SOME NOTABLE deaths occurred in 2017. Some well known, but most remained under the radar, to most of America.Each - in their own way - had an impact on the AAPI community. We give them a final aloha.
Eddie Kamae, Singer, composer and legend. He was the founder of The Sons of Hawaii, which sought to emphasize the working-class origins of "real" Hawaiian music. He was inducted into the Ukulele Hall of Fame. Kamae died in Honolulu at age 89.
Srinivas Kuchibhotia
Srinivas Kuchibhotla made headlines earlier this year when he was shot and killed in Kansas by a man who screamed at him to "get out of [his] country." His widow, Dumala, has been outspoken against racial bigotry and violence and on immigration. Kuchibhotla was 32 when he was killed.
Alex Tizon, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist taught journalism as an assistant professor since 2011 at the University of Oregon. His last article published posthumously, was controversial because he confessed that his family had kept a Filipina as a servant/slave for most of his life. He was 57 when he died March 23.
Fresh Kid Ice
Aaron Lee used the pen name "Arun Likhati" to write his blog Angry Asian Buddhist. Lee's online persona wasn't always angry, though. He sensed a tension Asian/American Buddhists and white Buddhists, which make up the majority of the faith in the U.S. . Lee died on Oct. 21 at age 34.
Christopher Wong Won is better known as rapper Fresh Kid Ice. He co-founded of the rap group 2 Live Crew. Won later left the group to form his own label — Chinaman Records. He died in July at age 53.
Mayor Ed Lee
Wood Moy, trailblazing Asian/American acto ris best known for his iconic role as Jo in Wayne Wang’s classic 1982 film Chan is Missing. Moy died Nov. 8 at the age of 99.
Ed Lee, the first Asian/American mayor of San Francisco was a civil rights and affordable housing advocate. As mayor, he declared San Francisco as a "sanctuary" city,.
He was 65 when he died last month in San Francisco.
March Fong Eu, the first Asian/American woman to hold an elected constitutional statewide office in Calfiornia died at the age of 95.
________________________________________________________________________________
LATE AUTHOR Alex Tizon revealed a family secret that he, his parents and his siblings kept hidden for over 50 years: His family had a slave. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tizon;s article , "My Family's Slave," was published posthumously in the June issue of The Atlantic, three months after he died.
In a country where extreme poverty presents little or zero options, it is not uncommon for a poor Filipino to become a household servant in exchange for meals and roof over their heads. Sometimes, a small salary comes along with the job; sometimes, not. It is a practice rooted deep in Philippine culture that existed in the pre-Spanish colonial period. The Spanish, who dealt in the slave trade, institutionalized the practice. In time, these "servants" can become like members of the family, or, as in Tizon's case, treated like a household slave.
Tizon's heartbreaking story tells what happens when his family moved to the U.S. and brought their unpaid servant, Eudocia Tomas Pulido, with them. In Tizon's childhood, it was her face he'd see first when he awoke and the last one he saw when he went to sleep. As Tizon got older and learned the meaning of "slave." He realized the circumstances that brought "Lola" into his household, his conflicting feelings eventually led to estrangement with his parents over how they treated her. It might be difficult for non-Filipinos to understand how the family could keep their secret for so long. I've known women like Tizon's "Lola" and understand how he, a beneficiary of a U.S. education and upbringing, still had to struggle to keep the secret from the rest of the world. "Slave" might be too harsh a word to describe the condition they live in and the economic and social mores that created this class of people. At the same time, "servant" is not an adequate word for that person. Sometimes, once in the U.S. and exposed to American culture with its broad number of choices, these people manage to escape their host families and disappear in the nether world of what Filipinos call tago nang tago, TNT in Filipino shorthand, meaning "hiding and hiding." In contemporary American parlance, they become "undocumented immigrants." In the end, Tizon brought Lola into his family as a true family member, as a lola (grandmother) with the respect, love and care that comes with that honorific title. It's a moving piece, it demonstrates that with Tizon's death, the AAPI community -- indeed, all of America -- lost a voice that could touch even the most hardened heart.
In a note accompanying the article Atlantic editor-in-chief by Jeffrey Goldberg writes:
The pulitzer prize–winning reporter Alex Tizon built an exemplary career by listening to certain types of people—forgotten people, people on the margins, people who had never before been asked for their stories. Alex’s wife, Melissa Tizon, told me recently that her husband was always impatient with small talk, because he believed that all people had within them an epic story, and he wanted to hear those epic stories—and then help tell them to the world. “Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story,” he liked to say.
... Alex offered us the chance to publish a story he had been waiting much of his life to tell, the remarkable tale of Lola, the woman who was his family’s secret slave in the Philippines, and who remained their slave when they moved to America.
Tizon's wife "Melissa told (Atlantic editor) Denise (Kersten Wills) and me that Alex wanted, more than anything else, to bring Lola's story to the world," Goldberg writes. "'This was his ultimate story,' Melissa said. 'He was trying to write it for five or six years. He struggled with it. But when he started writing it for The Atlantic, he stopped struggling. He wrote it with such ease.'"
"The eradication of all forms of slavery remains an unfinished goal of civilization, and of this magazine, and stories like Alex's help us understand slavery's awful persistence," writes Goldberg.
Tizon's article has created a bit of a firestorm on Twitter since the article was published online.
Filipinos in the Philippines and in the United States, however, had a very different point of view.
That just goes to show the different perspectives created by different cultures. That goes a long ways in explaining why Filipinos in the Philippines can so overwhelmingly support Rodrigo Duterte as their president, who is routinely criticized in the western press for the thousands of extra-judicial killings of alleged drug dealers.
We in the west, looking across the Pacific from our comfortable couches, reading our tablets and drinking wine, can't understand how terrible things can get; how dire, abject poverty and socio-cultural inequality can bring about an environment in which people accept the loss of due process rights, cheer the extra-judicial killings, bring a foul-mouthed, anti-American president to power and think nothing of taking advantage of the poor's hopeless plight.
I'm not condoning what happened in Tizon's family or what's happening in the Philippines politically, but sometimes, before we start pointing fingers, we do need to walk in someone
else's shoes. We should also realize how easy it is to justify something you know is ultimately not right.
In reading Tizon's article, one can almost feel the tension in his writing and how he must have struggled with this throughout his own life. At the very least, we should look at our own lives and how many times we turned away from a beggar, ignored the homeless sleeping in doorways or turn a deaf ear to the verbal slights against people of a different color; or turn a blind eye when we see an injustice being done because of at an accent, a turban or the shape of the target's eyes.
AJOURNALIST 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.
IT IS ALL about sex and power! That's the short answer to the question in the headline that's been tackled by scholars, social scientists, psychologists and Asian American men f-o-r-e-v-e-r. You can write a book (a thick one) for a more comprehensive response. In fact, that has been done. The touchy subject would be difficult to sum it up in a short video, but Filipna American journalist Cat Sandoval gives it a valiant effort in the NBC video produced for "Take Back," a five-part series on"NBC Asian America Presents...,"a digital video channel that will feature original content centered around themes and voices found in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
From "being nerds" to being seen as threats, negative stereotypes about Asian and Asian American men "have been perpetuated and maintained through history," according to Kevin Nadal, president of the Asian American Psychological Association.
But where did those stereotypes come from? And how has that affected how Asian American men are portrayed in Hollywood?
Yes, Hollywood is a major contributor to the stereotype, but the neutering of Asian American men began long before the silver screen and television began playing major roles in influencing our world perceptions through American pop culture.
A non-Asian friend approached me recently after reading my earlier posting about the stereotype Asian men have to confront and overcome in American society. That was not surprising because he didn't know about the stereotype, but then, he was an immigrant himself and wasn't raised in this culture. I tried to explain to him that the Asian male stereotype was foisted upon us to dehumanize us, to make us lesser beings. It has affected our ability to move ahead in so many professions, our relationships with the opposite sex and how we deal with our own families. But most of all, that demeaning image affects how we feel about ourselves. Full disclosure: Yeah. I freely admit this topic is personal and for a while, I was socially crippled by that image. So, be aware, my writing is colored by that particular lens.
Alex Tizon
The late Alex Tizon, a fellow journalist, was born in the Philippines but raised in the U.S., a cultural mishmash shared by many - separated from the first-generation immigrant parents and not quite second-generation Americans. Tizon, who won a Pulitzer with the Seattle Times, wrote a book about this subject titled "Big Little Man." Young Tizon landed in an America that saw Asian women as sexy and Asian men as sexless. ... as a young boy, everything he saw and heart taught him to be ashamed of his face, his skin color, his height, described one reviewer. An interview with Tizon sheds light on all aspects of the stereotype that inspired Tizon. He had to undergo the torture of reliving the emotions and traumas he experienced as the image was hung on him like an old oversized suit. One chapter focused on the image of Asian men displayed on television, from "Bonanza's" Hop Sing to 2 Broke Girls2 character of "a diminutive, sexless, bumbling, language-challenged restaurant owner who is a constant butt of jokes. He admits that things are changing on TV with Hawaii 5-0's Daniel Dae Kim, and Steven Yeun in The Walking Dead. At the time of the interview, he express high hopes for Selfie with John Cho and the strong possibility that there romance would blossom between the two lead characters. Alas, Selfie didn't even last the first season. Despite the charming and attractive leads, the sit-com couldn't overcome the weak writing and the one-joke premise of the show. However, along came Crazy Ex-Girlfriend which features a Filipno American bro - played by Vincent Rodriguez III - as one of the leads. By the end of the first season, he gets the girl and the show featured "The Kiss," which may be worth a chapter in the annals of Asian American cultural history. Ama Yawson, a Huffington Post contributor, wrote about the stereotype with the intriguing title, "Asian-American Men:Hunks of Burning Loe or Wimps with Small Wieners." In her blog, she interviewed Ranier Maningding, a Filipino American who pens the popular blog The Love Life of an Asian Guy. Yawson's take on the issue is interesting in that she sees the stereotype as a form of bullying. I think she's on to something there. RELATED:
Anti-miscegenation laws were drafted to prevent the marital mixing of races, usually seen as men of color and white women. The laws were originally intended to prevent black-white marriages, but they were extended to include Asian men, (or Mongol too. White men used to beat up on Filipinos because the Filipino farmworkers of the early 20th century with their flashy zoot suits, slicked-back hair and cologne attracted white women. In other words, the Filipinos were a threat to their manhood. The sexy Filipino drew the ire of white men who took to raiding their farmworker homes and beating up the Filipinos. One such raid resulted in at least one shooting death in Watsonville, California Maybe the stereotype was created and nurtured in order to dismiss the threat to the masculinity of white men. And what's the third-grader's response to a threat? You either beat him up or you begin to make fun of him. Besides calling men of color names, you emasculate them, you make up the myth about penis size, you set the attractiveness standards to benefit Europeans and anyone else -- from Africa, Asia or Native America -- as undesirable. Maningding writes in his blog:
The problem with being an Asian American Man is that you are stuck at a fork in the road but you've been told to stay still: while America tugs on your sense of identity and masculinity you want to push back and voice your concerns. But how do teach a group of men to SPEAK UP when they were raised to politely raise their hands? How do you untangle these robot wires and let these men feel? We may ace and code our way to a middle-class but given the open floor beneath our feet where no one is willing to see us - not Asian women,not other men, not even Asians from Asia ... It's like we're still on that railroad pounding away at the ground. This is our life.
There are signs this negative paradigm is shifting. Besides Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Alan Yang's and Aziz Ansari's Masters of None and Daniel Wu's Into the Badlands feature Asian/American leads and explores aspects of the Asian American male psyche that is not covered in CEG. Even Dr. Ken has had its moments and certainly Steven Yeun and Daniel Dae Kim are doing their parts (for now. There is strong speculation that Yeun's badass character, Glenn Rhee, might meet his end in the first episode of the new season of The Walking Dead.) On the movie side, Yeun is playing the male lead in another stereotype-busting role in the upcoming movie Mayhem, John Cho continues to expand his role in the Star Trek franchise and there is hope the film version of Crazy Rich Asians will show another side of the Asian male that is rarely seen by western audiences -- a romantic lead. But these fictional characters are also being augmented by real-life Asian American men excelling in their highly visible fields from medicine and research to the political world to the culinary industry to Silicon Valley. And to be completely rounded out, more and more Asian American men are showing up in our criminal justice system (Hey, if we clamor for a more complete vision of Asian American males, then we have to own the negative facet of us, too.) As you can tell, a lot has been written about the subject but you don't overcome an image that took a century and a half to ingrain itself into the American consciousness in one column or a single video. It takes all of us chipping away at that image that's been weighing us down until we're seen as individuals worth taking seriously, worth admiring, worth loving. I encourage you to click on some of the links provided in this article if you want to delve deeper into the subject.
