Posts Tagged ‘Memoirs of a Superfan’

Catherine Ceniza Choy’s new volume, “Asian American Histories of the United States,” is an urgent, necessary, readable, and concise-but-expansive look at our multiple origin stories and contemporary narratives.

Creating a Culture of Peace: Ukraine, Buffalo, Uvalde: We are veterans of a long struggle for social justice in our nation and peace in the world. We are the National Council of Elders (NCOE) and stand alongside legions of elders who work to resist oppression and build dreams of new worlds. Our commitment is to accompany younger twenty-first-century leaders in their effort to bring a greater measure of justice, equality, and peace to our country and world.

Caregivers and caregiving teams in health care, education, and child care have reported increased stress during the pandemic. Burnout and resignations have reportedly increased. Simultaneously, issues of racial justice, and LGBTQIA+ and women’s rights have risen to the forefront of broad public consciousness, triggering both calls to action and reactionary, defensive pushback. Socio-political issues clearly have an impact on caregiving. They can either divide us, or bring us together in service to broader, essential, critical, indispensable duties of caregiving. This essay is an attempt to offer insight, clarity and allyship from my position as a psychiatrist and writer for all those impacted by these tensions, and thus assist affinity, study, support, and action groups that continue to form.

Three films at CAAMFest this weekend brought home the central conflict of our times: social dominance orientation vs. what I call relational-cultural-contextual orientation. The latter is central to Asian and Asian American psychology, as well as other non-individualistic Black and Brown societies, feminine consciousness, and on a deeper level, our common humanity and compassion itself. To my knowledge, this way of viewing our times has not been discussed in this way, particularly in the Asian American community, and is potentially a paradigm shift that could fuel growth and change on our journeys of identity, belonging, wellness and meaning. In the end, we do have to fight for and affirm our human dignity, as well as affirm the human dignity of others.

Meaning, relationship and wellness have dominated my concerns as I’ve previewed shorts programs for CAAMFest40, which are all available on-demand May 12-20th, worldwide without geoblocking. Here, I talk first-and-foremost about women’s rights anticipating the release of the Dobb’s opinion.

There was, to my eyes in season 1 of Showtime’s Couples Therapy, a gradient, a hierarchy, one which should make us deeply uncomfortable; one that goes to the ugly, inflamed wound of our diseased culture. We must not look away.

I bawled like a baby while listening to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s remarks on the South Lawn yesterday. I should cry more often.

Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at Oscars 2022 in “the slap heard ’round the world,” which became a moment of collective shock and trauma, with discourse still spewing. I saw it as a moment of collective dissociation.

Min Jin Lee’s remarks at the anti-Asian hate rally in NYC, March 16, 2022. “I’m a novelist and it is my job to have empathy for everyone. And I imagine that things must be pretty awful for a person to carry a hammer, to shout racial slurs, sleep on the streets, be off their medication, and wish to take another person’s life. My assailant is likely a person without much reason, and I’m sure he’s desperate. And yet, when I think of my brothers and sisters almost imprisoning themselves in their homes, modifying their own faces in the hopes of not getting hurt, I get angry. Why are we tying ourselves in knots trying to solve a problem that we did not create?”

Pixar’s Turning Red is only the second Pixar film directed by a woman – Domee Shi. It is also centered on an Asian American girl going through the turbulent emotions of puberty. Not surprisingly, it triggered a racist, sexist and clueless response. But it’s a fantastic film coming at an important time! Here’s my review.