Deadline Soon for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Competition

If you were planning on entering the 2010 Asian American Short Story Competition, the deadline for submission is March 31, this Wednesday, so get your submissions in. The winner gets $1000 and publication in Hyphen magazine.

Yay! In Taiwan!

I arrived bright and early to Taoyuan Airpoirt in Taiwan around 6AM Sunday morning local time. I've decided that I rather like China Airlines since they had ketchup, disposable slippers, and disposable pre-toothpasted toothbrushes although they didn't have the individual screens that some airlines have for international flights. The rest of economy class was just as expected, just enough to not massively damage a human.

I'm excited for this trip back since I haven't been back in almost 3 years. I'll give a longer update later when I have some breathing time.... if I have some breathing time.

Taste Profiles

I find food fascinating, but I recognize that I have a bias when it comes to the foods I like to eat. I blame this on growing up in a household where Taiwanese food was the norm. What this means: I generally like foods which are sweeter but not overpoweringly so. For example, I like sweet-ish tomato sauce, and I don't like most American candy bars very much because I feel they are too sweet.

Those from Beijing like their flavors heavy. This means more salt, more chili, more vinegar, and just in general using more spices and flavorings.

Singaporeans, Szechuanians, Indians, and Koreans love their spicy food although each one has its own particular brand of spicy, which I am not completely familiar with enough to comment on especially since my taste buds aren't accustomed to eating particularly spicy things. The numbingly spicy hot pot which is guaranteed to set your mouth on fire originates from Szechuan though.

The Vietnamese like to put lemon/lime juice in a lot of dishes, and their staple sauce is fish sauce which also has a sour taste profile.

I'm not quite sure how to characterize the Japanese although they, like the Taiwanese, seem to really like sweet things. They do tend to eat sweeter things than the Taiwanese and also saltier in what seems to be an effort to preserve foods as Japan has to import a lot of its product.

Some other places(Laos, Thailand, Phillippines, etc) didn't make it into this post because I simply haven't had enough experience with these cuisines to make a commentary.

Some Film Festivals: SF, Chicago, LA

If you're in the vicinity of San Francisco, Chicago, or Los Angeles, there are a few upcoming Asian American film festivals you could consider going out to support.

(ongoing now until March 21st) San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

(April 2-15) Chicago Asian American Showcase

(April 10-25) Japan Film Festival, Los Angeles

If you have some time, definitely consider going.

Source: Hyphen

A Brief Aside

So normally, I post about Asian-American stuff, but I thought this post about the African-American author experience was particularly interesting. It talks about how the cover affects where a book is placed if you are an African-American writer. I also, wonder whether a similar thing happens for Asian-American authors. It might not since we don't have as big a section, but we may be placed in a small cultural section of sorts. If anyone can point me to articles on this topic, it would be appreciated.

Busy-ness

I'm going to be pretty busy this week and the next so you may not see as many posts. I will try to post as often as possible and maybe make some commentary about my trip to Taiwan (which I'm super-excited about). As a consolation, here's a dragon on a whiteboard credit to a friend of mine with not bad artistic talent.

re: Comment on 80-20

I was excited to get my first comment on the blog and would like to make a reply. Thank you very much anonymous reader for taking the time to make a response.

While I agree that 80-20 has laudable goals and achievements, I'm speaking to the fact that the membership base is not representative of all asian communities. The reason I feel this is a problem is because without the diversity of membership I fear that not all the opinions of these different communities are on the table. Perhaps other communities wouldn't focus on having federal judges first or targeting that particular executive order. This is not to say that those objectives are not worthwhile; simply that they might not be the targets of those other asian communities.

So, I ask if 80-20 is trying to bring these other communities to the table and not whether they believe their goals are representative without consultation.

Comment on Culture in Singapore

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to do a little bit of commentary on Singapore.

Singapore has a slight feel of a city-state of modernity in the midst of less developed countries. It is considered one of the four tigers of Asia. The government is very receptive to businesses and offers many tax incentives for businesses to move in and set up shop. Tax incentives in conjunction with the relative modernity of Singapore has led many businesses to open regional headquarters there. In conjunction with the concept of modernity, the government seeks to be a sort of global village and stamps out racism vigorously. Unfortunately, sometimes the methods used to stamp out racism have the side-effect of removing all traces of culture.

An example of this are the HDB (Housing Development Board, check it up on wiki for the full description) flats. Granted, these flats are meant to increase the amount of affordable housing for Singaporean citizens in an increasingly crowded city-state, but their architecture are not meant to be artistic. In building these monolithic, every neighborhood looks like the next flats, culturally styled single/double story buildings were replaced. Seriously, traveling from one end of the city to the other is an exercise in boring sameness. There are a few changes for the malls and commercial districts, but even those lack real flair.

What does it mean to be Singaporean? Perhaps a Singaporean would be able to comment more in depth, but my observation consists of an accented English profile, a liking of spicy food, and a general feeling of apathy towards many things. There's just not much there to encourage rousing patriotism. This is not to say that Singaporeans don't identify as Singaporean or try to hide their nationality, but rather there isn't much in the way of cultural exporting.

I Studied Abroad in Singapore

Awhile ago, I studied abroad in Singapore as part of a university program and also stayed on after the program ended to do an internship. I enjoyed my time there for a variety of reasons including the closeness of a lot of other countries which were inexpensive to visit. The whole experience was interesting. and there are some things I want to comment on about my trip. I feel it wouldn't be a bad idea to have them online as a collection of my thoughts about the country. Thus, you will be seeing some posts about this subject.

An Asian American Wizard

I went looking for Asian American writing and came across a post from Hyphen, which is an Asian American magazine (in print) although they have a pretty heavy online presence, that talked about books for asian american teens. The conclusion was that asian american teens want to read about asian american main characters but want to be able to identify with the main characters as teens first rather than whatever race the character happens to be because the persecution just doesn't seem a reality to many asian american teens now.

The end of the post speculates that writers should maybe create a young adult novel where the asian american main character is a wizard. If such a story were to occur with a standard fantasy settings of knights, elves, and dwarves, I'm not sure it would work well since the cultural fit wouldn't be there. A story that mixed dragons, the monkey king, magic, and an asian american teen might be more plausible. I, at least, would be interested in seeing some more fantastical settings which played with Chinese myths.