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
I confess to something very un-American.
Or since it’s me, would that be un-Asian American? Un-Filipino American?
This week on the day after the attacks on Brussels, for the first time ever, I really did feel a bit of fear.
It wasn’t the full blown Donald Trump/Ted Cruz fear of all things Islam–i
Even as an American Filipino, an Asian American, it’s hard not to be engaged by the historical news happening in Cuba.
People are getting choked up over seeing the first American president in Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
(White House photo)
Even me.
And you’ll hear that fact over and ov
Is Donald Trump a racist?
That was a great first-round made-for-TV question from reporter Karen Tumulty at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Miami, put on by Univision, the Washington Post and carried by CNN.
I kept wondering if anyone would have had the guts to ask any Southern Dixiecrat such a
It was getting so bad on the 88th Oscars telecast, I had the sound turned down. But then Chris Rock introduced the Oscar accountants. It was a bad enough sight gag. I only saw the three Asian American kids with the black-rimmed glasses.
Oh yeah, because they’re good at math.
Is that any better tha
My dad once told me that when he first arrived in the U.S. in the 1920s, some Americans would say the family name in an odd way to his face.
I always pronounced our name, Guillermo, the Filipino way: “Gill-yer-mo.”
But he told me some insisted on taking the life and beauty out of it.
They said, “
The Twitterverse was abuzz as soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been found dead at a resort in West Texas.
I saw honest expressions of shocked disbelief, some with a mixed sense of sadness and relief that a tenacious conservative opponent had passed on.
Based o
Oakland Raiders quarterback great Kenny Stabler getting elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame made my Super Bowl Weekend. For me, that overshadowed the corporate juggernaut known as the Super Bowl, with its 100 million-plus viewers worldwide. And considering there are 1.4 billion people in Chin
