I didn’t even know who Dr. Pierre Chang was, I just searched for “asian muppets”.
Michael Jang: He took most of them in the summer of ‘73, when he lived for a month in the Pacifica home of his Uncle Monroe and Aunt Lucy, his three cousins and their two dogs, while taking a photography workshop in San Francisco led by Arbus’ teacher, Lisette Model. Jang documented their daily lives, catching them as they sat around the living room reading and watching the tube, talked on the phone, danced at parties, watered the garden at dusk and set off Fourth of July fireworks.
Jang describes the images as “an often humorous look into the life of an Asian family trying to assimilate into the American mainstream of the ’70s.” He wasn’t thinking that when he took them. It was only in retrospect, looking at them 35 years later, that he saw these pictures in a larger social and historical context.
"Asian Like Me" →
iamilliterate: “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.”
This isn’t the first piece of writing on the bullshits of Asian-America, but it’s the first cover feature on a prominent “non-ethnic” magazine (New York mag) I’ve ever seen.
And sums up almost every feeling I’ve had about being Korean-American, if not all my feelings about Asian-America in its entirety.
(Source: iamilliterate)
Google commercial: “graduation”. Call your mom this weekend.
Scenes From An Impending Marriage (Editor’s note: Giant Robot published one of my letters years ago when I professed my man-crush for Adrian Tomine. Treat him right.)
Seriously, what’s up with the asian lady fro you girls get when you hit 60-70?
South Philadelphia High School And The School District Of Philadelphia = epic fail
The situation in Philadelphia schools must be utterly catastrophic for Asian students to go as far as protesting during school hours. I remember all the protests I went to in college were just to meet breezies. Philly is a gully place to live.
“Lord, thank you for blessing us today with this seedless watermelon…”
Staggering Abortion Rates in Korea →
As said, abortion in Korea is illegal like prostitution is illegal. Consider these staggering statistics from the Korea Times, which notes that a woman will technically be sent to prison for one year if caught having had an abortion, and her doctor for two:
“However, Rep. Chang Yoon-seok of the ruling Grand National Party said during a National Assembly inspection in October, that the number of illegal abortions exceeds 1.5 million a year but fewer than five doctors have been indicted for performing them.
Chang’s figure is far higher than the 340,000 illegal abortions estimated by the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs. ‘The figure could be the highest in the world,’ Chang said.”
Consider: the Korean birth rate is in the bottom 11 in the world at 8.93 births per 1000 people. It has a population of a little over 48 million.The United States has a population of 300 million and has a reported number of about 820, 000 abortions as of 2005 (though these numbers aren’t necessarily completely accurate either, they are probably more so than the Korean numbers).
You’re looking at a country with a population six-times smaller than the US that may (depending on the reliability of Rep. Yoon-seok) have conducted almost two-times more abortions.
Let me hammer it home: Koreans had about 446,500 babies last year, and, on the low end estimate, 340,000 abortions. That’s more than 3/4 of the actual babies delivered. On the high-end estimate (1.5 million a year) that would be 3.3 times more abortions than babies delivered in a year.
