Help us honor and argue with The Joy Luck Club on the 20th Anniversary of its publication AND celebrate API Heritage Month in May! Send us your immigrant story in 300 words or less!

I posted about this a few days ago, but this really needs its own post. The Asian Women Blog Carnival is up, and it's pretty spectacular.

Blogger ciderpress at Livejournal, inspired by a number of other antiracist blogging efforts (google "international blog against racism week," for example) decided to put together a blog carnival for Asians for Women's History Month (which was March.) A blog carnival is where someone names a topic or theme, then bloggers post on that topic or theme and submit their posts to the carnival. The "carnival" part is where all the posts on that theme are posted together, in a sort of mini-library of resources from a particular community of interest.

This one was open to any women of Asian descent and seems to be intended for an annual affair. This first year ciderpress asked for identity pieces, but also anything else anyone had to write. I contributed the linkspost for my Hyphen Women's History Month profiles, and also for a piece I wrote on my own blog about the word "hapa" and cultural appropriation. There are also posts on being Filipina in the Netherlands, being mixed-race "Indo" in the Netherlands, the history of Hmong communities in the US and why this history needs to be taught in schools, how on the internet, nobody knows you're Chinese, growing up Bengali in Malaysia, having to fight to be considered Indian when you're mixed race, why medical outreach into Asian communities is so important, etc.

I've been reading slowly through these pieces and I'm still not done. And I'm not going to link to any of them. You need to go to the carnival and peruse on your own. Here it is again. Go get 'em!

Our fucked up healthcare industry strikes again.

I just heard today that comatose Deftones bassist Chi Cheng's insurance company has refused to continue coverage for his treatment. His family has had to set up a website to solicit donations to support his care.

Cheng was in an automobile accident in November, which might have killed him had three off-duty EMTs not happened to drive by with all their gear. I haven't been able to find any information about why Cheng's insurance carrier decided to drop him when he needed them the most, but if you have a moment, try shooting off an email to Obama or your local or state brass asking them to do something about healthcare in our country.

Aside from playing bass for the Deftones, the Buddhist Cheng is a poet and community activist for homeless youth and battered women. He also has a wife and child. Please consider donating; his condition continues to improve.

Just ... just take a minute, and bliss out on this video, from a performance in England in 1964. Yeah, that's it ... rock me like my back ain't got no bones ...

Don't say I never do nothin' for ya.

Last you heard from me on this topic, I was promising some profiles of AzN Wimmin! And I haven't delivered! Yet!

The joke is so obvious, I'm almost ashamed to make it. But cut me some slack, I had to sit through two hours of this stuff:

This movie doesn't have a running time, it has a half-life.

Okay, I got it out. Now: it's not that bad.

One thing we haven't talked about yet is the start of Women's History Month, which is March. It's a great time to highlight the accomplishments of women, and a lot of organizations are jumping on the bandwagon.

One of the coolest things I've seen so far is a Glamour photo spread showing female "American Icons," played by current celebrities. E.g.: Hayden Panettiere as Amelia Earhart and Lindsey Lohan as Madonna. It's a great idea, and highlights national treasures of sports and political action as well as entertainment.

However.

Sorry, but it's raining. I have no little sarcasm, and no made-up theme, for Hyphen Lynks this week. It's just the news, plus a few undigested opinions, from all over the place. Please feel free to insert your own sarcastic comments below. Or to suggest themes. Above, enjoy a vid of Our Tamlyn explaining why everyone needed to vote last November. Glad she did. Why Tamlyn? See below.

Are you a poet interested in working in an exclusively Asian American workshop? Kundiman is taking applications for its 2009 Retreat.

The following is directly quoted from Kundiman's announcement. Please don't ask us for more information; we don't have any! Just go to the links below and ask them.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Ready to have a good cry? Pretty much everybody does when they see this, according to Broadsheet.

Please do embed and post this video of all these lovely couples and families who will lose their rights to each other if Ken Starr's legal brief seeking to nullify the marriages that happened in California before Prop 8 isn't stopped.

To go along with our rational new political era, the news is that hysteria about the black vote on California's Prop 8 needs to take a chill pill.

In honor of the ongoing Avatar controversy (in which a bunch of Asian and Inuit characters from a cartoon are going to be played by white actors in the live-action film) here's a brief and incomplete history of -- not merely yellowface (a blogger recently did this treatment of yellowface in general but I can't find and here's the post) -- but incidence of white actors taking strong Asian roles that an Asian actor might have actually wanted.

I finally decided that I wanted to stand with the
arrival of the new majority. I wanted to join with millions in flipping
a big bird to those who insisted this country was "center-right." No, I
wanted to say, November 4th showed we are progressive-left. Perhaps
even my father.

Still I couldn't get the words of Rosa
Clemente -- the 36 year-old Green Party vice-presidential candidate who
was for many of us just as much a symbol of hope and progress and
change -- out of my head. "If we become the majority," she told me last
summer, "then we're going to have more people like us put into these
positions from really moving us towards justice."

As we look
at who Obama has brought in to his administration thus far, I'm struck
by the notion that perhaps even he doesn't yet recognize the
transformative possibilities of the new majority that elected him.

Cornel
West said last March, "I told Obama that when he wins -- which I think he
will --I will celebrate for one day, I'll breakdance in the morning and
party in the afternoon. But the next day, I'll become one of his major
critics."

Two -- no, three -- views on today: one from the center and two from out here. (The second vid is from Jay Smooth, the blogger who broke the Hot 97 story, lo, these many years ago. The quote is from Jeff Chang, thanks to Momo.)

What do you think about the inauguration? Obama's address? What he said he was going to do? Are we swinging to the left or is Obama walking right? And are we now, officially, "post-race"?

Some rules: please try to stick to the topic of the inauguration and speculation about Obama's first days in office. I'd also like to hear your thoughts on what the significance to anti-racism will be, that we have just inaugurated our first black president. No grandstanding or agendas, please!

In the countdown to Obama's inauguration, the media is going crazy with speculation about what Obama will change in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

While I was at my parents' for the holidays, I spoke with a friend of the family who had been helping to take care of my grandmother until her death this spring. This woman -- with nearly grown kids -- had just finished college and was considering going on to grad school in hospital or healthcare administration.

With the US's largest generation ever -- baby boomers -- about to enter retirement age, geriatric health care is the biggest growth industry of our depressed moment. My friend had been getting cold-called all through December by graduate programs anxious to sign her up. It's looking very much like -- for an American of any age looking to get into healthcare -- the goose just started laying golden, golden eggs.

For an American-born, that is. Not so much for immigrants. Because one of the hangovers of the hysterically xenophobic and PATRIOT
ACT-hobbled Bush era is a bottleneck on processing visas and work
permits even for much-needed professionals in under-employed fields.
Another hangover is continuing funding cuts for health care. This is
a formula for disaster in geriatric health care, one in which wealthy
Americans will compete with each other for substandard care, and middle
class elderly will get left out entirely. Forget about the working
class.

Caught in the middle of all of this is the Filipina nurse.

Yes, that's right, chicks 'n' chickens: I SAID "CHRISTMAS"! And I'm an atheist.

But that don't mean I don't love me some dead pine tree on a stick, hearing seasonal rock songs that might have been clever 25 years ago for the eighty-two-thousand-five-hundred-and-twelfth time, and drinking lactose-intoleration nog. Love that rum and cream, even if I come from a family in which the entire greatest generation was alcoholics so the entire baby boomer generation is afraid to heft one for the holidays. Too Much Information? NO IT'S NOT! IT'S CHRISTMAS!

Anent the season, the news is being softpedaled, I guess because that's how you sell a lot of stuff as a people, we're just optimistic that way. So I had to dig through a lot of "holiday" cheer, bad fusion recipes, and east-meets-west human "interest" stories to bring you the following paltry list of whatevers. Enjoy!

This is gonna kill me.

One of my favorite TV shows of the past couple years has been Nickelodeon's anime-inflected cartoon drama Avatar: The Last Airbender. Although most of the names responsible for the show are not Asian names, the show takes place in an all-Asian-Pacific fantasy world that actually WORKS. The world is divided into nations modeled on Inuit, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Pacific Islander cultures. That means ALL of the characters are some kind of Asian Pacific. There are no other races/ethnicities.

Aside from this wonderful fact, the show is beautifully done. The music is good (if a little ching-chongy at times), the art starts out good and gets fantastic as the show goes on, and the stories are well-written and full of complex character development. It's really good work.

And then, I found out that M. Night Shyamalan had been tapped to direct a live action film of the series. How cool is that?

So the news this week that the main characters -- who are from Tibetan, Inuit, and Japanese-based cultures -- have been cast and are being played by white actors ... well it just stuck a knife in my heart. It's been done many times before: most notably in the recent casting of white actors to play the distinctly dark-toned characters  in Ursula le Guin's classic magical bildungsroman A Wizard of Earthsea.

But Avatar is different. It's not being adapted from a book. It's being adapted from a television show where the audience has already seen the characters' ethnicities -- and they are distinct, as you can see in the fan video above. Furthermore, the Avatar generation is less fussed about race, and more used to diversity. Casting Avatar all white is just so ... unnecessary.

Why? Why are they doing it? Argh!

I'm sending a letter.

Via.

The bad news is that, no matter what a lickspittle striver you were this year, you might not get that bonus, 'cuz the economy sux.

The good news is that, by pretending to be a conscious aZn who only cares about kultcher, you can save money on gifts, AND out-virtue all your friends! Here's how!

So, we've had some discussion in the past few weeks about Prop 8 here at Hyphen blog, and I wanna give you guys the chance to really dig in. Check out the article below and have at it!