MEDIA
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Never Say Die
Ethnic print media are going the way of the dodo. But one Japanese American paper went the non-profit route to say alive.
by VIVIEN KIM THORP
In June, the Nichi Bei Weekly, a Northern California Japanese American paper, hosted the second annual Soy and Tofu Festival. The event, held in San Francisco’s Japantown, drew thousands of visitors, doubling from last year and bringing the nonprofit organization some much needed funding. Three years ago, this event would not have been possible.
The Nichi Bei Weekly is an English-language, nonprofit offshoot of the Nichi Bei Times, a Japanese, bilingual paper that closed its doors in 2009 after 63 years of publication. Its roots can be traced even farther back, as the Nichi Bei Times was actually a reincarnation of the Nichi Bei Shinbun, which was founded in 1899, but forced to close after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942.
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Crystal Watanabe made these “cupcake girls” out of bundles of multi-colored somen noodles and quail eggs. Red and yellow peppers or nori were used for the bangs.
Obento, My Bento!
Creating bento box art is a growing trend in the States thanks to the power of social media.
by VIVIEN KIM THORP
Lunchmeat lions, cheese slice tigers, sandwich bread bears … oh, my! Welcome to the world of the modern bento, where rice balls lead second lives as nori-clad ninjas and artfully trimmed veggies can turn a bed of noodles into a tasty tableau.
The classic version of the Asian lunch box has rectangular compartments holding the contents of a pre-cooked meal, as well as the bento’s fanatical offshoot, the charaben, in which anime characters and the like are obsessively fleshed out over a canvas of white rice. But as of late, the bento has crossed the Pacific with a new role: ambassador for the healthy, homemade lunch.
Crystal Watanabe, a 32-year-old university office administrator and co-author of the Yum-Yum Bento Box cookbook, first started making bento in 2007. “I was trying to lose weight to be in my friend’s wedding party, and bento was a great way of doing portion control,” she says.
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Are We There Yet?
The third Harold and Kumar film has the titular characters grappling with adulthood. Has Asian American media itself come of age?
By Eugene Yi
So you’re watching TV. It’s good, it’s OK, it’s whatever. You have it on just to have something on. The situations and the characters are stock, and the jokes barely seem to fill the time between the imagined rimshots. You’re watching it and not watching it. It’s just TV, after all.
An Asian character walks onto the set. You think, “Oh. There’s one.”
You are counting. And you are primed for outrage.
Exotification? Emasculation? Model minority? A terrorist? A stupid accent? A deadly martial art? You think, “What am I going to be mad about now?” It’s not just TV, after all. A stock ethnic character on television is not just a caricature; it’s a template, and there are those who will overlay it on you, see where the lines overlap and where they don’t, and then, stereotype accordingly. Representation channeled through society influences identity—
Or does it? On the morrow of the release of A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, I’m spending a lot less time going all ethnic-studies on the film. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from “Whats-a happening-a, hot stuff?” to “MILF!” to, well, what exactly? Too many different representations, too many different actors, a fugue of voices upon voices striving to be heard. “Oh. There’s one” has become “OK, another one.”
Would this have happened without Harold and Kumar? Perhaps. But it is still the first Asian American Hollywood franchise. “I consider it an achievement that one movie was made, another grand achievement that a second one was made, and completely implausible that a third one was made starring a Korean guy and an Indian guy as the leads,” said Harold, née John Cho.
One could conceivably reverse the order: that it was completely implausible that one would get made, a grand achievement that a second one did, and a lesser but still notable achievement that we’re now at part three. And not just because the films made money. Something subtle has happened in the relationship between Asian America and mainstream culture. Seven years ago, when the first film came out, two Asian Americans helming a studio comedy seemed like the fruition of an impossible dream. Now, it’s hard to list prominent Asian American actors without feeling like you’re leaving someone notable out.
Some of the most popular YouTube channels are run by Asian Americans, telling stories about Asian Americans. Most large cities have at least one, if not several, Asian or Asian American film festivals. There is an array of options available for the average Asian American looking for faces that look like theirs. It’s not some utopian, Obaman post-racial nirvana, of course. But all the small steps—cultural, political, technological, accidental—seem to have allowed Asian American media to trend towards some sort of maturity.
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