Chinese American's opera wins Pulitzer Prize

Du Yun

A CHINESE/AMERICAN won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Music. Du Yun won the honor and $15,000 prize for her opera Angel's Bone.

Du, 39, won for her savage chamber opera, a collaboration with the librettist Royce Vavrek, which finds an allegory for human trafficking in the story of two angels who are brutally mistreated after they crash-land in a suburban backyard.

"When we look at human trafficking, we always think that it's far away from us," Yun told NPR. "We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard."

The Pulitzer Prize is an annual award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States.

Du's creation is a new work of opera-theatre that follows the plight of two angels whose nostalgia for earthly delights has, mysteriously, brought them back to our world. They are found battered and bruised from their long journey by a man and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. X.E. set out to nurse the wounded angels back to health: they bathe them, wash the dirt from their nails…then lock them in a room and decide to exploit these magical beings for wealth and personal gains. 

An excerpt from the opera Angel's Bone by Du Yun and Royce Vavrek

as performed by Abigail Fischer

Angel’s Bone melds chamber music, theatre, punk rock, opera, cabaret, and electronics, exploring the dark effects and motivations behind modern-day slavery and the trafficking industry.

The award for breaking news photography went to freelancer Daniel Brehulak, whose work published in The New York Times showed the violence in the Philippines during a government crackdown on drug dealers and users.

This is the third time Brehulak was given the prestigious honor for his work He won Pulitzers in 2011 and 2015.

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RIP: Alex Tizon, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Alex Tizon, 

By Louis Chan
ASAM NEWS

A JOURNALIST who dedicated his career to writing about the marginalized and whose 2014 book "Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self," told of his struggles as an Asian/American man, is dead at the age of 57.

Alex Tizon died unexpectedly of natural causes Thursday (March 23), according to his family and the University of Oregon where he taught journalism as an assistant professor since 2011.

“My family arrived in the United States in the mid-1960s, when race was a national preoccupation,” said Tizon in an interview with AsAmNews in 2014. “The dialogue was almost always framed in terms of White and Black — White Americans and Black Americans. There were less than a million Asians in the United States at the time, and we’re still a relatively small minority today — 5 percent, I believe. I don’t think Asians have been in the country long enough and in large enough numbers for the majority of White and Black Americans to be able to associate an Asian face with being “all-American.” I don’t like it, but that’s been the fact for as long as I’ve lived here.”

Tizon was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Seattle with his family when he was just 5, according to the Seattle Times

He won journalism’s most prestigious prize, the Pulitzer, in 1997 for his investigative story with two other reporters on corruption in a federally subsidized housing program for Native Americans.

He also worked as a bureau chief in Seattle for the Los Angeles Times and has published numerous stories in The Atlantic Magazine. In fact, what could be the last story ever written by Tizon is expected to be published in The Atlantic soon.

“His death is a tragic loss not only to his family but to the entire SOJC (School of Journalism and Communication) community,” journalism director Scott Maier wrote to students at the University of Oregon.

His book, "Big Little Man" is described as a memoir based on his life experiences.

“We all at some point encountered—and continue to encounter—the deep-rooted Western notion, perpetuated by entertainment media, that Asians are at the bottom of the food chain, the weakest, the smallest, the least masculine of men,” said Tizon to AsAmNews.

It’s that sense of empathy for communities often ignored by both society and journalists that Tizon will be remembered.

“He was very curious about other people — and learning about other people helped him learn about himself,” said his wife, Melissa Tizon to the Seattle Times. “That’s what journalism did for him. His whole life quest was about trying to understand who he was, as an immigrant growing up in a largely white community.”

A memorial is scheduled for Saturday, April 1, at the Newport Convenant Church in Bellevue, Washington at 1 p.m. Flowers can be sent there or his family says donations can be made in his memory to the Asian American Journalists Association.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer announces his retirement

Nick Ut with the photo that impacted Americans' view of the Vietnam War.

Reprinted from AsAm News
AFTER 51 years with the Associated Press, Nick Ut says he will retire in March of next year, reports Ahn Do of the Los Angeles Times.

Ut, 66, is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running in terror after being badly burned by napalm.

Today Ut is a fixture at many of Los Angeles’ biggest stories including the Michael Jackson, OJ Simpson and Night Stalker trials.

“I’m a lucky guy,” said Ut. “They knew my picture and they welcomed me. That picture gave me respect and allowed me to keep doing my job.” After 51 years with the Associated Press, Nick Ut says he will retire in March of next year, reports the L.A. Times.

Today Ut is a fixture at many of Los Angeles’ biggest stories including the Michael Jackson, OJ Simpson and Night Stalker trials.

Nick Ut/Associated Press

Nick Ut's famous photo showing Kim Phuc Phan  and other children running away from a napalm attack.

“I’m a lucky guy,” said Ut. “They knew my picture and they welcomed me. That picture gave me respect and allowed me to keep doing my job.”

The napalm girl was later identified as Kim Phuc Phan. The two remain friends to this day. It was Ut who took her and some of the other children to the hospital before he ran back to AP to develop his photos.

“Kim’s picture continue making me famous,” he said.

“That photograph is more powerful than bombs,” Phuc said this summer at a Los Angeles Press Club gala, presenting a career achievement award to her “Uncle Ut.”

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Ut was assigned to Tokyo where he remained until his arrival in the United States two years later.

(Views from the Edge contributed to this report.)

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Vietnamese/American's debut novel about Vietnam War's impact on his immigrant community wins Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

VIET THANH NGUYEN came to the United States from Vietnam as a 4-year old refugee in 1975 with his family.

Forty years later, he is the winner for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his debut novel "The Sympathizer," reported the Los Angeles Times yesterday (April 18).

Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California, is still getting over the shock of winning the highly prestigious and internationally recognized award.

“They say that 'The Sympathizer' really did win the Pulitzer Prize. Unless this is some cosmic virtual reality trick. I’m stunned.”

Here's how the Pulitzer committee described his novel:

A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.

 It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

“I’ve been thinking about the Vietnam War all my life,” Nguyen told a reporter last year. “I started watching things like Apocalypse Now and reading books about the war when I was 10 or 11.”

When his agent encouraged him to write a novel, he knew exactly what he was going to write about.

“I knew immediately that I wanted to write a novel about a spy because I thought a spy story would be a good way to tell this history in an entertaining way. Much of this novel is based on things that really happened, so it was a matter of finding the character that would allow me to string together these events in the plot,” Nguyen said.

From his Facebook page, Nguyen, gives a shout-out to University of California, Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department in this message he posted upon hearing the news that he had won the Pulitzer:

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