FKwang article in New Adoption Parenting Book by EMK Press

Check out Frances' article on page 319 and 332!

Release below:

EMK Press is proud to announce our NEW, groundbreaking parenting book:

Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections

Edited by Jean MacLeod and Sheena Macrae, PhD

Finally, a comprehensive parenting book for adoptive families!

Over 100 contributors have helped EMK Press to weave a stunning tapestry of advice specifically for adoptive parents. Parenting adopted children requires parenting with an extra layer and this book helps you to understand where that extra layer falls. This over 500 page book is a wealth of information for the newly arrived home family and the experienced family as well. This is a book you won’t read all at once, but come back to again and again as your child’s awareness of who they are develops and your awareness of how to help them increases.Our adopted children come to us from loss–loss of a birthfamily, culture, and language. There are helpful things that we can do to address these issues, and Adoption Parenting helps you to create an awareness to do just that. We also look at stumbling blocks to good parenting, and standard parenting practices that aren’t right for adopted children. We look at the core issues all members of the adoption triad face, and look at how that affects standard parenting challenges like sleeping through the night, discipline, and attachment. We cover specific challenges families have faced: FASD, Trauma and PTSD, Sensory Integration, Speech and Language delays, and at ways to effectively parent a post-institutionalized child or a child who has experienced trauma in their journey to you.

To see the actual table of contents, click below

Front Matter and Table of Contents: frontmatter.pdf

First Chapter Getting Started Click to view

NYC Exhibition: Erasing Borders: Indian Artists in the American Diaspora

Indo-American Arts Council Inc
and the
Queens Museum of Art
present
Erasing Borders: Indian Artists in the American Diaspora
curated by vijay kumar

February 4 - March 4, 2007
Queens Museum of Art
Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, New York

featuring Reeta Karmarkar, Vijay Kumar, Bivas Chaudhuri, Satish Joshi, Siona Benjamin, Tara Sabharwal, Nitin Mukul, Ela Shah, Vinod Dave, Nandini Chirimar, Antonio Puri, Anna Bhushan, Delna Dastur, Niyeti Chadha, Alka Mukerji, Yamini Nayar

AAV News Weekend Supplement - Jan 26

As we sometimes do, AAV's adding extra weekend arts and sports items from the AP:

• Maui residents object to island's portrayal in new MTV reality show, Maui Fever
• India to finally see Deepa Mehta's Water…7 years late
• Playwright Hwang to launch Stanford Univ.-NY Public Theater partnership series
• Ang Lee calls Tony Leung Chiu-wai 'dream' actor in his new movie
• Contract issue hangs over Mariners, Ichiro

The Maui article hits on a favorite ongoing theme at the Village, close to the hearts of editors and Villagers alike: the distorted, bleached out La-La-Land settings created by an entertainment industry whose vision of places like San Francisco, LA, New York, and Hawai'i is one sans Asians.

But is that what the controvery is really about?

As the article observes, Maui County is 31 percent Asian, 10 percent Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 22 percent mixed race. Caucasians account for 33 percent of the county, including the small islands of Lanai and Molokai.

The all-haole casting has some locals ... not quite up in arms ... but annoyed, in the same sort of way that makes them charge mainlanders higher prices for pretty much everything. (AAV's editors Stewart Ikeda and Frances Wang have both been spending a lot of time in Hawai'i lately.)

The bigger sore spot is that the contestants on the show all seem to be on Maui for the main purpose of getting lucky -- frequently and on-camera.

"The first episode highlights a group of men who target tourists for fast, easy, and noncommittal hookups," the article says, which left some residents disgruntled, such as Nathan Ugale, 16, of Lahaina.

The article quotes Ugale from the Maui News: “I don't want (tourists) to come to Maui and think that people are going to come up to their daughters, so 'I better keep them away.' It's good for TV but not when it's happening in the town that you live in, that you've been a part of your whole life.”

[BY THE WAY: Also from Maui News: Click to see Matthew Thayer's photo of what must surely be the world's largest spam musubi ever -- 60 feet! We can't link to it b/c it gives a server error, but see the homepage today or maybe Google "SIXTY FEET OF SPAM MUSUBI" laterand see what happens.]

Anyway, stop in and check out the weekend edition of the Village news, and let us know what you think of the show.

Bobby Jindal running for Louisiana Gov.; up in polls

In this Week's Asian American Village News Headlines:

U.S. Representative Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican, has announced that he is running to replace Kathleen Blanco as the state's governor. Although Jindal lost his first gubernatorial campaign against Blanco in 2003, the Governor has been weakened since Hurricane Katrina, and Jindal seems to have a good shot at becoming the state's first Indian American governor.

According the AP, a survey of likely voters this month by Southern Media & Opinion Research found that 59 percent favored Jindal and 35 percent favored Blanco (margin of error +/- 4 percentage points).

Interesting Factoid to Watch: Expect to see widespread claims that victory would make Jindal "the first Indian American governor," but this particular milestone has been recently scooped by -- just last month, in fact. Apparently, the honor of that claim goes to New Jersey transportation commissioner Kris Kolluri, who was also the the first Indian American to hold a cabinet post in New Jersey, according to the Times of India. To be precise, as originally reported in the Newark Star-Ledger, Kolluri acted as the Garden State's acting governor for a day while Gov. Jon Corzine and other officials going down the list were out of town on holiday.

So, a victorious Jindal would have to settle for "first elected Indian American governor".

[Image" "Talking with dairy farmers: Congressman Jindal holds a forum with local dairy farmers" from http://jindal.house.gov/]

Asian American Career Center: Featured Opportunities

Featured Editor's Pick at the Asian American Village Jobs for US Center, powered by IMDiversity.com:

Clinical Counselor Position #10935: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Posted Jan 9, 2007
Deadline: March 9, 2007
This Clinical Counselor position combines generalist counselor duties with a special emphasis in clinical and outreach work with Asian American students. Position starts August 1, 2007.

Editor's Note: UIUC is known as the home of one of the most dynamic, up-and-coming Asian American Studies and cultural scenes in the Midwest. Long-time Villagers may recall our early feature from 2003, Building Asian American and Ethnic Studies in the Midwest, by Sharon Lee at UIUC, detailing the challenges, growth prospects, and new opportunities for ethnic studies programs in the Heartland. Since then, UIUC has been steadily hiring new talent for administrators and faculty to build not only a strong academic program in AAS, but also related resource centers and support. If you're interested in working in an role providing support to Asia Americans, and being part of a vibrant Asian American community while enjoying a small, manageable city with a good standard of living, we think you should note the deadline and check this one out.

-- AAV Editors

Singaporean Director Ong Keng Sen--Beyond Cool

On January 12, I had the opportunity to hear the incredibly brilliant and beautiful Singaporean director of The Silver River, Ong Keng Sen, speak at the University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies about Collaboration across Borders in Art and Culture. He has received international acclaim for epic theatrical presentations that bridge cultures, making theatre a transcultural, transdisciplinary, collaborative art. He is very interested in the politics and negotiation of cultural expressions and collaborations that cross cultural boundaries, and using traditional and contemporary art to forge a new multicultural pan-Asian identity across international lines, asserting a new Asian asthetic in contemporary theatre.

I am always writing about APAs creating culture, multicultural living, pan-Asian alliances, and teaching our children about both their Asian heritage and their place in American history. However, it had never occurred to me that Asians in Asian countries might have some of the same concerns. I think that we APAs sometimes try to distance ourselves from contemporary Asians in Asia because we are tired of always being mistaken for foreigners or because we think of Asian culture as old and out of date. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, we could be part of something bigger than “Yul Kwon wins Survivor” and “Rosie O’Donnell said ‘ching chong ching chong.’”

Check this out from Theatreworks.org.sg: “Theatreworks asks, What is Asian in this age of globalisation, internationalization, modernisation and urbanisation? Its work exists on the tension between modernity and tradition; local and global. It hopes to rethink what is Western, what is Eastern, what is first world and what is third world: Do these dichotomies continue to make sense in the new millennium? Representing the continuum between tradition and contemporary, the work is unafraid to be exotic and yet conceptual. Theatreworks' aesthetics projects the hybrid identity of the modern Asian and embrace the multiple realities.”

How cool is that? You should also check out 72-13.com.

So much beauty and brilliance in one week, I’m about to have a heart attack.

Also check out Frances Kai-Hwa Wang's
Harry Potter, Asian-American Living, and Raising Our Children with Culture(s)--Multiculturalism as a lifestyle choice, not an abstraction or afterthought and

A Visit to the Hilo Longs Drugs (or Why I love Hawai’i)

David Henry Hwang and Bright Sheng's The Silver River

David Henry Hwang, Literary Genius (and Tony Award-winning playwright, M. Butterfly), is in residence at the University of Michigan Institute of the Humanities this week, and I had the opportunity to meet him (and get his autograph!) and follow him around campus like a starstruck teenager. He is preparing for a performance of The Silver River, which retells the ancient Chinese myth about the cowherd and the weaving goddess, and the creation of the Milky Way—a story which is celebrated on Chinese Valentine’s Day (7th day of 7th lunar month). With composer Bright Sheng, MacArthur “Genius” grant winner and UM faculty, The Silver River is touted as a combination of modern theatre, Chinese opera, Western opera, contemporary dance, and classical Western and Chinese music. The University Musical Society writes that The Silver River was the highlight of the 2000 Spoleto Festival, the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival, and the 2002 Theater Works Singapore and is being remounted for the first time in five years in this exclusive production. (Watch for it as it may go on tour!) As always, Hwang is brilliant and funny and gives the old lovestory a modern twist and APA sensibility with themes of interracial romance (human and celestial) and lines like, “If you don’t understand (what that character just said in) Chinese, take a class!”

The University Musical Society presents:
The Silver River, A Music-Theatre Work in One Act
Music by Bright Sheng
Libretto by David Henry Hwang
Directed by Ong Keng Sen
Friday, January 12, 8 pm, and Saturday, January 13, 8 pm
Power Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Also Check out Frances Kai-Hwa Wang's "Weak in the Knees--Revisiting the 'Nice Chinese Boy'"

OCA to Cut Ribbon on New HQ in D.C. Jan 12

The Organization of Chinese Americans will be opening what appears to be a beautiful new, three-building headquarters in the Dupont Circle section of Washington DC. The ribbon-cutting ceremony this weekend is the culmination of decades of fundraising and planning, and will mark an important step for create a permanent presence for Asian American advocates inside the Beltway. Read more and see a photo of the building at the AAV story here.

Congratulations to our friends at OCA!

Happy New Year from AAV

Back after some time off for family, travel, and R&R, the editors at AAV wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

We hope some of you had a chance to take a look at our Asian American Village 2006 Year in Review, check out our holiday Secret Asian Man double feature, and see some of our year-end featured jobs specials from the IMDiversity job bank.

This week, we kick things off on an unfortunately less-than-happy note following the terrible New Year’s Eve bombings in Bangkok that left 3 dead and 38 wounded, in a news analysis by frequent contributor Andrew Lam.

On a brighter note, we've got another new piece about an exciting development: PBS the broadcast of My Life Disoriented, a new Asian American drama pilot that's running this month on Independent Lens.

We saw and really liked some of the early cuts (and posted the filmmaker's release earlier), and think it has a good chance of getting a longer life. We got in a new interview with some of the My Life Disoriented stars courtesy of our good friends at Sampan in Boston (where the show will on on WGBH Jan. 7).