I’m crying. And it’s not from tear gas. I was watching cable news. Just like the president.
On my screen, a young Asian American woman, blonde streaks in her hair, desperately helps her distressed Asian American male companion. He’s squinting in anguish as if mocking Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at ...
Disgusted by the video of a white Minneapolis cop with a knee to the neck of George Floyd for at least eight minutes until Floyd, an African American man, succumbs and dies?
You should be. Or let’s make that, you better be.
If you haven’t realized it yet, that person could just as easily be an Asi...
When the Class of 2020 was admitted to Harvard, I had just finished a visit to my alma mater.
The most memorable thing I saw at Harvard Yard was a very young Chinese girl who, at the insistence of her parents, was looking through the lens and taking their picture on the steps of Widener Library. Pe...
The White House doesn’t know which end is up when it comes to Covid.
Mask or no mask? Test or no test? Social distancing? Only, apparently, from common sense.
Trump is leading everyone to rush back in and open up, even as the U.S. death toll rises to over 80,000, more deaths than the Vietnam War.
...
It’s easy to be annoyed with Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, a/k/a the yearly excuse for non-APAs to pay attention to us.
As a group, we are notoriously “unstatisticized” (coinage mine). There never seems to be a large enough sample size of Asian Americans to be statistically meaningful.
It...
This year, the man who puts the “P” in Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, or the “NHPI” in Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander, a/k/a AANHPI Month, is Dr. Raynald Samoa.
When Dr. Samoa tells you how to pronounce his name, he says it’s like “rainbow” with no “b.” So it’s “Ray-no," a ...
In 2020, we’re all practically Covid Americans caught in a crisis that could last two years and infect up to 70 percent of America, according to media reports.
That’s why the key guest on my APA Heritage Month special of Emil Amok’s Takeout, is the person I’ve dubbed one of the country’s “Most Esse...
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is around the corner, and from all appearances, most of us will be sheltering in place.
But as I mused a few weeks ago, APA Heritage Month doesn’t have to be cancelled.
Not when we have the technology to overcome it all!
I urge you all to participate in my li...
Gem Scorp is positive. But he’s feeling better and going back to work. He should be getting a thank you for his courage.
Instead, he’s getting a right-handed slap from the commander-in-chief.
Enabled by the virus, President Trump’s move to “pause” legal immigration is a way to sneak a major policy...
You’ve zoomed, right? It’s the latest way to reach out and not touch someone in these times of social distancing. If you want an Asian American perspective on the news, here’s my conversation with longtime civil rights activist Phil Tajitsu Nash. A professor in Asian American Studies at University o...
Next on Emil Amok’s Takeout:
I talk with Gem Scorp, a registered nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, who thinks we may have turned a corner in the fight against the pandemic.
He tells me things have calmed down a bit. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being normal, things were at a 2 four weeks ago. They’r...
If we’re at war with the virus, why does President Trump seem so eager to relax his trigger finger? So he can point his finger at something else–like the World Health Organization? China? Or Asian Americans?
Now that he’s finally realized Covid-19 is no hoax, he’s all about playing the “not me” gam...
Our sabre and shield against the pandemic? Hand washing and social distancing. Keep at it. Wash up and have a Zoom meeting.
But since the curve has not flattened, and we don’t really know how many are infected (not until we test nearly everyone), we may be at the point for another tool in the U.S.:...
I wish it were an April Fool’s joke, like everything else last month.
But with Trump this week extending his initial “we’ll see what happens” period beyond 15 days to the end of April, what prudent state official wouldn’t look at Trump’s slow response record and just assume his timeline is going to...
New Emil Amok’s Takeout Podcast!
Emil Guillermo talks to San Francisco State Asian American Studies chair Russell Jeung about the numbers of Asian Americans who have come forward to describe stabbings, hateful name calling, and even people spitting and coughing on them. Almost 100 reports have come...
So how’s the new “social distancing” going for you? When you’re an Asian American or a person of color, the old “social distancing” used to mean just one thing—racism.
It was just a form of separation, what happens when people segregated from the “other.”
No need to hang out with us. Distance was ...
CBS reporter Weijia Jiang tweeted how a White House staffer joked about the coronavirus in a racist way, calling it the “Kung Flu.”
If comedian Joe Wong said it, maybe it could be funny.
But when a White House aide says it to a working reporter in the midst of a national emergency, it’s just not a...
As a broken America shuts down, are you thinking about each other and yearning for the way things used to be?
You should be.
Fellow virus fighters, this is the ultimate in the DIY health world.
When health insurance isn’t a right for all, and when it’s up to you whether you’re sick or well, then ...
Andrew Yang has become a surrogate of sorts for Asian Americans. It’s the benefit of running for the highest office and losing—the very thing Donald Trump always wanted to do but couldn’t figure out how. He became president. Our loss.
But Yang has done losing right.
And now he’s become the go to f...
Last Friday, I asked Roger Lau, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign manager, whether Warren would stay in or pull out if she lost on Super Tuesday. Lau said without hesitation, “We have a plan to go all the way through.”
“This is going to be a long race,” he added, noting that Warren was in 31 states, with...
