DANIEL SEUNG TAK OH WRITES – The Dalai Lama is often seen as the face of peace, love, and compassion in the West. To the Tibetan people, he is the vanguard of their national identity and a living buddha. However, to the Chinese he is a dangerous demon, or as…
YOLANDA NOSAKHARE WRITES — At a time when hate crimes against Asian Americans are soaring across the US, the arrival of director Lee Isaac Chung’s film “Minari” hit theaters in the nick of time. The film’s storyline follows a first-generation Korean-American family’s experience moving to Arkansas in the 1980s. They…
TOM PLATE WRITES — The future is not always all that tough to predict: “Should both Pacific powers remain frozen in stereotype, high-level diplomacy may yield next to nothing, or worse”. That was my fearless view last month. It remains the view today in the aftermath of the Alaska summit where…
HEATHER CREAMER WRITES — Melissa Caddick, age 49, vanished from her luxury $6.1 million home in Dover Heights, a coastal suburb of Sydney, in New South Wales, Australia. Her disappearance occurred November 11, the day after corporate watchdog Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) executed a search warrant at her…
AUDIE LAYARDA WRITES — Seoul will invest $1.7 billion through 2022 to become one of the world’s top five technology start-up hubs. Seoul Mayor Park Won Soon said, “I will improve the structure of Seoul economy and make a “miracle of startup.” Seoul, now one of the top 20 startup…
ALEX DASHWOOD WRITES — Malaysia’s top court on February 25th ruled that a Syariah (Sharia) state law banning gay sex “against the order of nature” was unconstitutional. Its ruling exemplifies a step toward strengthening legal protections for the LGBT+ community in the Southeast Asian country. The case “arises from a…
KATIE SHIEH WRITES — On the evening of March 16, 2021, a 21- year- old Caucasian man named Robert Long murdered 8 people: Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon Chung Park, Hyun JungGrant, Yong Ae Yue and Suncha Kim, in a mass shooting. This happened…
ELLA KELLEHER WRITES (latest in her review series of new Japanese books) — Adolescence in Astral Season, Beastly Season (2020) is a frightening and tragic nightmare that haunts a person endlessly. The teenage mind is pried apart in Tahi Saihate’s unusual coming-of-age story to reveal a deep-seated psychology of obsession.…
SHAE KUROKAWA WRITES — In response to the recent shooting rampage in Georgia, in which three Asian spas were targeted and six Asian women were killed, investigators have begun to theorize that the massacre was not motivated by rising hate towards Asian Americans generated by the coronavirus. Instead, they say,…
SOPHIA JARAMILLO WRITES – Chinese American fashion designer Sandy Liang has designed the ‘quarantine collection’ of a lifetime for Spring-Summer 2021—overflowing with childhood and familial nostalgia and bringing the designer back to the not-so-basics of her signature styles. Sandy Liang was raised in Queens, New York, and graduated from Parsons…
MELANIE MARGARYAN WRITES — Asian countries take great pride in their cultures. One of the most prominent aspects of any Asian culture is food. Nations such as Japan, China, and India have authentic foods that are fairly familiar, but when it comes to Armenia, it’s difficult to come up with…
ABEER ABUNAYYAN WRITES — In 2018, Prince Mohammed bin Salman lifted the ban on theaters that had been in place for 35 years. The ban had originally been in place due to social pressure from conservative Islamists to limit public entertainment, particularly theaters that had mixing between men and women. However,…
NICOLAS PAPA WRITES — It has been almost three years, but Japanese baseball star Shohei Ohtani is starting to show glimpses of the two-way talent that had previously made him one of the most anticipated players in the history of Major League Baseball. The Los Angeles Angels player had sent…
NATALIE CHRISTENSEN WRITES — On February 27th, I held a Black-Asian Solidarity March in Playa Vista. Prior to the march, LMU’s Saisei Taiko gave a drum performance at Central Park. We then marched down Millenium Avenue to The Lawn. Speakers included Reggie Watkins, the co-founder of the Valley of Change,…
RYAN FRAZEE WRITES- How can we truly help the mentally ill? The Western world has undoubtedly revolutionized science and medicine. Yet the West has often overlooked and mishandled mental illness. In the United States in particular, the unfortunate tradition of stigmatizing psychiatric disorders such as Social Anxiety and Post-Traumatic Stress…
JONAR COWAN WRITES — I am a 23-year-old Asian American raised in San Francisco for the majority of my life. San Francisco felt safe and accepting while I was growing up because I rarely experienced racism or anything that insulted my Asian heritage. In fact, I grew prideful of my…
