Oh, and take a moment to note the passing of Coretta Scott King. A bit on her legacy, on MSNBC and in the NY Times.
The confirmation and swearing in of J. Alito. What this means for the country for the next 30 years – well, we do live in interesting times, even as we seem to transition from the Civil Rights era to an era of a curious future.
Okay, so I did some channel-changing tonight (remote in my hands, not the men of the house). I pretty much stuck with the NBC coverage of the speech, since I thought the ABC coverage was bothersome – Liz Vargas passing it on to Charles Gibson, who passes it on to Diane Sawyer, who passes it back to Liz, who then talks to Terry Moran for Nightline tonight. Umm, can we please have one voice, the clear leader for the coverage? On NBC, Brian Williams was the clear one voice, and on CBS, Bob Schieffer is the clear one voice. It doesn’t have to be an authoritarian voice (Bob’s a folksy sort, who clearly enjoyed the night, and said that it’s his highlight, anyway; Brian was the one who says it’s a grand ritual). Just one voice. The ABC coverage felt an awful lot like its current Nightline stuff – a cacophony of too many chefs in the kitchen.
But, I liked how everyone on ABC did get to pull their punches in pointing out the flaws of the President’s speech. Martha Raddatz, as the White House correspondent (and former Pentagon correspondent) did a great, sharp analysis. Fareed Zakaria as a talking head was pretty on the point, too, over the lack of originality in the President’s foreign policy segment. Charles Gibson steered things along. Kept wishing a little more from Liz Vargas, but oh well. ABC felt like a work in progress, missing the usual polish of the past (at least, the polish as it was under the Peter Jennings era).
The newspapers will present an interesting read tomorrow, no doubt.
How exciting. 9pm – A “political ritual,” NBC’s Brian Williams says. Indeed. J. Alito has been confirmed and he’s present, in robes and all, along the sides of Ch.J. Roberts, J. Thomas, and J. Breyer. NY Congressman Elliot Engel got himself a nice seat, so you can see him shaking the hands of the Cabinet. These are the moments where you pick and choose who you can identify in the crowds. Senator Frist, Senator Feingold, Secretary Norm Mineta, etc. Ooh.
Let’s see if the substance measures up to the grandeur of the ritual. Well…
Dodgeball.com: this Google-owned site turns your cell phone into something like location-enabled AIM. You set which of 27 cities it supports, and you can let your friends know where you are using SMS email. You can also try to find a bar or restaurant by sending the name, and it will return the address. I’ve signed up.
Farecompare.com: you provide two cities, and it tells you not only which airline has the cheapest flight, but on which days and flights you can actually use the fare, and the fare basis code, which is what you need to have a travel agent actually issue the fare. Great!
Portableapps.com: Site where you can find portable versions of open source apps that you can save on your memory stick and run anywhere, taking your preferences and data with you.
Terrible breaking news: ABC News’ Bob Woodruff and his cameraman were injured in Iraq. Hope for the best.
ABA e-Journal’s weekly poll asked “What celebrity would be good for the US Supreme Court?” and the respondents to the poll came up with… Oprah Winfrey. Heck, why not nominate Oprah as chief justice? She’d be a fantastic inquisitor at oral arguments and she can probably be a pretty good administrator. I thought it was amusing that someone suggested Avery Brooks (the ex-Captain Sisko of Star Trek: Deep Space 9), who is not only an actor but also a Rutgers professor of acting and a pretty socially aware kind of guy (the respondent also suggested making him a governor of NJ, but, you know, I think NJ needs more than Captain Sisko to save it; the state probably needs the entire crews of the Enterprise, DS9 and Voyager to save them from their own messy governments. Then again, can someone from the alternate future come save early 21st century NYS?).
The Korean pop star trend. Hmm. Well, not like I’m up on trends, but this looked like a curiously interesting article.
The idea that the best South Asian food can be found in London or the suburbs of London … well, curiously interesting to think about.
Diwali gets its own parking holiday in NYC.
NY Times compiled a list of Chinatown dim sum places, some (most?) of which we already know or have patronised.
If eating during Lunar New Year doesn’t get to you, next weekend might do it: Super Bowl Sunday. Yikes!
P and I had dimsum at Sweet n’ Tart Restaurant (the founding store is now a Custard Tart King) with YC and his family. Totally loaded up on very nice treats. Then P went off with YC’s wife to get haircuts, while we went shopping. We then regrouped at Hip Cup Cafe at Park Row. Coffee was ok – a lot of java permutations that I didn’t know about, but we blew a lot of money on lottery tickets, none of which were winners. Afterwards, we went to the Flower Market at Columbus Park. Crowded – the line went into the sidewalk through the AstroTurf soccer field. It was fun and pretty cheap – things were a few bucks apiece. Did some last minute banking, and then went to dinner at Jing Fong with P’s family. We ordered off the regular menu rather than the set menu, and came away with a dinner that P’s persnicketly mom was happy with. Afterwards, went to my mom’s house for the New Year countdown.
Tomorrow we’ll celebrate by doing pretty much nothing. Happy Lunar New Year!
Some topical things:
Beijing made firecrackers legal again.
NY Times’ Jennifer 8. Lee writes on the memories of NYC Chinatown(s):
There is no consistent name for “Chinatown” in Chinese. Newspapers use one name, popular speech uses others. At the Canal Street subway station on Broadway the chosen translation is delicately pixeled together from colorful tiles: “huabu.” Hua means “Chinese,” but with a sense that transcends geography, independent of the nation of China. Bu means “place” or “town.”
The characters were not there when I was growing up on the amorphous border between Harlem and Columbia University, when my family made regular pilgrimages to Chinatown by subway, later replaced by weekly trips to Flushing, Queens, by car. At the Kam Man grocery store on Canal Street, my parents would treat us to Haw Flakes, sweet tangy disks that tasted like bits of hard Fruit Rollups. The ingredients were listed as “haw” and “sugar,” which left a generation of Chinese-American children wondering what exactly haw was. (It is the fruit of the hawthorne.)
On Mott Street’s open storefronts, my parents would pick through the bins of live crabs, sluggish but still menacing to a wide-eyed girl. And Chinatown was our source for paraphernalia for the Lunar New Year, which always arrived in a frenzy of smoky firecracker pops and chiming gongs. The firecrackers planned for this Sunday, celebrating the Year of the Dog, have been centralized by the city government to a controlled ceremony.
For all our trips down there, I never knew Chinatown was known as huabu until I saw the characters appear after the station renovation. Hua is the distilled essence of being Chinese, free of fissures caused by wars and colonization. You can be hua even if you hold a passport from Singapore, the United States or Peru. You can be hua even if you have never set foot in China and don’t speak a word of Chinese.
Like many Asian professionals who came after the 1965 immigration reforms, my parents were liberated from the confines of working-class, Cantonese-speaking Chinatown by education and English. My family, like other Chinese who live abroad, are often called huaqiao, Chinese sojourners. The label sticks, as though one day we all might return, even generations later: pulled back by the tentacles of Chineseness.
In the meantime, huaqiaos seek and create Chinatowns. Manhattan’s Chinatown might not have been classy, but we got satisfaction in knowing we found better deals by braving the cramped streets. Haircuts were cheaper. The restaurants were yummier. Seamstresses were quicker. Chinatown was a bargain hunter’s dream, a word-of-mouth economy before online ratings guides democratized shoppers’ secrets. We went there for things you could get nowhere else in the city (like a white silk Chinese dress made for my sixth-grade graduation) as well as services that had no cultural basis, like film developing. My mom would hoard rolls of film and take them to a photo store at the base of Confucius Tower. Often spring or summer arrived before we saw pictures from Christmas.
American Chinatowns have been beacons since waves of anti-Chinese violence in the late 19th century drove Chinese workers out of California and into self-protective pockets across the country. Then, Chinatowns promised physical safety. Today they offer comfort for those who long for home. [….]
Chinatown exudes density. It not only rivals Times Square as the most crowded pedestrian area in the city, but also is one of the most visually cluttered, greeting you with a jumble of fire escapes, colorful store signs and streams of tattered flags. Like many crowded Asian cities, Chinatown has mastered the art of the vertical, inspired by languages that can be written up and down, not just side to side.
“Why do Chinese like America?” Charlene [Lee’s Chinese grad student friend] asked, rhetorically, as we were swept along by the crowds on Canal. “Because you can drive and have a big house. But not in New York City. Here, it’s just like in China. Why bother living here?”
Chinatowns, she said, had a bad reputation in China: dirty. They are not the face that a rising China wants to present to the world. Having explored many Chinatowns, I am amused to report that perhaps only Japan, in Yokohama, had the discipline to create one that is both clean and expensive.
But I take pride in the vibrancy of New York City’s immigrant communities. You can spot a dying Chinatown: vestigial restaurants, but no doctors’ offices, no barbershops, no funeral parlors, no businesses required by daily living. Outside New York and San Francisco, many urban Chinatowns have dwindled to Chinastreets, or even Chinablocks, as the population centers have shifted to the suburbs. Washington’s Chinatown is superficially preserved: the storefronts, including Starbucks and Subway, must display Chinese names. The Hooters sign says “Owl Restaurant” in Chinese.
In contrast, New York now has three Chinatowns — one each for Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, though only the original can claim the name. In 1946, a small group of United Nations delegation members from the Nationalist Chinese government settled in Flushing, in what was then a largely white middle-class community. Since the 1980’s, the neighborhood has flourished as the Chinatown for Mandarin speakers from Taiwan, Shanghai and northern China. More recently, Manhattan’s working-class Chinese population has been squeezed down the N subway line, emerging on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in other satellite clusters farther out.
Manhattan’s Chinatown has fought off the forces of urban decline. It has even grown, with a churn of immigrants that provides both fresh customers and new entrepreneurs. Starting in the late 1960’s, Chinatown expanded as Little Italy and the Jewish community of the Lower East Side receded. Small reminders of the Italian presence peek out on the southern part of Mulberry Street. Chinatown’s only park, where the elderly can be spotted doing tai chi or playing Chinese chess, is named after Columbus. The Antica Roma restaurant, renamed Asian Roma, offers dumplings along with spaghetti to the courthouse crowd.
Today Chinatown is large enough to have two main arteries: Canal Street, the tourist-friendly thoroughfare that is still predominantly Cantonese, and East Broadway, which has become Main Street for Fujianese immigrants. East Broadway, Charlene agreed, looks like China — from the stripped-down restaurants with folding tables to the vendors selling piles of snacks for long bus rides, to the signs unapologetically free of English. The center of Chinatown has shifted east, engulfing the Grand Street subway station. Perhaps one day it will get a huabu sign as well. [….]
And, of course, the little differences between and among the Chinatowns of NYC:
For this rising class of Chinese-American professionals, Chinatown can be an uncomfortable echo of a time when Chinese immigrants were almost exclusively male laborers.
The geographic and class divides are visible. Flushing has many more Chinese bookstores and more men in suits. It is home to the World Journal, a national Chinese-language paper owned by a Taiwan media company, and to the Taiwan government’s cultural offices. When I was a bridesmaid for a Chinese-American friend who was a medical student at Columbia, she hired a white limo to take us from her Washington Heights dorm room to the Flushing Mall to get our hair and makeup done before the wedding.
Where Chinatown is shrouded in history, Flushing is bright and contemporary. The broad, flat cityscape of Queens is spiced up with the shiny metal-and-mirror aesthetic popular in industrial East Asia. “In Chinatown, everything is right in front of you,” Charlene said, putting her hand right in front of her face. “In Flushing, you can breathe.”
The street food is more northern and western Chinese. We bought Xinjiang-styled lamb kabobs on Main Street for $1. Charlene, raised in a city with a Muslim influence, quickly devoured them. “Do you like America?” we asked the vendor, who had come from the western Chinese city of Urumqi on the Silk Road. “I like American money,” he said. But he would never raise his kids here — he doesn’t like the values. Charlene, too, wants to return to China after graduate school. With its roaring expansion, the opportunities are better for her there, she said — a philosophy opposite that of my parents, who had arrived a generation before. [….]
Interesting article. Stuff I can say that I share. And, really, I never realized haw flakes were made from hawthorne fruit.
The wee small hours of Thursday night (or early Friday morning) — when, oh when, will I ever learn to go to bed early? Fortunately, Lunar New Year is upon us, so I can (again) renew those pesky resolutions. Try, try again, to change those bad, bad habits.
Wednesday night – yes, as FC noted, I was a panelist at the Law School Alma Mater’s Asian American Law Students panel on the profession and diversity. Felt weird – I mean, inviting me, who was probably the most recent graduate on that panel, as if I knew anything about diversity (ok, arguably, I may have known anything, considering where I work and the area of law I allegedly work in). And, inviting me must mean I’m getting old (which is really stupid of me to say, since the law students were likely my age anyway, but what the hey, I thought it was weird that I was sitting behind the panelists’ table for once, excluding the time I had moderated a program for my local bar association committee – really weird experience too, since I actually made a reference to actual law in that program too). I thought I rambled a bit much (I really am no public speaker; I fumbled when I spoke before an ALJ a few weeks ago, but that was a settlement conference, so no big deal). But, an enjoyable time. I really admire knowing that Law School Alma Mater has graduates of color who have done pretty well for themselves.
Now, I hope I can make the Law School Alumni dinner – but I checked my schedule and I might have a conflict. Man, I’d hate to miss a really good free dinner!
This week’s WB’s Beauty and the Geek 2 – Tyson, the East Asian contestant/Geek, got eliminated. Seemed like a sweet kid, a little introverted, but he gained a little more confidence. He’s quite articulate, I must also say. The Rubik’s Cube Record holder/Cal Tech senior Tyson will also be guest-starring in WB’s “Reba,” at least according to the commercials. Umm, ok, that show has its moments, but couldn’t you convince WB to let you guest on something geekier but slightly cooler, like “Smallville”? Anyway, the South Asian Geek/MIT grad, Ankur, remains on the show. So, Asian representation continues (and, hopefully, so will the whole undermining/emphasizing of stereotypes of beauties and geeks).
Speaking of “Smallville,” I only caught the tail end of Thursday night’s 100th episode of Smallville. I taped the entire episode to view at another time. At any rate, I couldn’t resist catching this episode, considering all the hype on who in Clark’s life was fated to pass away. You suspected all along who it would be, but kept hoping it isn’t… well, they did it. (No, I won’t do the big revelation, not yet anyway).
But, the choice made sense – every superhero-to-be has to have that key tragedy that pushes him/her to become a superhero. Batman had it, Spiderman had it. Traditional Superman mythology suggested only that Clark’s Kryptonian tragedy (i.e., that he was the sole survivor of the end of Krypton) was that impetus. But, I’ve been impressed by how “Smallville” takes a different tack on the mythology, showing how Clark’s Earth upbringing was the real influence to his being that great all-American hero, Superman (as previously suggested by Superman IV, the movie) and how Clark struggles with his alien origin versus his self-identification as a mere ordinary American kid. Then again, I’m a sucker for superhero stuff. I tolerated only so much of Smallville’s Alien of the Week stuff, preferring the series more once it took on the Road to the Once and Future Superman, Clark Kent. (well, it’s also about how Lex Luthor became a super villain too, by the way). The writing has a tendency of being a little odd, but not a bad show to watch.
(And, I enjoyed the episodes where Flash and Aquaman made their youthful appearances. I very much resented that the young Batman didn’t come through, but then again, with Batman Returns coming, it made sense that Batman didn’t make an appearance after all).
Will Clark overcome the tragedy? Hmm. More seriously, will WB renew “Smallville”?
Several of my friends including SSW will be on a panel tomorrow evening. I think it is the surest sign of growing up when you end up on a panel, view by those seeking whatever wisdom you might have accumulated from your life experience. More coverage tomorrow, possibly a joint blog with SSW…
OhmiGod – LOL moment. Mary Worth comic strip, 1/24/06 edition:
Mary Worth: What?! … You’re being SUED?!
Her neighbor Wilbur: Yes, my advice column persona “Wendy” is being sued.
Mary: That’s terrible, Wilbur… Do you want to talk about it at my place? … I made apple strudel this morning.
Wilbur: Thanks, Mary. I could use some advice myself right about now.
Ah, ok, Mary, do you really think apple strudel will solve Wilbur’s problems? I laughed. Then, of course, there’s that odd little feeling that maybe this is a joke or reference to this other comic strip Mary: Apple Mary.
Crazy tv network news. So, if WB and UPN join forces to be the new “CW” (or, as Leslie Moonves, the exec of CBS, whose parent company owns CBS and UPN, puts it, “‘C’ for CBS and ‘W’ for Warner Brothers…” – trying to be stupidly cute, Mr. Moonves?), and in NYC, the local UPN – Channel 9 – is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s FOX people (such that a bunch of Channel 5 FOX’s shows show up on Channel 9) – and Channel 11, the local WB, is now somehow allied with Channel 9 (although I’m still not clear where Channel 5 fits in this equation) to capture the 18-34 demographic – it’s just nuts. Someone will lose out. Likely Channel 9, if you ask me, since it’s weaker (Channel 11 gets more viewers, and even its news gets more local Emmies – no offense to the longtime anchorman Rolland Smith on Channel 9 or even the Fields father and son weatherforecasters and sports guy Russ Salzberg). But, the consolidation of power – all those shows on one station? Veronica Mars, Everyone Hates Chris – on the same network as Smallville, One Tree Hill (which I don’t care for), Gilmore Girls, and Everwood? Yikes.
Flavors of the Lunar New Year.
Hockey player Mario Lemieux is retiring. Again. But for real. This time. Seriously.
And, last but not least, those folks in Boston – they’re strange: Red Sox re-hires Theo Epstein as General Manager. In vague, inspiring language, Epstein and his ex-boss/ex-mentor/new boss, Larry Lucchino, have kind of kissed and made up. Sort of. Whatever. Epstein barely got to claim unemployment benefits (well, ok, so he resigned, so it’s not like he was fired), and he’s back in the job. Wish we can be all so lucky.