Asian American Studies @ RU: Interview with Leader Cabinet

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Dave Lam

Asian American Leader Cabinet is a po-litical activist organization dedicated toeducate and empower the Rutgers com-munity. Laurence Louie, also one of thefounders of Native Tongue, created it to provide Asians with a stronger voice andcontrol at Rutgers. Currently Anna Phung leads AALC along with a small group ofinfluential and bold individuals. Relating to their mission statement and goal, AALCis currently trying to bring an Asian American Studies Program to Rutgers.

David Wong: First, lets start off with a brief de-scription about you.

Anna Phung: Hi, I’m Anna, a senior and Head Coordinator of the Asian American Leader-ship Cabinet (AALC), which aims for the im-portance of activism and social justice in the Asian American community. I am also involved in Bridge, which is like a safe group for Asians Americans in LGBTQ community. One per-sonal fact is that I enjoy playing the Guitar.

Long Pham: Hey, my name is Long. I’m a senior majoring in Women Gender Studies. I am a mem-ber of LC and I volunteer at one of the Women’s Center. One personal hobby of mine is reading.

Ryan Ramones: Hi, my name is Ryan Ra-mones. I’m currently a junior and a civil and

environmental major. Right now I’m an ac-tive member in Leader Cabinet, while also be-ing active in both the Engineering and Greater Rutgers Activist Community. And something personal about me, I’m actually working dur-ing the weekends as a cook and head chef.

Connie Phung: I’m Connie Phung. I’m a first year here at Rutgers University and an active member of LC and Bridge. I guess I could say I’m trying to integrate myself into the school and learn about Asian Americans in general and the inequality going on here. And some personal information is that I like to sing.

Dw: What is Asian American Studies about and what do you want to learn from it?

LP: For me Asian American Studies is about

transnationalism, people moving across bas-es. The reason why we have this notion of Asian American is the fact of people migrat-ing from Asian countries to America. How-ever, we don’t know what that means because we don’t have any way of viewing or analyz-ing the history or dynamic of being an Asian American or how we get here or how we fit in.

RR: My view would also incorporate transnation-alism. It’s not Asian American, as United States of America, but Asian American as in North Amer-ica and South America. In regards to the United States, Asians Americans have had such a strong impact in the Americas but it just hasn’t been shown in our textbooks. For example, there’s no mention of the Filipino American communities that settled in New Orleans around 1500s, plan-tation workers in Hawaii, or even the Chinese immigrants working around the east coast during the industrial revolution. American history lacks all those details even though they were all im-portant in the growth and progression of the US.

AP: It’s really about breaking the whole two lines we get in history textbooks. You probably only hear about Japanese interments, or gold rush, and maybe about the Chinese workers work-ing on the railroad. It’s really all we learn and is emphasized in like less 20 minutes of the class. We want to broaden that and make sure every-one knows how significant we were in history.

Continued on Page 2...

Irene Grandeza

On Thursday, October 13th, Native Tongue par-ticipated in the Charity Bed Race with other or-ganizations. The race was held on College Ave and featured about fifty various organizations that came together to participate in the charity event. In order to enter, each team had to donate at least twenty-five winter hats or gloves to the New

Brunswick School District. Each team was judged in four categories: speed, design/decoration of the bed, design/decorations of the team uniform, and number of gloves/hats donated. Teams raced down College Ave two at a time and at the end, the eight fastest teams raced against each other again. This year, Native Tongue decided on a Lilo and Stitch theme with Hawaiian decorations. The team consisted of Jordan Biason, Joyce Ho, AJ Delgra, and Abrar Qauim. Although Native Tongue did not place, a lot of people took notice and complimented the outstanding costume de-sign on the members. Jordan described the event as “fun, exhilarating, and quite the experience.” When asked if he would do it again next year, he said “heck yes.” All in all, the team had a won-derful time and helped contribute to the charity. The total glove/hat donation of all the teams ex-ceeded 1,000, which is an amazing contribution to the school district. Native Tongue will partici-pate again next year and hopefully you readers can support us on the sidelines.

Rutgers Homecoming 4th Annual Bed Race

CONTENTSStaff 2

Culture 3Entertainment 4

Reviving The Rising SunJorelle Baker

After a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear disasters, the Japanese government has decided to open its land, giving away 10,000 free tickets for guests to visit. Winners from around the world will have their flight and accommoda-tions completely paid for.The goal of this surprising event is to have the tourist population return to their great land. Ever since the natural disasters, tourism has decreased by 50%, crippling the economy. In order to win these free tickets, applicants must submit a form stating why they wish to go to Japan and where they would prefer to stay dur-ing their visit. The Japan Tourism Agency, the company sponsoring the event, has yet to reveal where and how the forms will be received. Much of the land has recovered from the terrible incident, and the only immediate dangerous ar-eas are located near the Fukushima Daiichi nu-clear plant. The Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant is the nuclear facility where the radiation spread. Although this area still has certain levels of ra-diation, the town surrounding the area will be opened to the public. More information is still being developed and released after the first announcement made on Monday, October 11, 2011.

Laurence Louie, founding member of NT and LC at a rally for Asian American studies at Rutgers

NT members (L to R) Jordan Biason, Abrar Qaium, Joyce Ho and Aj Delgra

Editor-In-Chiefs David Lam David Wong

News Editor Jiwon YoonAssist. News Editors Andrew Cheung Abrar Quaim

Managing Editors Cindy Tran Franklin Tong Assist. Managing Editor Rensa Chen

Layout Editor Valerie HungAssist. Layout Editors Kathy Wu

Public Relations Chair Connie Ngo PR Officers Jordan Biason Irene Grandeza Kelvin Knudtamarn

Treasurer Joyce HoWebmaster Francis EusebioAdministrative Assistant Fadila NoorHistorian Gabe Aquino

Fundraising Chair Teresa EaFundraising Committee Henry Tse

Add these AA Organization’s on Facebook!

AALC Asian American Leadership Cabinet

ASC Asian Student Council 2011-2012

CSO Chinese Student Organization

KSA Rutgers Ksa

RAPS Rutgers Association of Philippine

StudentsRCC

Viva RCCTASA

Taiwanese American Student AssociationVSA

Rutgers Vietnamese Student Association(give us a holler if we missed your org!)

Connect with Us!runativetongue.webs.com

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David Lam

Am I talking about the sauce from your neighbor-hood Applebee’s restaurant or am I talking about the exoticism of the hyper-sexualized Asian fe-male? The first one of course! I remember one night in the beginning of September when I went to Applebee’s with a group of friends and I ordered these wings. Those wings came with a few different options of sauces that you could order from. As I scanned the list I noticed something that stood out. Among the list of sauces was the flavor, “Sweet & Spicy Asian Flair.” That was when I thought to myself, “what’s that sup-posed to mean?” Since when was there such a thing as “Asian sauce?” And did they really have to add the “flair” just to make it seem more ex-otic? I mean I’ve never seen a “Sweet & Spicy European Flair.” Is this what people really think of Asians and Asian Americans?This brings me to the latter topic aforemen-tioned.

Even some types of food created in the United States are influenced by Westerners’ objectifi-cation of Asians and Asian Americans as being exotic and mystique. This preconceived notion of Asian cultures and its people being weak and

feminine dates back to histori-cal times, mainly in the age of colonialism and imperialism. In the East-West interactions centuries ago Western travelers have depicted Asia as “the oth-er” as Asia was seen as drasti-cally different from the Western viewpoint of what is normal. They brought back home with them misrepresentations as well

as stereotypes that would remain to this day.I’m not suggesting that you should avoid trying the sauce nor eat any foods like Oriental chicken salad (where they just add some type of “Asian sauce”) or Mandarin orange chicken salad (la-beled because of the Mandarin orange slices). These names just reflect what society thinks of Asians and Asian Americans. All in all it is still food so just remember to enjoy the foods you like and to savor their taste.

DW: What are some of the approaches we’ve tak-en towards this program?

LP: Based from I know we had a proposal, pe-tition, and support from faculty, student govern-ments, and even administration, but was put on the back burner, basically due to funding. Recent-ly there has been another set back, we’ve been no-tified many heads of the departments feel that we don’t need an Asian Americans studies because we have an Asian Studies.

AP: Basically 4 years ago, there was a real move-ment. One of the found-ing members of Native Tongue and Leadership asked why we don’t have an Asian Americans stud-ies, when many other schools had a fully de-veloped Asian America programs. So they came together and researched and compiled a proposal of why we need an Asian Americans studies and how it can benefits Rut-gers. The proposal was brought to many faculty and administrative department, and a petition was developed to show the need for Asian Americans Studies program.

During this four-year time there has been a Asian American symposium to get other members from the east coast to come together to discuss what an Asian American Studies program means, how-ever it was put on the back burner again. So last year we came up with another petition to not only

show that it’s about the Rutgers community but also about equality in the whole United States. We even met with Dean Greenberg, so now the next step is to get an Asian American Studies program here at Rutgers.

RR: Adding to Anna, last year of spring semester AALC approached RUSA and they unanimously passed a resolution for supporting the creation of an Asian Americans Studies programs at Rutgers.

DW: It’s not that many people don’t support the creation of an Asian American Studies Program,

but it takes too much dedi-cation in devoting their time to achieve this goal. What message do you want to provide them?

RR: I just want to say hav-ing an Asian American Studies program is more then academic or the topic of having a major or mi-nor. It represents Rutgers showing support of one of its longest constituents in

New Brunswick. It’s about Rutgers reaching out to Asian Americans and embracing their commu-nity. This shows how Rutgers wants to provide the students with the most complete curriculum avail-able. In a simple sense, it gives the opportunity for people to learn.

Sweet & Spicy Asian Flair

Continued: Interview with Leadership Cabinet

Wedding of the Dragon King Fadilla Noor

A country that measures the personal hap-piness of its people as Gross National Hap-piness is known as one of the happiest plac-es in the world. Also, known as The Last Shangri-La, its main attraction for tourists is its culture and tradition. A place that re-quires all citizens to wear the national dress, where there were no paved roads or currency until the 1960s. A place that still has no traffic lights and where television and internet were only introduced in 1999. Bhutan, previously an ab-solute monarchy, has recently be-come a constitu-tional monarchy meaning that the monarch is now bound by a constitution. It is the first country in the world to ban tobacco; a country where the two main religions are Buddhism and Hinduism. Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, crowned king of Bhutan in 2008, is the world’s youngest reigning monarch. He married Jetsun Pema in a traditional Bud-dhist wedding on October 13, 2011 and their reception was held October 15, 2011 in Pu-nakha. No foreign officials were invited to the wedding as the king wanted to keep it sim-ple and traditional, which comprised mainly

of their ordinary citizens. October 13th was declared a national holiday so that the na-tion’s 700,000 people could join in the cele-brations. The Royal Couple also had a Hindu marriage on October 18, 2011 in Thimpu. Bhutan is also called, ‘Druk-yul’ or “Land of the Thunder Dragon.” The Queen, Jetsun Pema, was a commoner before her mar-riage to the Bhutanese King. Her father is

a pilot with Bahrain Air. “Druk Gyalpo” refers to the Bhuta-nese King. Polyan-dry has been done away with, while polygamy can be practiced with the permission of the first wife. In fact, the former king Jigme Singye Wangchuk had married his four sisters who served as his four queens!

Bhutan has been blessed with abundant nat-ural beauty. Its stunning scenic beauty has to be seen to be believed! It is as yet unspoiled with the problems of pollution and overpop-ulation. Therefore, anyone who wants to be close to nature and get away from the “mad-ding crowd,” as the English author Thomas Hardy would say, should just head for Bhu-tan and enjoy the quiet, peace, and solitude that the surroundings offer in abundance!

page 3

Jordan Biason

The definition of beauty typically varies from culture to culture; there is no true definition. Some people pre-fer tall while others prefer short. Another person may like light brown eyes over dark brown eyes. In the Philippines, the need to have lighter skin is always a topic that flies.If you have every watched television in the Philippines, you may have noticed something about the actors or actresses. Most of the people on TV are good look-ing and light skinned men and women. Society seems to be fixated on the idea of being light skinned because of all the products that are ad-vertised as skin whitening products. Many are listed in mag-azines, shown in commercials, and displayed on billboards.Some products include skin whitening/bleaching lotions, creams, and soaps. I have personally used skin whitening or Papaya soap. You use it as if you were normally using soap in the shower and completely lather yourself up. As long as you don’t continually go outside and counter the whitening, re-sults will be seen. One other product that people have taken is a pill containing GSH or glutathione, which is an antioxidant. It provides a radiant glow, improves skin hyperpigmenta-tion, controls acne, and makes the skin smoother and clearer.In the Philippines, dark skin is typically associated with the working class. This is because they are usually work-ing outside doing hard labor in the sun thus, causing tans. If you have light skin, it is assumed you probably have air-conditioning (a luxury in the Philippines) and spend most of your time inside for an office type of job.We all should be happy with what we have, whether we are short or tall, or even light skinned or dark skinned.

Skin Whitening

Connie Ngo

Question: What do you do with disposable chopsticks after you’ve used them? If you answered, “throw them out”, you’re not alone. Over 57 billion chopstick pairs are manufactured in China, with 45% made from 3.8 million trees, make their way all around the world. Countries like China, Japan, and South Korea consume the vast majority, while a “mere” 2% of the total manufactured gets shipped to the United States.So what’s the point? With major deforestation knocking on the doors of Asian countries, it’s hard to leave this problem unacknowledged. Donna Keiko Ozawa, a third-generation Japanese American, brought to light this increasingly devastating situation through her Warib-ashi Project. Through the use of recycled, disposable chopsticks, she sculpts abstract – and not so abstract – forms that capture the enormity and gravity of how careless people have become towards the environ-ment. With mounds upon mounds of these wooden sticks at her dis-posal (no pun intended), it raises an alarming concern at the rate in which we tear down forests just for the sake of having “sanitary” chopsticks.The problem with disposable chopsticks isn’t even that they create lots of waste. It’s our carelessness of our environment that we need to be more conscious of. Trees are meant to combat some of the pol-lutants in our air, but the more we take down, the more air pollutants there are. Perhaps chopsticks made from sustainable tree or bam-boo farms could be an answer, but not every chopstick manufac-turer has heeded this call to action. However, Asian countries are al-

ready aware of the problem. Some restaurants have switched over to reusable chopsticks, which are in fact, more cost-effective than disposables. The cost of washing each chopstick seems to be far less waste-ful than making (over and over again) new, single-use chopsticks.You may want to think twice about disposable chopsticks the next time you use them; Chinese manufacturers sometimes have little supervision over their production, which can lead to possible contamination of substances like sulfur, paraffin (a carcinogen), and hydrogen peroxide. Though not all chopstick factories run these risks, the ones that have higher risks can possi-bly contaminate soil and bodies of water when they are improperly dumped.The movement to “go green” has been encouraged, albeit light-ly, by Asian governments. If chopsticks are your go-to utensils for Asian cuisine, then you may want to consider getting yourself a pair of reusable chopsticks made out of wood or bamboo (but remem-ber – they’re reusable), metal, or plastic. Though the choice is com-pletely up to you, if you do choose to reuse your chopsticks, then at least you’re making a statement about being more earth-friendly.

Wari-what?

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MYX TV: A Growing Asian American TV ChannelRensa Chen

How often is Asian-influenced entertainment broadcasted on national tele-vision? Lately, the Asian American community has grown quite large and

in order to accommo-date for the increasing numbers of Asian and Asian-American audi-ences, there needs to be some kind of entertain-ment geared towards them. Many of you may or may not have heard of MYX TV, the only nationally-distributed channel that broadcasts

Asian-influenced entertainment. Stemming from its ABS-CBN Network counterpart in the Philippines, MYX TV was established in 2007 and is currently in over 5 million households. Similar to the well-known MTV channel, MYX TV’s agenda consists of music, shows, and movies. The primary aim and intention of the channel is to support the continuously growing Asian-American population and to give entertainment geared

more towards viewers that may otherwise feel unacknowledged by the mainstream media. The website, myx.tv, includes some of the channel’s shows, highlights, community events, and even blogger posts from people like us! In addition to providing the communities with the latest music from Asia, MYX TV includes a variety of broadcastings. Their section ‘Movie So Good’ features many carefully selected Asian movies that are shown weekly. “Music Bang” is their famous music video show that puts on the latest and hottest MVs from all over Asia, taking requests from bloggers through their online website. Another show, “Distortion 2 Static,” shows influential trends focused on hip hop and features many artists that may have not been heard of yet. MYX TV is indeed home to many talented youths of the Asian commu-nity and the contents of the channel cannot be fully described as it has an large variety of entertainment that one will just have to check out. Current-ly, MYX-TV is available in: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Northern Virginia, Houston, and recently, the San Fran-cisco Bay Area. Although it is not available in NJ yet, there is no doubt that this hit channel will soon be in our very own Jersey homes. If you’re ever bored of the mainstream television shows and are looking for a more diversely cultured channel to watch, come discover MYX-TV to be more aware of the Asian community and see what it’s got to offer.

Racial Discrimination in Gran TorinoHenry Tse

Racial discrimination – we see it everywhere nowadays, especially in the social media and films. There is one movie that rushes to my mind when I think of the racisms that we Asian Ameri-cans face in life, and that is Gran Torino.

Gran Torino, which was re-leased in 2008, starred ac-tors Clint Eastwood (Walt Kowalski) and Bee Vang (Thao Vang Lor)as the two main characters and antag-onists of the movie. Here is a synopsis of the plot: It starts out with Walt Kowal-ski, a widowed Korean War veteran who is angry at the

world and has become extremely hostile. Thao, a young Hmong who has moved next to Walt tries to steal his prized 1972 Ford Gran Torino in order to gain acceptance into his cousins gang. When Walt finds out that Thao tries to steal his car, he points a gun at Thao, but luckily Thao’s parents come out to protect him. However, Thao’s cous-ins’ gang comes in and causes more trouble with Walt, causing him to hate all Asians because of this and having been through the Korean War. To Walt the reasoning to hate entire races are jus-tified by the actions of certain individual Asians. These reasoning may sound foolish and idiotic, however it is the core of how racism begins. These actions from a small selective group of ethnicities are more than enough reasoning to label them with certain images. Prejudice s then formed from this hate of a certain group of peo-ple. In the movie this hate slowly built up in Walt causing mass hatred towards Asians. However, there was a turn of events toward the middle of the movies.Thao is later sent to work for Walt, to pay back for the attempted theft. Slowly yet surly they develop a nice bond between each other. How-ever, all that time spent with Walt angers Thao’s

cousin. Soon Thaos sister is kidnapped, this then leads to Walt trying to rescue her but loses his life in the end. Thao attends Walt’s funeral, finds out later that Walt had given his Gran Torino to Thao, the very car he was trying to steal at the beginning.This movie has many messages, even though Walt was prejudice towards Asians in the begin-ning, he later had a change of heart. Walt figures out that his perceptions of Asian were wrong. The change of heart occurred all from the time spent getting to know Thao. Before Walt passes away he leaves his car to Thao. Goes to show how eas-ily everyone can have misconceptions about any race, which in this case deals with Asians.

What the Hell is Minecraft?Connie Ngo

Upon first glance, Minecraft is just a simple game composed of cheap, pixelated graphics and cubes – nothing special. This top-rated indie game, de-spite its horrendous graphics (relative to the top game consoles’ like those on PS3 and Xbox), has captured the hearts of millions of gamers. The totally freeform, sandbox gameplay allows for the user to create a myriad of things, from fa-mous landmark replicas to 2D pixel sprites, out of block-shaped materials like dirt, stone, and colored wool.

Its appeal doesn’t extend to everyone; in fact, most people who love Minecraft were avid Lego block users in their younger days (so if you thought Legos were stupid, then you will most likely will not appreciate the full potential of Minecraft). This game is rather nostalgic, dig-ging up from the deep corners of our brains the kind of creativity that our teachers and parents used to encourage, once upon a time. But Mine-

craft isn’t just about building (unless you choose that game mode); it’s about survival against the enemy “mobs” that can whittle down your health points and cause you to drop all your belongings, while collecting material blocks and building grandeur structures. To many gamers’ pleasure, the RPG-like aspect of Minecraft gives it all the more charm to play.The cooler thing about Minecraft is that there ex-ists an entire community dedicated to this game. Of course, you can argue and say that there are many games with communities – like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty – but because Mine-craft allows for the creation of worlds to be shared through multiplayer servers, people all over the world can play with one another through the internet. A single world can have up to 256 players logged in at one time (though, this tends to lead to a lot of lag [you gamers know what I’m talking about]). Cooperative building becomes a must, and for the most part, people are friendly towards one another in the Minecraft world.Since its alpha testing days, the development of Minecraft has been rapid. What started out as a small, lowly-funded game with roots in Sweden suddenly boomed into a new gaming phenom-enon. Its graphics were originally worse than they are now (imagine that!) and the gameplay was very simplistic: survive the first night, col-lect materials, and then just build, all-the-while avoiding those darn hissing Creepers (they’re green, pixelated, walking rectangles that blow things up when you get too close). But now, it’s more than that; one has to make sure that his/her hunger bar doesn’t go down, that the animals within the area are contained and bred, and that the now-creepier Endermen don’t suddenly pop up to try to eat you.People these days are dazzled by high-definition graphics. Minecraft contains none of that, and is definitely a step back from the visual hubbub. Even with the lack of fancy graphics, the game still shines through with its very unique game-play, which is so freeform that sometimes peo-ple get frustrated that there is “no point” to the game. But what’s so great about Minecraft is that it’s a game that allows you to play…just for the hell of it.