On Friday, Hillary Clinton was at a joint meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists/National Association of Hispanic Journalists and mentioned a South Asian American, Khizr Khan.
The Constitution-toting Khan has become democracy’s “model minority supreme.”
The South Asian immigrant,...
She’s not using the middle name anymore. Maybe that’s because it’s a new era. She’s her own woman now.
But Hillary always had me at Rodham. Her father, Hugh, was a Navy chief petty officer who became a salesman, then started his own drapery business out of Chicago. And on the Howell side, her mothe...
Considering the evangelical tilt of the GOP, the only time Donald Trump came close to talking about God in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was when he talked about himself.
“I am your voice,” Trump declared to the American people.
If you ever wanted to speak in tongues,...
Dr. Toribio Flores is an ear, nose, and throat guy at the Cleveland Clinic. And he’s going to the Republican Convention.
“I’m not afraid,” he tells me.
But I know most of America is.
We’ve arrived at the point many of us have been dreading. The GOP is all set to be re-branded Trump’s Old Party,...
When Dallas happened, I was already upset by the shootings all over the world this summer, from Bangladesh to Baton Rouge and Minnesota. But I was in Berkeley, Calif., where I was hoping a little art would help.
Berkeley already puts me in another world. But I was in yet another subworld because I ...
I hope you have a bang up July Fourth.
Our country and the world could use a good explosive, safe, and sane display of freedom and liberty.
We’ve had too much of the opposite, the stifling, intimidating, freedom-robbing violence that puts all of us, and the world, on edge.
From Orlando, Florida, ...
With Orlando still fresh in the national consciousness, is there anyone who doesn’t know what constitutes a hate crime?
And yet, when it comes to Asian Americans, America has not always been sure.
That is one of the main lessons of the classic case of Vincent Chin, when the legal system stumbled b...
Father’s Day is this weekend, so I’m thinking about my dad, again.
After all these years, and despite my own dear children, I still defer to my late father.
It’s still his day.
And now suddenly, thanks to Orlando and Donald Trump, it really does feel like the late 1920s and 1930s again in America...
On the occurrence of the worst mass shooting and act of domestic terror in U.S. history, this is the kind of diversity we don’t like to talk about.
The perp is one of us.
The alleged shooter is 29-year-old Omar Siddiqui Mateen, born in New York to Afghani immigrants. Mateen’s an American of South ...
I was still a small boy when I first heard Muhammad Ali’s infamous declaration that all the world heard. And remembered.
It was the bellow of self-esteem that came deep from within Ali.
It struck me deep in the heart.
He was the greatest?
I took him at his word. There was no question.
In Februa...
Hillary Clinton changed her schedule and is back in California campaigning again. And it wasn’t just to give that policy speech in San Diego.
Her words were like scuds at the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, of the now defunct Trump University.
Clinton could have given that speec...
In 1996, Asian Americans suffered from what I dubbed our ACDC problem: The Asian Campaign Donation Controversy.
And it definitely disrupted Asian American involvement in the U.S. political process for at least a decade.
So when CNN reported this week that the Justice Department’s Public Integrity ...
When Joyce Xi graduates from college next week, I hope the celebratory pride and joy she and her family experience will be so tremendous, it will blast away the cloud of suspicion and shame that has hovered over them the last year, once and for all.
That’s always the hope when you come to a “good” ...
With everything so presumptive in politics these days, it’s easy to see why the primary season has turned secondary.
So Donald Trump crushing his GOP opponents in Nebraska and West Virginia was just page A4 in my morning newspaper on Wednesday morning. (Oh yeah, newspapers, I still read them. But I...
Happy Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month (the official name signed into law, as per President George H.W. Bush‘s pen), or Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, or AANHPI Month.
By whatever name you choose, it’s still May–our time to revel in our Asian-ness and help people understan...
For an Asian American guy like me, who has a penchant to go amok, Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” with its purple banana reference, was always a favorite.
But now the lyrics seemed to have a divine message:
‘Cause in this life Things are much harder than in the after world In this life You’re on your o...
Color lines were broken on April 15, 1947, almost a generation before the Civil Rights Act.
That still left a lot of barriers to break down, even after Jackie Robinson took his first step into fair territory on a major league diamond.
Surely, you didn’t see a lot of Asian Americans on baseball t...
I was just getting back to normal. Not from the overwhelming sentimentality of watching the original “American Idol” judges–Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, and Simon Cowell–take their star turn on last week’s series ending finale.
No, that wasn’t the striking finale moment for me.
I was still recoveri...
I went back to Harvard last October, and there were Asians and Asian Americans everywhere.
I even saw a Vietnamese sandwich truck at the foot of the Science Center, just outside the gates of Harvard Yard.
Of course, it was outside.
You might be able to “pahk yah cah in Hah-vahd Yahd.”
But not yo...
Hooray for the unions.
For more than a generation since Ronald Reagan’s takeout of air traffic controllers, unions have been taking it on the chin, in the shorts, and every other soft tissue place that can possibly hurt.
And now as tech Uberizes everything in America, unions have little cred with ...
