Thanksgiving Indeed

The turkey turned out pretty good~

Numa Numa!

After wasting close to 3 hours looking at numa numa videos online, I decided to post one here so it won't be a COMPLETE waste of time. Check out this tranny Japanese ganguro schoolgirl parapara dancing and singing numa numa. If I believed in God this might just be heaven.




Okay I should really start working on my paper.

Yoda Sings to Britney Spears

This is so much more interesting than school:

All-American Girl

Wohoo! Margaret Cho's All-American Girl DVD is coming out in January! I think I was about 13 when the series first came on TV. I don't remember any of it...but I'm SOOOO looking forward to watching all the episodes again on DVD! Wohoo! Read more about it at Margaret Cho's blog!

Ignorance in Baseball Journalism

This is from a while ago, but when the Chiba Lotte Marines won the Japan Series in October, many articles in the U.S. included lines like this:

He's the only foreigner to manage in the Japan Series and only the fifth to head a team in the 70-year history of the league.

This is just wrong. Sadaharu Oh, the home run king in Japan with 868 in his career, was the manager of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks when they won the Japan Series in 1999 and 2003. Though Oh's mother is Japanese, he himself is a citizen of Taiwan.

What these reporters meant was that Valentine is the first white manager to win the Japan Series. How hard is it to do some fact checking when writing these articles? I guess since we all look the same it's safe to assume that every Asian-looking person playing baseball in Japan is Japanese? Dumbasses.

See the full article.

French Laundry

Two months ago I was fooling around on OpenTable. It was about 11:30 at night, and I remembered that French Laundry's tables are open for reservation two months ahead at the stroke of midnight. So I thought what the hell I might as well try it. Not thinking I would get a table because I had tried unsuccessfully a few months before, I wasn't expecting much. But I got a table for 2!

Later I realized that because the reservation was for the day after Thanksgiving, probably not too many other people were waiting on OpenTable vying for the coveted tables.

Too bad my restaurant buddy, the only person who could afford the $200+/person (without wine) tab because he used to work for The Man, is heading home for Thanksgiving. So I cancelled the reservation a couple of days ago lest I get charged $100/person for a no-show. (On a side note, now that he's not working there anymore, Mike has been working on making some movies. Check out his blog).

For those of you who don't know, French Laundry is considered one of the best, if not the best restaurant in the U.S. While no doubt the food is probably really good, it is probably the whole experience that makes it so highly rated. But given that it is easy to spend more than $400/person including wine, people probably deceive themselves into thinking they're having a good time. How idiotic would people think you were if you told them you spent that kind of cash on dinner and didn't enjoy it? It's probably for the best I'm not going there next week. Maybe I'll wait till when I make some money and can actually afford it.

Restaurants I've liked in the Bay Area

MICHAEL MINA
Jardinière
China Village (Sichuan food in Albany)

Disappointing ones

Slanted Door
Gary Danko

Racism and Organ Transplant

From Newsweek:

UNOS [United Network for Organ Sharing] admits the disparity is a problem, but denies racism. "I don't believe the transplant system is racist," says Dr. Carlton Young, chair of the group's minority-affairs committee. "It's an issue of American medicine and the biases that have always existed there."

It seems a bit scary that the chair of minority affairs does not see the connection between bias and racism. Isn't the most basic definition of racism people of different races being treated differently because of their race? Dr. Young acknowledges that these biases are causing disparate treatments...so how can he then turn around and say this is not racism? Maybe he is being quoted out of context. But still. Gosh.

On another note, as usual the article fails to mention Asians/Asian Americans.

Read the full article here.

Education Reform in Taiwan

From an article in Today's Taipei Times:

Education reforms will not succeed unless the overall values of Taiwanese society changes, Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng said yesterday.

Giving a speech in Taipei on the challenges in education development, Tu said education reforms are bound to fail if they involve only changes in schools.

According to Tu, education reforms should be comprehensive, farsighted and persistent and aimed at enhancing personal quality, rather than simply teaching children to pass exams

This is what I've been thinking recently. Change in Taiwan needs to be done via education, from elementary school to college to adult schools. I wonder if I'm in the right school program...perhaps I should be getting a PhD or EdD. That is assuming I will go back to Taiwan though.

The state of education in Taiwan is really sad. Without adequate education, nothing moves forward in society. Though the percentage of high school students continuing onto four-year universities have been increasing every year, this is actually just an illusion. The reason more people are attending college is because there are more spots, and there are more spots because an increasing number of vocational schools have been transformed into four-year colleges. These new colleges do not have the resources and infrastructure to provide adequate higher education, so the rising number is just an artificial inflation. These new students are basically only getting vocational education but receiving glittery bachelor's degrees.

I read somewhere a couple of years ago that Taiwan has the highest percentage of government officials with doctoral degrees in the world. That is not surprising since so many students continue their education by pursuing doctoral programs in the U.S. The concentration of officials with doctoral degrees has done nothing for Taiwan, however. Having a degree means nothing if there's no substance. From my experience, the attitude of Taiwanese people toward education is one that values brand name degrees and schools over knowledge. My suspicion is that these people get their jobs with their spiffy degrees, but because they have no substance to actually effect change, the high percentage of doctoral degree holders becomes a number with no substantive meaning.

Now, what I said above might seem contradictory. If so many Taiwanese people are getting doctoral degrees in the U.S., wouldn't they have had to complete substantial research to get their degrees? Wouldn't the Taiwanese attitude toward education not affect whether or not their dissertation is approved? Makes sense. My hypothesis is that international students who come to the U.S. after college live in such an insular world they do not have the chance to absorb the mentality of higher education here. They live in their own worlds and only interact with other Taiwanese or Chinese students. Their only American interaction is with their advisors and (perhaps) "well-meaning" American students with Asian fetishes. What kind of crappy experience is that? So even though they do get their degrees, they do not get to enjoy the spirit of education that exists in the U.S. Even if they do, their 16 years of the banking style of education(See Freire) has already ingrained a system in them that is antithetical to progress. Thus, the fact that they are physically in the U.S. also becomes irrelevant.

American consumerism, capitalism, and jingoism are fucked up, and a lot of American higher education is screwed up too. But it is still (probably) the best system in the world. If the Education Minister is serious about reforming the educational system in Taiwan, then his farsighted approach would need to include both improving the immediate system in Taiwan and figuring out how to better understand different systems and ideas throughout the world (including the U.S. but also other countries) and bring that back to Taiwan (whether or not specific ideas are suitable for Taiwan should be determined on a case-by-case basis). I think this means that Taiwanese students should be studying abroad starting their undergraduate years, or even high school. It's too late after that.

Hierarchy

I was reminded of this randomly while driving just now. I've been yelled at by professors before for calling them by their first names instead of Professor Whatever or Dr. Whatever. Gosh, grow up. So may professors are so petty. They think they deserve to be treated differently just because they went through whatever number of years getting their doctoral degrees.

What about janitors or child care workers or anyone else in the informal sector who work for 12-20 hours a day for years and years just to get by? Haven't they put in MUCH MORE for themselves and others than doctoral students sitting in their labs or offices cranking out theories that benefit no one? Why don't these hardworking people get any honorific titles?

This student-professor hierarchy is so ingrained in students' minds too. A couple of weeks ago, a classmate accidentally called the professor by her first name while asking a question, and she audibly gasped at her own "mistake." The professor was cool about it though and said we can call her by her first name. She's a cool one.

Any lefty professors who criticizes discrimination and oppression and hierarchy and all that stuff in their research and teaching while insisting on being called doctors or professors by their students is a hypocrite. Now, there are professors on the left who are just liberal and want to affect change within the system and do not necessarily see anything inherently wrong with hierarchies. I don't agree with those people, but at least they're not preaching an end to hierarchies while enjoying the benefits of it.

I've had many cool professors who went by their first names with students and treated us as equals. Those are the only ones worth anything. Those are the only trustworthy ones. Sadly, I haven't encountered many of them at my new school.

My First Post

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I had my own website for a while, but I never did anything with it. So instead of continuing to pay maintenance fees for nothing, I decided to start a blog here. The more immediate reason was finding out that my brother has a blog. I've been unable to reach him by phone or email for the past two months, so I thought he's just been really busy. And it turns out he has time to be blogging?! Argh. Perusing his blog and other people's got me interested in doing this again, so here I am.

I'm not sure what I'll be writing about. Probably some Asian American stuff, some other POC stuff, some Taiwan stuff, some lefty stuff, some movie stuff, some food stuff, some law stuff, and probably just random stuff that come up.

Yay!