Jason Coe

Horror on Tape

We've been desensitied by more violence, but viewing mass killer Seung-Hui Cho's manifesto is still chiling.

HORROR IS A FEELING oft expressed but rarely defined. Entire genres of literature, film and arts have taken on this moniker, but the means of generating horror and why humans find things horrible is often left unsaid. Horror is seemingly such a universal human emotion that one need not describe it. "That was horrible!" is descriptive enough.

The Lost Generation

Dust of Life shows the Vietnamese community’s wounds.

In Dust of Life, first-time director Le-Van Kiet portrays the conflicted and sometimes violent lives of Vietnamese American youth living in Orange County during the early ’90s. The film follows the life of Johnny, an orphaned and displaced teenage refugee dealing with issues of assimilation and gang life.

Can you explain the title and how it applies to Vietnamese American youth?

Music Moments

Artists, albums and events of note—pardon the pun—in Asian American music history.

Writer Jason Coe

Illustrator Nathan Huang

1938 Charlie Low opens Forbidden City—the first nightclub to showcase Chinese American performers—in San Francisco, a favorite haunt of locals and visiting celebrities such as Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby.

1955 Indian sarode player Ali Akbar Khan becomes the first Indian musician on American television when he appeared on Alistair Cooke’s Omnibus.

1957 Pat Suzuki becomes the first Japanese American signed to a major label when she is referred to RCA by Bing Crosby.