Today is the Lunar New Year. I grew up calling it "Chinese New Year" in English but it has occurred to me that I don't know anyone who actually speaks Chinese and calls it "Chinese New Year" in Chinese. To them it's the "lunar new year" (農曆新年) or simply the "new year" (年節 or 過年) or the Spring Festival (春節, a newer name for the festivities after ( Read more... )

I've really been mulling over the whole Distress of the Privilege thing...how people view remedies for discrimination and/or addressing disparities as a form of oppression.

Some examples:

OH NOES: "[Straight] people need to protect the marriage, families, and children from gays and their efforts to access the right to marry."
WELL, ACTUALLY... ( Read more... )

Reposted from my tumblrAs a young-ish Asian American girl when Mulan first came out in the early 2000s, I distinctly remember not liking Mulan's appearance. I never really pinned down why exactly this was until recently ( Read more... )

One of the interesting and frustrating things I've observed in my graduate program is the attitude that "grades don't matter." This is not just from the professors--who take great pains to remind us: "Your grades in graduate school don't matter. No one is going to care. Well, unless you're going to get a Ph.D. Then they might care."--but from ( Read more... )

I was out with a group of friends a few days ago and a conversation about my really inexpensive (but apparently has problematic plumbing) apartment came up. The origin story for Casa Jedifreac.

The truth is, my apartment is brilliantly cheap for the area I live in. The narrative behind why that is is a bit more complicated than that. If you ask ( Read more... )

The election to replace Jane Harman, the blue-dog Democrat House of Representatives incumbent of my District, is today. (As noted in previous blog posts, to me, Harman was a big "meh.")

No less than 16 candidates have emerged to replace her and this is the first test of California's new open-primary law.I'm not a registered Democrat, but I pretty ( Read more... )

Last November, I spoke at a small OCA-GLA conference for youth on a panel alongside Jay Chen, a member of the school board from Hacienda Heights.

You may remember Jay Chen, one of very few second-generation Taiwanese American politicians, from this commercial he recorded for the Mandarin-speaking Californian community urging people to vote no on ( Read more... )

So lately, I've developed this terrible, terrible "bad" habit that has affected how I consume media. In a detrimental way. I'm not sure exactly what I should call it. (Perhaps the demographically-statistically-wing-wally peeve?) I don't even know if it's rational.

So this is the pet peeve.


( Read more... )

There was a lovely little four year old girl with her mom on the bus, sitting across from me today. Her mom was reading the Entertainment section of the paper. She pointed at an ad and asked, "Who is this ( Read more... )

"My name is Marissa L. and I've been an Asian American for 23 years ( Read more... )