Los Angeles’ Chinatown is still one of the most vibrant ethnic communities in the country and holds the title as the first Chinese enclave in the United States “owned” by Chinese Americans. But the Chinatown that we know today may not have existed if it hadn’t been for a woman named Christine Sterling.
Sterling (1881-1963) was a Los Angeles socialite (a.k.a. wealthy white woman with time on her hands) who had a passion for local history. She once remarked: “Los Angeles will be forever marked a transient, Orphan city if she allows her roots to rot in a soil of impoverished neglect.” Read more...
With the National Hockey League playoffs well into the homestretch for the 2009-2010 season, it serves as an opportune time to spotlight the national sport obsession of our neighbors from the True North. It’s not exaggerating to say that Canada’s pandemic pride — trite though it may sound — is measured in parallel to its fortunes in hockey(reference the national team’s thrilling overtime gold medal victory over Team USA at February’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver), such is the importance of the sport within the country’s national and global identity. How much? Would you believe Canadians have 5 on it?
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I’ll take ‘American Icons’ for $2000 please, Alex.
“Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek, outfitted in sporty tweed, picks up the cue card and in his recognizable Northern Ontario-tinged and CBC-honed baritone, presents the video clues while reading the answer in his trademark fashion:
“Despite a racist exclusion policy from her own swimming club, this San Francisco native became the first woman to win two diving gold medals in the same Olympics and in doing so was also the first Asian American to medal in an Olympiad.”
Time winds down and micro-seconds from the buzzer, the third place contestant offers, out of desperation, an obvious crapshoot guess.
“Uh, who is . . . Olga Connolly?” Read more...
Tyson Alualu
Ed Wang
This past weekend in culmination of months of heightened, whispered anticipation, a group of well-into-thirtysomething men, temporarily gave the slip to their families and professions; and relinquished general responsibilities in order to secretly converge and engage in a private, annual male bonding ritual held sacrosanct since high school.
The guys are me and some friends.
No, we’re not Freemasons, militiamen nor are we on the down low.
We met, as we’ve done for the previous 18 years, to watch envelope ourselves in the NFL Draft. We are draftniks — people with a hyper-geekified interest in an annual, sensationalized, non-event event where collegiate football players are selected, round-by-round, by the professional football teams that will employ and pay them large amounts of cash to play a game they played as children. Read more...
If you think it’s difficult being an Asian American director today trying to make Asian American-themed projects, imagine what it must have been like 94 years ago. Up until recently, it was, in fact, thought that no Asian American filmmakers existed that far back (Sessue Hayakawa wouldn’t start his own company, becoming the first Asian American producer/actor, until 1918). That is until 2006 when two reels of a 1916 silent feature entitled The Curse of Quon Gwon were discovered. The director and writer of the movie was a Chinese American woman named Marion Wong.
Documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong was researching Hollywood Chinese, his excellent look at the history of Chinese Americans in Hollywood, when he unearthed the two 35 mm reels (about 35 minutes of footage) in an Oakland basement. The film was preserved on highly flammable nitrate stock and had to be carefully handled and restored (among other dangers, old nitrate stock has a tendency to suddenly explode). The Curse of Quon Gwon was the first narrative feature made by a Chinese American and also one of the first films to be directed by a woman. Read more...
I promised previously to continue to blog about the impact that Asians have had on rock n’ roll so…saw this recent article from the UK about the seminal British “Asian punk band” Alien Kulture. It’s safe to assume that most of our readers probably never heard of this group—they never achieved the level of fame of their “peers” like the Clash–but when they stormed onto the London music scene thirty years ago, they had an impact on the culture that’s still being felt today.
The band formed in the late ‘70s and consisted of three young Asian/Pakistanis (Azhar Rana, Pervez Bilgrami, Ausaf Abbas) and a “token white bloke” (Huw “Jonesy” Jones). None of them were trained musicians (with the “possible” exception of Jonesy), but like other punk bands, they had something to say and it was loud and angry. In this case, Alien Kulture was created in reaction against the then-new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the country’s move toward the extreme right and an anti-immigrant xenophobia that was violently rearing its ugly head (the band’s name came from a speech Thatcher made where she said “people rather fear being swamped by an alien culture”). Read more...
Recently, I got addicted surfing the multimedia series in the NYT ‘One in 8 Million’ - wonderfully photographed slideshows with audio profiling various New Yorkers. I stumbled upon this moving piece about May Wong Lee, a mother of three boys who along with her husband decided to adopt an Ethiopian girl. Her goal was always to have a family of four kids and to commemorate the completion of her family, she got a tattoo of the word “Grace”.
Chinese Jamaican producer Leslie Kong discovered Bob Marley
Phil’s recent posts about Asian American pioneers of the punk and rock scene of the 1980s, inspired me to write up about another group of music pioneers to what is arguably one of the biggest music genres on the planet. Reggae music, the unique, infectious hybrid put together by the island’s masterful musicians in the 1960s, is now one of the most popular forms of music in the world; the iconic figure of Bob Marley, often described as “the first Third World superstar”, has been rightly recognized as an exceptionally talented singer-songwriter whose universal messages of self-determination have struck chords with people on all continents. Everyone knows Marley was Jamaican, yet few realize his first recording was made by a Jamaican record producer of Chinese origin, just one example of the crucial yet largely hidden role that Chinese Jamaicans have played in reggae’s creation and dissemination. Read more...
My fellow Offender Alfredo reminded me in his last post of how hot Debbie Harry is. And that made me think of the time I saw her live at a small Los Angeles club called Madame Wong’s West which I can pinpoint as the night I entered puberty (more on this later). But I would not have had that experience if it were not for Esther Wong a.k.a. the “Godmother of Punk.”
Born in Shanghai in 1917, Wong immigrated to the United States in 1949. In the 1970s and ‘80s, she owned two restaurants/clubs—Madame Wong’s in L.A.’s Chinatown and Madame Wong’s West in Santa Monica—that became the beacon for some of the greatest punk and rock n’ roll bands of the era. Read more...
Another entry in my month-long celebration of all things Halloween
Charles Gemora was known as Hollywood’s “King of Gorillas.” This may sound like a silly or trivial title to us now, but it was a title given to him with the utmost respect. It meant he was the best at what he did. And what he did, among many other things, was play gorillas. Gemora was a Filipino American who somehow made his way to Hollywood in the 1920s and found work as a make-up artist and mask maker. But he found his true calling donning ape suits in a number of popular films. Read more...
Another entry in my month-long celebration of all things Halloween
In 1966, when Korean American Peter A. Chang, Jr. was elected district attorney in Santa Cruz County, California, he became not only the youngest person in the United States to hold that position (at age 29) but also the first and only Asian American. He served in that role until 1975. This alone would qualify him as an Original Offender, but Chang’s tenure also happened to coincide with a period when the normally bucolic college town of Santa Cruz was suddenly home to three of the most notorious serial killers to ever operate in the United States; earning itself the unpleasant nickname of “the murder capital of the world” (a term Chang himself unwillingly coined). Read more...
Chang Apana died in 1933 at the age of 64.
Everyone knows Charlie Chan — the Chinese sleuth, who in the movies, was portrayed by white actors in yellow face, bestowing nuggets of fortune cookie proverbs, while solving murders. Over four dozen features were produced featuring Chan. But, little is known of the real life influence for the Chan character. He was in fact, one bad ass Honolulu Police Detective named Chang Apana, a hapa Chinese/Hawaiian who patrolled the then seedy streets of Honolulu at the turn of the 20th Century. Read more...
With the release next month of Mira Nair’s film Amelia which stars Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart, arguably the most famous female aviator in history, I felt it was a good time to write about another pioneering aviatrix. She was called the “Chinese American Amelia Earhart” and became the first Chinese American woman to become a licensed pilot. Her name was Katherine Sui Fun Cheung and she is the second individual I’d like to nominate as an Original Offender. Read more...
(This is the first of what may become a regular feature profiling individuals, Asian American and non-Asian alike, who have made a contribution to our culture and history but may not be well known to the current generation)
In my humble opinion, maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller may have done more to create realistic and positive portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans than any other non-Asian in Hollywood. Although he had a long career as a filmmaker starting as a screenwriter in 1936 that lasted until his death in 1997, Fuller was never as famous as his directing contemporaries like John Huston and John Ford, but he made an indelible impact on American film–influencing a whole generation of future mavericks like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Curtis Hanson. His movies were accused of being barbaric and rough, but that’s what made them so powerful. His canvas was the mean urban streets littered with crime or battlefields where war was ugly and messy, but he found both the poetry and the truth in these worlds. That’s what made his work so memorable. Read more...
