Fifty years ago in Long Beach, California at the inaugural International Karate Championships competition the legendary martial artist, action TV/film star, and philosopher Bruce Lee performed his martial arts feats that stunned and shocked the attendees and competitors at the event. Bruce Lee was a complex individual, beyond the punching and kicking; he was a philosopher, a civil rights activist (in his own way), a rebel against traditions that he saw as stifling to human progression, and a family man. For …
Tag: Asian American
The murder of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, MO brings back memories for Asian Americans of another murder, that of Vincent Chin some 32 years ago in Detroit, MI. Vincent’s murder case became a turning point in galvanizing the Asian American community to take action and becoming involved in social activism, reaching beyond the young Asian American progressive/radical college student set. Since Vincent’s tragic murder in 1982, there have been countless incidence of hate crimes; a recent example …
What is the true origin of General Tso’s chicken? Was there a General Tso? Did he create the chicken dish that is ubiquitous on many Chinese restaurant take-out menus across U.S. and the western world? Director Ian Cheney searches for the answers to these questions and more in the documentary The Search For General Tso. A synopsis of the documentary: THE SEARCH FOR GENERAL TSO is a feature-length documentary tracing the origins of Chinese American food through what is arguably America’s …
Have you ever wonder why there are so many nail salons owned and operated by Vietnamese women? Director Adele Pham had the same questions and decided to explore this question in a documentary she’s working on called NailedIt: Vietnamese & The Nail Industry. Adele Pham explores the social, economic, environmental factors of Vietnamese in the nail industry. Along the way she discovers some interesting stories like how actress Tippi Hedren’s (stared in Hitchcock’s The Birds) meeting with 20 Vietnamese refugee women triggered an early …
For the month of July until the end of the month (7/30/2014), PBS is streaming online the documentary American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs by filmmaker Grace Lee (no relation). This documentary premiered recently at San Francisco’s CAAM Film Festival 2014 and is about the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit, who along with her husband James Boggs (who was a well known black activist) devoted their lives to fighting for …
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