Blog Archive: December 2010

Why hello, another year has (almost) passed, and, just in time for the holidays...it's your Hyphen Holiday Gift Guide, the documentary DVD edition.

California-based pipa artist Jie Ma has spent the past few years creating a unique blend of music that incorporates traditional Eastern instruments with Western musical elements. Her CD is an innovative contribution to the overall body of American music. Her work is a twist on classical and new age genres, in much the same way that Shanghai Restoration Project is a combination of Eastern sounds with modern hip hop and electronica.

News coverage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which passed by a thin margin in the House and will presumably be voted on today in the Senate, focused yesterday on the kind of polemical soundbites which have come to dominate public discourse on immigration. On the one hand, conservative senators called the bill a “nightmare act” that would further chip away at ordinary Americans’ tenuous economic footholds. On the other, liberals fruitlessly prodded their opponents with the provocative human element of the bill: at its core, the DREAM Act is meant to provide a path to citizenship for the several hundred-thousand undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. 

Of course, no representative thoughtfully considered the voices on the other side of the aisle and changed the vote they walked in the door with -- it’s pure naivete to think that any ever do.

Hello, reader. The below is a work-in-progress: starter dough and nothing like a full list. But hopefully this opening gambit will inspire those with further information to add their knowledge to the resource list here. Ideally, this guide will eventually become a nationwide compendium of local mental-health resources -- personal-shopped for second-generation Asian Americans.