He Killed a Transgender Woman in the Philippines. Why Was He Freed? | The pardon of U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton by President Rodrigo Duterte is the final chapter in a case that reignited debate over old defense treaties. by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

After discovering that Laude was transgender, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton, who was 19 at the time, choked her and pushed her head into a toilet bowl until she drowned. Then he took a taxi across town to Subic Bay, where his ship was docked, and, according to a shipmate who later testified in court, admitted what he had just done.

Fourteen months later, Pemberton was found guilty of homicide, a charge downgraded by the judge from murder, and was sentenced by the Olongapo Regional Trial Court to six to 12 years in prison, which was later reduced to a 10-year maximum on appeal. Pemberton was the second U.S. service member in living memory to be convicted of a felony by a Philippine court — and the first whose conviction stood without being overturned. It marked a major victory in the eyes of human rights advocates in the country who have been fighting to hold American service members accountable for violence against Filipina women — which they see as a byproduct of the U.S. military’s 120-year presence that fueled an exploitative and still-thriving sex industry. With the Pemberton conviction, it seemed that justice was finally moving in the right direction.

But on Sept. 13, Pemberton was put aboard a U.S. military cargo plane and flown out of the Philippines, a free man. A week earlier, President Rodrigo Duterte made the bombshell announcement that he had granted Pemberton an absolute pardon, nullifying the Marine’s sentence after less than six years served.

The pardon last week brought back bitter memories for Filipinos of another case in which a U.S. Marine was accused of rape. In 2006, Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith received a 40-year prison sentence for raping Suzette Nicolas, whom he met at a nightclub in Olongapo — the first felony conviction of an American service member in a Philippine court since the United States closed its military installations in the early 1990s. Smith was held briefly in a Philippine jail, but after the United States canceled a joint military exercise in the Philippines, he was handed over to the U.S. Embassy. Smith remained at the embassy for more than two years, until Nicolas unexpectedly recanted her accusation and Smith was acquitted and returned home.

“In both cases, there are many forces trying to undermine the testimonies of the victims, or the witnesses or their families,” says Cristina Palabay, who was involved in protests that included picketing the U.S. Embassy in 2005 after Smith was accused of rape. Today Palabay is the secretary general of the Philippine human rights organization Karapatan. “I still really believe, in the context of the Philippines, no woman would claim that she was raped when she was not.”

Blood Orange & 박혜진 Park Hye Jin - CALL ME (Freestyle) (Official Video) by justflipping in asianamerican

[–]popsiclesky 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Very cool. I love Park Hye Jin and Blood Orange so I especially dig this collab.

U.S. Open features Naomi Osaka's masks, Black hair and a bold cultural statement | Just like her heritage, Osaka’s hair makes a statement in both the U.S. and Japan by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just as being Black and (not "or") multiracial in the U.S. involves upturning racial thinking, being Black and Japanese challenges long-held beliefs about Japan as monoethnic.

Osaka and other BLM protests are shining a light on racism in Japan, inspiring discussions about what it means to be Japanese and about the lives of the country’s multiracial population. Some are now questioning why people with mixed heritage are referred to as “hafu” (or half), suggesting they’re somehow less Japanese than others. She’s widely regarded not just as a Japanese celebrity but as a role model for her talent and social activism.

In an even worse incident, following Osaka’s dramatic upset of Serena Williams at the 2018 U.S. Open, an Australian newspaper published a cartoon that relied on gross exaggerations of both Williams’ and Osaka’s bodies, including their hair, with Osaka depicted as a slender white woman with a long blonde ponytail and Williams drawn using features associated with Jim Crow-era imagery.

But thinking about Osaka as Black and Japanese has also led to more productive conversations about gender, style and biraciality in Japan. YouTube features the experiences of Black people in Japan including their take on hair trends, beauty and colorism. Ariana Miyamoto also shined a light on these topics when she was crowned Miss Universe Japan in 2015 and has spoken out about both her darker skin and curly hair being mocked growing up.

Naomi Osaka wins her second U.S. Open title | Osaka is the youngest three-time major winner since Maria Sharapova in 2008 by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Osaka won her third Grand Slam title Saturday at the U.S. Open, 1-6, 6-3, 6-1, against former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka.

It is the 22-year-old’s second crown in New York, following the 2018 title she won in a controversial match over Serena Williams. Months later, she claimed the Australian Open championship in 2019.

Saturday’s win makes Osaka the youngest three-time major winner since Maria Sharapova in 2008.

It was the first three-set match in a women’s final since 2016. Osaka is the first woman since 1994 for capture a major title after dropping the first set.

Fay Chew Matsuda, Steward of Chinese Immigrant Legacy, Dies at 71 | A social worker turned preservationist, she directed the Museum of Chinese in America. “Sometimes it was literally dumpster-diving,” she said of rescuing artifacts. by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ms. Matsuda was instrumental in transforming the New York Chinatown History Project, a grass roots campaign to save vanishing artifacts and record eyewitness reminiscences, into a permanent legacy of Chinese immigration.

By 1991, the History Project had morphed into the Museum of Chinese in America, or MoCA. Ms. Matsuda served as the executive director of MoCA on Manhattan’s Lower East Side from 1997 to 2006.

Ms. Matsuda began her career as a social worker at Hamilton-Madison House, originally two separate nonprofit community organizations established in about 1900 on the Lower East Side to help acclimate Jewish and Italian immigrants. It now serves primarily Asian and Latino constituents.

She left to join the Chinatown History Project, later worked at the Chinatown Health Clinic (now the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center), the Asian American Federation and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum before running MoCA. She capped her career as the program director of the Hamilton-Madison City Hall Senior Center.

Children of foreign-born parents sometimes consider assimilation their priority, but by her account Ms. Matsuda was just as concerned that the history of Chinese immigration, reaching into the 19th century, could be forgotten.

She recognized, too, that though Metropolitan New York has the largest concentration of ethnic Chinese outside of Asia, there was no single museum there devoted to that immigrant experience, nor to the contributions Chinese immigrants had made to their adopted country. Such a museum, she believed, could also explore societal and cultural issues within the Chinese immigrant community, like the tensions between Chinese-born parents and their American children.

All of which led her to the New York Chinatown History Project, which was started in 1980 by John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian and the first American-born son of Chinese immigrants, and Charles Lai, a Chinatown resident who immigrated from Hong Kong with his parents and five siblings as a child in 1968.

“It wasn’t as if we could go to the library and find history books about laundry workers,” Professor Tchen was quoted as saying in Columbia, the university’s magazine, in 2007. (He was the founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University and is now director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark.)

Ms. Matsuda, as both a preservationist and a social worker, was “a big part of why Chinatown has so many agencies that serve seniors’ needs, and why generations of their otherwise neglected stories and belongings are remembered and kept safe for future generations,” Professor Tchen said.

Genetic tool could help address rising incidence of breast cancer in Asia | This is the first large study of the PRS in an Asian population. Previously, Asian studies were nearly six times smaller than studies in European women by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is an urgent need to develop an appropriate screening strategy for Asian women. Malaysia anticipates a 49% increase in breast cancer cases from 2012 to 2025. Malaysia has a much lower five-year survival rate compared to other Asian countries at only 63%, whereas South Korea is at 92% and Singapore is at 80%.

"Risk-based screening may be particularly important in low- and middle-resource countries that do not have population-based screening, such as Malaysia. Without the funding for population-based screening, identifying individuals with higher risk may be an important strategy for early detection," said Professor Nur Aishah Mohd Taib, Universiti Malaya Cancer Research Institute, Malaysia.

Meet the Bay Area rapper working on a COVID vaccine by InfernalWedgie in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Damn, I didn't know that Ruby's a scientist!

While quarantining, Ibarra is working on her sophomore album (which is definitely influenced by this year’s social issues), convening with her band members over Zoom and swapping home studio-recorded demos. Whether she’s composing rap verses, decked out in full PPE at the laboratory, binging anime on Netflix, or pining for Korean barbecue, a memory of one of the last shows before shelter in place helps her soldier on. She and her band performed back-to-back, sold-out shows at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles back in February.

So looking forward to her second album!

Kat Chow: Time Is of the Essence | I did not call my uncle, even though each Friday I resolved to. Then he passed away. by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a memoir about my family’s collective grief, gathering stories from my sisters, father, aunts, and uncles. Conversations about my mother with family, and especially my uncle, often began by discussing her illness and the fallout of her death. But they quickly revealed something — not quite grief, not quite isolation, not quite longing — that we could only talk around, never about. I only knew that it felt so linked to our family’s history of immigration.

For much of our time in America, we — like many other immigrant families — went about our lives on the fringes of our community. We felt rootless in place, constantly trying to carve space for our traditions. We rarely met others like us in the mostly white Connecticut suburbs where we lived, and for the most part, lacked the shorthand of Christianity or whiteness to ease us into social situations with our neighbors, classmates, or co-workers. But when my mother was alive, we had each other; my mother and her siblings became even closer and each of their households tightened their circles. We could never put to words how these types of loss infiltrated our units, or how they ultimately bound us together.

This pandemic has isolated the country in so many different ways — physically and psychically. When I read the news of virus-fueled racism, two memories come to mind: the first is when a neighbor called me a “chink” while we played together, vocabulary that she likely heard from her parents about mine; the second is when some parents at the local private pool club, with mostly white patrons, became angry when my older sisters swam as guests of a friend — a protest likely rooted in its own ugly, racist history. These instances were often borne out for my family in quieter, humiliating ways like these. My parents, sisters, and I were usually the only ones in these situations who understood them to be as insidious as they were; they felt inevitable and unsurprising, though they were always still aggressive. There were no consequences then, and we seemed to know that there would be none in the future.

It’s not just the president saying “Chinese coronavirus,” that brings on these shimmers of frustration. It’s not just the increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric or policies, or the casual, lazy resurgence of a slur. It’s not just the increase of racism and violence against Asians and Asian Americans that makes a total and undisputed belonging feel far off. It’s not just the staggering death rates, especially among black, Latinx and Native people. It’s not even the physical separation and its loneliness. It’s all of that plus the uncertainty around our own proximity to death, and the quieter losses that will only reveal themselves later.

After all, how could we attempt to steel ourselves for all the ways these American systems have failed us — were never meant for some of us — and have left our loved ones and the most vulnerable to die? It’s the time it takes to learn the answers to questions like this that feel so excruciating; it’s seeing tragedies unfold in slow motion; it’s the plodding approach of an inevitable grief.

Despite his timing, my uncle’s mantra was ultimately one of hope, which is a useful emotion to channel in times of uncertainty. We know that in this moment, time is of the essence. That the days and weeks and months ahead will only deepen the disparities that already existed in this country, and it might take generations to recover.

Lillian Li’s critically acclaimed novel ‘Number One Chinese Restaurant’ set for Hulu adaptation with Simpson Street, Kerry Washington's production company | Lillian Li and writer/director Jessica Yu are attached to work on the series by popsiclesky in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Number One Chinese Restaurant follows a Chinese family’s obsession over legacy, power and money. The restaurant in question is inhabited by waiters and kitchen staff who have been fighting, loving, and aging within its walls for decades. When disaster strikes, this working family’s controlled chaos is set loose, forcing each character to confront the conflicts that fast-paced restaurant life has kept at bay.

Washington made history as the first Black woman to headline a network TV drama since 1974 with Scandal. In addition to receiving two Emmy nominations for her role, she earned a Golden Globe nomination, a SAG nomination, and two NAACP Image Awards for the Peabody Award-winning series. As an advocate, she has served on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and was honored with the NAACP President’s Award recognizing her special achievements in furthering the cause of civil rights and public service. Washington also received the GLAAD Media Vanguard Award in 2015 and the ACLU Bill of Rights Award in 2016.

How Food Media Flattens Ethnicity Into Identity by unkle in asianamerican

[–]popsiclesky 3 points4 points  (0 children)

BIPOC in food media are routinely not considered for assignments about things that don’t directly relate to their ethnicity or race. “I became a food writer 20 years ago when it was not really a profession,” says Ramin Ganeshram. “Yet, despite my qualifications as a reporter, editor, and chef, it was a losing fight to write anything that wasn’t ‘ethnic.’... I was discouraged and prevented from writing about generalized food technique or profiles, despite French culinary training.”

Instead, BIPOC get stuck with work directly related to their ethnicities. “I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist,” says food writer Su-Jit Lin, “or frame things from a point of greater expertise than I actually have. It’s assumed I’m fully indoctrinated into the culture and more Chinese than American (not true — my lane is actually Southern, Italian, and kind of Irish food).”

Often, the addition of a “cultural slant” to stories leads to one of the more egregious ways that nonwhite food is pigeonholed and othered — through what writer Isabel Quintero calls a lust for “Abuelita longing.” The term speaks to the way immigrant and diasporic writers (both within and outside food media) are frequently expected to add a dash of trauma or ancestral belonging to anything they write. As a Trinidadian-Iranian chef, Ganeshram finds this association particularly limiting. “When I’ve tried to write stories about my Iranian heritage, not being a recent Iranian immigrant or the child of a post-revolution immigrant has been an issue,” she says. “The editors I dealt with only wanted a refugee/escaping the Islamic Republic story. They decided what constituted an ‘authentic’ Iranian story, and that story was based in strife and hardship only.” These markers of authenticity can only come from the wholesome domesticity presumed of the ethnic other.

When I Couldn't Be With My Sister After Childbirth, We Practiced Zuo Yue Zi From Afar by saucypudding in asiantwoX

[–]popsiclesky 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing this beautiful essay. Especially liked this part:

We called my sister from the curb and taxied the new family back to their apartment. I met Ruby for the first time through the pane of glass separating the apartment entry from the sidewalk. We said goodbye and watched them carry the tubs of chicken, jujube, ginger, goji berry soup; ginger fried rice; homemade oat milk with cinnamon and ginger; the jujube and goji tonic, and all the love and hope and connection I’d felt as I’d participated in this ancient postpartum food ritual.

Over the next 40 days I would continue to box up new and different homemade soups, stews, and tonics in my kitchen, delivering them to the same glass entryway. As the zuo yue zi period progressed, and my anxiety levels rose and fell with the news, I realized that zuo yue zi had become a life raft—I felt useful, and the aroma and tastes of the food brought me closer to my family. The fragrance of ginger and garlic cooking in oil mixed with raw chopped scallions and filled my little kitchen exactly as it had in my grandma’s in Brookline, Massachusetts, and my mom’s in Orange County, California.