An excerpt from Lam new book, where a family vacation to Waterloo unearths some enlightening findings about his father, a former general for South Vietnam.
Girls at the brothel were beaten and raped. Many were dying of AIDS. Who were their customers? All kind of foreigners. Americans. Thai. Vietnamese. Cambodian.
American schools stress self-esteem as the stepping stone to academic achievement. But students from Asian cultures, which place little stock in self-esteem, seem to do better than their American counterparts in school.
As the country waited to learn the identity of the killer at Virginia Tech, Asian Americans held their breath, waiting to see if they would shoulder the spillover of blame for the acts of an individual.
Plastic surgery is on the rise in ethnic communities across the United States, and in Asia it is as routine as having one's wisdom teeth pulled. Are these alterations an attempt to look more "white?"
Many comparisons have been made about the Iraq and Vietnam wars. But what Iraq may have finally done is not so much remind us of Vietnam as ultimately usurp it from our national psyche.
April 30 became the birth date of an exile's culture, built on defeatism and a sense of tragic ending. But through the years, that date has come to symbolize something entirely different to this Vietnamese American.
The Golden Era of Hong Kong film is over. As Hollywood embraces stars like John Woo and Jet Li, and coopts the kung fu flick, the city that spawned the genre takes on a more down-to-earth identity.
Posted on Jun 7, 2004, Source: Pacific News Service
Overshadowed by Michael Moore's big win at the Cannes film festival, a Thai director is awarded the prestigious Jury Prize shining a spotlight on a new generation of Thai filmmakers.
While McDonald's golden arches may be proliferating in every major metropolis across the world, so, for that matter, are Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
This Asian American writer finds the pleas he gets from students to explain his fiction are an example of how Asian immigrants, even young ones, are having a tough time thinking like Americans.
Posted on Apr 8, 2003, Source: Pacific News Service
The suicide of gender-bending actor Leslie Cheung also symbolizes the demise of a wild, uninhibited era of Hong Kong film that inspired many Hollywood directors.
Outraged greeted the news that the Taliban in Afghanistan were going to destroy two very large statues of the Buddha. It is important, however, to recognize that Buddhism and its precepts are in no way endangered by this action.
