Last week, the House of Representatives voted on the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), a bill sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) to fight “a war on unborn little girls” among Asian immigrants. But does such a threat even exist in the Asian American community?

Washington, DC, celebrates the 100th anniversary of Tokyo's gift of 3,000 cherry trees as a symbol of friendship between the US and Japan. But in the midst of the festivities, let's not forget our darker history.

Civil rights activist Fred Korematsu became the first Asian American to be part of the National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection.

Independent filmmaker James Z. Feng's MMA documentary Fight Life premieres on Friday, January 20.

Call me old-fashioned or idealistic, but there is something really touching about the Four Freedoms paintings Norman Rockwell produced during World War II. Though we live in a different political landscape today, those freedom are no less alive than they were in the 1940s.

When an event begins with something like, “Yes, it’s meant to be racist and discriminatory,” you can probably guess that some people are going to be upset. That’s exactly what UC Berkeley’s Campus Republicans did with their pay-by-the-race bake sale.

Want to see more Asian American faces in the mainstream media? Here are three great Asian American film projects that could use your support.

Fourteen-year-old Sukanya Roy was crowned National Spelling Bee Champion after correctly spelling ‘cymotrichous.’

From “anchor babies” to “tourism babies,” the wee ones just can’t seem to catch a break.

In the last year, the news media has been peppered with stories about illegal immigrants sneaking across our borders to have children and then staying in the country to raise them as US citizens. Cue the arguments about anchor babies not paying taxes, depleting US resources, making a mockery of the Constitution, et cetera.

Having missed the memo on outdated racial stereotypes, social critic Caitlin Flanagan keeps the fear alive in her recent article in The Atlantic, where she discusses the paranoia that Western white ‘good mothers’ have about all these gosh darn upstart Asian robots taking Junior’s place at Yale and how it’s all because of these insane Asian women parceling out switchings like cough lozenges.

While national attention is focused on giving undocumented students the opportunity to go to college, Asian American students face the peculiar dilemma of being too over-achieving to qualify as a minority, despite making up less than 5 percent of the US population.

This picture is from a Thanksgiving Day meal at the Rohwer Relocation Camp’s staff mess-hall in McGehee, AR, 1942. Though accurate population statistics were hard to come by, due to the constant movement in the internment of Japanese Americans, Rohwer is estimated to have held about 8,475 people at its peak. Almost 30 percent of those were children.

Coming from a rather short family (even by Asian standards), losing track of my family members in public places has become something of a tradition. Our usual solution involves using a jump-look technique, which consists of 1. jumping and 2.quickly scanning over the tops of the aisles for other jump-lookers, aka the people you came into the store with. If you ever see people popping up and down aisles like flailing psychotic prairie dogs in a Best Buy, well, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve just spotted my family.

I might be dating myself here (chronologically, not like, romantically, because that’s weird), but the bulk of my childhood was spent growing up in the Age of the Supermodels. The mile-long legs, high cheekbones and bedroom eyes of Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, and Christie Brinkley formed my earliest standards of beauty. Even the heroines of my imagination were of that All-American cast: Nancy Drew in all her incarnations; twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield and their adventures in Sweet Valley; the Tanner sisters from Full House. 

Last month, Rich Cho of the Portland Trail Blazers became the first Asian American General Manager in the NBA. Rich kindly took time from his busy work schedule to talk candidly to Hyphen about his passion for sports, his love of sushi and the three things he’d bring with him on a desert island.

So I was on Facebook the other day and noticed a link posted by a friend I went to college with: Is Virginia the Next Arizona? My friend, now a law student at Ohio State, had prefaced the link with: “Be careful.”

Okay, so I realize that the headline doesn’t actually make that much sense when you see the DREAM acronym spelled out, but I can never resist a good (or bad) pun. DREAM stands for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, which is a proposed federal legislation that would permit undocumented immigrant students, who are otherwise law-abiding citizens, a chance to apply citizenship.

I’m not really what you call a “sports person.” I can’t tell the difference between a hockey run and a basketball goal, and have trouble distinguishing between offense and defense.

Just in time for the summer, Arizona is introducing a new term to mainstream vernacular: “anchor babies.” 

Sure, the term conjures up images of tots in little sailor caps, playfully dumping sand on each other and trying to maneuver little plastic boats through makeshift moats. But on the political scene, “anchor babies” is a term that could not be farther from the image of a happy toddler in the sun. It’s used to refer to children of undocumented imnmigrants who were born in the US -- children who are seen as “legal weights” holding the "illegal" parents in America.

As a progressive feminist-type, I am obligated first to say that beauty pageants are appalling, superficial, etcetera. As a closet girly-girl, I am fascinated by them, in kind of the same way my inner bad-ass is with tattoos. So yes, I watched Miss USA on Sunday, and it was awesome. But initially, I wasn’t that impressed by Rima Fakih of Dearborn, Michigan, who won the title of Miss USA 2010. Don’t get me wrong: she looked amazing. But what was with her weird interjections in the middle of answering her question?