yes!

Say hello Asian America to Rex Walters. Current head coach of the University of San Francisco men’s basketball team, and former Sixer/Heat/Net. But he was also a member of those Japanese American basketball leagues that have been one of the most consistent and constant sources of cultural connection for JAs in California for decades. (In fact, the homie Tad Nakamura made a movie about it…more on that another day.)

So raise your glasses of soju or grass jelly drink or, you know, Johnnie Walker to all the Asian ballers from front to back.

Oh, and I speak for most of us here at Boston Progress Radio when I say: go Celtics!

(And their API strength coach Bryan Doo.)

Tags: basketball.

So May is our Month. Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Like a lot of other things on the calendar, I’m not totally sold on the idea of having one month to celebrate our heritage. At least it’s not as bad or as commercialized as one day to say I love you, one day to recognize the work of mothers or one day to go out and spend a lot of money.

That being said, I do welcome the opportunity for us to collectively reflect on our heritage, to celebrate our accomplishments, and to get a chance to have a table at Barnes and Nobles that says “Asian American Literature” or maybe even a display in Tower Records that says “Music by Asian Americans.”

Here at BPR, we are going to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month by publishing a new post every day. Come discuss, reflect and share with us!!

Watch for Shuffled! every Thursday. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past shufflers.

Today’s Shuffler: Catzie Vilayphonh

Laotian American multi-talented spoken word artist Catzie Vilayphonh is the Fashion Director for two.one.five magazine where she also writes a weekly interview column called Catz Out The Bag. In the column, Catzie a.k.a. Catzuella questions all kinds of interesting folks from designers to directors and artists to actors. Previously, she was an editor at dorkmag.com, and a manager and assistant buyer at Ubiq.

When she’s not working at her day job, Catzie is one member of the spoken word group Yellow Rage. If y’all didn’t know they were featured on the first episodes of Def Poetry in 2000 (when it was actually still good). If you got the time, tune into their live interview here at Boston Progress Radio.

She’s been a citizen of Philly for nearly all her life and says she knows cheesesteaks like the back of her hand.

Now, on to the shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

(Editor’s note: Youth Outlook and WireTap are kicking off the third Youth Media Blog-a-thon. This month’s topic is money.)

Once in a blue moon my mother will throw out the term ‘money sucker.’ It’s her derogatory label of those people who are all about the benjamins, baby. I don’t hear her rant about the money makers very often these days, but growing up she used to say it all the time. I remember these personalities in her life like zombies chasing dollar after vacuous dollar, bereft of virtue or worthwhile purpose. It instilled in me a distaste and discomfort with money and its zombifying properties, even as my mother’s opinions about money began to change.

caaaassshh… er, braiins??

It’s probably relevant that we were a lot poorer then. By the time I was in middle school she’d bought her first home, and the rants took a significant drop. We settled in a nice city with a good school, and I noticed my mother’s attitude about money had changed from something negative to something positive. Read more

Tags: Commentary, Youth Media Blog-A-Thon.

Sigh… there’s an article in this Sunday’s NYT about “Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills.”

If you couldn’t guess from the headline, the article is about two schools in South Korea that send a lot of their students to Ivy League schools in the US.  The article talks about how students from one of these schools score higher on the SAT than students from Phillips Exeter.  And how American-educated teachers at these schools think that even their “worst students are great.”  And?

The article makes it sound like a disproportionate number of students from these Korean high schools get in to Ivy League schools.  What about legacy students who get in to places like Yale?  What about class issues?  (Both of the schools profiled are private.)

Sounds to me like one big article perpetuating the model minority myth.  It makes these students sound like robots… they just study… and study.

And it’s not like youth in South Korea don’t have other skills that people should hear about… what about those 5 year old djs?  or babies singing the beatles? or the youth in Planet B-Boy?

May! It’s almost May and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is here. With the summer solstice beckoning, it is time to setup the backyard furniture, fire up the grill, make some lemonade and enjoy more East Meets Words. Boston Progress Arts Collective welcomes Conchita Campos to East Meets Words on May 9, 2008 at 8pm. The event takes place at the East Meets West Bookstore at 934 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge. Come listen to her sing some soulful tunes. Come early to sign up on the open mic. Bring $3, an open mind, and something to share. Have a pleasant day!

Tags: Boston Progress, Open Mic.

Watch for Shuffled! every Thursday. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past shufflers.

Today’s Shuffler: Danny “Dandiggity” Le

Danny “Dandiggity” Le is a 26-year-old Vietnamese American poet hailing from San Jose, California. He has performed for crowds all over the nation at different colleges and venues for the last seven years. With his unique brand of storytelling and humor he hopes to build a bridge of words from California to Vietnam. A friend once told him he was “a jack of all trades” and he lives up to that title very well.

Dandiggity is an artist, designer, event promoter, community organizer, street culturalist, music reviewer for Onecypher.com, freestyle dancer, and lead singer in the Christian band Before Royalty. When he is not busy juggling a million projects Diggity enjoys hanging out with old friends and making new ones to share in his laughter. He is a Libra and knows life is always going to be beautiful.

If you peep his Myspace, he offers the following words of wisdom: “Envy and hate robs people of their ability to RISE.”

You can find him at www.myspace.com/dandiggity or www.onecypher.com.

Email him at dannythienle@gmail.com if you would like to book or collaborate with him on anything. Even going out for food.

Now on to the shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

I bet you didn’t know that today is Pay Equity Day… or at least the internet tells me so.

I was poking around on some sites to try to learn a little more about pay inequity… and unfortunately, as I searched around for statistics on Asian American income relative to other group averages, I came up with this little footnote:

Individual earnings data for Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are available, yet they are from a very small sample and thus are not as reliable. NCPE [National Committee on Pay Equity] encourages advocates interested in additional data on Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans to notify their Congressional representatives and encourage support for research in this area.

Hpmh. Ok. So we don’t know.

I think one of the biggest issues about pay equity is that the issue isn’t just about men and women (or Asian Americans and white Americans) getting paid the same in the same job. But it’s also about the value assigned to jobs that are traditionally viewed as women’s work and jobs that are traditionally viewed as men’s work. This makes more sense to me. I worry about why someone providing childcare or teaching a child gets paid so little relative to people who work in finance. Do we really value the work of the person in finance that much more than the person providing care to a young child?  (I have no idea what working in “finance” actually entails.  But I can definitely understand why I would want to pay some one providing care to a child more that $8.75 an hour…)

I remember seeing a graph that charted average incomes for men and women by the degrees that they earned.  And I remember seeing that average incomes for men with high school diplomas were about the same as the average income for women with masters degrees.  Clearly, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before there will be pay equity.

As a woman of color and a mother, I often wonder if I have made the best career choice to be able to financially support my family.  And while, it is depressing to think about how much people in other industries are making, for me, it’s not just about pay and equity.  It’s also about finding work that supports what you believe in, that supports your values.  And this, in many ways, is worth more than any salary.  (Well, almost.)

[Oh yeah, and happy earth day too!  As my daughter says, today you have to hug the earth!]