A couple of years ago, my friends and I called an Uber to take us to a Laker game. We were a motley crew, reflective of the diversity of Los Angeles, and I was the only Asian. The driver, who spoke with an accent that made me believe he was an immigrant like myself, asked […]
When Maya Katz-Ali saw the ad on Facebook recruiting Asian Jews to participate in a new video project about identity, she scrolled through her list of friends to figure out who might be a good fit. The daughter of a Jewish mother from New York and a Muslim father from India, it didn’t occur to […]
Asian American restaurant owners in New York City have banded together to launch an initiative in response to the recent spike in anti-Asian violence in the U.S. The campaign, called #EnoughIsEnough, is fundraising to donate food to underserved New York City shelters and raising awareness about the surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans across the country. […]
Once, as a child riding in the back seat of the family station wagon, I told my mom that someone was following us. I’d seen spy movies on TV; I thought it would be fun to evade some imaginary bad guys. But she reacted with real fear, urging me to lie horizontal so that I […]
A spate of high-profile assaults on Asian Americans has renewed long-standing criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups that the U.S. government is vastly undercounting hate crimes, a problem that they say has grown more acute amid rising white nationalism and deepening racial strife. The attacks — including several in Northern California over the past month that […]
Business and civil rights groups in California are demanding action after a recent surge of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area left one person dead and others badly injured. The brazen, mostly daylight assaults have rattled nerves in communities ahead of Friday’s Lunar New Year holiday. Just last week in […]
Nearly 40 years ago, the filmmaker Wayne Wang cobbled together $22,000 and shot his debut feature on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The result was “Chan Is Missing,” widely considered the first Asian-American indie film and a work that managed to be at once a vérité peek into a neighborhood, a sly neo-noir buddy […]
Lee Isaac Chung’s soulful drama Minari is set to break records for Asian American representation at this year’s Oscars, over a year after it received rapturous reviews at the Sundance film festival and coming soon after Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell made key strides. These three films have become successive rallying points for Asian […]
Jacob Azevedo’s stomach turned as he watched a disturbing video of an 84-year-old Thai American man who was fatally shoved to the ground on a sidewalk in San Francisco. It was the second video of an unprovoked attack on an elderly Asian American that Azevedo, a resident of Oakland, had seen on social media out […]
Steven Yeun has seen your outcry over “Minari”‘s being placed in the foreign language film category at the Golden Globes, and he is appreciative. In many ways, the film and the ensuing protest highlight what many people think is the Asian American experience — walking the line between two cultures and not having a solid […]