Why You Need to Pick up A Pen/Brush/Camera

When Jeff Daniels’ documentary about Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer was scheduled to be shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2009, the Chinese consulate requested that the film be withdrawn. Festival organizers refused. In response, a number of Chinese directors pulled out of the festival and hackers—posting the Chinese flag, among other actions—managed to shut down the festival website. Not only did the Chinese government disagree with the content of the film, they did not…

Taiwanese Brothers and Sisters, Global Edition

Picking me out of my high school senior class photo is a short game of "Where's Waldo?" Representing 50% of the Asian American families in Small Town, OH, my family had many things, in addition to physical appearance, that helped us stick out: taking our shoes off at the front door, bee-hwun for New Year's, and our militancy about our Taiwaneseness. The older I get the more I realize that the things that made me stick out like a sore thumb in Ohio are the very things that connect me to other Taiwanese…

Behind the Scenes: A Word from the Designer

Hello, and welcome to our new home! I am Anna Wu, Creative Director/Managing Editor of TaiwaneseAmerican.org, and I'm the girl behind the scenes for this revamp. It was back in June 2009 that Ho Chie and I first started talking about a new look for TaiwaneseAmerican.org. After three years of tremendous growth, we had outgrown the array of Blogger accounts that we had strung together in an elaborate network of pages. We were ready for something bigger and better. And it wasn't just about looks.…

Director Justin Lin on Asian American Filmmaking

Check out this article by Justin Lin, arguably one of the better known Taiwanese American filmmakers who started out on the independent track with films such as Shopping For Fangs, Better Luck Tomorrow, Finishing the Game, and more recently has broken through the Hollywood glass ceiling to work on industry films such as Annapolis, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Fast & Furious. Read his article: Am I 'retarded' for making Asian American films? In it, he discusses the making of…

Amateur

I am standing in a circle, being taught simple Portuguese lyrics. I only need to repeat the words - not necessarily grasp the language. As the words slip around inside my mouth and through my mind, I realize they are, well, slippery. It was quite an epiphany that’s hard to explain. I start to visualize my brain filling up with this and that. Language-wise, I came up with this. I am an amateur of languages. A lover of languages. A dilettante perhaps. It is almost an addiction in which I cannot…

The Cost of Public Outings

Today is Free Slurpee Day at 7-11. I like free things, I like Slurpees, therefore my sister (who has the same sentiments) and I went to the nearest 7-11: small, far from spotless, and located on a large boulevard calm on a Saturday night. The few people that were in there before us trickled out and we were left sampling the new Liquid Artillery flavor in peace. Mixing the strawberry-pineapple-lime deliciousness with Blue Raspberry and Wild Cherry creates a scrumptious blend with a tang, a bite, a…

ITASA West Coast and Midwest Conferences 2009

The following is a blog by Serena Wu reflecting on her experiences and thoughts after recently attending the Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association conferences at the University of Southern California and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. HoChie Tsai, creator of this website, teamed up with Serena Wu, who is one of the co-founders of mymomisafob.com, to present a workshop addressing generation gap and family dynamics issues. This piece is reprinted with permission…

A Papaya Story

When my dad was in the military, he served near a mountain covered with farms. There, people planted a lot of mangoes and papayas. But some of the papaya was wild and grew on their own, free. One day, a man from Taipei looked around and saw a big, red, pretty papaya. It was beautiful and delicious looking. He climbed up the wild tree and fell down because there was a bee nest in the tree. He cried and cried, and was sent to the emergency room. He ended up with a fever for a couple of days and…

Choosing Your Own Battles

It's easy for those who are conscious of their Taiwanese-American ethnicity, culture, and history to say that they would like to empower their people, but it's not easy to do it. I'm a senior in high school now and I've gone M.I.A. on you guys for a while. I live in a small town where I don't experience much culture outside of where I live, nor do I feel the life experiences regarding my heritage that I used to feel in a bigger city. That all changed very quickly. My school has an annual…