I was feeling sad on Monday. After all, it was 9/11. I was in New York. I was dreading it. What do I do to honor the day?
I’ll never forget where I was in 2001. In the San Francisco Bay Area, I was thinking about trading the markets, so I was up way early with CNBC at 5.46 a.m. Pacific time when th...
Are you ready to kill the colonizer?
You can on Oct. 2 from just about any AMC theater in the country.
If you’re Asian American of any stripe, but especially Filipino, you can get the thrill of seeing a Hollywood movie that gets it right.
One with the narrative where we win. And the colonizer los...
What? You working on Labor Day weekend?Well, yes. On the weekend that Jimmy Buffett died, we must be mindful that he was no Margaritaville slacker. He made hundreds of millions of dollars selling the fantasy of not working hard. He worked plenty hard, albeit in flip-flops.
Or you just do what you l...
A graduate student shooting his professor is not model minority behavior.
But given the proliferation of gun violence in America, maybe it is.
Tailei Qi, 34, a graduate student from China attending the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was charged with first degree murder in the killing of...
It’s been a historic week in America. After a presidential debate featuring eight Republicans who couldn’t get arrested, we now have one Republican who can. Get arrested, that is. Four times.
He’s the Notorious DJT.
And in our strange twisted democracy, a tremendous number of Republicans still can...
Broadway loves “Here Lies Love,” the musical about the Marcos dictatorship.
But as audiences leave, I hope they understand what happened forty years ago.
On Aug. 21, 1983, Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, the Philippine political activist in exile in the U.S., went home to win back freedom for Filipinos li...
I’ve read over the latest indictment on the disgraced former president who wants to be president again. Don’t get inured to the shock of it. That’s the real threat to democracy. And yet we also must understand No. 45 is innocent until proven guilty and will no doubt say that his tweets, his misstate...
My father, a fry cook most of his life in union restaurants in San Francisco, didn’t have much. But he had the right to vote.
After coming here as a colonized Filipino barred from voting, he managed to become a U.S. citizen later in life, which earned him the only real opportunity he had in this co...
If you think I mention Harvard a lot, please forgive me.
I did wait until the sixth word in this piece.
This restraint may not be much compared to those (mostly white) who incessantly debate, “When do I drop the H-bomb?” as a social calculation so as not to alarm people they are in the presence of...
If we apply the Florida educational standards of history to Filipino history, I suppose there would be a “positive benefit” of the Marcos dictatorship—the authoritarian singing and the dancing of the Marcoses themselves!
But wait a minute, the history of a Filipino dictatorship funded and propped u...
Last week, when the big news was inflation’s drop to three percent (the target was two percent), some observers wondered why people seemed underwhelmed.
Maybe it’s because our happiness is connected to more than just the price of gas and eggs.
But how can you cheer for an improving economy when yo...
The AAPI person of the moment, Waltine “Walt” Nauta, had his day in court Thursday, and he wasn’t really lawyered up.
And that’s why even though his name is emblazoned on page one of the historic first federal criminal prosecution of a former president, Nauta may as well be “nada.”
I prefer to giv...
I’ve always talked about race. And now, I’m upping the volume. The Supreme Court made me do it. The six conservatives may have on their race blindfolds (the ones they want everyone to wear).
But they don’t have earplugs.
If you were bashful before, don’t be. It’s time for all of us to tell our sto...
If you’ve been following the Pro Publica reporting on Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and their failure to disclose their gifts from billionaire Republican donors, then you know at least one thing. The judges, who make a base pay of around $285,000, believe in affirmative act...
Juneteenth is as close as AAPI folk get to a national holiday commemorating the fight against anti-Asian American violence.
What? Juneteenth?
Yeah, that’s right.
But we weren’t slaves, Emil…
No, but I’m not taking anything away from Juneteenth.
I’m adding to it.
You’ve got to admit it’s a stra...
I don’t know what my father, a career fry cook, would have thought about Donald Trump. But I’d guess if Willie Guillermo worked for him, Trump would definitely need a food taster.
Still, I cried after the historic arraignment of Trump in Miami and his visit afterwards to Little Havana to be serenad...
The Waltine Nauta Scale? It is part of the broader unofficial “loyalty scale” Asian Americans know all too well from U.S. history.
For some of us, it’s the difference between incarceration and freedom (Japanese Americans in WWII). For others, it’s the price of fighting in a racist Army to prove jus...
I have been dreading every single move by the Supreme Court so far this month.
This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for ever since a decision was promised before the summer recess.
Before that it was Halloween, when the Supreme Court heard both sides present their arguments. And before that, ...
On Sunday, a non-binary Asian American dressed in tank top and short-shorts out for a Sunday stroll passed me in the North Beach area of San Francisco.
Good thing they were in San Francisco. No problem.
But it’s not that way in other parts of the nation, which is why the U.S. District Court for th...
As Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month comes to an end, was the weekend for honoring our nation’s lost warriors the opening of “The Little Mermaid” or the finale of “Succession”?
Or maybe you just chilled.
I had a vegan hot dog.
I must confess this: I was a “Succession”...
