Larry Itliong (left) and Cesar Chavez (far right)

For me, the back story is the juicy stuff. I want to know about ingredients and underpinnings -- the stuff that comes before the conclusion. Maybe that's why I've always loved a good obituary.

In this column, I'll be offering "old news" of people and events of the past or not-quite-present, profiling Asian Americans who may not be the most famous or the most influential -- or even the most likable -- but like everyone, have stories of their own.

If you've got a suggestion for someone you want to see profiled, please leave a comment.

R.I.P. Pat Morita, forever immortalized as Mr. Miyagi on The Karate Kid and formerly of Happy Days fame. A pioneering Asian American actor, comedian, and internment camp survivor, Morita was the first Asian American actor I ever saw in a lead role on the big screen.

Henry Hwang, founder of the first Asian American bank (and father of playwright David Henry Hwang) passed away last Saturday at the age of 77. His story is the stuff of immigrant fairytales: arrive in the U.S. with nothing but a few bucks, toil away in a Chinese laundromat, get a CPA, start a bank, and eventually sell it for 90 million big ones. No wonder he was a big Republican supporter and Reagan crony.

Add spelling bees to the list of Asian American competitive triumps (along with ping-pong, competitive eating, and the Westinghouse Science Awards). The top four finishers in last week's National Spelling Bee were all Indian American kids, who have garnered first place in five out of the past seven Bees. Is it a nerd thing, a cultural thing, or both? The New York Times seems to think so.

Little did I know that I am actually Korean and Japanese. Yes: according to Face Analyzer, which “analyzes” a photo of you to ever-so-scientifically determine your real race, I am a mind-boggling 90 percent Korean/Japanese, news I am sure will stun my Chinese Filipino parents.

In addition to the weirdo race calculations, the Analyzer has deemed me Average Intelligence (oh well), Average Ambition, Average Politeness, and Very Low Gay Factor, among other things. The white collar versus blue collar stereotypes are super lame (and what does Gay Factor really mean?), but I’m determined to upload more pictures until I can finesse that hidden and magical combination of races that will explain my true origins.

Perhaps more enjoyable is the wonderful Face Transformer, a java tool which allows you to transform your face into you as a child, as an elderly person, as a manga cartoon, as a chimp (SCARY), as a member of a different race or gender. My “masculine” doppelganger might hypothetically resemble the long-lost cross-dressing sibling I never had, while my African American self was kinda cute.

Click here to see me as a white girl with swirly skin. Eek!

Haven't we all witnessed lame-ass tattoos in Asian languages, mostly on people who don't know the language in the first place? For your browsing amusement, I bring to you Hanzi Smatter, where users submit photos of such tattoos to a guy named Tian, who then posts on whether or not they actually mean anything. As Tian writes: "I have been a fan of the website Engrish.com for years. To my surprise, there is virtually no website existent for pointing out the faults in Westerners' interest of Eastern culture, especially the usage of Hanzi Chinese characters. As a Chinese American, I felt it was my duty and honor to educate the public about the misusage of Chinese characters." The results are somewhat unintentionally hilarious: witness such photographic evidence as the sorry sucker who got the Chinese word for "idiot" permanently etched on his flesh.

If Harry's entry about Iris Chang's suicide wasn't disturbing enough, I just found a few more disturbing links while reading the news.

Namely, that pharmacists are now refusing to dispense birth control on "moral grounds". (I read a similar blurb here a few months back, as well.) Since when is the birth control pill considered an abortion? And since when can one's personal beliefs interfere with fulfilling prescriptions and providing basic medical care? Seriously, I am so disturbed. Tell me I'm not the only one.

Not to make this blog too San Francisco-centric (San Francentric?), but I’ve been walking past the hotel workers picketing at the Holiday Inn two blocks from my house in SoMa each night for the past month, feeling pissed that they were still there, night after night, locked out of their jobs. But as Jennifer mentioned yesterday, SF mayor Gavin Newsom threatened to—and actually did—join the picket line today! Maybe mayoral pressure will mean that one day soon I’ll walk past the hotel and not see the strikers, because they will have been able to return to their jobs.

Hearing that neighborhood news was a lot sweeter than reading about the Asian sex slavery that occurred just another few blocks away. A recent raid on a downtown massage parlor found 17 young Asian women hidden in the basement who had been trafficked into the country for forced sex slavery. This topic hit pretty close to home in more ways than one, because I’ve been researching it all week for a documentary that the company I work at is funding, and the statistics are horrifying: of the more than one million women and girls who are sold, transported and forced into sexual slavery each year, 50,000 are in the United States. It makes me wonder about the “Oriental massage parlor” with the blackened windows up the street from my house that I walk past at least twice a day.