You are a superhero!
Colorlines posted an adorable infographic about how to be a racial justice superhero. Click on the image to enlarge:

Image by Colorlines.

Chinese Australian participation in politics
Jen Tsen Kwok, a PhD candidate in politics at the University of Queensland, was cited in an article in Melbourne daily The Age about Chinese Australian participation in politics. He has further comments on his blog. From the article:

Jen Tsen Kwok, who is writing a PhD on Chinese Australian engagement in politics, cautions against any assumption of a homogenous Chinese community.

Instead, there are diverse communities made of different strands: descendants of 19th century migrants who survived the White Australia policy; students from Malaysia and Singapore who came in the late 1950s and 1960s; refugees from Indochina in the late 1970s; and the surge of migrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China from the late 1980s.

”There are not many ethnic groups like the Chinese who come from so many diverse source nations and have such diverse experiences, so to try to construct a single narrative around political engagement is very difficult,” Mr Kwok says.

This is a point I’m trying to push in the US, as well. American conceptions of Chinese and Chinese Americans as a singular cultural “unit” obscure cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries that are still relevant in the everyday lives of Chinese in the US, who come from all over the world. Mainlanders may be a plurality, but Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia and Latin America are also here in large numbers. As Kwok says, the diversity of Chinese in America makes it hard to put everyone under the same umbrella, which is why I am consistently dissatisfied with broad generalizations in the news and in the academic literature that assume a single origin or single culture.

American Chinese takeout containers
The New York Times investigated the origin of American Chinese takeout containers. If you thought they were a Chinese invention, think again:

The Chinese-takeout container, with its Japanese-influenced origami folds, is a uniquely American invention. On Nov. 13, 1894, in Chicago, the inventor Frederick Weeks Wilcox patented a version of what he called a “paper pail,” which was a single piece of paper, creased into segments and folded into a (more or less) leakproof container secured with a dainty wire handle on top.