Photo by Khánh Hmoong (Flickr/Creative Commons).
Today is the 37th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.
Photo by Mick Taylor (Flickr/Creative Commons).
Yesterday (April 29) was the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots (known among the Korean American community as Sa-I-Gu).
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Lining up in front of Louis Vuitton in Hong Kong. Photo by Anne Roberts (click on image for original).
Lately, the US media seems to be obsessed with Asian people spending money:
Chinese and Vietnamese are not the only newly conspicuous spenders in the US; Brazilians have been buying up comparatively cheap properties in New York and Miami.
Sorry for the lack of new posts lately! Between studying for finals, writing proposals, and showing prospective graduate students around Los Angeles, I haven’t had time to sit and think about anything non-academic for a while. But spring break is coming up soon, so there will be tons of exciting new stuff then!
Say NO to the Wal-Mart in Los Angeles’ Chinatown
Retail giant Wal-Mart is planning to open a grocery store below a retirement home in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. I’ve written before on how this would negatively affect the local small businesses that are at the heart of the Chinatown community. Local activists met on Tuesday to discuss how to organize against Wal-Mart, and a social media campaign has come out of this:
Campaign Tumblr: http://nowalmartinchinatown.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @NoWalMartinCT
Vietnam-Korea connections
Viet Thanh Nguyen for Diacritics: Korea’s Viet Nam, Viet Nam’s Korea
The stretch of coast from Hue to Hoi An, the Vietnamese Riviera, seems to be entirely dominated by Korean-built resorts and golf courses, with even more under construction, at least when I drove the length of Highway 1 in the summer of 2010. Ironically, this is the same area where Korean troops fought and earned a reputation among the Vietnamese as a very scary bunch. Both Le Ly Hayslip, in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, and Truong Nhu Tang, in A Vietcong Memoir, note that the Vietnamese were more terrified of the Koreans than they were of the Americans.
New York Times: For Some in Vietnam, Prosperity Is a South Korean Son-in-Law
The couple, like many others in the Vietnamese countryside, had prospered in recent years, thanks to daughters who, driven by dreams of better lives for themselves and Confucian filial piety for their parents, had emigrated to marry South Korean men. The money they and others earned in South Korea, wired regularly to small towns in Vietnam like Quang Yen, often manifested itself in telltale new homes, though the wealth paled in comparison with the Lexus S.U.V.’s favored by businessmen in Hanoi, about 100 miles west of here.
I wrote about Vietnamese brides in Korea earlier this year.
