Yes, we know Asian Americans are not a monolith. But pop culture is about to give us all a facelift. This is fair warning if you are one of the baby boomer Asian Americans, offspring of the early pioneer immigrants, both before and after 1965. If you were a descendent of legendary civil rights plain...
From an Asian American perspective, there are certain times when we find ourselves faced with issues bigger than the concerns of our collective ethnicities–Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Korean, et al.
In other words, the Asian part is less important than the American part in our umbrella phrase of uni...
Over the Easter weekend, Donald Trump was resurrecting his anti-immigrant rhetoric in tweets and off-handed comments. First, he blasted California for issuing pardons to a group that included three Asian Americans subject to deportation. Then he tweeted he’s changed his mind on DACA and that he woul...
Why all the hubbub about a citizenship question in the 2020 Census?
The truth is the government already has all the information it needs.
Every ten years comes the official Census. But that doesn’t mean government workers for the next decade pass the time by twiddling an abacus.
Each year there’s...
This weekend, I’ll be thinking about Peter Wang, the 15-year old from Parkland, Florida, last seen alive by his friends when he gallantly held open a classroom door for other students instead of seeking refuge himself during the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School.
For his act of courage, Wang...
If you’re of Chinese background, do you ever have non-Chinese people come up to you and try to score points with a well timed “Ni hao”?
Or if you’re Filipino, do you get a “Mabuhay” or two?
According to the latest Census numbers, there are about five million of Chinese ancestry in the U.S. and ano...
Stormy Daniels, Kim Jong Un, and trade war inducing tariffs? The Trump administration is a never-ending three-ring circus, where chaos is Trump’s best friend. How can the American public get a grip on any of the really big issues like gun control after Parkland, or the ongoing Russian investigations...
All along I was rooting for “The Shape of Water.”
I do, after all, pronounce my name, “GILL-yermo.”
It’s my line in the sand with director Guillermo del Toro.
We disagree on how to say his first name, which is my last name.
That’s diversity for you. He pronounces it the Mexican way—the double-L ...
I wish I could have hung on to the Chloe Kim snowboarding victory and let it last the entire two weeks.
This was supposed to be an Asian American Winter Olympics in Asia, especially the way NBC was pushing both Kim and men’s figure skater Nathan Chen.
We know about the Asian American Olympians of ...
Forget the orange hair. Donald Trump wants to get his white on. Or at least keep it where it’s at.
There is no other way to look at it.
Trump’s immigration agenda is all about stopping the inevitable in the U.S.
Every reputable demographic study knows the reality. At some point by mid century, ar...
Preet Bharara knows what it’s like to deal with Donald Trump.
The former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York–who made it to the cover of Time magazine for going after Wall Street criminals with a vengeance–was asked personally by President-elect Trump to stay on after the Obama Admi...
When Donald Trump gives his first actual State of the Union address, what the country really needs is a confessional, not fake news.
We need the president to come clean. Did he attempt to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller at the start of the Russia investigation last summer? The president doesn’t...
Cheska Perez is a Filipina who was brought to the U.S. by her parents when she was just six years old. It’s the standard story. She didn’t have a choice.
She didn’t know the U.S. government would shut down because of her.
Perez entered legally when her father, like so many others from the Philippi...
If his pussy grabbing rhetoric wasn’t enough to sink his candidacy in 2016, why do you think Trump’s talking about immigrants from Africa and Haiti as coming from “shithole” countries will phase him?
But now, the president has gone too far. His racism cannot be excused.
Trump has made it a practic...
That strange immigration meeting at the White House on Tuesday looked like a scene from a political “Twilight Zone.”
Was Trump really negotiating an immigration deal with a bipartisan group from Congress while the cameras rolled? Sure looked like it.
The president was even urging what he called a ...
After I burned up my Kindle reading “Fire and Fury”–Michael Wolff’s fly-on-the-wall tale of the Trump White House–here’s the most positive and optimistic thing I can say: There is no reason an Asian American couldn’t be president of the United States in the near future.
Oh, we’d need to have the mo...
I swear if I had a nickel for every time someone has mentioned bitcoin to me in the last month, I would be really, really rich.
Not Trump rich. But who wants to be that?
So on the last business day of 2017, I found myself buying into all the bit business.
A bit at a time.
I know about these thin...
Donald Trump, our president of tweets and low ratings, is capping off the year spearheading the drive to bribe–or, ahem, give you a Christmas gift–that’s more like a ticking time bomb.
Or is that what a tax cut is supposed to sound like?
The ticking should only last until 2025, as the individual t...
Off and on, throughout the years, I knew Ed Lee.
His death at age 65 leaves me in shock.
Roy Moore? Special election? Alabama? On this election day, if you’re an Asian American who follows politics, Lee’s passing eclipses it all.
You can’t overstate the importance of the death of Ed Lee.
He wasn...
When you heard the news that General Michael Flynn had flipped, I just wanted to assure you that those of us of Filipino heritage aren’t upset by the use of that phraseology at all.
We’re ecstatic. At least, I am.
Flynn, the former National Security Advisor to Trump, is no flip, but he most assure...
