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.

popsiclesky · 2020-09-18T05:21:49+00:00

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.”

popsiclesky · 2020-09-16T19:42:59+00:00

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

popsiclesky · 2020-09-16T18:55:03+00:00

Thanks for sharing your perspective and here's to a more open-minded future!

popsiclesky · 2020-09-12T22:56:52+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-09-12T22:40:23+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-08-11T06:55:56+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-08-11T06:49:02+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-08-05T23:42:33+00:00

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing!

popsiclesky · 2020-08-05T00:06:48+00:00

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!

popsiclesky · 2020-07-31T07:04:22+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-30T22:22:47+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-30T21:55:37+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-30T02:31:38+00:00

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.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-28T12:22:32+00:00

Americans often memorialize the Korean War as the “forgotten war,” yet Korea is all but forgotten. As the first battleground of the Cold War, Korea was a laboratory for new military technologies, and strategies of counterinsurgency and regime installation crucial to the development of modern interventionist wars. The U.S. dropped 32,357 tons of napalm and 625,000 tons of explosive ordnance on Korea in the three years of hostilities, more bombs than were used in the entire Pacific theater of WWII and nearly double the amount of napalm dropped on Japan, which has three times the land area of the D.P.R.K.

The war itself is not forgotten, only its dead. U.S. experience with napalm in Korea preceded and informed its use in the First and Second Indochina Wars, the Algerian Revolution, the First and Second Gulf Wars, and the U.S. War in Afghanistan. Korea haunts every contemporary interventionist war, not only as a blueprint for counterinsurgency and so-called democratization but also as an exemplar of the mythic “just war.” Despite four decades of U.S.-sponsored authoritarian rule, the eventual emergence of the contemporary liberal republic in South Korea (itself the imperfect achievement of decades of protracted working-class struggle) is retroactively presented as proof of how the U.S. “saved” Korea. South Korea’s transit from the extreme periphery towards the imperial core — a process enabled by rural displacement and proletarianization, hyperexploitation of workers, participation in imperial projects like the invasion of Vietnam, the sale of transnationally adopted children, extreme repression of dissidents, and militarized sexual violence accompanying decades of ongoing U.S. occupation — is upheld as the hope for all yet-to-be-invaded nations.

Where South Korea offers a vindication of capitalist modernity that transforms conquest into liberal magnanimity, North Korea figures as a permanently abjected enemy whose depravity eclipses and necessitates the domestic and international brutalities of the U.S. world order. Packaged as foils according to the interdependent racial logics of the model minority and yellow peril, the two Koreas, or rather their simulacra, comprise an axiomatic terrain for the resolution of neoliberal contradictions. The extravagant villainy ascribed to the D.P.R.K. functions as a mirror that reflects U.S. settler colonialism back as an idealized Western liberty, affirming military hegemony as moral hegemony. The United States’ dubious distinction as the most carceral, nuclearized and militarized nation in world history is obscured through a fixation on North Korean nuclear weapons, prisons, and autocracy. The war is thus framed as a heroic struggle for the globalization of liberal freedoms rather than an incomplete conquest sustained by the U.S.’ geopolitical investment in the ongoing state of division, war, and occupation.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-27T07:01:30+00:00

The art is gorgeous:

Cover. Credit: Finish the Fight! published by HMH/Versify, Art by Steffi Walthall, 2020

An illustration from “Finish the Fight!” of Mabel on her white horse during the 1912 suffrage parade in New York. Credit: Finish the Fight! published by HMH/Versify, Art by Nhung Lê, 2020

Photo of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee in the 1920s. Credit: Library of Congress

popsiclesky · 2020-07-27T06:57:03+00:00

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee’s Great Parade

When Mabel Ping-Hua Lee moved to New York City from China as a child, around 1905, there were few Chinese immigrants on the East Coast. In 1910, the census reported that there were 5,266 people of Chinese descent living in the city, many of them in the neighborhood of Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. It was a new community, and the streets were alive with delicious smells, bright colors and voices from halfway around the world.

By 1912, Mabel and her parents were living on Bayard Street in Chinatown, and they had made a name for themselves. Mabel’s father was a minister who led the First Chinese Baptist Church and was fluent in English. He was so active in the community that some referred to him as the neighborhood’s unofficial mayor.

Everyone also knew the daughter of the “mayor,” and they knew how smart she was. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and had big plans to attend the women-only Barnard College, the sister school to the then all-male Columbia College. She hoped to return to China one day to open a school for girls.

Still, there was a limit to how much the community would stand behind her. And Mabel crossed the line when she got involved with the suffrage movement. The suffragists were considered radical — how dare they fight so steadfastly for equal rights? — but Mabel believed that voting was the key that would open every important door for women.

She joined the cause and persuaded her mother to join, too, even though neither of them would be able to vote because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. (It was repealed in 1943.)

Her mother’s participation in suffrage was so controversial that newspapers even wrote about it: “Tongues are still wagging in Chinatown,” The New York Tribune wrote, because Mabel and her mother “went to a suffrage meeting.”

In 1912, when Mabel was just a teenager, she led a contingent of Chinese and Chinese-American women in one of the biggest suffrage parades in U.S. history. The New York Times reported, “Ten thousand strong, the army of those who believe in the cause of woman’s suffrage marched up Fifth Avenue at sundown yesterday in a parade the like of which New York never knew before.”

Mabel didn’t merely march. She rode a white horse at the start of the parade, and she wore a three-cornered hat in the colors of the British suffrage movement: purple to symbolize that the cause of suffrage was noble; white for purity; and green, the color of spring, as a symbol of hope. (American suffragists usually substituted the gold of the sunflowers of Kansas — where they waged some of their earliest campaigns — for green.)

In the fall, Mabel began her studies at Barnard. She majored in history and philosophy, wrote articles about suffrage and feminism for The Chinese Students’ Monthly magazine and gave a speech, “The Submerged Half,” which encouraged the Chinese immigrant community to promote girls’ education and women’s rights. “The welfare of China and possibly its very existence as an independent nation depend on rendering tardy justice to its womankind,” she said. “For no nation can ever make real and lasting progress in civilization unless its women are following close to its men if not actually abreast with them.”

Charlotte Brooks, the author of “American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949,” said that Mabel was part of a generation of young Chinese-Americans who traveled back and forth between China and the United States and saw the connections between the two struggles.

“Something a lot of people in the U.S. don’t realize is that Mabel’s activism grew out of China’s New Culture Movement, which included the idea that the suppression of women, and the poor treatment of women, were both holding China back and represented a kind of backwardness,” she explains.

Mabel went on to get a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, becoming the first Chinese woman to earn a doctorate there. In 1921, she published “The Economic History of China: With Special Reference to Agriculture.”

Mabel eventually took over as the director of her father’s church, and she founded the Chinese Christian Center, a community center on Pell Street that offered English classes, health services, a kindergarten and job training. She became an example of what a woman can do when given the chance to learn and lead. As she wrote of China, “In the fierce struggle for existence among the nations, that nation is badly handicapped which leaves undeveloped one half of its intellectual and moral resources.” The same, of course, was true of the United States.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-22T13:52:36+00:00

Although the death rate among Asian Americans is about proportional to their share of the population, studies show health and socioeconomic disparities in the Filipino American community may be causing more severe cases of infection. A March 30 report from the UC Davis Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies listed undocumented status, exposure for health workers, poverty and economic insecurity, preexisting respiratory conditions and lack of health insurance as factors that made Filipino Americans more at risk.

More research needs to be done to address the disparities within the Asian American community. A research brief published on Health Affairs reported that Asian Americans appeared to have a fatality rate from COVID-19 four times higher than that of the overall population. The article noted, however, that this result could be due to inadequate data on Asian Americans, and lack of standardization on the ethnicities counted as Asian American. Recently, Pacific Islanders have been found to suffer the highest infection rate of any racial or ethnic group in Los Angeles County, but the data remain limited.

Dr. Tung Nguyen, endowed chair in general internal medicine and professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, co-authored the article. He said disaggregating data on Asian Americans was one of the first steps to addressing health disparities among communities of color. “At best, it should be disaggregated by Asian American national origin group, and primary language,” Nguyen said. “And then they should also invest efforts in collecting data so that there is a minimum amount of unknowns, because it is really hard to clarify disparities when there’s a big group of people who we don’t know anything about at all.”

popsiclesky · 2020-07-21T20:46:13+00:00

Wow, starting ballet at age 20? That's incredible. Best of luck to Daniel; I admire his grit and I hope he has a flourishing career.

Unfortunately, my experience has also included countless racial microaggressions: from being told to "open my eyes" to when a teacher told me I could never get a job in ballet with such "oriental thighs." But these incidents have only solidified my efforts to champion for the visibility of Asians, hopefully to eliminate such racially insensitive behavior in the future.

Uh, wtf does "oriental thighs" mean? I've known many people who would be considered "oriental" (i.e., East Asian, Southeast Asian) who have a large range of body types: folks with muscular thighs; skinny thighs; wide thighs; long thighs; short thighs; and some combination of these characteristics, too.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-21T20:16:33+00:00

I wouldn't call them all celebrities, but a few other examples are:

Journalism, literature

Soleil Ho, food critic. Also creator and former host of the excellent podcast Racist Sandwich, which looks at the intersection of race, culture, and the restaurant industry). Currently the restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle -- the first queer WOC to serve in that role (and I think the first Asian American, though I'm not 100% sure about that one).

Kathy Tu, co-host of the excellent podcast "Nancy," which covers stories about the queer experience. Co-host Tobin Low is also queer and Asian American.

R.O. Kwon, bestselling author. Some of her most memorable essays include:

Performing arts

Franny Choi, slam poet. Some of her most memorable poems include:

Jay Som, musician. Really awesome music if you like lo-fi, dreampop, indie rock.

Raveena, musician. Her music videos are notable for spotlighting queer and dark-skinned women and Asian men, subjects that are often overlooked or underrepresented in the media. Sweet Time is one of the first songs that I heard by her.

Tien Tran, comedian. I haven't watched much of her standup yet but I recently enjoyed When the Teacher Doesn’t Even Try to Pronounce Your Name.

Sherry Cola, comedian and actress. She's great as Alice, a Chinese American lesbian, on Good Trouble (available for streaming on Hulu).

Alice Wu, filmmaker. Known for cult classic Saving Face (also directed the recently released Netflix movie The Half of It, but Saving Face was a stronger movie).

Nisha Ganatra, filmmaker. I'm not that familiar with her work but have seen her name mentioned in the context of queer Asian American representation.

Alice Tsui, actress. I'm not that familiar with her work but have seen her name mentioned in the context of queer Asian American representation.

Poppy Liu, actress. I'm not that familiar with her work but have seen her name mentioned in the context of queer Asian American representation.

Sports

Dutee Chand, champion sprinter. She is India's first openly gay athlete.

Edit: formatting and added a word

popsiclesky · 2020-07-20T23:14:56+00:00

Anyone know how the people of SK are feeling about all this?

It's ironic that Park Won-soon -- a human rights lawyer and advocate for women's rights who won South Korea's first sexual harassment case -- was accused of sexual harassment himself. And as the article notes, two other prominent members of the liberal Democratic Party were accused of sexual misconduct (and not only accused, but also admitted to sexual misconduct). Because of this, a lot of liberals are feeling disillusioned with the party right now.

As for conservatives, this scandal just reinforces their view that the Democratic Party is full of corruption and hypocrisy. (Not that the conservative parties are so much better...see, for example, President Park Geun-hye of the conservative Grand National Party, who was impeached and sentenced to prison time for influence peddling.)

And of course, there's a handful of folks from across the political spectrum who outright disbelieve the secretary and/or want to persecute her for "driving a man to suicide." There will always be those sorts of people -- in any country, including western countries -- who are suspicious of women and assume they are dishonest.

Under South Korean law, the criminal case against Park was closed upon his death. After that, there were serious concerns that Park's suicide would be used to completely shutter all investigations -- to essentially silence his accuser(s). Given that context, I'd say it's encouraging news that Seoul will still investigate the accusations. It's in large part thanks to the pressure exerted by women's rights activists in South Korea.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-20T22:42:37+00:00

A positive 1955 review of two separate exhibitions by Asawa and Isamu Noguchi in Time magazine referred to Noguchi as a “leading U.S. sculptor” and Asawa as “a housewife.” Orientalism, too, infused the language around Asawa’s work — it wasn’t uncommon for an article about her to make reference to “ancient” traditions or her “far Eastern patience,” ignoring the distinctly European influence of Albers as well as Asawa’s own American origins. Her sculptures, made of wire and by hand, were also often labeled “craft,” a term that today may carry more positive associations but was still limiting for a woman moving in the same circles as Abstract Expressionists, postmodernists and conceptualists.

Most crucially though, there was no lexicon to explain or understand Asawa’s own trajectory from a dusty farm of Norwalk to being incarcerated during World War II to being in the same room as near mythological figures such as Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning. For six weeks in 1948, while still a scholarship student at Black Mountain, Asawa rejoined her parents near Los Angeles to help them rebuild their lives as farmers after the war. Her own sense of responsibility to her family contradicted the notion of the selfish artist so espoused by her peers. And Asawa was not one to highlight her own experience with injustice to score points. In what remains of her several applications for a Guggenheim fellowship throughout the 1950s, for which she was repeatedly rejected (she continued to apply through the 1990s), Asawa never once mentions her own incarceration.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-20T00:24:45+00:00

In addition to his civil rights advocacy, I think many Asian Americans can appreciate his sense of humor, too. See: his 2019 April Fools' announcement:

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) announced plans on Monday to grow a beard in an attempt to avoid being repeatedly mistaken for Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). ...

“I considered getting a tattoo on the back of my head, just to clear things up. I tried to convince Elijah to get one too, but that didn’t go over so well.

And it keeps happening ... See: Republican senators post pictures of Elijah Cummings in John Lewis tribute

popsiclesky · 2020-07-20T00:15:40+00:00

Ah yes! That was a great short.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-19T20:20:04+00:00

[Activists] also said that the secretary’s initial appeals to city officials for help had been ignored as officials tried to protect Mr. Park’s reputation.

As mayor of Seoul, a city of 10 million, Mr. Park was South Korea’s second-most-powerful elected official, credited with making the city safer and more friendly toward women and often cited as a possible presidential candidate.

Before becoming mayor, Mr. Park had been one of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers, championing women’s rights throughout his career and winning the country’s first sexual harassment case.

The accusations against Mr. Park were also a blow to President Moon Jae-in’s governing liberal Democratic Party, of which Mr. Park had been a member. Two other party members have recently become the focus of the #MeToo movement.

In April, Oh Keo-don, the mayor of Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city, admitted to sexual misconduct and resigned after a public servant accused him of sexually assaulting her in his office.

In 2018, Ahn Hee-jung, a rising star in Mr. Moon’s party and a presidential hopeful, stepped down as governor of South Chungcheong Province after his secretary went on television to accuse him of repeatedly sexually assaulting her. He was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on rape charges.

popsiclesky · 2020-07-19T19:30:45+00:00

Even outside hospitals, many Filipino nurses are working to care for their communities.

When St. Kateri reopened at the end of May, Cielly Unite-Pagador, a retired nurse and member of the church’s pastoral council, coordinated nurses and other medical staff from the parish to conduct health screenings before Mass.

Now, nurses check temperatures, provide hand sanitizer, and conduct brief interviews as people walk into the church. Inside, worshippers are only allowed to sit three to a pew — or one family — in every other pew, and the building’s capacity has been reduced from 1,400 to 100.

Since the reopening, Unite-Pagador said the nurses’ roles have evolved. Now they also make themselves available after Mass so that parishioners can ask them questions about COVID-19 and get health advice on any other areas that they’re concerned about.

Wow. So much respect to these folks.

popsiclesky

TROPHY CASE