San Francisco Chronicle’s Asian Pop Columnist Jeff Yang comments about the once-derogatory term “FOB”, “When Hwang and I were growing up, it was always clearly an acronym, with each letter spoken out loud, Eff Oh Bee. For Teresa and Serena and their generational peers, the term “fob” has become monosyllabic, rhyming with “rob” — disconnecting it from its expression of origin and softening its harsh meaning…There’s something metaphorical about the move from “F.O.B.” to “fob.” A fob, after all, is a length of chain tied to a watch, allowing you to readily draw it forth; it’s an omnipresent link to something precious — something that always tells you what time it is.”

Yang also quotes graphic novelist, Gene Yang, “…the high school Teresa and Serena attended, has one of the most Asian student populations in the nation. ‘It’s like 80 percent Asian,’ he says. ‘The average SAT scores there are through the roof, and they have no football team, but an absolutely killer badminton team.’”

—An accent on love: Cherishing our immigrant parents — malapropisms, cultural disconnects and all by Jeff Yang

CNNGo also featured us twice this month—thanks, Chris!

So why blog today? Because My Mom is a Fob just turned one. (My Dad is a Fob is a week younger and celebrates on the 25th.) The fob-filled year in recap:

• October 17, 2008: The very first posts and birth of “Is funk means sexy?”
• October 21, 2008: Teresa is qualified and ready to teach Online Marketing for Dummies
• October 22, 2008: Hyphen joins the ranks of Disgrasian and Angry Asian Man and also blogs about us (then publishes us in print a few months later for a Mother’s Day feature)
• October 26, 2008: Go Productions loves us too?
• October 31, 2008: Holla at Margaret Cho! I guess we’re now famous by association.
• November 11, 2008: Neatorama skyrockets our readership for one day…and then we lose track of all bloggers, high school newspapers, and British journalists who feature us after that.
• November 18, 2008: We accidentally curse on live radio and someone named Angry Ninja says we’re “insanely popular“…? wow.
• November—Thanksgiving Break, 2008: I skip school and escape to Thailand for a week while Teresa meets up with Phil of Wong Fu Productions.
• December 23, 2008: T & S reunite at HoChie’s and get spotlighted.
• December 28, 2008: We meet up with Phil of Wong Fu again in good ol’ Mission Coffee and come up with some awesome ideas saved for the future.
• January 2009: New year, new start? We get lives. Teresa studies abroad in Cyprus and also visits Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovakia, Israel, and Egypt. We finish our 61-page book proposal and send that to our Writer’s House agent, who starts contacting publishers.
• February-March 2009: School gets tough. Teresa is still gone. MMIAF is receiving way too many hits and overburdening Bluehost’s servers, so they suspend us multiple times until I decide to switch mom’s over to Linode.
• April 2009: We score a book deal with Penguin’s Perigee Books! I present two workshops with HoChie at the ITASA West Coast and Midwest Conferences.
• May 2009: I graduate a year early and Teresa is back from Cyprus!
• June 2009: Teresa leaves for New York and I leave for Taipei.
• July 2009: Teresa is still in New York and I’m still in Taipei…but we’re still updating the blogs while on vacation/internships…
• August 2009: I’m typhooned in and then leave for Kuala Lumpur, Brunei, Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Teresa’s finishing up her internship in New York! We keep on blogging…
• September 2009: Teresa leaves for Taipei and Korea (we barely miss each other), I come back to the Bay, then Teresa comes back to the Bay and leaves for school in San Diego. We both blog some more.
• October 2009: Jeff Yang features us on SFGate …and we just keep blogging on, no matter where we are.

Here’s the funny part: Teresa’s piano teacher first told Teresa’s mom, who then Skyped Teresa (who’s currently in Cyprus—as in the Mediterranean), who then Facebook msged me sad faces and question marks.

I was on the phone with a Bluehost IT guy for more than half an hour and finally got our websites back up. Rest assured, our accounts weren’t hacked—we only ate up too much CPU to get us in trouble. Thanks to your parents, we’re now infamous and on Bluehost’s “watch list”.

In fact, we’ve used up the most CPU out of any other Bluehost account member. Here’s a direct quote from the notes added about why we were suspended. It was intended for the tech wizards, who only forwarded it to me since I asked what was up:

“They have used 321072 CPU Secs since Feb 20th and the next highest user is at 91152 CPU Secs.”

I’ve installed a caching system and optimized the SQL tables…so hopefully everything will run smoothly from now on. If we get suspended again, tell your parents they’re just too funny and e-popular.

Many people have asked us to combine the two sites into one—and we’ve really considered the pros and the cons—but we just can’t change what we’ve already branded. We don’t want to confuse any more readers, so if you would like to receive MMIAF, MDIAF, & WUINK updates, please follow or subscribe to Wuink’s twitter. If you want to follow the sites individually, MMIAF has a twitter and so does MDIAF.

Happy tweeting and Happy Niu Year!

I know a few people have subscribed to wuink.com only to be disappointed by weeks of uhh, dormant winter behavior. Well, it’s true, we’re finally up—a few sleepless nights later. So you’re probably wondering why there are posts before this one, and it’s because we’ve actually been blogging over at blog.wuink.com just to keep track of what’s been happening. We will be updating at this site from now on to avoid any confusion.

So what’s the latest juicy gossip? Word on the street is, Wuink and [one-third of] Wongfu Productions met up today to talk about future collaborations. Stay tuned! Oh wait, that’s old news cuz you already knew that Teresa and Phil met up earlier over Thanksgiving break—while I was stuck in Thailand. No I’m not jealous. of nice guys/gals. I kid, I kid—but really, are you a Nice Guy?

We talk online every day. We Skype. We Twitter. We Facebook. We blog. There is no shortage of Wu-communication between Serena and me. Yet unbeknown to most, we actually hadn’t seen each other for nearly three years — since our high school graduation in June of 2006.

That’s right. While we talk and act like sisters, we somehow just… never met up in ALL THAT TIME.

On a fateful and drizzly December 18, we reunited in Berkeley under the roof of TaiwaneseAmerican.org founder Hochie Tsai for a spotlight interview. I sat there thinking what a long way the two of us have come since were 17. (Then Serena ate one slice of Cheeseboard pizza while I ate three, and I realized that maybe not that much has changed.)

Anyway, check out the spotlight here. Sigh. No, we don’t know why we allow for public evidence of our lack of eloquence, but we’re gluttons for punishment, so you may as well enjoy it.

In the past couple weeks, we’d been contacted about going on the radio about mymomisafob.com, and well, frankly, we’re internet people for a reason. We get high-pitched and sweaty under pressure. Also, our nervous giggles rival those of 12-year-olds’. Nevertheless, by some stroke of idiocy we agreed to go live on a Seattle talk show tonight, where we were (gently) grilled about the potentially racist implications behind our site, why my mom doesn’t know about mymomisafob.com yet, etc.

We officially said “fuck” on live radio! Now we can cross THAT off our list. Minus the expletives (oops — we were trying to describe the classic “is funk means sexy?” post) — and the rambling on about Asian parents’ view of homosexuality for six minutes too many, I think we did okay.

In hindsight, we sort of wish we’d have recorded it so that we could listen to ourselves, but actually, scratch that — we’re pretty sure we confused and/or bored the hell out of all of Seattle’s late-night commuters.

We’re sorry, Seattle. We’ll do better next time.

PS: We are terrorizing a Korean radio station in Chicago next. If we become less phone-inept by then, we’ll let you know how to listen in. Maybe.

Anyway. Hello, darling readers. So Serena and I couldn’t help ourselves — we just had to start another blog. That’s right. A blog about a blog. How redundant ARE we?

What’s it all about? In a nutshell, we wanted to keep loyal mymomisafob.com/mydadisafob.com readers updated on all our progress, so you can see exactly how the whole running-a-blog process goes from start to finish. That and we wanted to document the one successful thing that’s come out of eight years of pulling all nighters. (Actually, in sophomore year we successfully mastered the Charleston thanks to YouTube. And once, Serena taught me nine chapters of Calculus in under four hours.) But other than that, we’ve been unreasonably unproductive… until fob moms took the internet by storm.

Not that you can really call this productivity either. Agh.

What the hell is “Wuink,” you ask? Well, both of our last names are “Wu” — no relation whatsoever. It’s like “Wu Inc.” but also “Wu Ink” but also “Wuiiiink.” If that’s not the most clever thing you’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is. Like I said. We don’t get much sleep.

The point of this post was to say: We love running these sites and we want to share all the nitty-gritty details with you. It’s been a total blast, and we’re awed and appreciative that you guys come back to read again and again. We couldn’t do it without you!

Much love,

S&T