It's really a beautiful thought: choose life. Yes! Choose LIFE, not DEATH! I think that's a sentiment we can all get behind, no matter what it really means or how overpopulated and underfunded and undereducated and under-health-cared we become!

So this week, everybody at Hyphen, and everybody in Asian America, either chooses life or gets punished!

Watch:

• The Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) will brief Congress next week on their survey on the attitudes of Iranian Americans about Iran policy. Undoubtedly, Congress will choose life.

• Raja Krishnamoorti, Obama's former Indian American policy guru, has chosen a life of contemplation. Not really! He's just raised a mill for his campaign for Illinois state comptroller. Maybe his proposed constituents will choose a life sentence.

• The Northern Virginia Association of Realtors has started the Chinese Realtor Forum, soon to be followed by similar fora for Vietnamese, Latino, and Korean realtors, to reach out to a growing homebuying demographic. They have chosen life ... or at least, profit.

• Full disclosure: I am not a boxing fan. So, no joke, maybe recently-formered Fil-Am world light-flyweight boxing champ Brian Viloria, who is still in the hospital, should choose life by hanging up his gloves.

• Choose life with this nice profile of Justin Chon, the Korean American actor who is part of Bella's on-screen high-school posse in Twilight. He has a clothing store in Orange County, and is otherwise a hipster of a familiar type to us here down Hyphen way.

• Pakistani Canadian would-be Danish newspaper bomber Tahawwur Hussain Rana will be arraigned in Chicago tomorrow for not choosing life.

• Choose to read this article about the family of a paper son, and choose life.

• Chinese instruction is on the rise in US public schools, in areas where there are few Chinese Americans. Choose Rife!

• Asian figure skaters dominate ... and choose life in an oblique manner which I am not prepared to explicate.

• More on recruitment of South Asian Americans into the intelligence community. Choose life by the sword, die by the sword, folks!

• Rockford, IL-based weight loss guru Dr. Gautam Gupta apparently chose life when he elected to trade insiderly. The SEC went after him and now the FBI is raiding his clinics. Bad doctor!

See how wonderful life is, as a choice? Now you!