Blog Archive: October 2010

Blog Archive: October 2010

Junk Food Biculturalism

Victoria Yue - October 29, 2010

Coming from a rather short family (even by Asian standards), losing track of my family members in public places has become something of a tradition. Our usual solution involves using a jump-look technique, which consists of 1. jumping and 2.quickly scanning over the tops of the aisles for other jump-lookers, aka the people you came into the store with. If you ever see people popping up and down aisles like flailing psychotic prairie dogs in a Best Buy, well, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve just spotted my family.

Free Online: '9500 Liberty' and 'Wo Ai Ni Mommy'

erin K Ninh - October 29, 2010

 

We thought you might want to know that two of this year's acclaimed film festival features are available to view online, for free, for a limited time. See below for reviews from our writers earlier this year. And click on their titles to see the films. 

9500 Liberty will be available until election day, Nov 2.

My Morning at the White House with Michelle Obama

Melissa Hung - October 28, 2010

Last week, I had the honor of going to the White House to pick up an award from Michelle Obama. No, it wasn't for Hyphen. (Though I'd love to be invited back for Hyphen -- hint, hint to any White House staffers reading this.) I was representing San Francisco WritersCorps, a program that places published writers in San Francisco communities to teach creative writing to youth.

With Love from Mr. Hyphen: API/A Love Letter Project

Pahole Sookkasikon - October 27, 2010

Recently, I was asked by Hyphen to write about a small project I started a little while back: the API/A Love Letter Project. For me, as easy as it would seem to just talk about what my endeavor entails, it is extremely difficult to articulate the Project’s importance and the emotion behind it which pulsates it forward.

Flipping the Cultural Script

Theresa Celebran Jones - October 26, 2010

I'm not that big into personal finance blogs, but I love Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Last week he had a great post about the invisible scripts that guide our lives, and specifically, the invisible scripts embedded in him through Indian culture. The comments section is an enlightening look at red-blooded American ideals, but a few in there talk about the experience of coming up under two or more cultures (and some of the commenters don't live in America, which adds another great layer) and how these values sometimes stand in opposition to each other. 

This got me thinking about the invisible scripts I grew up with, some uniquely Filipino values, and some values specific to the immigrant experience that affected my cousins and me and set us on our paths. Some were helpful, others not so much. Some scripts I came up with:

Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel Nominated for a National Book Award

Cathlin Goulding - October 25, 2010

Earlier this month, Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel was nominated for a National Book Award. A longtime professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Yamashita's latest novel is a multi-narrative epic that explores the lives of student activists, artists, and residents evicted from San Francisco’s International Hotel during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement. The Asian American Writers Workshop has called I Hotel “a future classic of Asian American literature.” Hyphen interviewed Karen Tei Yamashita about the ten years of research she conducted in writing the novel.