Bowen Yang can officially add Emmy nominee to his already-impressive résumé. After just two on-camera seasons on Saturday Night Live, the 30-year-old actor nabbed a well-deserved nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series on Tuesday, making him the first featured player to do so in the show's 46 seasons.
Read MoreYeun and co-star Youn Yuh-jung also finally snapped a disheartening streak that had heretofore seen Asian actors shut out of recognition from their otherwise decorated films (Parasite, The Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Last Emperor all garnered multiple Oscar nominations, including best picture, without a single acting nod). A year after Korea's Parasite swept the Academy Awards (except in the acting categories, of course), the two have become the first performers born in that country to earn Oscar recognition.
Read MorePolitical forces have drastically shifted racial stereotypes of Asian Americans from a threat to whiteness to a model minority Commonly mistaken as a “positive” stereotype, the model minority myth upholds systemic white supremacy by dismissing historical and contemporary realities of both anti-Asian racism and racism against other POC.
Read MoreLulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and Bong Joon Ho (“Parasite”) are both in the hunt for Best Director at the Oscars, and both of their candidacies would be historic. If they both make the cut, it would be the first time in history that two Asian filmmakers are nominated for the award at the same time.
Read MoreFew Hollywood stories can match the career highs and heartbreaking lows of James Wong Howe, whom Variety recognized in its July 15, 1976, edition as “one of the world’s foremost cinematographers, and usually considered without peer in the black-and-white field.” More than 40 years later, that still holds true.
Read MoreIdentity isn’t a prescriptive solution. But when you’re uncertain of your place within society, it can help to have ready-made categories or narratives, even if you choose to reject them. There’s a power in being able to recognize our struggles as the result of paradoxes we live within rather than seeing them as purely private failings. It’s a step toward imagining lives that we might be the authors of, with endings that we write ourselves.
Read MoreAs Chinese food rises in stature and price, a new wave of white restaurateurs are realizing there’s money to be made in the field, just as Starr and Tepperberg did decades ago. But unlike then, Chinese communities in the U.S. or the U.K. now have the ability to critique the work of these chefs, thanks in part to social media.
Read MoreIt is about giving our communities a voice, raising our visibility, fighting for resources that should also be shared with us, making room for our history and contributions to this country, and accepting us as Americans as well. It’s striking to me given the demographic significance of Asian Americans in the U.S. We need Asian American studies really now more than ever.
Read MoreFor some Chinese-American restaurateurs in the mid-20th century, I think there definitely is a move towards education,” she says. But its omnipresence in Chinese American restaurants tells the story of the changing role those restaurants played in American lives, and how their proprietors used Orientalism to drive acceptance of their culture.
Read MoreBut Pei was different. His name—not to mention his unmistakable appearance, with the enormous round glasses he always wore—seemed to have little effect, in this country, at least, on how he was viewed. He wasn’t famous because he was a good architect among Asian-American architects. He was famous because he was a great architect who happened to be Asian-American. To a young immigrant from China, this decoupling of identity was exhilarating.
Read MoreFrom a food truck peddling Hawaiian-Korean fusion dishes in Seattle to an underground Japanese speakeasy in D.C. to a Korean barbecue restaurant that focuses on home cooking in New York City, one ingredient is surprisingly constant: Spam.
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