Here’s the thing about San Francisco — there’s the Bay Area that you know and there’s the Bay Area that I grew up in. The Bay Area I grew up in didn’t have internet culture or crazy ass social media parties or Valleywag; it was blue-collar, more diverse and we watched Dominique di Prima rapping on Home Turf every morning on Channel 4 and all knew how to do the running man when Heavy D came on. Fuck, even the social pariahs like me knew how to do the running man. (I didn’t listen to “alternative rock” until I was a sophomore in college.) And that scene still exists, you just have to know where to look for it; the Bay Area is big enough for everyone to just barely tolerate each other.
I guess this is why I really like this food vlog — because first of all, they don’t call it a fucking vlog and second, these guys are like the people I ran with in college. Also, Style Beyond Compare; I remember they played on KMEL all the time growing up.
Hey, Ev! Do you remember seven years ago, in 2002, when I had my birthday party at Min Jung’s house and we were all high on ecstasy and then you guys swung by and you were all, “are you on drugs” and I was all “yeah, I’m totally twacked” and you were like “oh hey, so does it feel weird when I touch your arm like this?”
No? Nevermind, then. Oh hey! You’re on Oprah! Good job, man.
(Posted as a writing exercise as part of The Joy Luck Hub. 63 words over, but they can just suck it if they have problems with that.)
The Joy Luck Club was the first and last movie we ever saw as an immediate family. I mean, it seemed like an obvious choice at the time — it’s 1993 and I’m a junior in high school, and holy shit, here’s a movie and it actually has people speaking Chinese in it. In Mandarin, with subtitles! Which is perfect, because my mom doesn’t speak a lick of English, even though she’s been here since forever. Maybe I was expecting her to comprehend the Chinese parts so well that she would magically extrapolate the rest of the movie. I think I had assumed that my parents would instantly relate — or at the very least be entertained — by the people speaking Chinese on the screen.
Yeah, not so much.
The tales of immigration on the screen clearly did not resonate with our families tales. My parents came over here in the 1970s from Taiwan, enticed by America’s dream that with hard work you could live “the good life,” whatever that is. Prosperity, I think. It’s always prosperity.
This is what I remember shortly after the movie: The house lights come up. I look over to my dad and he has a giant frown on his face. But he always has a frown on his face, so I look over to my mom. And she’s just shaking her head. They cry too much in this movie, she says. And the pacing is too slow. And there’s my sister who has borrowed a kleenex from the four black women sitting behind us. She is sobbing. She would have her final, tragic mental break five or six years later, and there would be no dramatic close-up with melancholy erhu music. There would be no happy ending. (None that I’m aware of, anyway.)
And sometimes I wonder if my parents were somehow fortold what would happen — that their daughter would succumb to mental illness and their son would become an overweight homosexual with a penchant for putting his private life to share with the Internet — if they would perservere and stay in the United States, or if they would turn around and go right back to where they came from.
“ReadyMade” I'm the worlds worst crafter - I can't cut anything in a straight line, I can't measure anything correctly, I have a low patience where if something doesn't look perfect I throw down whatever I'm working on and walk away. And yet I totally love this magazine.
I heard they moved the magazine from Berkeley, CA to Iowa, thereby instantly losing it's hip credo. RIP, ReadyMade.
“Hyphen” Hyphen Magazine is a non-profit Asian American magazine. It's an artsy high-brow magazine about cultural and activist issues which I never, EVER read, even though I'm a regular subscriber. But it makes me feel like I'm supporting the Asian community. That makes me a shitty Asian, doesn't it?
“Real Simple” Because I'm apparently a 40 year old woman. I don't subscribe to this magazine, so I secretly hide the mag behind a Wired to read this behind a Barnes & Noble. (That's right! When I was 16 it would have been a Playgirl, and now it's a Real Simple. God, I'm beyond lame.)
It seriously does not help that Cancun Taqueria in the Mission - one of the best burrito places in the Bay Area - is less than a block from my house.
If I've had a fairly terrible day, I have been known for getting a super carnitas burrito and then bring it to my neighbor Laurie's, slowly rocking back and forth while I talk about how terrible my day was.
We call them "stressitos." Stressitos are delicious with extra avacado and sour cream, I'm just saying.
One of the nice things about being the editor of a general interest website like 8Asians: I get to go in and make inappropriate image changes for the original writers to be mortified at. I’m particularly proud of this one: this started out as an image of a victim of a panda attack while he was trying to retrieve a dropped toy for his son.
Today is my 32nd birthday. If the human race only had two fingers, we would live in a fantastic world based on binary and I would be 100,000 years old today.
Thankfully, humans have ten fingers on each hand, thus making my birthday completely insignificant. (That said, I’m not too crushed; it would be really difficult to hold a fork to eat your birthday cake if you only had a finger on each hand.)
(Although honestly, to give you an idea of the mindset that I’m in: I just spent 45 minutes just staring at a textbox on my laptop, trying to think up something constructive or positive or clever to say. But what was once eloquently blogged about so many years ago is now just kinda bottled up deep inside, because, at this point, I’m not really sure if there’s any mind-blowing revelations to declare anymore.)
Last week, I bought a Playstation 3. One of the first games I got for it was Grand Theft Auto 4. Over the years, I have bought all the games in the GTA series, and at no time have I ever beat the game. Actually, I’ve never even gotten halfway through the game. This game will be no different, and for all the reviews about the graphics being phenomenal and the story being compelling — all true — I only remember now why I can’t get very far in the game:
It stresses me the fuck out. Take this scene, no less than twenty minutes into the game:
Guy sitting shotgun: [in a Serbian accent] QUICK QUICK! THE COPS ARE CHASING AFTER US! WE MUST NAVIGATE THROUGH THE UNFORGIVING STREETS OF LIBERTY CITY WHILE YOU DRIVE THIS SHITTY CAR THAT DOESN’T HANDLE WELL AND I YELL AT YOU CONSTANTLY. Ernie: Fuck me. Guy sitting shotgun: WHAT THE FUCK ASSHOLE WHERE DID YOU LEARN HOW TO DRIVE DRIVE GODDAMMIT Ernie: [Makes a left turn into a light pole] Fuck. Guy sitting shotgun: YOU PIECE OF SHIT NOW WE’RE D–
[car gets rammed by 150 Police Squadrons from all sides, MISSION FAILED message appears on the screen, Ernie removes the disc from the PS3 out of frustration and plays Minesweeper on his laptop]
Seriously, I don’t care if this is the highest rated game on the Playstation 3 — if I wanted to be screamed at in an automobile, I could driving my mother around the Bay Area and tell her I was gay.
Will BoA be the first Asian pop star to reach super-stardom in the United States? The short answer: No, but it won’t be for a lack of trying.
The long answer: Anyone who has a basic knowledge of J-Pop or K-Pop music knows who BoA is. If you don’t, here’s a brief synopsis: A 12 year old Korean girl auditions and gets drafted into the Korean music scene. She becomes huge in South Korea, then promptly goes to Japan and records a bunch of #1 Japanese records, making her the first Korean to do so. She promptly becomes a superstar all over Asia. Now BoA is 20 and there are dreams for her to make it big in the United States. Don’t they all, really? But this will be easier said than done, because — and let’s be brutally honest here, because I’m actually a really big fan of BoA since her Kimochi Wa Tsutamaru days — the girl can’t pronounce her Rs.
No, seriously. Take this song, performed by teen fashion dolls turned bad pop band Bratz, for example: I played this for my ex once and when BoA butchered the line “All the Girls” as “ARR DE GURRS,” I lost car radio privileges for the next two years.
So now BoA is giving another go at it with her new single “Eat You Up,” and the big guns have been called: the song is produced by Bloodshy & Avant, who produced another song you may have heard of called “Toxic,” by Britney Spears. Her video producer is Diane Martel. And Flo Rida is rapping on one of the remixes.
If I was the agent of a pop star, those are the names I would want to be using, really. But at the end of the day, the great American music machine is more than that — it’s promotion, it’s going to radio stations, it’s going to TRL and having 15 year olds from New Jersey being able to love you through an accent and a lot of peace signs. And it’s a shame, because she has the image skills, she definitely has the dancing skills and watching an exhausted-looking BoAlearning hip hop moves and auditioning dancers and dealing with Americans that speak 100-words-a-minute, she most definitely has the drive and the work ethic. And it’s for those reasons that I really want her to do well when her single comes out in digital format on October 7th.
