By Leeland Lee

Spoiler alert: In the latest installment of the Star Trek franchise reboot, Lieutenant Sulu dies a cruel, horrific death.

How does it happen? Does he get vanquished at the hands of a murderous Klingon? Sucked into a worm hole? Blown into subatomic particles by an out-of-control warp core breach?

No, actually it’s far worse than all those treacheries combined.

John Cho’s character suffers the ignominious fate of nearly being written into oblivion by a team of scribes who, when conceiving Sulu’s role in the movie, clearly set their phasers to boring.

While other crew members of the Starship Enterprise seem to be constantly beaming in and out, doing battle with alien life forms, or happily messing around with Starfleet Command—it’s shameful that an integral character like Sulu is asked to do so little. At no point in the movie does he handle a weapon, throw a punch, or make a heroic gesture. At least in the first movie he swung a sword and killed something ugly. Here, he’s nearly as inert as intergalactic furniture.

I say “nearly,” only because there’s a brief, unnecessary moment in the film when Sulu assumes the captain’s chair, enabling him to utter an empty threat to the movie’s arch villain. But it’s not enough, and feels more like equal opportunity patronage than anything else. Plus he misses out on all the action.

What’s most unforgivable is that, unlike the other crew members, Sulu’s character is as flat as the Enterprise’s front windshield. He possesses no rivalries, no past, no torments, and no apparent attachments with anyone else onboard that ship.

By movie’s end, we know nothing about him, except that he is the Enterprise’s designated button-pusher/chauffeur. I’m just amazed his uniform didn’t come with a Starfleet-sanctioned Coolie hat.

And while Captain Kirk is busy wooing alien women left and right, while Spock is locking lips with Uhura, and even McCoy is shown flirting with a fellow crew member (while disarming a torpedo, no less!)—Sulu is portrayed as all-business, apparently too consumed with driving the ship to have any time left over for chasing female tail. Sound familiar?

Then again, as the film wore on, I began to realize that Sulu does, in fact, have an important role. You might even say, it’s an incredibly necessary role, since he’s the NARRATOR for nearly half the movie. Without Sulu telling us precisely what’s unfolding, we, the audience, would literally be lost in space. Consider the following sound bites:

“Flight check’s complete, we’re good to go.”

“Captain, there’s a ship coming at us at warp.”

“He’s locking phasers on us, sir.”

“Sir, their weapons have been knocked out.”

“If we don’t get back on line, we’ll be incinerated on reentry!”

Regrettably, during the long stretches in the movie that don’t call for explicit narration, like during outdoor battle scenes and chase sequences, Sulu disappears from the action altogether. Where’s Sulu? I kept wondering. Probably out fetching intergalactic White Castle.

If there’s one thing I learned from this movie, it’s that in the 23rd century, when starships routinely cruise at warp speed, when humans make war—and love—with alien species, Asian men have evolved little beyond our personality-challenged, conformist ways. During the movie, Sulu utters the classic words, “Yes, sir,” at least on three separate occasions. Not exactly the words of masculinity, a domain that may forever remain—at least in cinema—our true Final Frontier.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Leeland Lee has previously written for 8Asians.com about Asian self-hatred in The New York Times

photo credit: Paramount Pictures

In my lifetime, I’ve been called a “Chink” more than a “Jap.” Of course this doesn’t stop people on YouTube from calling me a “Jap.”

To be fair, this was in response to my movie “Chink” and I did want to touch a nerve with people. Based on this person’s reaction, I guess it worked.

I remember the first time I was called a “Chink.” My first reaction was that I wasn’t Chinese/Chinese American. The least they could do was to call me a “Jap.” But that never quite felt right. After all, they weren’t calling me “Chink” to compliment me and they definitely weren’t trying to be ethnically correct.

I decided to do some research (“some” being the operative word here) on the word “Chink.” And according to the Wikipedia, it means:

Chink (also chinki, chinky, chinkie) is an English ethnic slur usually referring to a person of Chinese ethnicity.

The origin of the word seems to be in some dispute:

A number of dictionaries have provided different suggestions as to the origin of chink. Some of these suggestions are that it originated from the Chinese courtesy ching-ching, or that it evolved from the word China, or that it was an alteration of Qing, as in the Qing Dynasty (Ch’ing Dynasty), or that the word evolved from the other meaning of chink, which is a small crevice, crack, gap or a narrow opening, being a simile for squinty or slanted eyes. With regards to this latter meaning, the word is sometimes used as an adjective, as in chink-eyed.

Another possible etymology is that chink evolved from the Indo-Iranian word for China, that word now having similar pronunciations in various European languages, such as Farsi

But reading further down, I found this:

Although chink originally referred to those appearing to be of Chinese descent, the meaning expanded sometime in the 1940s to include other people of East Asian descent

I wonder what it was that transitioned the word “Chink” from meaning just Chinese people to meaning all East Asian people. Was it that people couldn’t tell the difference or didn’t care to? Or was it the result of the wars in Asia/Pacific (re: Korea and Vietnam)? Or was it something else? Can anyone enlighten me on this?

Anyway, this brings me back to the point of this article. Recently, a professor at Humboldt State University released a map visually depicting the location of hate words used in Tweets.

Here is a little bit more about the project:

The Geography of Hate is part of a larger project by Dr. Monica Stephens of Humboldt State University (HSU) identifying the geographic origins of online hate speech. Undergraduate students Amelia Egle, Matthew Eiben and Miles Ross, worked to produce the data and this map as part of Dr. Stephens’ Advanced Cartography course at Humboldt State University.

The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 – April 2013 containing one of the ‘hate words’. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing ‘hate words’ as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

The tweeted hate words they used were around LGBTQ, race, and disability issues. For the purpose of this post, I’d like to focus on the racist words.

Here’s the map of the tweets that contained the word: “Chink”

Here’s the map of the tweets that contained the word: “Gook”

Here’s the map of the tweets that contained the word: “Nigger”

Here’s the map of the tweets that contained the word: “Wetback”

Here’s the map of the tweets that contained the word: “Spic”

What I find most interesting about the maps are how much more prominent the use of the word “Chink” is to “Gook.” I guess it is proof that it is the preferred word for all anti-Asian Pacific Islander racism. But most of all, I am saddened by how “Nigger” is by far the most-commonly used hate word on Twitter. Of course, this isn’t surprising but to see it (as compared to other hate words) is.

One thing I would recommend is to take a closer look at each map. For example, on the “Chink” map it appears that all of states from Indiana to Maryland is guilty of using the word but when you zoom in on the map, most of it is centered in Virginia.

When you look at the map, what does it tell/teach you?

Follow me on Twitter @ksakai1

By Nithin Coca

Let me start my first article on a lighter note–an anecdote from my freshman year of college, more than 10 years ago. I was at the In-N-Out across the street from the dorms sitting on a bar stool along with two Asian-Americans dormmates I had just met. We sat facing the window, with a clear panoramic view of the campus. It was orientation week at UC-Irvine, so school hadn’t yet started, but I was excited. Finally, after six years living in the Midwest, I was in California and, happily, already making friends.

A short Asian girl with an oversize backpack passed our view. “She definitely Chinese,” said the guy sitting next to me.

I looked at her, perplexed. Did they mean ethnically? After all, this was UCI, and though it was majority Asian, it was also 98% Californian. There were very few international students here. And how could they tell her nationality just by looking at her?

“That one, definitely Korean,” said the other guy, pointing at a tall guy in glasses. Was this some sort of game Californians played? Guess-the-ethnicity? Was it a skill?

“Filipino for sure!”

Across the street, I saw two Caucasians males walking toward the In-N-Out. I could play this game too.

“Over there, that guy is definitely German, and the other, Irish,” I said, barely able to not giggle. I turned to them, expecting laughter.

Instead, two faces stared at me with a mix of perplexion and pity, clearly saying – are you mentally troubled?

Hurt, and not sure how to respond, I quietly went back to my burger.

That was my culture shock, and despite traveling to Asia, Africa, and Europe in the subsequent years, nothing was ever as hard as that first move from Kansas City to California and being surrounded by, for the first time, other Asians. Or, at least, that’s what I thought.

Growing up in the Midwest, I’d always felt out of place, and, naturally, blamed it on where I was. It wasn’t lack of diversity per se — sure, my high school was mostly white, but within “white” were Irish-Catholics, Southern Baptists, German Protestants, and a large Jewish minority. My best friend, in fact, was Jewish and resoundly rejected being called “white.” Diversity exists everywhere, but only if we want to see it.

No, my dislike was more to do with the bubble my suburban high school was in, disconnected from not only urban Kansas City just up the freeway, but the world as a whole. We were, after all, more than a thousand miles from any border, as Americana as you could get. I knew that there was more out there, and hoped that in California, I would be more connected to it, and find others like me.

Yet, as my intro shows, my return to California was far from smooth. Ethnicity, which I’d tried to ignore my whole life, all of a sudden was in the forefront. My skin color mattered — so much so that people made judgments based on it (“So you must be studying Engineering?”), judgments I’d never been exposed to before, cloaked in so-called cosmopolitan cultural intelligence.

In the Midwest, no one would ever ask your ethnicity — it would be impolite. However students at UCI seemed to have no such qualms. So when my Asian-American roommate first asked me about my race, I answered as I always had.

“I’m  Asian,” I said. There was a pause.

“You’re not Asian,” he responded curtly.

For a few seconds, I was too shocked to respond.

I’m Asian. You’re Indian,” he continued. In his mind, he was both Asian and Chinese. But I was just Indian. We also never became friends.

It got harder from there. On the second day of class, I walked through the student center, where everyone was eating lunch. I froze. Each table in the outdoor plaza was filled with a different ethnicity. Where did I fit into this scheme? As my roommate had showed me, I wasn’t “Asian” enough to hang out with the Chinese, Koreans, or Filipinos, and, conversely, not “Indian” enough for the Indian cliques either. Even the white students were unapprochable, an antagonistic minority, nothing like my mostly white friends in high school.

I was as out of place in California as I had been in Kansas, despite the dramatic increase in diversity. But, it was, as I would later see clearly, diversity in name only, and that the clique-ish behavior I saw was, I’d later learn, a natural reaction to far greater forces at play all across America.

As an antsy 19-year-old, I reacted as I always had. I left. The next year, I studied abroad in France, and would, with time, travel the world to expand my mind. Upon returning to California, at a new University, I formed my own clique with a bunch of diverse misfits, united in our differences, not, like the cliques at UCI, in our common skin color or parents’ birthplace. They challenged me to think and destroy preconceptions.

The prejudices I was exposed to as a freshmen have made me resoundedly anti-stereotype, and I pride myself on not only breaking barriers, but not judging others by appearance either. At the same time, my respect and pride in my own culture has grown – South Indian, Hindu, Buddhist, American, and yes, Asian.

It wasn’t an easy journey, and I still have a lot to learn. As a contributor to 8Asians, I hope to explore issues of identity from my own unique Asian-American perspective, all stemming from my reaction to moving to California back in 2001.

And just to be clear. I AM Asian.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nithin Coca is Californian by birth, his parents are from South India, and he was infected with the travel bug at the age of of two months when his mom took him halfway across the world to India to meet his family. 30 years and 44 countries later, he is now sure that there is no cure. Nithin has taken his international upbringing to the maximum, having lived and worked in the United States, France, Spain, Nepal, and Indonesia. He believes that travel is a way to bring good to the world, by connecting people, issues, and building a global community, and he hopes that his writing helps make a difference, even if it’s small, in tackling the world’s problems. As an Asian-American with a unique perspective, he hopes his articles here inspire debate and discussion on challenges our community faces, and perhaps, ideas too. He can be reached at freelance@nithincoca.com and blogs at www.nithincoca.com.

As you know, the month of May is American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and thus it’s no surprise that the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the First Lady’s Let’s Move! Initiative and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have joined up to not only celebrate but also educate how to cook traditional AAPI dishes in a healthy yet also tasty way:

“To promote healthy eating among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, White House Executive [Filipino American] Chef Cristeta Comerford and Chef Ming Tsai have teamed up to film a cooking demonstration in the White House kitchen featuring healthy and traditional Asian recipes that follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommendations that support the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) MyPlate food icon. … MyPlate serves as a powerful visual cue to remind all of us to choose healthier foods among the five food groups and build healthier plates at mealtimes. It points consumers to the ChooseMyPlate.gov website where consumers can put the Dietary Guidelines into action. … “There’s no reason to have to sacrifice the foods we love in order to eat a healthy diet,” Comerford said. Chef Ming Tsai agreed, “The key here is that you don’t have to sacrifice flavor, sacrifice culture, to make food that is still actually good for you.”"

In general, I think a lot of Chinese food that I eat isn’t necessarily all that healthy – since I like to eat a lot of meat and anything stir fried, etc. But it’s good to see that traditional dishes like fried rice can be cooked more healthily too!

Get to know the writers who make 8Asians possible! Joz started the “Meet the 8Asians” series a while back when she introduced our then resident heartthrob Brian. Now meet some of our new writers on staff, such as Nithin, an old soul traveler at heart.

Nithin represents many firsts for 8Asians, and I will leave it up to you to figure out what those are. His writing style conveys a social consciousness and wisdom for the world that is well beyond his years. Be sure to read articles by Nithin published in Jakarta Expat. He writes with precision and acuity about environmental issues that impact Indonesia and boasts an impressive portfolio of writings on travel, food, culture, social and political issues that not only impact the Asian or Asian American community, but the physical landscape and environment of Asia as well.

A genuine peripatetic, Nithin has traveled extensively: 44 states in the U.S. and 44 countries around the world. He has been an activist with the Sierra Club and other grassroots organizations and a mentor on social media for advocacy and citizen journalism. Since finishing his masters in International Affairs from Columbia University, he’s traveled across Asia and Africa and focused on building his freelance writing career.

Nithin was first introduced to 8Asians by his friend, another one of our fellow writers, Johnny C, and was impressed by the quality of writing and the active, engaging community. He felt that with his unique perspective, he could add to the debate and bring up some interesting points about Asian-American culture, while also learning from all of us here and our own experiences.

Some personal predictions? We’ll probably see provocative and meditative articles from Nithin about culture or the idea of culture, especially on the experience of being raised apart from one’s cultural homeland and what “cultural homeland” even means in today’s globalized society.

Nithin is also a speaker for campus engagements, conferences, panels, and workshops. Be sure to visit his website, www.nithincoca.com.

This commercial from Ace Hardware shows “Greg” (Actor Ryun Yu) getting a bit of hardware advice from his “neighbor” at Ace.

I wonder if they can give advice like Tim does on Asian American DIY such as installing powerful kitchen exhaust fan, or adding a heated toilet seat and bidet.

Lucy Liu recently discussed racism in Hollywood, the problem with not being American enough and not being Asian enough–the classic paradoxical existence every Asian American lives in. She’s tired of being the emotionless Asian girl or the Asian girl that kicks your butt.

But her role in “Elementary“, a contemporary re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes in New York, throws a sizable wrench in the Asian female stereotypes by casting her as Dr. Joan Watson. What’s cool about this from an Asian American perspective?

First of all, she doesn’t have an Asian sounding name because, you know, not all of us do. Duh. Second, she is a female doctor who is drawn into forensics. That just screams Scully awesomeness. Finally, she’s just a person in this show. Not an Asian person or and Asian American person, just another person, a character with thoughts and feelings, with a personal past of some sort of tragedy or conflict, who finds herself having to deal with the bizarrely enigmatic Holmes. You don’t see her prancing around in geisha wear or striking a kung fu pose. She’s just Dr. Watson, doing her job, and letting herself be dragged into Sherlock’s world.

I watched the first episode and was pleased with it for all the reasons stated above. Then I proceeded to hate the show, because as cool as Lucy Liu’s Dr. Joan Watson was, I could not stand this Sherlock Holmes.

I’m a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes series. I haven’t read all of them, but I plan to. All of it put together is like two and a half Bibles.

Everyone was complaining and griping about having a woman, and a Chinese American woman at that, play the dear Dr. Watson, but seriously, they should have been paying a lot more attention to the reconstruction of Holmes himself. Nothing against the actor (Johnny Lee Miller), I don’t really know his work too well. Here are the reasons I hate this Sherlock.

First, when you first meet him, he creates sexual/romantic tension between himself and Joan Watson. NO! Why are we starting this relationship off with gender at the center of the equation? If that’s the case, then please change Watson back to a man right now because it’s ruining everything!

Second, Sherlock apparently has sexual encounters with random women to “satisfy” his primal urges. WHAT? This is Sherlock Holmes we’re talking about! He’d rather study the various types of glue used in envelopes than be distracted with women, most of whom he finds dull and predictable.

Next, he’s a drug addict here. Yes, Holmes used to smoke some stuff to help him think, probably to calm his ever-racing mind, but drug addict? If Holmes is addicted to anything, it’s the chase.

Finally, he’s apparently under the thumb of a rich but controlling father of some sort who had hired Dr. Joan Watson to be his sober companion. Let’s just make it clear, Sherlock Holmes is under no one’s thumb but his own, even if it is smelly from weeks of chemical experiments.

I know I’m getting emotional, but hey, I just don’t handle it well when someone messes with one of my favorite characters.

Despite this rocky beginning, I am going to try to give this show another chance and try to watch the rest of the first season, because I do like the Joan Watson character so far, and I want to support the groundbreaking that Lucy Liu is doing here with the Dr. Watson role.

In the meantime, I’m much more excited about another Sherlock series, namely the BBC PBS Masterpiece Sherlock, starring the Star Trek: Into Darkness bad guy, Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Bilbo Baggins Martin Freeman as Watson. Now here’s a contemporary re-imagining of Doyle’s Sherlock. It is so much more intelligent and true to the original Holmes than an Iron Man Sherlock or a drug addict one, and the random banter between Holmes and Watson is simply golden. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the Iron Man Sherlock movies, but after seeing the BBC one, there’s just no comparison.

Happily, despite the possibility of cancellation (EGADS! How dare they!) Season 3 is scheduled to broadcast Fall 2013 and is currently being filmed. I wait with bated breath. In the meantime, I guess I’ll hack away at that mountain that is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s complete Sherlock Holmes.

By “Cleanchino” Cho

Although I am not a proud lurker on Facebook, I still continue to browse the ever-so revealing News Feed on a regular basis. It’s part of my ritual during my daily commute home from work. Facebook is not only just a social media profile page, but it is a marketplace for sharing information. While scrolling down, I find an interesting image posted on an acquaintance’s posting. I was profoundly confused after reading the description defined on the image.

It stated the following:

Asian girls definition: The best looking women on Earth. Make great wives, great sex, usually not as slutty as white girls, can cook good food, and make white girls undesirable in comparison.

Using the lovely capabilities and options on Facebook, my acquaintance also decides to ‘tag’ 20 of her Asian girlfriends to the post, with many of them ‘Liking’ the status.

First of all, I was surprised that anyone would post such a demeaning description of themselves publicly, and then classify that her ethnicity and gender is superior than another one. As much as I hate the generalization, I also find that the comparative narrative suggests hatred for another. Why is there a need to bring yourself above one, and then push them below your own? It is easy to dismiss this passage as being racist, but I don’t believe the intention is to project prejudice toward Caucasian people. The underlying factor is that they are contrasting for a reason: it’s because they are targeting a particular reader, Caucasian men.

Without going in-depth regarding the mutually fulfilling prophecy between Asian women and Caucasian men, I am shocked that these girls would degrade themselves by suggesting that they make the ideal housewife because they are great at pleasing their men– and much better at it than another race of women. What’s also counter-intuitive is that they first suggest that they’re great at sex, but they’re not slutty. If I was trying to convince others that I’m not a criminal, but at the same time broadcast that I am fantastic at stealing, I’m delivering a mixed message. (Yes, I’m aware that being good at something doesn’t make you do something frequently and without morals).

Another point I want to emphasize is that the entire statement is marketing Asian women as trophy wives that you can enjoy at home and bring outside for show-and-tell as a fashion accessory. What my concern is, where is the part or notion that suggests that Asian girls are “intelligent, classy, and sophisticated”? Why is this Asian girl proud of selling herself short? And the fact that other girls are approving of it makes me question them and why they are interested in fulfilling the stereotype.

I am not a bitter Asian man, but I feel insulted that this is where the girls of my ethnicity are moving toward while women have spent years fighting for equality. In current society, which seems to be losing the classic 60′s gentleman, I find it pathetic that women are selling themselves short to appeal to another race.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: “Cleanchino” Cho is a 24 year-old Chinese-Canadian male working in fashion management.  He is proud of his culture, but ashamed of some who represent the whole.