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Tag: asian americans

  • Six mental healthcare recommendations for and by L.A.’s Thai community

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    The Times spoke to several therapists, social workers, researchers and organizations serving Thai and Asian Americans to examine how treatment and recovery can be tailored toward their needs. These recommendations emerged: addressing a client’s practical needs, involving family and community in their care and practicing mindfulness in the context of community.

    Addressing clients’ practical needs first

    Gordon Hall, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, explained that Asian Americans have high dropout rates after going to therapy. Helping them solve practical problems can be a way to keep them engaged.

    “[Some therapists] may spend the first three weeks on [a client’s] thoughts and feelings, and maybe that will eventually get to the person’s practical problems,” Hall said. “But for many Asian Americans, they may think: What do my thoughts and feelings have to do with this conflict I’m having with my mom, or this issue with my boss about asking for a raise?”

    Natyra Na Takuathung, a case manager at Asian Pacific Counseling & Treatment Centers, works with psychiatric social worker Wanda Pathomrit to help clients, many of whom are Thai immigrants, apply for social benefits. Pathomrit meets with clients to understand their mental health anxieties, and Na Takuathung can help them apply for programs like CalFresh or CalWorks.

    Pathomrit explained that she integrates case management into her therapy sessions because many clients with depression, trauma or avoidance behaviors may struggle to maintain relationships with case managers or follow through on referrals. Instead of separating the roles, she uses real-world situations — navigating the Department of Public Social Services or substance treatment centers — as opportunities to build coping skills, practice emotional regulation and foster self-compassion.

    “By coaching in the moment, I help clients grow confidence and self-esteem while accessing services,” Pathomrit said. “For high-need, high-risk cases, this intensive approach is not ‘extra’ — it’s critical for progress.”

    But some clients are hesitant to accept help, explained Na Takuathung, because they believe they will “burden” society by doing so.

    “They had this idea that if they did not ask for public benefits, then they were ‘good immigrants,’” Na Takuathung said. “They would think it’s better that they struggled and made their own money, and even if it wasn’t enough, they would just struggle in silence.”

    The choice is ultimately up to them, Na Takuathung said. But she explains how these programs can relieve some of their stress, reminding them that they do not have to feel guilty.

    “You’ve been living in this country. You contributed to this country, too,” Na Takuathung said. “You deserve kindness.”

    Involving family in care

    In a study examining culturally competent treatments for Asian Americans, Hall and co-author Janie Hong explain that Western-based approaches tend to emphasize individualism and personal reflection.

    “You go in, you have to talk about your problems, you have to verbalize what’s going on inside to a stranger within 50 minutes, and that healing happens through this vocalization of your internal experiences,” said Hong, a clinical associate professor at Stanford Medicine.

    In contrast, many Asian communities are rooted in collectivist cultures, where identity and wellness are deeply intertwined with family and group harmony.

    “If you’re in a community where everyone’s supposed to be taking care of you and you’re supposed to be taking care of them, if you have a problem, that implicates your whole group,” Hall said. “Approaches that are very focused on the individual … may deter Asian Americans from seeking treatment.”

    As the chief clinical officer of Richmond Area Multi-Services, one of the country’s first agencies addressing Asian American and Pacific Islander communities’ needs for culturally competent services, Christina Shea has observed the value of involving family members in a person’s care.

    “If you work with [a client] in the Western psychology, it helps because that’s one unit,” Shea said. “But if you work with, say, somebody from Southeast Asia [and] you work with one individual, that’s not enough. That’s not a unit, because that person is connected with the family.”

    Phramaha Dusit Sawaengwong sees these dynamics frequently as a monk at Wat Thai of Los Angeles. He commonly observes conflict when immigrant parents’ high hopes and expectations clash with their children’s own career aspirations.

    Phramaha Dusit Sawaengwong, monk and secretary, stands inside the temple at Wat Thai of Los Angeles.

    (Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

    Language barriers can exacerbate the disagreement. A common Thai word used to describe suffering is hua òk ja tàek, which means that one’s chest (heart area) is about to shatter. But parents with limited English may have difficulty conveying this sentiment to their child.

    “[They] want to say something, but [they] don’t know how to say it,” he said.

    Since parents often visit him at the temple for counseling help, he advises them to let their child absorb all the different opportunities available to them and to let them bloom.

    “Don’t expect … just let them learn,” Sawaengwong said.

    Support can extend beyond family.

    Danielle Ung, a counseling and health psychology assistant professor at Bastyr University, is examining the mental health toll on Southeast Asian students during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. She works with patients to identify communities where they can receive support, viewing community as “concentric circles that surround that person.”

    “Community can mean friends, extended families, adopted families, even the community which you live in,” Ung said.

    Pam Evagee and Ta Sanalak are volunteer teachers at Wat Thai temple who coordinate Thai-language lessons and cultural programs to foster communication and understanding between family members. They ask parents to understand how living in the U.S. can influence their child’s beliefs while explaining to the student the importance of learning traditional customs because of where their parents grew up.

    “We understand the parent because we are Thai, and we understand the kid because we’ve lived here [in the U.S.] for quite some time,” Sanalak said.

    Families can also support each other at Wat Thai.

    Some kids may be the only Thai student at their school, explained Evagee. At the temple, they can form friendships with other Thai students who understand their challenges. And many parents will cook meals together at the temple for their children while sharing advice on handling conflicts within families.

    Mindfulness is a core tenet of Buddhism. According to the Pew Research Center, 90% of adults in Thailand identify as Buddhist, and many Thai Americans continue to practice the religion.

    According to Hall, many Western therapies incorporate mindfulness, but the focus remains on the individual, whereas Eastern-based mindfulness practices account for the self within a community.

    “There’s what’s called loving kindness meditation, where you focus on someone who’s done something for you,” Hall said. “You might meditate on your mother to the extent that she’s taken care of you, the gratitude you have for [her] and what you [owe] her.”

    Buddhist monk Phiphop Phuphong frequently employs this approach when visiting people who are ill or hospitalized.

    A diabetic man who had his leg amputated expressed deep grief over the loss and shame at “becoming a burden,” feeling dependent on his mother and sister. Phuphong guided him through mindfulness exercises to help him find peace with his new reality while encouraging him to stay strong for his mother’s and sister’s sake.

    “Your body is your present,” Phuphong said through an interpreter. “Bring your mind back to your home.”

    Health policies and training have come a long way

    The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health has services to reach underserved communities. It supports cultural competency through translation and interpreting services, culturally and linguistically inclusive services and bilingual bonuses for employees. But language is just the start.

    “We’re trying to cover all of our bases, but I do think there’s still a lot of work to be done,” said Dr. Lisa Wong, who heads the department. “And I don’t think we’re going to make a huge amount of progress until we bring a more diverse workforce into mental health.”

    Wong added that it is difficult to recruit clinical professionals from diverse ethnic backgrounds because many new immigrants and their children choose higher-earning professions rather than mental health fields.

    In addition, much of the training and education for practitioners are still based on Western concepts of mental health and recovery. Many evidence-based models were developed from research on predominantly Eurocentric populations, explained Carl Highshaw, executive director of the National Assn. of Social Workers’ California chapter.

    “While these models have value, they often fail to capture the realities of immigrant and collectivist cultures,” Highshaw said. “We need to adapt and co-create interventions that honor cultural traditions, family systems and community networks.”

    Hong appreciates that many therapists are now acknowledging clients’ cultural context. Equally important, she said, is finding methods that do not stereotype.

    “Not all Asian Americans are going to respond to a problem-solving approach, and not all Asian Americans are collectivist or interdependent,” Hall added. “[Some] may really want the mainstream cognitive behavioral approach. They want to talk about their thoughts and feelings, and that may actually help them.”

    Approaches that have worked for the Thai community and for Asian Americans can work for other communities too, Hall said.

    For Highshaw, cultural competence is “not optional,” especially in a diverse state like California.

    “Moving beyond a one-size-fits-all approach,” he said. “Ensuring that interventions reflect the lived experiences, values and strengths of the communities we serve … is an ethical responsibility.”

    Interpreter Supakit Art Pattarateranon contributed to this report.

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    Phi Do

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  • The Ritual of Civic Apology

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    I was standing onstage at the University of Puget Sound, preparing to give a talk about anti-Chinese violence in the American West, when a man I’d never met stepped up beside me. He was introduced as a member of the Tacoma City Council. Without preamble, he turned to the audience—and then to me.

    “I tell my kids reconciliation begins with an apology,” he said. “On behalf of the city of Tacoma, I am sorry.”

    Maybe he meant the apology for the room. But it landed on me.

    In November, 1885, the white residents of Tacoma, Washington Territory, drove out their Chinese neighbors. It took only hours. Armed with clubs and pistols, vigilantes went door to door, herding more than three hundred men, women, and children through the streets and out of town. As the forced march began, rain started to fall. Two of the expelled died of exposure; the rest made their way to Portland by foot or rail. Days later, arsonists returned to burn what was left of Chinatown. No one came back. For decades, anyone who tried was run out again. That history was the subject of my talk. It was why I had come to Tacoma.

    The Tacoma councilman looked at me. I felt the instinct to respond—to match his gesture with one of my own. I know what he tells his children; I tell mine the same: when someone apologizes, you accept. But this apology wasn’t mine to take. I let it hang in the air.

    When you visit small-town archives in the West, ask for records of anti-Chinese violence, and look like you might be Chinese, the apologies come quickly. While I was researching my latest book in one such archive, the kind white archivist apologized every twenty minutes or so, each time he handed over another piece of evidence.

    “This one is a coroner’s report of a ‘Chinaman’ killed by parties unknown. I’m sorry.”

    “In this one, the sheriff tried to arrest one Chinese man and shot another instead. I’m sorry.”

    “I’m sorry. This one involves a suicide. He was in the jail.”

    The volunteers who worked with him echoed the refrain. “I’m sorry,” one of them, a woman with white hair and a sympathetic smile, told me. “Would you like a caramel?” She watched me from the corner of her eye for most of her shift, chatting with the others about wildfires, her grandchildren, a friend with cancer, and what to do about the “illegals” who had come to town. Once, there had been Chinese in this gold-rush settlement. Now there were only white residents and new fears of an immigrant threat. I worked to the taste of melting candy.

    When I struggled to unfold a file, the volunteer rushed to help without being asked. Her polished nails appear in my photos of the materials, framing images of discrimination and death. She leaned in to read over my shoulder.

    “It’s just terrible how they were treated,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

    Tacoma has a long history of trying to come to grips with what happened there. The effort began in 1991, when the city council solicited public input on how to redevelop a stretch of land along the waterfront. Among the suggestions was a handwritten note from David Murdoch, a Canadian pastor who had moved to the city. He proposed that the city acknowledge the 1885 expulsion. “Our city has never apologized for this gross injustice,” he wrote, “& it would appear our city, as a result, has suffered (in many ways: especially reputation & unity).” His solution: “an area of reconciliation”—a small park, with a Chinese motif—and a citizen committee, with members “most essentially of Chinese ancestry.”

    Murdoch’s note arrived in the midst of a global surge in public contrition. What began in the nineteen-eighties with Australia’s calls to reconcile with Aboriginal communities became, in one historian’s words, “a global frenzy to balance the moral ledgers.” In the U.S., truth commissions were launched to confront slavery, the colonization of Hawaii, the Tuskegee experiment, Jim Crow violence, and Japanese American incarceration. The language of reconciliation drew openly from psychology—trauma, healing—and tacitly from theology: confession, redemption.

    Tacoma’s gesture was early and, at the time, singular. Though hundreds of towns in the American West had histories of anti-Chinese violence, I could not find any others that had made a formal acknowledgment. In 1993, Tacoma broke the collective silence and passed Resolution No. 32415. It did not apologize. But it did call the expulsion “a most reprehensible occurrence,” affirmed the council’s commitment to the “elimination of racism and hatred,” and allocated twenty-five thousand dollars toward building a park. No other city would officially confront its own role in anti-Chinese violence for another two decades.

    Tacoma spent years building its Chinese Reconciliation Park. David Murdoch reached out to the small Chinese community then living in the city—mostly recent immigrants who’d never heard of the 1885 expulsion and initially felt detached from what they called “ancient history.” But, by the time I first visited the park, in 2009, that detachment had turned to purpose. I was joined by Theresa Pan Hosley, a Taiwanese immigrant and businesswoman, who had taken on the work of research, fund-raising, and design. While seeking to heal the local community, she told me that she also hoped the memorial would register in China. “We want those buses of Chinese tourists, the ones who drive through Seattle,” she said. “We want them to come here, to Tacoma.”

    When I returned in 2020, I visited the park again—this time alone. A map at the entrance announced, “Your Journey to Reconciliation Begins Here.” The words gave me pause; were they meant for me, a fifth-generation Chinese American who was an outsider to this city and its history? Was I to journey to reconciliation?

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    Beth Lew-Williams

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  • Kamala Harris Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Kamala Harris Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of Vice President Kamala Harris.

    Birth date: October 20, 1964

    Birth place: Oakland, California

    Birth name: Kamala Devi Harris

    Father: Donald Harris, economics professor

    Mother: Shyamala Gopalan Harris, physician

    Marriage: Douglas Emhoff (2014-present)

    Education: Howard University, B.A. political science and economics, 1986; University of California, Hastings College of the Law, J.D., 1989

    Religion: Baptist

    First African American, first woman and first Asian American to become attorney general of California.

    First South Asian American attorney general in the nation.

    First Indian American and second African American woman to serve as a senator.

    First African American woman to represent California in the Senate.

    She is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.

    Grew up attending a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple.

    Her name comes from the Sanskrit word meaning “lotus” flower.

    1990-1998 – Serves as deputy district attorney for Alameda County, California.

    1998 – Is named managing attorney of the Career Criminal Unit of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

    2004-2011 – District attorney of San Francisco.

    2009 – “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” is published.

    2011-2016 – Attorney general of California.

    January 3, 2017-January 18, 2021 – Serves in the US Senate.

    December 5, 2018 – Accepts the resignation of Larry Wallace, a senior aide, after accusations of harassment surface from the time that he worked with her at the California Department of Justice.

    January 8, 2019 – Harris’ memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” and picture book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” are published.

    January 21, 2019 – Announces she is running for president in a video posted to social media at the same time she appears on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

    October 30, 2019 – In a memo to staff and supporters, Harris’ campaign manager says the campaign will cut staff and expenses to focus on strategy in Iowa. It will lay off staffers in her Baltimore headquarters and deploy staff from New Hampshire, Nevada and California to Iowa.

    December 3, 2019 – Harris ends her 2020 presidential campaign.

    March 8, 2020 – Harris endorses Joe Biden for president.

    August 11, 2020 – Biden names Harris as his running mate, making her the first Black and South Asian American woman to run on a major political party’s presidential ticket.

    November 7, 2020 – Days after the election on November 3, CNN projects Harris is elected vice president, making her America’s first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president.

    January 20, 2021 – Is sworn in as vice president of the United States.

    May 28, 2021 – Harris gives the commencement speech at the United States Naval Academy addressing the 2021 graduating class. She is the first woman to give a commencement speech at the school.

    November 19, 2021 – Biden temporarily transfers power to Harris while he is under anesthesia for a routine colonoscopy. Harris becomes the first woman with presidential power.

    April 26, 2022 – The White House announces that Harris has tested positive for Covid-19. She is exhibiting no symptoms. She will isolate and work from the vice president’s residence.

    May 27, 2023 – Becomes the first woman to deliver a commencement address at the graduation ceremony at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York.

    March 14, 2024 – Harris visits a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota, the first time a sitting US president or vice president is believed to visit an abortion provider.

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  • Post-affirmative action, Asian American families are more stressed than ever about college admissions

    Post-affirmative action, Asian American families are more stressed than ever about college admissions

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    The admissions consultant described what it takes to get into an elite college: Take 10 to 20 Advanced Placement courses. Create a “showstopper project.”

    Asian American students need to be extremely strategic in how they present themselves, “to avoid anti-Asian discrimination,” the consultant, Sasha Chada of Ivy Scholars, said at the October webinar to an audience of mostly Asian parents and students.

    Edward Yen, who doesn’t consider himself a “tiger parent,” wondered what extreme accomplishments his 11-year-old daughter will need to get into USC — considered a relative shoo-in back in the 1990s, when he attended.

    Parents and students at an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.

    (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

    “I appreciated the honesty,” Yen said of Chada’s presentation, which was co-hosted by the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn. and the nonprofit Faith and Community Empowerment.

    In the first college application season since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, Asian American students are more stressed out than ever. Race-conscious admissions were widely seen to have disadvantaged them, as borne out by disparities in the test scores of admitted students — but many feel that race will still be a hidden factor and that standards are even more opaque than before.

    At seminars like Chada’s around Southern California this fall, some held in Korean or Mandarin for immigrant parents, consultants reinforced the message — even students with superhuman qualifications are regularly rejected from Harvard and UC Berkeley.

    Parents who didn’t grow up in the American system, and who may have moved to the U.S. in large part for their children’s education, feel desperate and in the dark. Some shell out tens of thousands of dollars for consultants as early as junior high, fearing that anything less than a name-brand school could doom their children to an uncertain future. Sometimes, anxious students are the ones who ask their parents to hire a consultant.

    Some consultants say they try to push schools that fit the student best, not necessarily the top-ranked ones — even as skeptics wonder whether they are scare-mongering in an attempt to drum up business. But especially for parents from countries like South Korea, China and India, where a single exam determines a student’s college choices, the lack of objective standards can be overwhelming.

    “The worst part of stress comes out when kids feel helpless, not when someone sets a high bar for them,” said Chada, whose Indian father grew up in Northern Ireland.

    Yen pointed out that going to a top college is no guarantee for career success, with Asian Americans overrepresented at many campuses yet underrepresented in leadership positions in government and other workplaces.

    A woman stands next to her teenage daughter, who is wearing a mask.

    Julie Lin, left, and her 14-year-old daughter Jasmine Liao visit an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.

    (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

    “A lot of our Asian parents are thinking it’s a golden ticket if you’re able to get into Harvard or Yale,” said Yen, president of the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn., who lives in San Marino and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan. “I just want my daughter to be healthy, safe, and I want her to be successful in life.”

    Srikanth Nagarajan, a 52-year-old manager at DirecTV and an immigrant from India, has been nudging his daughter to shoot for top schools like Harvard.

    Sam Srikanth, a senior at El Segundo High, has a 4.41 GPA and has taken seven AP courses, which she said was the maximum number offered at her school. She is captain of the varsity swim team and is working on a research project about the role of race in college basketball recruiting.

    After asking teachers and school counselors to read her admissions essays, Srikanth decided to hire a private counselor. But she ended up not using the counselor’s suggestions because they didn’t feel like her voice.

    Srikanth said her “hopes got a little bit higher” after the Supreme Court’s decision.

    But with her last name, she said, “you actually fill out the application and realize there’s no way colleges won’t figure out what race you are.”

    Her older sister, who applied to colleges five years ago with a similar resume, got rejected from 18 of 20 or so schools and ended up at Boston College.

    “I can’t be let down if my expectations are already so low,” Srikanth said.

    When Sunny Lee came to the U.S. from South Korea in 2006 for postdoctoral work at USC, she thought that people could succeed in America even if they didn’t go to college.

    But after moving to San Marino about a decade ago to raise her three sons — the oldest is now in 7th grade — she saw neighbors hiring athletic coaches and academic consultants for kids who were still in elementary school.

    The moms she knows fret about students who seem like slam dunks being denied by top schools.

    “A student known as a genius at San Marino High ended up going to Pasadena City College,” said Lee, 48, a researcher at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Moms were having a mental breakdown.”

    A friend told Lee that she regretted spending only $3,000 for a consultant to go over her child’s admissions essays. For her next child, the friend would spend at least $10,000.

    With both her and her husband working full-time, Lee feels an admission consultant is necessary just to keep up, especially with opaqueness and unpredictability of college admissions.

    “It’s a fight over information,” she said.

    She said she doesn’t think her oldest son needs a consultant yet. But she would like her middle son, a fifth-grader, to start working with one.

    On the outskirts of Koreatown in July, dozens of Korean American students and parents attended a five-hour seminar hosted by Radio Seoul.

    Several admissions consultants said in Korean and English that the end of affirmative action could improve Asian American students’ chances of getting into elite colleges.

    One urged parents to give up their hobbies — no more golfing every weekend — so they can hover over their children.

    Won Jong Kim, director of the college consulting firm Boston Education, described several students who got into elite schools.

    Anna, who got into Harvard, took AP Calculus AB in 7th grade. Ben, who got into Stanford, took 15 AP classes.

    Esther’s academics weren’t “stellar,” Kim said — only a 4.3 GPA, 1520 SAT and nine AP courses. But in her personal statement, she wrote about her mother’s fight with breast cancer. And she was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania.

    “That was her trump card. It was a unique situation that she overcame,” Kim said. “To be frank, she got really lucky.”

    In an interview, Kim said he wanted to show the “common characteristics” of those who get into Ivy League schools.

    “Every year, the bar goes up for students looking to get into top colleges,” he said.

    Chung Lee, the chief consultant at Ivy Dream, said he tries to share information in free seminars hosted by various community organizations.

    Ethan Chen, 17, left, & Audrey Balthazar, 16, Arcadia High students, browse through material at annual college & career fair

    Ethan Chen, 17, left, and Audrey Balthazar, 16, both Arcadia High students, browse through material at a college and career fair at Temple City High School.

    (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

    “The colleges’ lack of transparency has created this sense of fear,” he said.

    In Temple City, Shun Zhang said she doesn’t want to put pressure on her son, Connor Sam.

    Zhang, a 48-year-old realtor, wants to give him the support structure she didn’t have growing up as an immigrant from China.

    Her only requirement is that he play a sport, to stay active and healthy. Still, Sam, a senior at Temple City High who is on the varsity soccer team and interns for Assemblymember Mike Fong, feels the need to push himself. He wants to double major in sociology and some kind of science at UCLA.

    Hoping to be “more organized and put together,” he asked his parents for a personal admissions counselor to help him reflect on his accomplishments and brainstorm essay topics. He has been working with the counselor for two years and finds it helpful.

    Sam, whose father is a refugee from Vietnam and works as a project manager, said he thinks about how well his parents have provided for him and wants to be as successful.

    Going to a good college would go a long way in securing a good job and “maintain where I am,” he said.

    But for all his hard work and preparation, he views college admissions as a crapshoot.

    “I don’t really know what they are looking for,” he said.

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    Jeong Park

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  • Nail Artist Kim Truong Is In High Demand. And It’s By Design.

    Nail Artist Kim Truong Is In High Demand. And It’s By Design.

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    Kim Truong has held some of the most pampered hands on the planet. As a go-to nail artist for celebs such as Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Kerry Washington, and Dua Lipa (to name a few), she’s spent much of her career being an integral part of transforming people into their most glamorous selves. She also recently became an ambassador for Gitti, a vegan, eco-friendly nail polish brand out of Berlin that launched in the U.S. this summer.

    But as one of the first Vietnamese American celebrity manicurists, she is also an icon in her community.

    When I spoke with Truong, she was getting ready for a trip to Vietnam, where much of her extended family lives. And, although Troung is American, it’s not lost on her that she is still part of a cultural legacy that has become a racial trope in this country: the Asian nail tech.

    Growing up, we saw comedians rip on Vietnamese nail ladies all the time, laughing at the way manicurists would talk shit about their clueless clientele’s raggedy cuticles in a language that was presented as so foreign that it was part of the joke.

    There’s an actual theory as to why so many nail tech roles are filled by Vietnamese women. Tippi Hedren, a white Hollywood actor who volunteered at a Sacramento camp for Vietnam War refugees in 1975, helped 20 Vietnamese women become licensed nail technicians, NPR explains. Those nail technicians reportedly spread their skills through their communities and soon, Vietnamese immigrants began to open nail salons everywhere, offering prices that were accessible to middle-class Americans.

    When Truong’s family moved to the U.S., her mother became part of that movement by earning her nail license. At 18, Truong got her own license and paid her way through college by helping her mom out at her nail salon.

    But Truong had always seen doing nails as a means to an end; it was, after all, one of the jobs that allowed Vietnamese immigrants to survive and gain a financial footing in America for at least a generation. Troung knew that she wanted to pursue a different path, so she moved from Maryland to Los Angeles to attend dental school. “When I went to LA, the last thing I wanted to do was nails,” she says.

    But she needed to work while she was in school, and several restaurants and coffee shops that Truong applied to told her that she didn’t have enough experience. The only place that hired her was a nail salon in Hollywood, where she quickly became known for her talent — and where she was recommended to celebrities such as Kim Kardashian. And so, six months after graduating from dental school, Truong started down a path she thought she’d avoid: doing nails full-time.

    Truong has a quiet confidence that’s immediately palpable — and even comforting. It feels as if she trusts that fate will always lead her in the right direction. And her chill disposition and grounded energy are actually part of her success.

    “One time, Kelly Rowland told me, ‘I just love your voice,’’’ she said. She’s so treasured by celebrities that last year, Katy Perry flew Truong and her sister out to Capri for a Dolce & Gabbana shoot. “It’s rare that a celebrity brings their manicurist with them. For her to fight for us… I thought it was a really touching thing.”

    By creating intricate works of art on some of the world’s most visible people, Truong is literally helping shape the direction of our style culture. A single viral look on a celebrity can determine how the rest of us paint our nails for an entire season, whether it’s flowers on chrome on Kerry Washington’s nails or Hello Kitty figures on Truong herself, people are looking to her to get an idea of what’s going to be relevant next.

    As children of immigrants, many of us saw our parents work hard at jobs that were considered inferior because, in America, you’re only as good as the white imagination believes you to be. But there are Vietnamese nail ladies who work in both strip malls and celebrity spaces creating masterful art every day — the type that requires immense precision, patience and creativity. And they’re seldom recognized for their craft.

    Truong did for nails what Michelangelo did for church ceilings, by adorning and reimagining them as canvases. By elevating her art form, she is also elevating an entire group of people who have been the targets of xenophobic jokes. And her career is an example of the beauty and innovation that can come from knowing your worth as the child of immigrants.

    But Truong’s motivations appear to be simpler than all of that. “When I do people’s nails, I want them to love them and be happy,” she says. “And the thing with hair and makeup is they’ll get their makeup done, their hair done and that washes off. But nails can last for two weeks, you know, so you can be happy a little longer.”

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  • National Spelling Bee champ Dev Shah goes from ‘despondent’ to soaking up the moment

    National Spelling Bee champ Dev Shah goes from ‘despondent’ to soaking up the moment

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    OXON HILL, Md. — Fifteen months ago, Dev Shah spent a miserable five hours spelling outdoors in chilly, windy, damp conditions at a supersize regional competition in Orlando, Florida, only to fall short of his dream of returning to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

    “Despondent is the right word,” Dev said. “I just didn’t know if I wanted to keep continuing.”

    Look at him now.

    Soft-spoken but brimming with confidence, Dev asked precise questions about obscure Greek roots, rushed through his second-to-last word and rolled to the National Spelling Bee title Thursday night.

    Dev, a 14-year-old from Largo, Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, first competed at the national bee in 2019, then had his spelling career interrupted. The 2020 bee was canceled because of COVID-19, and in the mostly virtual 2021 bee, he didn’t make it to the in-person finals, held in his home state on ESPN’s campus at Walt Disney World.

    Then came the disaster of last year, when he was forced to compete in the Orlando region because his previous regional sponsor didn’t come back after the pandemic.

    “It took me four months to get him back on track because he was quite a bit disturbed and he didn’t want to do it,” said Dev’s mother, Nilam Shah.

    When he decided to try again, he added an exercise routine to help sharpen his focus and lost about 15 pounds, she said.

    Dev got through his region. He flexed his knowledge in Wednesday’s early rounds by asking questions that proved he knew every relevant detail the bee’s pronouncers and judges had on their computer screens. And when it was all over, he held the trophy over his head as confetti fell.

    “He appreciated that this is a journey, which sounds very trite but is really quite true,” said Dev’s coach, Scott Remer, a former speller and study guide author. “I think the thing that distinguishes the very best spellers from the ones that end up not really leaving their mark is actually just grit.”

    Dev’s winning word was “psammophile,” a layup for a speller of his caliber.

    “Psammo meaning sand, Greek?” he asked. “Phile, meaning love, Greek?”

    Dev soaked up the moment by asking for the word to be used in a sentence, something he described a day earlier as a stalling tactic. Then he put his hands over his face as he was declared the winner.

    “I would say I was confident on the outside but inside I was nervous, especially for my winning word — well, like, before. Not during,” he said.

    Runner-up Charlotte Walsh gave Dev a congratulatory hug.

    “I’m so happy for him,” said Charlotte, a 14-year-old from Arlington, Virginia. “I’ve known Dev for many years and I know how much work he’s put into this and I’m so, so glad he won.”

    The winner’s haul is more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. When Charlotte returned to the stage later to congratulate Dev again, he reminded her that the runner-up gets $25,000.

    “Twenty-five thousand! What? I didn’t know that,” Charlotte said.

    Earlier, when the bee was down to Dev and Charlotte, Scripps brought out the buzzer used for its “spell-off” tiebreaker, and Dev was momentarily confused when he stepped to the microphone.

    “This is not the spell-off, right?” Dev asked. Told it was not, he spelled “bathypitotmeter” so quickly that it might as well have been.

    “I practiced for the spell-off every day, I guess. I knew it might happen and I prepared for everything, so I kind of went into spell-off mode,” he said. “But I also was scared for the spell-off.”

    Dev is the 22nd champion in the past 24 years with South Asian heritage. His father, Deval, a software engineer, immigrated to the United States from India 29 years ago to get his master’s degree in electrical engineering. Dev’s older brother, Neil, is a rising junior at Yale.

    Deval said his son showed an incredible recall with words starting at age 3, and Dev spent many years in participating in academic competitions staged by the North South Foundation, a nonprofit that provides scholarships to children in India.

    The bee began in 1925 and is open to students through the eighth grade. There were 229 kids onstage as it began — and each was a champion many times over, considering that 11 million participated at the school level.

    The finalists demonstrated an impressive depth of knowledge as they worked their way through a sometimes diabolical word list chosen by Scripps’ 21-person word panel, which includes five past champions.

    This year’s bee proved that the competition can remain entertaining while delving more deeply into the dictionary — especially early in the finals, when Scripps peppered contestants with short but tough words like “traik” (to fall ill, used in Scotland), “carey” (a small to medium-size sea turtle) and “katuka” (a venomous snake of southeastern Asia).

    “There are a lot of hard words in the dictionary,” Dev said. “There are realms of the dictionary that the word panelists need to dive into and I think they did a great job of that today.”

    With the field down to four, Shradha Rachamreddy was eliminated on “orle,” a heraldry term that means a number of small charges arranged to form a border within the edge of a field (she went with “orel”). And “kelep” — a Central American stinging ant — ousted Surya Kapu (he said “quelep”).

    While sometimes Scripps’ use of trademarks and geographical names can anger spelling traditionalists who want to see kids demonstrate their mastery of roots and language patterns — and even the exceptions to those patterns — Scripps has made clear that with the exception of words designated as archaic or obsolete, any entry in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary is fair game.

    Dev is happy to be closing that book for now.

    “My main priority is sleep. I need to sleep. There have been a lot of sleepless nights these last six months,” he said. “I need to sleep well tonight, too. There’s a lot more sleep debt.”

    ___

    Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow him at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols

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  • I’ve Been Told To Go Back Where I Came From. Here’s What I Wish I Could Explain.

    I’ve Been Told To Go Back Where I Came From. Here’s What I Wish I Could Explain.

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    A few weeks ago, during one of my regular visits back to Seoul, I stopped by the local mogyoktang for a routine deep-body scrub. I entered the bathhouse and went through standard protocol — disrobe, shower and soak.

    But as soon as I opened the glass doors and stepped onto the dark concrete floor of the bathing area, I could feel all the ahjummas’ and halmonis’ eyes on me. I tried my best to ignore their stares and washed in the middle of the room quickly so I could submerge myself in one of the hot tubs, hiding my body from view.

    I love bath culture, but in South Korea, I always feel like I’m on display at the bathhouse because we’re completely naked and I’m the only one with tattoos.

    I relaxed and let the hot water expel all the nasty stuff that’s been building up since my last scrub. When it was my turn, I walked over to the body scrub area, where the ahjumma in her black bra and underwear dumped a bucket of hot water on the table before I plopped my body on top of it.

    She immediately started rubbing my body with a rough loofah, reaching crevices even my closest partners haven’t been privy to. I could see the dead layer of skin coming off.

    “Why would you do this to your perfect body?” she chastised as she scrubbed. “Now it’s ruined. This is such a waste. Promise me you won’t get any more.”

    South Korea is one of the few countries left in the world where tattoos are still illegal, and this ahjumma was just one of the older generation of Koreans who often look down on me for having them. I tried to laugh it off and not take it personally when this went on for the next 30 minutes. But it’s an example of one of the many cultural differences between me and my motherland. Even though I love her, she doesn’t always love me back.

    In America, which I’ve officially called home since age 3, I’m often told that I don’t belong. Like all Asian Americans, I hate the question “Where are you from?” because it’s almost always followed up with “No, where are you really from?”

    Most of us have also been told, at some point during our lives in America, to go back to “where you came from.” But I don’t fully belong there either.

    Even though my family and I immigrated to the States when I was just a toddler, I never lost my mother tongue, so communication isn’t an issue when I’m in Seoul. But sometimes I’m jealous of other gyopos — those who grew up in the United States, England, Germany, Argentina, Canada, wherever — who lost the language because they don’t have to overhear the things that I do from locals who presume I don’t understand.

    “Look at her — she looks homeless.”

    “What do your parents think about you?”

    “What is she wearing? She looks crazy.”

    “I can’t believe she walks around like that.”

    I didn’t return to Korea until I was 23 — a full two decades after I left. Upon arrival, I felt a wave of comfort similar to when I’m in Koreatown in Los Angeles. Finally, people who look like me.

    I assumed I would automatically be accepted as a fellow Korean, but in Korea, they immediately see me as an outsider. They can tell by the way I dress and how I look, and they hear it in my accent. You’re not like us. This was a jarring realization.

    In a hyper-collective, mono-ethnic, conservative culture where the status quo is celebrated, Koreans point out anything that looks different. In America, I am used to being othered because I am not white. But it’s a special kind of alienation to feel othered by your own people.

    Additionally, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, South Korea ranks first on a per capita basis, with 13.5 cosmetic procedures performed per 1,000 individuals. Many of those procedures attempt to conform to Korean beauty standards in which white facial features and skin are glorified. Even though I grew up in the United States and my style and identity are a blend of East meets West, my face will never be American enough for either country.

    With the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes and the recent mass shooting in North Texas, in which half the fatalities were of Asian descent and included a Korean American family, it’s hard to say which home I prefer. At least in South Korea, where even the police almost never carry guns, I rarely fear for my physical safety.

    But in South Korea, same-sex marriages are still illegal, mental health care is highly stigmatized despite one of the highest rates of suicide in the world and fatphobia is notoriously perpetuated — my family never hesitates to comment when I’ve gained a few pounds.

    Despite how much I love visiting, I choose not to live in Seoul. Even though there are pockets of the city with young, queer, tattooed, diverse and liberal folks, like the Itaewon and Hongdae districts, I don’t want to have to live my life in confined spaces to feel accepted — just like I don’t want to be limited to the 2.7-mile radius that is Koreatown in Los Angeles.

    When neither Asia nor America feel like home, Asian Americans of many different cultures have had to create our own distinct identity, as Asian Americans. We have different languages and traditions, but we are united in asking ourselves the same question I’ve asked myself for as long as I can remember: Where do I belong?

    This is what so many fail to understand about the unique loneliness of being Asian in America: We’re trapped between two worlds, but we will never fully belong in either.

    Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch.

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  • Florida sued for restricting Chinese citizens, other foreigners from buying property

    Florida sued for restricting Chinese citizens, other foreigners from buying property

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    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A group of Chinese citizens living and working in Florida sued the state Monday over a new law that bans Chinese nationals from purchasing property in large swaths of the state.

    The law applies to properties within 10 miles (16 kilometers) of military installations and other “critical infrastructure” and also affects citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. But Chinese citizens and those selling property to them face the harshest penalties. The prohibition also applies to agricultural land.

    The American Civil Liberties Union says the law will have a substantial chilling effect on sales to Chinese and Asian people who can legally buy property. The suit says the law unfairly equates Chinese people with the actions of their government and there is no evidence of national security risk from Chinese citizens buying Florida property.

    The law “will codify and expand housing discrimination against people of Asian descent in violation of the Constitution and the Fair Housing Act,” the ACLU said in a news release announcing the suit. “It will also cast an undue burden of suspicion on anyone seeking to buy property whose name sounds remotely Asian, Russian, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan, or Syrian.”

    U.S.-China ties are strained amid growing tensions over security and trade. In nearly a dozen statehouses and Congress, a decades-old worry about foreign land ownership has spiked since a Chinese spy balloon traversed the skies from Alaska to South Carolina last month.

    Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to launch a presidential campaign this week, signed the bill May 8. His office didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

    The law is set to take affect July 1. It will be a felony for Chinese people to buy property in restricted areas or for any person or real estate company to knowingly sell to restricted people. For the other targeted nations, the penalty is a misdemeanor for buyers and sellers.

    It applies to military instillations as well as infrastructure like airports and seaports, water and wastewater treatment plants, natural gas and oil processing facilities, power plants, spaceports, and telecommunications central switching offices.

    The ACLU says the law “will have the net effect of creating ‘Chinese exclusion zones’ that will cover immense portions of Florida, including many of the state’s most densely populated and developed areas.”

    “This impact is exactly what laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the California Alien Land Law of 1913 did more than a hundred years ago,” the lawsuit says.

    Those on the restricted list that already own property near critical infrastructure must register with the state or face fines of up to $1,000 a day. They’re also prohibited from acquiring additional property. The law has provisions to allow the state to seize property from violators.

    The number of states restricting foreign ownership of agricultural land has risen by 50% this year.

    Heading into 2023, 14 states had laws restricting foreign ownership or investments in private agricultural land. So far this year, restrictive laws also have been enacted in Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

    Foreign land ownership has become “a political flashpoint,” said Micah Brown, a staff attorney for the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas.

    Brown said the recent surge in state laws targeting land ownership by foreign entities stems from some highly publicized cases of Chinese-connected companies purchasing land near military bases. Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force said that the Fufeng Group’s planned $700 million wet corn milling plant near a base in Grand Forks, North Dakota, poses a “significant threat to national security.”

    After a Chinese army veteran and real estate tycoon bought a wind farm near an Air Force base in Texas, that state responded in 2021 by banning infrastructure deals with individuals tied to hostile governments, including China.

    ___

    Associated Press writer David Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report.

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  • Championing famous and forgotten Asian Americans, this artist uses cookies as her canvas

    Championing famous and forgotten Asian Americans, this artist uses cookies as her canvas

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    Artist Jasmine Cho makes exquisite portraits that champion famous and forgotten Asian Americans. Her canvas?

    “Cookies, I’ve always said, are the perfect platform for education, activism and healing because they are one of the most disarming, inviting and surprising mediums,” said Cho, who is also a baker.

    She believes her art comes in part from a sense of not belonging that she felt growing up. May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, but Cho’s cookies bring attention to AAPIs every month.

    The Korean American self-described “cookie activist” has gained fans over the last several years for her finely detailed cookie faces. Actors Awkwafina, Daniel Dae Kim and Tamlyn Tomita are among those who’ve gushed about receiving the cookie treatment.

    The city of Pittsburgh, where she has lived since 2009, even issued a “Jasmine Cho Day” proclamation in 2020.

    In 2016, Cho was contentedly making cute character cookies for her online bakery, Yummyholic, when she turned flour, sugar, butter and other ingredients into cookie likenesses of a friend for a birthday party. The cookies quickly grabbed social media attention. Others wanted them done too.

    “I suddenly have this platform or this medium that everyone is paying attention to,” Cho said. “It felt like a sort of superpower.”

    She had an “aha moment” of how to use her great power with greater responsibility.

    The 39-year-old, who grew up in Southern California and New Mexico, always took notice when Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders weren’t present in a movie, TV show or history book. It contributed to her questioning her own sense of belonging in America.

    “That was always a pain point for me growing up,” said Cho, who recently completed a master’s degree in art therapy. “So, I kind of always had this question: ‘I wonder if I could use this point of joy for me to address this pain point?’ And cookies was the answer.”

    A few months after making those first cookie faces, Cho held her first portrait gallery show. She made cookies of Asian American Pittsburgh natives like actor Ming-Na Wen and Leah Lizarondo, the founder of 412 Food Rescue, which distributes unsold fresh food to people in need in the Pittsburgh area. Lizarondo also founded an app, Food Rescue Hero, that is active in over 25 cities in the U.S. and Canada.

    Lizarondo remembers how surprised she was to find Cho had cookie-fied her. For the Filipino American, the tribute was definitely not a waste of food.

    “I shared it as widely as I could as I was so proud to be among the people she did cookie portraits of,” Lizarondo said by email.

    While cookies and cake tributes might come off as silly, Lizarondo saw something different in Cho’s art.

    “It is such an accessible way to catalyze conversation,” said Lizarondo.

    A one-woman crew, Cho needs between four and six hours for one portrait. She draws the cookie face by hand, fills it in with icing and then lets it dry.

    Her “art-ivism” has taken her interesting places. In 2019, she wrote and illustrated a children’s book, “Role Models Who Look Like Me.” In the last few years, she has made over 20 virtual and in-person appearances at universities, elementary schools and conferences. If she isn’t giving a speech, she’s leading a cookie-decorating workshop.

    The biggest thrill is when young Asian Americans, particularly females, feel inspired.

    “They tell me things like, ‘I learned more in your 15-minute talk than I have in my whole class that’s about Asian American history,’ or something like that,” Cho said.

    At a time when demanding to see Asian American history included in school curricula can get you branded as “woke,” even Cho’s seemingly innocuous cookies can be a target. Ahead of a university visit last February, someone Cho thought was a student journalist asked to talk to her. Cho later learned that person wasn’t a student but part of a far-right group. The school decided to increase security for the event — something that stunned her.

    “It’s just cookies,” Cho said. “But, not to diminish the intent of what I’m actually using the cookies to do… Unfortunately, even something like cookies could be seen as a threat because of what they symbolize.”

    They’re definitely not just cookies. They can evoke poignant moments.

    Cho made a cookie portrait of Betty Ong, an American Airlines flight attendant who died on 9/11. Ong was credited as the first person to raise the alarm about the terrorists’ hijacking, passing along crucial information from a phone on the ill-fated plane. One of her nieces spotted Cho’s creation on Instagram and contacted her.

    “For a family member to reach out and just thank me for sharing her story in the way that I did … reminding me of the tenderness that comes with this work, the importance of it,” Cho said. “I don’t ever want to upset a family member in any way. I’ve been very grateful that those who I have heard from understand my intention.”

    Cho estimates she has between 50 and 70 of the cookie portraits now boxed up in storage. Some she dreams of giving to the subject ( Michelle Yeoh, if you’re reading this.). Others she would love to display, as well as publish a picture book of them.

    Even with praise from families, celebrities and Instagram, Cho still has moments when she can be dismissive of her own work. “I’ll be like, ‘I’m just making cookies. What am I really doing?’”

    But then she feels re-energized when encountering audiences who have never heard of figures like civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs or diver Sammy Lee, the first Asian American man to earn Olympic gold.

    “Part of what keeps me going is one day, I do hope that my work maybe becomes irrelevant because everyone has access to this history and awareness of it.”

    —-

    This story was updated on May 24, 2023, to revise the reference to 412 Food Rescue’s reach.

    ___

    Tang, who reported from Phoenix, is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at @ttangAP.

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  • From Xerox to TV box, long awaited adaptation of ‘American Born Chinese’ book hits Disney+

    From Xerox to TV box, long awaited adaptation of ‘American Born Chinese’ book hits Disney+

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    Gene Luen Yang remembers feeling pumped in 2007 when Hollywood came calling about his trailblazing graphic novel “American Born Chinese.” But that excitement turned into exasperation when it became clear the interested party completely missed the point of the book.

    “It came out that the reason why they were interested is because the Beijing Olympics were coming up in 2008. And they wanted some property that had the word China or Chinese in it,” Yang said in a recent interview. “Every now and then there would be an inquiry. But I really think the world needed to change in order for there to be an appetite for a story about an Asian American protagonist.”

    Change has finally come. After 17 years, the cartoonist is seeing his American dream play out.

    “American Born Chinese” debuts on Disney+ on Wednesday with a mostly Asian cast that now includes two new Oscar winners — Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. The show, which also boasts Asian American showrunners, centers on high school soccer player Jin Wang (Ben Wang) growing up amid pressure to reconcile his American and Chinese sides. Mixing elements of teen drama, fantasy and fight sequences, the show, like the book, jumps between Jin’s storyline and one involving the Monkey King, an iconic character in Chinese folklore. The story threads eventually intertwine.

    “It feels like a very surreal moment to have this book that I did as Xerox copies that I would put together at my local Kinko’s eventually become a show on Disney+,” Yang said.

    The first two episodes have been screened around the country from San Francisco to New York City to the White House, partly to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The predominantly Asian American audiences have praised the show’s heartfelt and at times humorous portrayal of an Asian American family

    “‘American Born Chinese,’ you can’t do it in one long movie,” said Yeoh, who’s proud of how the series turned out. “There’s so many different aspects of it that need to be shown, it needs that space and time on screen.”

    Yeoh, who made history as the first Asian to win her Oscar category for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” plays Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. She was invited to the project by her “Shang-Chi and the Legends of the Ten Rings” director, Destin Daniel Cretton, an executive producer.

    In the show, Yeoh gets to don a sweeping gown and headdress as well as sweats and a baseball cap. Being a revered Chinese folklore figure, many people already have an image of Guanyin. The Malaysia-born Yeoh didn’t dwell on the pressure of playing someone larger than life.

    “What I do think about is how we have to be very respectful of this goddess of mercy because she represents so many things to so many followers all around the world,” Yeoh said. “We gave her the gravitas the she deserved and the respect to show you what we love about her.”

    Yeoh and Quan had already wrapped up “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” when they started filming “American Born Chinese.” Castmates Stephanie Hsu and James Hong also guest-star in an episode. The best picture winner premiered in the middle of production and then “we watched the whole world change,” executive producer Kelvin Yu said.

    On the opposite end of the spectrum, Wang is the star after doing mostly one-episode guest spots. He still isn’t quite used to seeing himself on posters. Having grown up seeing little on-screen Asian representation, it’s a novel concept that he could be an example for a teenage Asian American boy today.

    “It’s very surreal and strange,” Wang said. “I still can’t believe that it’s me. I just feel like it’s someone who looks like me, which is double weird. It’s like seeing your doppelgänger.”

    The television adaptation comes in the wake of other teen shows with an Asian American lens. Disney+ also has “Ms. Marvel” featuring a Muslim American female superhero. Jenny Han’s two book series, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” have been hits for Netflix and Amazon Prime, respectively. The fourth and final season of “Never Have I Ever,” about an Indian American high schooler, drops in June.

    “We’re standing on the shoulders of those kinds of things, going back to ‘Joy Luck Club’ … all the way up to ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ and shows like ‘Never Have I Ever,’” Yu said. “We’ll take all that momentum. We’ll take all that sort of education for an audience to get used to faces like ours and we’ll embrace it and move forward.”

    The graphic novel was landmark literature for Asian American millennials. Reviews lauded it as a fresh take on adolescence, bi-cultural identity and racism. It won several accolades and was a National Book Awards finalist.

    For many young Chinese American readers, it was the first time they had seen themselves and the Monkey King — a legend they likely heard about from their parents — in that genre. The character first appeared in the epic 16th century Chinese novel, “Journey to the West.” The tome has been adapted several times including a memorable 1980s TV series created by China Central Television (CCTV). The super-powered simian is well-known across Asia like Batman or Spider-Man, according to Yu.

    Daniel Wu, who grew up in California but began his acting career in Hong Kong, plays the Monkey King. This project brings him full circle from when he dealt with his own “American-born Chinese” issues.

    “Even though I was warmly accepted by the audiences there, I always felt like slightly being an outsider because I was American,” Wu said. “Because we knew we were trying to tell Gene’s story of what it’s like to be of both sides, there was this kind of special energy that was on set. We knew that we were trying to tell authentically what our story was.”

    ___

    Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP

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  • Chef Brandon Jew Is Redefining Asian Tradition In The Most Delicious Way

    Chef Brandon Jew Is Redefining Asian Tradition In The Most Delicious Way

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    On a surface level, Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco has everything you’d expect of a Michelin-starred restaurant: elaborate plating, an immaculately curated Instagram presence and a revolving tasting menu. At the helm of the kitchen and its vibes is executive chef Brandon Jew, who, like many of his peers, is navigating culinary expression through his blended, Asian American identity. Specifically, he wants to rejigger the space that contemporary Chinese cuisine occupies in the American food zeitgeist.

    The menu at Mr. Jiu’s (a reflection of Jew’s overall cooking ethos, it seems) is both innovative and reverent of San Francisco’s old Chinatown, bejeweled with slightly remixed Cantonese-style dishes meant for sharing, as well as a tasting section that leans a bit more adventurous. He never strays too far from home, though — his choices feel cohesive and cozy.

    For those in the East Asian diaspora, sharing a meal is quintessential to forming and nurturing bonds. Food is sometimes a unique type of love language that rescues us from having to be unnecessarily sentimental, even borderline uncomfortable. The word “love” in Mandarin, for example, carries a lot of weight — and for many of us, asking someone if they’ve eaten yet is an easier way to express it.

    Jew is at the helm of Mister Jiu’s kitchen and its vibes.

    There’s love in community, too, which has become crucial during the uptick in anti-Asian rhetoric and racist crime. This need to band together and seek comfort in the familiar was the impetus for Jew’s most recent event, a Chinese banquet-style dinner for artists and other prominent community members in the Bay Area. It’s his hope that through the gathering, which he called the Golden Generation dinner, the larger AAPI community and its allies can foster support and strategy to combat anti-Asian violence.

    A little context for why simply coming together in this way can be a radical act of resistance: Too often and for a number of reasons, many Asian Americans have avoided getting deeply involved in U.S. sociopolitics. It’s a broad assessment, but it’s linked to the fact that many immigrant families have been too focused on adapting and assimilating into American life to worry about high-level politics. Many Asian immigrant elders believe that keeping a low profile and taking up less space will ensure easier survival. Another harsh reality is that most American politicians and cultural activists have simply ignored Asian communities until fairly recently, even in places like the Bay Area, which is full of people of Asian descent.

    For those in the Asian diaspora, sharing a meal is quintessential to forming and nurturing bonds.
    For those in the Asian diaspora, sharing a meal is quintessential to forming and nurturing bonds.

    And so, coming together to eat, talk and celebrate is the joyful form of advocacy that Jew has been craving. Some of the esteemed guests in attendance at the Golden Generation dinner included contemporary artist So Youn Lee, “Beef” actor Young Mazino, and journalists Mariecar Mendoza, Tim Chan and Dion Lim.

    Anti-Asian violence reached a peak nearly three years ago, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Asian Americans are still vulnerable to racially charged hate crimes, especially in San Francisco.

    “The violence that was happening within our communities in the Bay Area was upsetting and disheartening, but it also brought us together,” Jew says. “We want to continue using that momentum we’ve created in our communities, and continue to have forums where we come together, celebrate each other and have a place to check in with each other and strengthen our connections.” Through this demonstration of organized community building, Golden Generation itself becomes political — a sign that silence and isolation are things of the past.

    For people in the AAPI community, simply coming together is a radical act of resistance.
    For people in the AAPI community, simply coming together is a radical act of resistance.

    This shift brings an intentionality to Jew’s style of cooking and organizing, but he has always hoped his culinary pursuits can fundamentally change how Chinese food is perceived. His career took him from his training in Italy to working in Shanghai, and then in 2008 to San Francisco, where he initially experienced some pushback to this type of reimagining of Chinese fare, even in one of the most Asian and progressive regions of the country. “I was determined to open a Chinese restaurant, but it was tough at the time,” he says. “People did not understand what I was trying to do.”

    Jew’s story sounds painfully similar to the initial reaction that San Francisco residents had toward Chinese restaurateurs in the mid-1800s, when Chinese people were still seen as shady undesirables in America. And even though this experience happened literal centuries ago — and under entirely different circumstances — it goes to show that America is not the infinitely compassionate melting pot we were promised. It’s probably for the best: We shouldn’t have to “melt” into anything to thrive together.

    Chinese food continues to play an integral role in bridging the gaps between AAPI communities, and there’s more work of all types to be done. It just so happens that in some spaces, that work is warming, satisfying and ripe with unspoken affection.

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  • Barbie unveils Anna May Wong doll for AAPI Heritage Month

    Barbie unveils Anna May Wong doll for AAPI Heritage Month

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    Six months after she was immortalized with a U.S. quarter, Asian American Hollywood trailblazer Anna May Wong has received another accolade affirming her icon status — her own Barbie.

    Mattel announced Monday the release of an Anna May Wong doll for Asian American and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month.

    The figure has her trademark bangs, eyebrows and well-manicured nails. The doll is dressed in a red gown with a shiny golden dragon design and cape, inspired by her appearance in the 1934 movie “Limehouse Blues.”

    Wong’s niece, Anna Wong, gave her blessing and worked closely with the brand to develop the Barbie’s look.

    “I did not hesitate at all. It was such an honor and so exciting,” Wong told The Associated Press in an email. “I wanted to make sure they got her facial features and clothing correct. And they did!”

    As a child, Anna Wong owned a Barbie and Skipper doll (Barbie’s little sister) and a Barbie dream house and car. She loves the idea that Asian children will now have a doll who looks like them.

    The doll is part of the Barbie “Inspiring Women” series, which features dolls in the likeness of pioneering women. Past inspirations include aviator Amelia Earhart and artist Frida Kahlo.

    “As the first Asian American actor to lead a U.S. television show, whose perseverance broke down barriers for her gender and AAPI community in film and TV, Anna May Wong is the perfect fit for our Barbie Inspiring Women Series,” Lisa McKnight, an executive vice president at Mattel, said in a statement.

    Born in Los Angeles, the Chinese American actor is considered the first major Asian American movie star. She started out during the silent movie era in the 1920s and gained international notice in films like “The Thief of Bagdad” as well as for her fashion sense. In the ’30s, Anna May Wong was acting opposite actors like Marlene Dietrich in “Shanghai Express.” But in 1937, she lost the lead role of a Chinese villager in “The Good Earth” to Luise Rainer, a white actor who went on to win a best actress Oscar.

    In the ensuing decades, Anna May Wong went to Europe to act. But she later returned to the U.S. In In 1951, she led her own television show, “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong.” The short-lived mystery series was believed to be the first with an Asian American lead.

    In another first, she was the first Asian American woman to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for acting in 1960. She died a year later at age 56.

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  • Shift in San Francisco politics serves as warning from Asian American voters to Democrats in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Shift in San Francisco politics serves as warning from Asian American voters to Democrats in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Allene Jue used to vote in a simple, rapid manner – scan the names on the ballot and pick the Asian sounding names.

    That was before 2020.

    “Something turned on during the pandemic and lit a fire,” said Jue, a Chinese American mother of two girls, ages 3 and 5, living on the west side of San Francisco. Throughout the pandemic, Jue watched as violent hate crimes against Asian Americans brought fear to the community with not enough response from local law enforcement or prosecutors. As the school closures wore on and on in California, Jue saw her local school board discuss progressive policy issues like renaming schools ahead of focusing on simply returning students to the classroom.

    Jue, who generally considers herself a Democrat, recalled her anger at liberal local politicians.

    “They care about policies that don’t really help someone who just lives in the city and just want to be safe, who wants their kids to be educated well,” she said. “They forgot the core problems for regular people. I wanted to do something to try to change and take that power back. It was fear and frustration, a lot of frustration, that I turned into action.”

    Her involvement began with stuffing envelopes for recall campaigns against the district attorney and several school board members and then grew – she even appeared in Chinese language campaign ads for a moderate Democrat running for city supervisor.

    It was a political awakening replicated to varying degrees by other Asian Americans in San Francisco, resulting in a series of political upheavals in one of the United States’ most progressive cities – including a moderate White man unseating a progressive Chinese American incumbent for supervisor of the majority-Asian American Sunset District

    California activists warn that these shifts in the politics of San Francisco – a place that has long been a beacon for progressives – are a signal to national Democrats ahead of 2024 that the party needs a course correction with the fastest growing racial group in the US – Asian Americans.

    “I see this frustration with the direction of the party,” said Charles Jung, a civil rights attorney and local Bay Area advocate. “Asian Americans feel like Democrats are focused on the wrong things, that they’ve let ideology run amok. If Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core Democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”

    Supervisor Joel Engardio, a gay married man who by most national standards is a liberal, describes himself as a moderate in San Francisco. And he is quick to criticize the word “progressive.”

    “To me, progressive is forward thinking, moving into the future and building a better city,” said Engardio from his San Francisco City Hall office. “For too long, we have not followed that definition of progressive. Progressive is a city that works and functions and builds toward the future.”

    Engardio unseated a Chinese American incumbent last year, becoming the first non-Asian supervisor to represent the majority Asian American district in more than 20 years. He campaigned on removing roadblocks for small businesses, putting more police officers on the streets, and using merit-standards for public schools. He said his supervisor race, while close, sends a broader political message about the limits of liberal ideology.

    “We should all pay attention that San Francisco, the most liberal place in America, is saying enough. We want safe streets. We want good schools. That should tell anyone – pay attention,” said Engardio.

    CNN national exit polls do show the pendulum shifting among Asian American voters in recent elections. In 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported Democrats by 77% vs. Republicans at 23%. In 2022, Asian Americans remained supportive of Democrats, but that preference slid 58% vs. Republicans at 40%.

    That’s a significant shift, warns Jung. “You saw a substantial double-digit erosion of support from Asian Americans from this midterm election to 2018. And incidentally, it’s not just Asian Americans, you saw the same thing among Hispanic voters,” he said. “I think if Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”

    While Asian Americans may be thought of as a Democratic constituency, Jung warns recent history shows that wasn’t always the case.

    CNN’s historical exit polls on congressional vote choice show Asian American voters were closely divided or tilting toward Republicans in the 1990s. But since 1998, they have generally leaned toward the Democratic Party, by varying margins.

    Erosion among Asian and Latino voters, said Kanishka Cheng of grassroots community building organization Together SF, is explained by Democrats forgetting the core values for immigrant communities.

    Kanishka Cheng is the founder of community building organization Together SF and Together SF Action, whose mission includes fighting against crime, homelessness and high housing costs through change at San Francisco's city hall.

    “Democrats have a really hard time talking about public education and public safety,” said Cheng. “That’s the common denominator between the Asian and Latino community – we are immigrant communities. We came to America for stability and opportunity. Public safety and public education are the things that give us stability and opportunity. We need education and we need to feel safe.”

    Engardio said that message came through loud and clear as he knocked on “14,000 doors, talking to voters. My advice is to talk about what they need, and actually, listen.”

    Listening to Asian American voters is the work that Forrest Liu continues in the Sunset District as 2024 approaches. A former Bay Area finance worker, Liu left the business world and became an Asian community advocate to fight hate crimes targeting Asians.

    Liu spends his day conducting field interviews to try to understand the political shift that took place among San Francisco’s Asian voters, because Liu believes it’s predictive of what will happen in the upcoming national elections. “I want to understand why they made the decisions they made last year and what they want moving forward. And what we should be advocating for,” said Liu.

    What he’s learned so far, he said, is the community is far savvier than politicians may think.

    “There are some politicians out there who are like, ‘Let me get in a photo with some Asian people. Let me walk through Chinatown, shake hands with a few Asian community leaders and that’s it. I got the Asian vote,’” said Liu. “No. You actually need to be in tune with what this demographic needs.”

    Liu said the political discontent that led to Engardio’s victory remains, even as publicity around “Stop Asian Hate” may have faded.

    “‘Why should I feel unsafe?’ I would say that’s the summary of the emotion of the people I’m interviewing. They still feel unsafe.”

    You hear three languages spoken in Jue’s house – English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Her 5-year-old daughter, Eloise, is in a Cantonese immersion kindergarten, though she also speaks Mandarin. Lucille, 3, speaks Mandarin to her parents. Jue flips from one language to the next, a product of the multilingual public schools in San Francisco.

    “I’m a public school kid, from kindergarten all the way to college,” she said. “There is a common background from my core group – children of immigrants who went through public school.”

    Work hard, strive for educational success, and build a safe community – that’s what Jue and her generation grew up seeking.

    The effects of the pandemic began to crack into all those core values. The attacks targeting Asian American – which spiked 567% from 2019 to 2021 in San Francisco – worried Jue.

    07 Asian American Voters Allene with Kids

    “I’m Asian, my family’s Asian. If I have to worry about just stepping out to run an errand, I think that’s a huge problem and I can’t live in a city like that,” she said.

    Amid those concerns in 2021, Jue noticed the school board vote to rename 44 schools whose names were linked to former presidents like Abraham Lincoln, stating the names were linked to “the subjugation and enslavement of human beings/ or who oppressed women.”

    The school district at that time still had shared no public plan for reopening schools.

    Jue, juggling working at her tech job and raising kids about to enter pre-school, was incensed.

    Jue was among the Asian Americans in San Francisco who rolled out recall actions first against the school board, recalling three members. Jue then helped the successful effort to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, which a majority of the west side Asian communities backed.

    Last November, Jue volunteered for her neighboring district’s supervisor race – where Engardio successfully challenged the Sunset district’s sitting city supervisor. She was featured in two Mandarin and Cantonese campaign ads.

    Like many political shifts, Jue said the Sunset District was driven by discontent. And Jue said that discontent, while felt most profoundly in her city, is not limited to San Francisco.

    The self-described socially liberal-fiscal conservative said while she is a registered Democrat, she struggles with the current state of the party entering 2024. “I don’t think they’ve gotten those basics down yet, like crime and education,” said Jue. “I know of folks that have traditionally voted Democrat that are now voting Republican because they do not feel that the Democratic Party is representing them.”

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  • For Asian Americans, Yeoh, Quan’s Oscar wins are theirs too

    For Asian Americans, Yeoh, Quan’s Oscar wins are theirs too

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    LOS ANGELES — Edward Dion Farinas watches the Academy Awards every year but the Filipino American didn’t expect to have such a visceral reaction when hearing Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh’s awards announced.

    “I had a squeal come out that I was not expecting,” said Farinas, who was watching Sunday from his Austin, Texas, home, complete with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” themed pastries from a local Asian American-owned bakery.

    “I was surprised by how heavily invested I got. It’s not even about the acting. It really just kind of lets us feel like we can accomplish things that normally are not in our lane.”

    Quan’s best supporting actor win and comeback story from childhood star of ‘80s flicks, coupled with Yeoh’s historic win as the first Asian best actress winner ever had viewers of Asian descent shedding tears of happiness — and grinning. The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-stars bring the total number of Asians who have earned acting Oscars to just six in the awards’ 95-year history.

    For many Asian Americans, the film’s seven Oscars, including Best Picture, feel like a watershed moment — that Hollywood is moving past seeing them only in tropes. It represents an opportunity for optimism after three years of anti-Asian hate brought on by the pandemic.

    Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known as the Daniels), who won best-directing and best original screenplay Oscars, the story centers on a glammed-down Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a frazzled laundromat owner preparing for an IRS audit. Meanwhile, she is struggling with an unhappy husband (Quan), her critical father (James Hong) and an openly lesbian daughter (Stephanie Hsu).

    When Yeoh said, in accepting her Oscar, that the award was for children who look like her, the message landed “straight to the heart” said Jasmine Cho, who is Korean American.

    “Now I’m like looking at when I’m in my 60s,” the 39-year-old said. “I want to be like Michelle. She’s my forever badass woman role model.”

    Cho, of Pittsburgh, is nationally recognized for her cookie portraits of forgotten and famous Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and has drawn social media attention for her tributes to Yeoh and Quan. She hopes to give the cookies to them one day because she’s been so inspired by their performances and how they’ve carried themselves.

    “I feel like they already like completely made history with being like the most awarded film and just all the other awards that they’ve been receiving,” Cho said of the possibility the two might not have taken home Oscars. “So yeah, I would have been somewhat disappointed” had they not won. “But in my mind, they already won.”

    Yer Vang, a Hmong American living in Minneapolis, was moved to tears by Quan and Yeoh’s acceptance speeches. She recalls coming out of the theater hoping for this scenario. To actually see it happen was “phenomenal.”

    Quan’s remarks about coming to the U.S. as a Vietnamese refugee and living in a refugee camp resonated particularly because that’s what her parents lived through.

    “It’s crazy because … that’s my mother’s story,” Vang said.

    But all the movie’s Oscars (it also won best-supporting actress for Jamie Lee Curtis and film editing) mean a lot to Asian Americans, she said. “It does tell the community that we have done enough … and we deserve to be celebrated, whether in like the highest of courts or just back home.”

    Norman Chen, CEO of The Asian American Foundation, let out a scream and fist pump for every Oscar the movie picked up. Among the foundation’s initiatives are scholarship and fellowship programs with the Sundance Institute. He called the impact of the wins massive.

    This is going to elevate the narrative … to create more future actors, directors, screenwriters” of Asian descent, Chen said.

    “The recognition is there finally. Just across society, people will be appreciating more even in education with more interest about Asian and Asian American history. It will change the mindset of Asian Americans being foreigners.”

    __

    For more coverage of this year’s Academy Awards, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/academy-awards

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  • Grand test for Indian diplomacy as American, Chinese and Russian ministers meet in Delhi | CNN

    Grand test for Indian diplomacy as American, Chinese and Russian ministers meet in Delhi | CNN

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    New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    Foreign ministers from the world’s biggest economies convened in New Delhi Thursday in what was seen as a grand test for Indian diplomacy, which ultimately didn’t succeed in reaching a consensus because of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

    In the second high-level ministerial meeting under India’s Group of 20 (G20) presidency this year, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, met his American, Chinese and Russian counterparts, hoping to find enough common ground to deliver a joint statement at the end of the summit.

    But amid festering divisions over Moscow’s war, New Delhi was unable to convince the leaders to put their differences aside, with Jaishankar admitting the conflict had struggled to unite the group.

    India, the world’s largest democracy with a population of more than 1.3 billion, has been keen to position itself as a leader of emerging and developing nations – often referred to as the Global South – at a time when soaring food and energy prices as a result of the war are hammering consumers already grappling with rising costs and inflation.

    Those sentiments were front and center during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opening remarks earlier Thursday, when he spoke of multiples crises the world faces, with less wealthy nations hit especially hard.

    “The experience of the last few years, the financial crisis, climate change, the pandemic, terrorism and wars clearly shows that global governance has failed,” Modi said.

    “We must also admit that the tragic consequences of this failure are being faced most over by the developing countries,” who he says are most affected by global warming “caused by richer countries”.

    Eluding to the war in Ukraine, Modi acknowledged the conflict was causing “deep global divisions.” But he encouraged the foreign ministers to put differences aside during their meeting Thursday.

    “We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can,” he said.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the summit, according to a State Department official traveling with Blinken.

    Blinken and Lavrov spoke for roughly 10 minutes, the same official said.

    Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed to CNN that the meeting took place but played down its significance.

    “Blinken asked for contact with Lavrov. On the go, as part of the second session of the twenty, Sergey Viktorovich (Lavrov) talked. There were no negotiations, meetings, etc,” she said.

    Deep disagreements over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine played out in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru last month as well, when G20 finance chiefs failed to agree on a statement after their meeting.

    Both Russia and China declined to sign the joint statement, which criticized Moscow’s invasion. That left India to issue a “chair’s summary and outcome document” in which it summed up the two days of talks and acknowledged disagreements.

    Analysts say that throughout the war New Delhi has deftly balanced its ties to Russia and the West, with Modi emerging as a leader who has been courted by all sides.

    But as the war enters its second year, and tensions continue to rise, pressure could mount on countries, including India, to take a firmer stand against Russia – putting Modi’s statecraft to the test.

    Arguably India’s most celebrated event of the year, the G20 summit has been heavily promoted domestically, with sprawling billboards featuring Modi’s face plastered across the country. Roads have been cleaned and buildings freshly painted ahead of the dignitaries’ visit.

    Taking place in the “mother of democracies” under Modi’s leadership, his political allies have been keen to push his international credentials, portraying him as a key player in the global order.

    Last year’s G20 leaders’ summit in Bali, Indonesia, issued a joint declaration that echoed what Modi had told Russian President Vladimir Putin weeks earlier on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan.

    “Today’s era must not be of war,” it said, prompting media and officials in India to claim India had played a vital role in bridging differences between an isolated Russia and the United States and its allies.

    A board decorated with flowers welcomes foreign ministers to New Delhi, India, on February 28, 2023.

    India, analysts say, prides itself on its ability to balance relations. The country, like China, has refused to condemn Moscow’s brutal assault on Ukraine in various United Nations resolutions. Rather than cutting economic ties with the Kremlin, India has undermined Western sanctions by increasing its purchases of Russian oil, coal and fertilizer.

    But unlike China, India has grown closer to the West – particularly the US – despite ties with Russia.

    New Delhi’s ties with Moscow date back to the Cold War, and the country remains heavily reliant on the Kremlin for military equipment – a vital link given India’s ongoing tensions with China at its shared Himalayan border.

    The US and India have taken steps in recent months to strengthen their defense partnership, as the two sides attempt to counter the rise of an increasingly assertive China.

    Daniel Markey, senior adviser, South Asia, for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), said while India’s leaders “would like to facilitate an end to this conflict that preserves New Delhi’s relations with both Washington and Moscow and ends the disruption of the global economy,” India did not have “any particular leverage” with Russia or Ukraine that would make a settlement likely.

    “I believe that other world leaders are equally interested in playing a peace-making diplomatic role. So when and if Putin wishes to come to the table to negotiate, he will have no shortage of diplomats hoping to help,” he said.

    Still, as Putin’s aggression continues to throw the global economy into chaos, India has signaled an intention to raise the many concerns faced by the global South, including climate challenges and food and energy security, according to Modi’s opening speech earlier Thursday.

    “The world looks upon the G20 to ease the challenges of growth, development, economic resilience, disaster resilience, financial stability, transnational crime, corruption, terrorism, and food and energy security,” Modi said.

    While Modi’s government appears keen to prioritize domestic challenges, experts say these issues could be sidelined by the tensions between the US, Russia and China, which have increased recently over concerns from Washington that Beijing is considering sending lethal aid to the Kremlin’s struggling war effort.

    Speaking to reporters last week, Ramin Toloui, the US assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, said while Secretary of State Antony Blinken would highlight its efforts to address food and energy security issues, he would also “underscore the damage that Russia’s war of aggression has caused.”

    Blinken will “encourage all G20 partners to redouble their calls for a just, peaceful, and lasting end to the Kremlin’s war consistent with UN Charter principles,” Toloui said.

    At the same time, Russia in a statement Wednesday accused the US and the European Union of “terrorism,” stating it was “set to clearly state Russia’s assessments” of the current food and energy crisis.

    “We will draw attention to the destructive barriers that the West is multiplying exponentially to block the export of goods that are of critical importance to the global economy, including energy sources and agricultural products,” Russia said, hinting at the difficulties New Delhi might face during the meeting.

    India has “worked very hard not to be boxed into one side or the other,” Markey said. The country could not “afford to alienate Russia or the US and Modi doesn’t want discussion of the war to force any difficult decisions or to distract from other issues, like green, sustainable economic development,” he added.

    But with plummeting ties between Washington and Beijing after the US military shot down what it says was a Chinese spy balloon that flew over American territory, New Delhi will have to carefully drive difficult negotiations between conflicting viewpoints.

    China maintains the balloon, which US forces downed in February, was a civilian research aircraft accidentally blown off course, and the fallout led Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing.

    As differences played out during the ministerial meeting Thursday, analysts say while India will be disappointed at the outcome, they were in a very difficult position to begin with.

    “It will be a disappointment for Modi, but not one that cannot be managed,” Markey said. “Nor would it be India’s fault, as it would primarily be a reflection of the underlying differences over which Modi has very little control.”

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  • Biden to nominate Julie Su as next US labor secretary

    Biden to nominate Julie Su as next US labor secretary

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is nominating Julie Su, the current deputy and former California official, as his next labor secretary, replacing the departing incumbent, former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

    Su, a civil rights attorney and former head of California’s labor department, was central to negotiations between labor and freight rail companies late last year, working to avert an economically debilitating strike. She also has worked to broaden employee training programs and crack down on wage theft. If confirmed by the Senate, Su would also be the first Asian American in the Biden administration to serve in the Cabinet at the secretary level.

    Biden, in a statement on Tuesday, called her a “champion for workers.”

    “Julie is a tested and experienced leader, who will continue to build a stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive economy that provides Americans a fair return for their work and an equal chance to get ahead,” he said. “She helped avert a national rail shutdown, improved access to good jobs free from discrimination through my Good Jobs Initiative, and is ensuring that the jobs we create in critical sectors like semiconductor manufacturing, broadband and healthcare are good-paying, stable and accessible jobs for all.”

    Su was considered to lead the department when Biden won the White House but instead became the department’s deputy. Walsh announced his intention to leave the administration earlier this month to lead the National Hockey League Players’ Association. Su will serve as the acting secretary until the Senate acts on her nomination.

    Biden had been under pressure from the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and other Asian American and Pacific Islander advocates to select Su to head the department. This administration was the first in more than two decades to not have a Cabinet secretary of AAPI descent, despite its regular declarations that it was the most diverse in history. Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai are of AAPI descent but don’t lead a Cabinet department.

    Su, if confirmed, would also expand the majority of women serving in the president’s Cabinet. She was confirmed by the Senate to her current role in 2021 by a 50–47 vote.

    Su’s nomination drew swift support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer saying she would be “phenomenal” in the job.

    “The president couldn’t have picked a better nominee,” he told reporters. “I’m really excited about her, and we’re going to move to consider her nomination very, very quickly.”

    Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who will preside over Su’s confirmation hearing as chair of the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee, praised the selection. Sanders had urged consideration of Sara Nelson, the president of the flight attendants union, but made clear Su had his strong support.

    “I’m confident Julie Su will be an excellent Secretary of Labor,” he tweeted. “I look forward to working with her to protect workers’ rights and build the trade union movement in this country.”

    But Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate health, education and labor committee who opposed Su when she was selected for deputy secretary, called her work overseeing the department “troubling” and “anti-worker.”

    The committee should “have a full and thorough hearing process,” Cassidy said.

    Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said she was “overjoyed” by the selection, thanking Biden in a tweet for “nominating your first AAPI Cabinet Secretary!”

    “It certainly is better late than never,” Chu said in a brief interview, citing CAPAC support for Su two years ago for the top Labor post and praising Su’s credentials as a leader and enforcer of labor laws including minimum wage and occupational safety standards. She said GOP criticism about Su had been fully vetted two years ago and that the coming confirmation process will show their charges “have no basis.”

    Chu noted that Biden had said he would name a Cabinet that looked like America, and “he fulfilled that promise.”

    Su’s nomination also comes at a key moment for labor unions, which have been facing a decline in membership for decades. Unions gained some momentum as workers at major employers such as Amazon and Starbucks pushed to unionize. But Biden — an avowed pro-union president — had to work with Congress to impose a contract on rail workers last year to avoid a possible strike.

    The Labor Department said just 10.1% of workers last year were union members. That figure has been cut nearly in half since 1983 and could fall further, as younger workers are less likely to belong to unions.

    “There’s no one more dedicated and qualified to defend the fundamental rights of working people than Julie Su,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “It’s her life’s work.”

    ___

    Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Mary Clare Jalonick and Hope Yen in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • History repeats itself with anti-China land ownership proposals | CNN Politics

    History repeats itself with anti-China land ownership proposals | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    New efforts to bar Chinese citizens and others from owning property in Texas and other states echo the treatment of Asian people in the US more than 100 years ago, when Congress barred them from obtaining citizenship and multiple state laws restricted land ownership.

    • In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin is expected to sign legislation to bar citizens of countries the State Department has designated as “foreign adversaries” from owning agricultural land. Companies with deep ties to those countries would also be affected. Those countries currently include China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. There are similar proposals in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. Foreign owners control a fraction of US farmland, according to the Congressional Research Service.
    • In Texas, a much broader proposal names those countries and bans citizens of them from owning any land whatsoever. The ban would presumably extend to legal immigrants living in the US. That bill is still working its way through the legislature but has the support of Gov. Greg Abbott.

    The Texas proposal in particular specifically recalls a despicable chapter in US history, when so-called Alien Land Laws were passed in numerous states between the 1880s and 1920s to specifically bar Asian people from owning land. The California Alien Land Law was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in 1952 for violating the 14th Amendment.

    Chinese people were explicitly barred from immigration to the US for generations – from the 1880s, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, until that law’s repeal during World War II.

    So few Chinese people were allowed to immigrate for another generation after that until 1965 – 105 per year – that it amounted to a de facto ban.

    As a result, the anti-Asian property laws mostly affected Japanese Americans.

    While the laws did not specifically single out Asians, they were applied to people “ineligible for citizenship.”

    That made the laws specifically apply to Asians since Congress, at the time, allowed citizenship only for immigrants coming from Europe or Africa.

    The most notorious example of Alien Land Laws was in California, which passed multiple versions of these laws over the years, and where Asian immigrants were concentrated.

    One celebrated and yearslong court battle pitted a Japanese immigrant, Jukichi Harada, who found a way around the law by having his children own the house where his family lived in Riverside, California. They were ultimately able to keep the house when a judge ruled in their favor in 1918, but they were later moved to internment camps during World War II because of their Japanese ancestry.

    Today, the Harada House is a National Historic Landmark and a museum.

    I called Madeline Hsu, a history professor and expert in Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, to ask if these new proposals are an example of history repeating itself.

    “It’s definitely sort of reinvocation of kind of what people in Asian American studies would refer to as ‘Yellow Peril’ fearmongering,” she said.

    “There are ways in which it resonates with what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II, where regardless of citizenship, regardless of nativity, they were racially categorized as enemy aliens.”

    Hsu pointed me to an article in the Journal of Southern History by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley professor Brent Campney that documents fears of a Japanese “invasion” in the Rio Grande Valley more than 100 years ago.

    Campney’s larger argument in studying the treatment of Asian Americans, in this case people of Japanese descent, is that the local discrimination in Texas and also California reverberated back into the growing animosity between Japan and the US leading up to World War II.

    Decades before the US government robbed Japanese Americans of their rights and held them in camps, Campney writes, “white Americans appealed to the same stereotypes and exclusionary impulses used against the Japanese during the internment, exacerbating tensions between Japan and the United States.”

    That’s a historical lesson everyone has an interest in learning as tensions between the US and China grow today. The US military is maneuvering with allies to control China in the Pacific. The US government is focused on making the economy more independent from Chinese manufacturing. There is even talk of banning TikTok, the app popular with young people in the US and owned by a private Chinese company.

    These efforts against a government seep into more problematic territory when they seem to target the many Chinese and ethnic Chinese people who live in the US.

    “Targeting people by nationality is also problematic,” Hsu said. “That’s not a good way of identifying people who are national security risks or who are acting on behalf of a foreign government.”

    She drew a correlation between these new state proposals and former President Donald Trump’s promise to enforce a ban on Muslims traveling to the US. In order to get a plan through the Supreme Court, he instead banned, for a time, travel from certain countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America.

    The Texas bill similarly targets specific countries by name and generalizes that all citizens of those countries could be a threat.

    “The only thing it does is it expresses these kinds of gut suspicions and hostility to these countries,” Hsu said.

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  • Rise of Asian leads in network TV shows, now ABC’s ‘Company’

    Rise of Asian leads in network TV shows, now ABC’s ‘Company’

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    In fourth grade, Catherine Haena Kim could not muster the courage to audition for the female lead of her school’s production of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” But her teachers saw something in the way she held herself in the classroom.

    “My teachers actually gave me the part because whenever I did speak up, I was very animated and expressive,” Kim said. “When I did this play, I honestly think it’s one of the first times I actually felt seen and special in a way that I think I really hadn’t before that.”

    Kim’s teachers subverted a problem that has frustrated many Asian Americans’ career trajectories, whether on screen, in political office or in an executive suite: receiving praise for being reliable, hard workers, but never quite being perceived as leadership material.

    Across industries, Asian Americans have long been held back by unquestioned biases rooted in racial stereotypes. Employers often paint Asians as passive, lacking in gravitas or not a “cultural fit,” said Justin Zhu, co-founder of the advocacy group Stand with Asian Americans.

    An all grown-up Kim (“Ballers,” “Good Trouble”) is now reveling in the thrill and facing the pressure of being the lead on a much bigger stage: She stars opposite Milo Ventimiglia in the new ABC drama, “The Company You Keep,” which premieres Sunday. A remake of the Korean drama “My Fellow Citizens,” it centers on the hot and heavy romance between Kim’s CIA agent and Ventimiglia’s con artist.

    Given network TV’s woeful record of failing to cast Asian actors as main characters — and increased competition from cable and streaming services — there is an extraordinary number of recent shows that are making change. Other recent broadcast series with Asian or Asian American leads include “Quantum Leap” (Raymond Lee), “Kung Fu” (Olivia Liang), “The Cleaning Lady” (Élodie Yung), “NCIS: Hawai’i” (Vanessa Lachey) and “Ghosts” (Utkarsh Ambudkar).

    Advocates are mixed on whether this rise in visibility is a sign that Asian Americans are actually gaining wider, meaningful representation. Over the last decade, there have been ups and downs: For two years, ABC even had two sitcoms with all-Asian casts — “Fresh Off the Boat” and “Dr. Ken” — but the latter, starring Ken Jeong, was nixed after only two seasons.

    In 2019, after “Crazy Rich Asians” became a box-office hit, things looked promising, said Milton Liu, interim executive director of the Asian American Media Alliance, which puts out a diversity “report card” rating the broadcast networks. That same year, six TV pilots with at least one Asian lead were ordered but only one — sitcom “Sunnyside” starring Kal Penn — went to series, and it was canceled after 11 episodes.

    Liu concedes that the current crop of shows indicate things are “improving slowly.” A member of the Writers Guild of America, he tempered that assessment with a reminder of how difficult it is just to get a TV pilot made.

    Also, most of these broadcast shows don’t showcase an Asian main couple or all-Asian ensemble. The conventional wisdom that many industry executives still hold firm to is that casting a white actor as the lead will make a series relatable to more viewers, so it will be more profitable. Liu said that demographics for network viewers are trained to older audiences, which skew predominantly white.

    “We understand that,” he said. “But we also understand the importance of having shows like ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ so that we aren’t just marginalized.”

    A Nielsen Company study found that two-thirds of Asian Americans feel there is not enough Asian representation on TV. More than half say the depictions that do exist are inaccurate.

    It was “The Company You Keep” executive producer Jon M. Chu, the director of “Crazy Rich Asians,” who suggested that agent Emma Hill be Asian American — and have an on-screen family with a Korean American father and Chinese American mother. The Hill family is also a political dynasty.

    The character of Kim’s on-camera father (James Saito) is loosely inspired by former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, the first Asian American governor on the mainland. The former U.S. ambassador to China has no direct involvement, but called the connection “awesome” in an interview with the AP.

    In past political roles — which include serving as commerce secretary under former President Barack Obama — Locke never lacked confidence in his ability to lead. It was anti-Asian racism that colored how he was perceived by others that was the problem, he says.

    In 2003, the FBI learned he was the target of an assassination plot by a white supremacist and anti-government extremist who “specifically said that there’s no way that an Asian American could be a legitimate governor of the state of Washington,” Locke recalled.

    Zhu, of Stand with Asian Americans, said that underestimating Asian Americans goes back to the 1800s, when Chinese laborers built the U.S. railroads.

    “Asian Americans, since we’ve gotten to this place from working on the railroad, we’ve been paid a fraction of what we deserve and have been seen as sort of workers but not leaders,” Zhu said.

    Locke believes seeing Asians and Asian Americans taking charge on-screen does have an impact in real life.

    “Just seeing more more Asian Americans in all walks of life — even if it’s fictitious — is important because that may be their (viewers’) only exposure to Asian Americans in roles that they’re not accustomed to,” Locke said.

    Kim feels like a “lucky chosen one” because she has a seat at the proverbial table with her new, leading character status. Seeing her name at the top of the call sheet is a brand-new experience. Despite the confidence she now has, sometimes the insecurities that once dodged that timid fourth-grader persist.

    “Most of the time, I’m just like ‘How does everybody do this?’ I feel my imposter syndrome blaring louder than ever,” Kim said. “But I keep going because it’s all mixed in with that feeling a little kid dreams of” — of being seen and recognized as special.

    ___

    Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at @ttangAP.

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  • Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus calls on Biden to tap Julie Su to replace Walsh as Labor secretary | CNN Politics

    Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus calls on Biden to tap Julie Su to replace Walsh as Labor secretary | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus is throwing its support behind Julie Su, the deputy Labor secretary, to replace Labor Secretary Marty Walsh who is soon departing the Biden administration – a significant public display of support for an Asian American to join President Joe Biden’s Cabinet.

    “We remain troubled that the Administration has no Secretary-level AANHPI official serving in the Cabinet, the first time we have not had representation at this level since 2000,” CAPAC said in a statement shared with CNN. “President Biden has the opportunity to better realize the ‘most diverse Cabinet in history’ with the elevation of Deputy Secretary Su. CAPAC urges him to seize that opportunity by nominating Julie Su as our next Secretary of Labor.”

    US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan, is the only Asian-American woman who is currently in a Cabinet-level position under Biden.

    Walsh is expected to depart the Biden administration soon, according to two people familiar with the matter, marking the first Cabinet secretary departure of Biden’s presidency. Walsh has been offered a job heading the National Hockey League Players’ Association, the people said. His departure has not been officially announced.

    CAPAC’s endorsement of Su to be the next Labor secretary is part of a broader effort in recent years by Asian-American lawmakers to push the Biden White House to appoint more people of Asian backgrounds to high-ranking positions within the administration.

    Early on in the Biden administration, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Mazie Hirono threatened to vote against Biden’s nominees who weren’t minorities, as they expressed their displeasure at the lack of Asian Americans in the Cabinet. Duckworth went as far as to say that the White House’s attempts to address her concerns about AAPI representation were “insulting.”

    “To be told that you have Kamala Harris, we are very proud of her, you don’t need anybody else, is insulting,” Duckworth said, adding she had been told that “multiple times” by the White House.

    The White House ultimately agreed to add a senior Asian American and Pacific Islander liaison, and the two senators dropped their threat.

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington and a member of CAPAC, told CNN on Wednesday that choosing Su to replace Walsh would “fill a gaping hole in the lack of AAPIs at the Cabinet secretary level,” and that she had recently “weighed in personally” on the matter.

    “Julie is someone who knows how to navigate the DOL. She will ensure that DOL is doing all it can to support and advance workers wages, rights, and benefits on the job,” Jayapal added.

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  • Biden offers condolences to victims of California mass shooting, acknowledges impact on AAPI community | CNN Politics

    Biden offers condolences to victims of California mass shooting, acknowledges impact on AAPI community | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden offered his condolences to the victims of a mass shooting in California that left 10 dead, while acknowledging the impact on the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in a statement on Sunday.

    “While there is still much we don’t know about the motive in this senseless attack, we do know that many families are grieving tonight, or praying that their loved one will recover from their wounds,” Biden said in the statement.

    “Monterey Park is home to one of the largest AAPI communities in America, many of whom were celebrating the Lunar New Year along with loved ones and friends this weekend,” he said.

    This is a breaking story and will be updated.

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