Shaolin Gong Fu (Kung-Fu)

The Original Five Animal styles:

Tiger,Leopard,Crane,Snake and Dragon

What characterizes of these styles and/or the practitioners?

Music that is Asian influenced.

Manong/manang-first born son or older male relative-1st generation

Rachel Devitt-Lost in the Translation:Filipino Disapora(s) ,Postcolonial Hip-Hop,and the Problems of Keeping it Real for the “Contentless” Black Eyed Peas

resistance vernaculars-(Tony Mitchell) spectacular vernacular(Russell Potter)

Preserving a language/culture by using culture of birth

-What are guilty pleasures?

secret knowledge

race/sexuality

pleasure/discovery

white passing

knowing more than the chars.

Movie: The Wedding Banquet

Directed by Ang Lee,4 August 1993,US,106 min.

About a gay Taiwianese man who marries a Chinese woman to give her a green card to the US. With the resulting problems that entails.

First of Ang Lee’s 3 movies made with a gay theme;his most famous being Brokeback Mountain. 

Nominated for an Oscar in 1994 for best foreign language film.

Boundary Crisis-divisions,borders,lines

American-ness

Anti-Chinese/economic/picket

-opportunitty

-family/generational

-identity

-tradition

-industries-film/TV/Actors

-interracial

Kato Readings-Martial was a very integral part to Asiatic culture. Starts in China and spreads to Japan. The martial arts spread in a way that is the 2nd group. Thus,identity based on martial arts culture goes global.

East Main Street Chap. 1-Goa and Electronic trance,they were using Buddhist/Hindu religious symbology. Took them from China and India;also,appropriated them into trance music.Which,also,becomes popular and spreads during the counter-culture movement of the 1960′s.

East Main Street Chap. 2-Hybrid music(English rock bands w/ Vietnamese folk music singing Vietnamese words to MTV videos. It’s the hybrid mi of music styles.

East Main Street Chap. 5-Globalization of language;specifically page 107 for reference. Which addresses the globalization of all cultures and languages not just one particular group due to the increasing use of tech in everyday life.

There are few things that symbolically represent America better than baseball. Pitchers & catchers reported last week marking the beginning of spring training for Major League Baseball (MLB) 2014 season.

Pop-culture icons the New York Yankees announced the $175M signing of the popular Japanese pitcher, Masahiro Tanaka. Since loosing Robinson Cano to our Seattle Mariners, the Yankees needed to secure Tanaka to not only improve their team, but also to keep him from possibly signing with the Dodgers.

Tanka is not the only Asian making baseball news in the US; Suk-min Yoon formerly with the Kia Tigers (S.Korea) signed with the Baltimore Orioles for $5.7M.

Of course these are not the only two Asian MLB players, but they are the ones making the headlines this week.

Also of interest to me in this weeks API news is the 2014 Winter Olympics. I LOVE hockey, and Olympic hockey is the best of the best in my book. As I write this, Team USA women’s hockey is smoking hot! They are dismantling their opponents like few teams have ever done. Ever. Tomorrow (Monday) they advance to the Semifinal against Sweden. How is this API news? Because forward, #13 Julie Chu is the first Asian/American woman to play for our Olympic team. And our women’s team is on track to score their first Olympic gold medal. 

Go Team USA!!

On February 16^th 2014, this was the 72^nd birthday of Kim Jong-Il.

http://www.euronews.com/2014/02/16/north-korea-celebrates-birthday-of-late-leader-kim-jong-ii/

Before I talk about him, I have a question. Since I came to America, I found that people here say “Korea” putting together North Korea and South Korea. They might say it without any care, but it is really strange for me with their current situation. This is because there are big differences between North Korea and South Korea, and they have big problems between them. I’m curious how much they know about North and South Korea.

Kim Jong-Il was the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly referred to as North Korea, from 1994 to 2011. After he died on 17 December 2011, his son; Kim John-Un succeeded to his father. He has kept standing giant statues of his father Kim Jong-II and his grandfather Kim-Il Sung as soldiers saluted them. Some people say these statues are his power structures. However, in fact, the lives of people in North Korea are shrouded in themselves. Since Korea’s war from 1950 to 1953, Korea split in two and some people’s families were torn apart. Because of the war, there is now a tense atmosphere between the South and North. Every time when there were nuclear tests in North Korea, these tense atmosphere was also around Asian countries such as Japan and China. I want everyone to know there are different countries between North Korea and South Korea, even they used to be the same country and called “Korea.” So, if you don’t know the difference between them and you say “Korea” putting both of them together, I suggest you to know about them and recommend saying “North Korea” and “South Korea.” This is because sometimes we make Korean mad with thinking South Korean and North Korean are the same country.

Browsing through the internet I found this in the Human Rights Campaign. Interesting article.

http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/coming-out-issues-for-asian-pacific-americans

Here is a short clip by Austin Andrews called Deaf Ninja. He is a hearing individual who has been deeply involved in Deaf culture for many years. Some of our class has a background in American Sign Language (ASL), so get with them to figure out the stuff that doesn’t immediately make sense to you. I will say that the gestures Andrews makes about a box & ear pieces refers to an old device some deaf /hard of hearing people would wear to help them hear (before cochlear implants were widely used). It’s a fun video even if you don’t know the first thing about ASL. Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is a followup video to Deaf Ninja:

Click here to view the embedded video.