With Katy Perry's recent AMA performance, yellow fever has become the hot topic among Asians and Asian Americans. I've called it the Asian Babe Syndrome where guys, usually white, but not necessarily so, seek out Asian or Asian American women hoping for compliant and unconditional love.
That may or may not include BDSM if only because the man is seeking a submissive partner. When I was still dating, I got a few emails from male doms looking for a female sub--something I didn't get when I didn't identify my race or lied and alleged that I was white or black.
The cure of the man looking for a geisha is a heavy dose of reality. I recommend a spreadsheet in place of spread eagle legs, showing how much it costs to support a real geisha.
Numbers, I know, can be boring and as Americans are historically lacking in math skills in comparison with most of the world, probably a better way is to show rather than tell.
There are two movies I recommend:
"In the Realm of the Sense" which is inspired by the real case of Abe Sada or Sada Abe.
"Audition" which is a movie that strikes terror in the hearts of many men.
Sada Abe was a Japanese woman born in 1905 and became famous, after a brief attempt at being a geisha, for cutting off the penis and testicles of her lover, Kichizo Ishida, in 1936. She kept those organs because she wanted a part of him that gave her vivid memories. They had been engaged in torrid sex and Ishida was stranged as a part of erotic asphyxiation--so during sex to intensify his pleasure.
Nagisa Oshima's 1976 "In the Real of the Senses" is about that incident and includes nudity, unsimulated acts of sex and violence. You can watch it on HuluPlus.
It should be noted that the woman who played Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) didn't enjoy a respectable film career, but the man (Tatsuya Fuji) was able to go on into legitimate films.
The 1999 "Audition" is based on a book by a man, Ryu Murakami. A widowed middle-aged man, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) pretends to audition women for a movie, but is actually auditioning someone to date and be his new wife. His friend Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, helps him but has a bad feeling about the woman, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) that Shigehara chooses.
Abe did it out of love. Others, like Ecuadorian-born Lorena Bobbitt, cut their lovers penis off out of spite. In Orange County (Garden Grove), Katherine Kieu, who was born in Vietnam, drugged her husband, cut off his penis and then threw it down the garbage disposal. That was in 2011. The couple had only been married 16 months. She was only recently sentenced to life in prison in June of this year.
In an earlier case in Guangzhou, Mainland China, a husband, Lin Mouru, suggested that he, his wife and their three kids live together with his mistress. That was in 2008. By 2009, his wife, Xie Mouman, asked for a divorce. He refused. She alleges that he threatened her and their kids. In February of 2009, she cut off his penis and then fled the scene. She was captured two days later. She was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison.
You might be able to buy "love" but that unconditional love depends upon your bank account. Asian and Asian American women are not butterflies or chrysanthemums, but human beings who can be just as angry and bloody as other women.
Justin Chan of PolicyMic.com recently posted the question: "Are Asian Men Undateable?" The answer is both yes and no. Instead of moaning about it, there's plenty Asian men and Asian American men can do about it.
Chan worried about being rejected (Don't all men worry about that except those extraordinarily vain few?). He mentions a UCLA Bruin who wrote "I feel cheated out of a myriad of romantic experiences that could have been brought to fruition were I not an Asian male." Does that comment make you think the writer, John Shim, was looking for a relationship or a notch on his score card?
When I first read both of these articles, I thought that not much had changed since I started dating. Because of my stalker ex (despite a restraining order in place and one arrest), I didn't post my photo. I was told this would greatly decrease the number of responses I received. However, as a Japanese woman, I received about 20-30 a day. So I decided to experiment. Without a photo, if I used the same profile and wrote Asian, I got about 30 responses per week. If I did not identify my race, then I got very few. If I identified myself as black, then I got none.
What I also noticed was that if I politely declined men, as an Asian woman or as a Japanese woman, I received more nastigrams---even if the decline was for something as simple and impersonal as geography. I didn't want to date someone on the other side of the country. This kind of outrage never happened if I didn't identify myself as Asian or Japanese. Some men in their nastigrams would tell me that they had had my mother, sister, cousin for a buck when they were in Asia. I got the distinct feeling they felt I should be honored to have received their attention.
Further, I was more likely to get complimented for my English even though I clearly stated I was born in the U.S. Of the men who responded without knowing my race, when I revealed my race, there were some who would claim that they could tell from my writing that I was a non-native speaker of English.
As a Japanese or Asian American woman, I also got asked my bra cup size by white men, sent photos of erect penises by white and black men, and received unwanted advice from Asian men about how I should behave. Some were greatly offended that I was willing to date men of any race. Some wanted to teach me how to be more Asian.
If nothing has changed since I was dating and it seems not much has changed since Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yuniyoshi in the 1961 "Breakfast at Tiffany's" then there's no use in whining about it. If "Frances Ha" and her best bet for a good relationship both call themselves "undateable" maybe there's something undateable Asian American men are missing. Get up and make yourself more dateable.
Dating as practiced in the United States is filled with facades building up false expectations. For Asian and Asian American men, I recommend they turn away from this often artificial dating practice and cultivate other aspects of socializing with the gender of their preference.
First, I think that Asian American men must deal with the disconnect between what their parents teach them, particularly parents from an older generation. Many Asian American parents value their sons above their daughters. So the Asian American man may get to order his sisters and mother around at home and his mother may tend to his every need, but he's not the object of adoration outside the house within the larger general American population. Asian American women will be sought after by men of various races and in higher demand than Asian American men.
That means, you can't treat Asian American women unkindly. You can't take them for granted. You can't treat them like your mother and you can't let your mother or father treat them poorly either. You may be king at your home, but you're not one of the golden princes of the American social scene.
One way to deal with this disconnect is to understand what is generally acceptable. You can glean this from reading Dear Abby or various other advice columns and the comments posted on those columns. Read Miss Manners or Emily Post. Good manners will get you noticed.
In my opinion, some Asian American men are the worst of both cultures--they adopt the most sexist aspects of their respective Asian culture and add it to the sexist aspects of the American culture. They become super sexist. That, in my opinion, isn't sexy. What is sexy is a guy who is interested in what I'm interested in without being paternalistic or condescending. The interest, however, must be geniuine.
As a geek and someone who has been in the geek culture, this is the same advice I'd give to my science geek friends. Many geek subcultures that are predominately male. If you want to attract the few women in that culture, you have to be better than your competition.
If you want a woman who looks a certain way, then you better be able a good match for her. Be a Ken to her Barbie. If you're a jeans and T-shirt guy, don't expect to get a fashionista.
If the competition is too rough in whatever culture you're in, then you need to find activities that put you together with more women. My hobby of rock collecting is predominately male. However, you can be like Rosey Grier, the former football player, and take up hobbies like macrame and needlepoint. You could take dance classes. Don't be one of those leering guys in the yoga class, aerobics or zumba class. People notice and you'll be labeled the creepy guy.
Most of the dance classes have more women than men. Of course, when I emphasized that I wanted a man who danced, I got a lot of hate email from men who told me that there were no heterosexual men who liked dancing and that John Wayne never danced. If that's your prejudice, you might need to work on yourself. John Wayne did dance in a movie and there are plenty of heterosexual men who dance. Remember, Fred Astaire was balding, didn't have the kind of physique that makes you want to rip his shirt off, but he was attractive to women. I've seen short men, men with paunchy stomachs, balding men and even older men who don't have the Donald Trump big bank account advantage being swooned over by women who want to dance.
My husband, who I met through Argentine tango, believes that Asian men need better PR and after a recent U.N. study made headlines, that may be true and there's a lot one can do about the bad PR. More people must be willing to speak out and not accept ghastly yellowface or the whitewashing of history. That's a campaign that won't help your immediate needs on the dating frontline, but one that needs to be fought just the same. Don't be the always ranting angry guy, because that's also unattractive.
Women must also be willing to speak up. One thing that personally turned me off of many men, white and black, with yellowfever was how they spoke about Asian men. I reminded them that my father was Asian American, my grandfathers and uncles were and are Asian American. My brother and cousins are Asian American. Every derogatory statement they said about Asian and Asian American men was a negative comment about my family.
Being undateable may just be a state of mind. Things at the movies have changed since my parents time and the era of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" despite the yellowface in "Cloud Atlas." Besides Bruce Lee, we have Bi (Rain), Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Poreotics, Jackie Chan and a former part-Japanese Superman in Dean Cain and part-Asian Booboo Stewart ("The Twilight Saga: Eclipse") and part-Asian Dan Southworth ("Act of Valor"). While it's true that Asian Americans face different problems on the dating scene than Caucasians, Latinos and African Americans, there's always something one can do to improve one's chances and opportunities and in doing so, on a local level you can help define the new normal.
How do we define normal? That's a question we need to consider anytime we read newspaper articles or listen to reports. Are Asians and Africans--both nationals and ethnic communities--used in defining what is normal? Or are we allowing white Christian men and women to be the standard.
Recently I had a heated discussion regarding two Facebook postings of articles. One article was about Asian men and the other was not. Both articles were posted by white American women. Consider what both articles mean in regards to being normal.
Yet there were other flaws to the study such as the respondents not being representative. The title "Rape widespread across Asia-Pacific, UN Study Says" is from NPR and not some yellow journalism rag. Bloomberg.com used the headline "One in Four Men Surveyed in Asian Study Say They Raped." Imagine what kind of misinformation could be spread by other headlines and careless readers.
When a post by a white woman hit my Facebook page, I looked at the article and looked at the original source and made sure everyone commenting on that particular post knew that the study didn't represent Asia. Asian men are from one continent but they come from different cultures and different religious communities.
Limited research is always a problem but consider this: How many studies are Asians and Asian American left out of? Asians make up 60 percent of the world population, but we make up only 11 percent of the population in Los Angeles. Yet why wouldn't we want to add our voices to that 60 percent?
When discussing another recent issue brought up by an article posted (again by a white woman), research on mental health and human sexuality, I raised the lack of research into non-white communities such as Africa and Asia as problematic. I was told that this was a ridiculous concern. The study was reported by the Huffington Post as "BDSM Correlated with Better Health Mental Health, Says Study." The Huffington Post writer cites other sources such as LiveScience and Reuters, but it doesn't seem that the study has anything to do with the United States. The study was done through online questionnaires using 902 BDSM practitioners and 434 people who practiced non-kinky sex, but it was done by a psychologist, Andreas Wismeijer, at Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands. As the lead author, Wismeijer admitted that the study was limited.
The study is somewhat limited by a self-selecting response pool and by the fact that BDSM practitioners could have been answering in ways to make themselves look better and avoid stigma, Wismeijer said — though the fact that the participants didn't know the reasons for the study ameliorates that concern somewhat. The findings are reason for mental health professionals to take an accepting approach to BDSM practitioners, Wismeijer said.--LiveScience.com.
The Netherlands has over 17 million people. As the Netherlands has that Black Peter tradition and the possible limitations of the language spoken, Dutch, I would question how representative this study was of Europe and then of the world in general. From the three articles I read, it wasn't clear that the study went beyond the borders of the Netherlands or hit any English-speaking communities. The study did use the largest BDSM forum in the Netherlands and the so-called vanilla sex practitioners were drawn from "a women's magazine website, a personal secret website and a university website." Using those three sources, they were only able to find 434 people, that's less than half of the BDSM practitioners. Not good.
Yet even if we consider the studies representative of Europe, just watching movies like "Stranger by the Lake" or "The Warmest Color Is Blue" should indicate European attitudes (French in the case of the movies) are different from American attitudes toward sex and nudity. Why should we believe that this small limited study done in the Netherlands has anything to do with the United States and anything to do worldwide attitudes?
My points are:
We shouldn't allow news items that roll up Asia into one monolithic culture to go by without comment. Six countries do not represent the 49 Asian countries and are less representative if you add the Pacific Islands. The concept that Asia and the Pacific (and sometimes North Africa) can be seen as one cohesive culture is Orientalism at its worst.
A study of white people by white people, particularly in a nation that is predominately Christian (Protestant or Catholic) is not representative of the world and does a disservice to the peoples of Africa and Asia as well as people of other world religions such as Islam, Hindu and Buddhism. While "The World Factbook" lists Christians as 30.59 percent of the world population, Muslims as 23.2 percent and Hindus are 15 percent. Together that's 33.2 percent. Buddhists are only 7 percent. The majority of the world isn't Christian (and doesn't celebrate Christmas). The largest ethnic group in the world is the Han Chinese (18 percent worldwide) and Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language (14 percent to 5.52 percent for English). The next most populous ethnic group is Arab. The Arabs are a panethnic group from West Asia and North Africa. As 1 out of 5 people in the world are Muslim and a large percentage of the world population is Arab, both Arabs and Muslims and even Arab Muslims should be included in any study that is meant to determine worldwide norms.
If you want to claim that a small study of white people should apply to peoples of the world, then conversely a study about people in Asia or Africa should apply to all peoples of the world. That means instead of saying, Asian men, the headlines in the U.N. study should have said simply "1 out of 4 Men Surveyed Say They Raped."
Where we have seen movies such as "21" and "Emperor" whitewash East Asian Americans out of historical events--major and minor, we can also see Asians and Asian Americans being whitewashed out of research and data used to define normal. Minorities are part of normal in the United States. Asian Americans may only be 5.6 percent of the American population but we are the fastest growing ethnic group. There are cities in California where Asian Americans are a majority and citizens of those cities shouldn't be held to a measure of normality that was defined by research that excluded them.
Moreover, Asia holds a little over 60 percent of the world population. If religion and culture define attitudes toward sex and other emotional issues, and the largest religion in Asia is Islam, followed by Hinduism and Buddhism, then sexual practices and attitudes of these populations should be part of any research on human beings so we understand what is average and what is normal. The true norms of the world may not be the norms of America or Europe. The true normal in this global community would best be defined by including research on Asia.
Just as the U.N. research of 10,000 men in nine sites in six countries doesn't represent Asia or Pacific Asia as in the case of the rape, then less than 1,500 people in the Netherlands doesn't represent Europe, America, Africa or Asia in regards to sexual attitudes and mental health.
According to world demographics, research on what is normal, mentally or physically, should include both Han Chinese and Arabs, Christians and Muslims as a significant percentage of the research subject pool.
What we, as Asian ethnics, as Asian Americans, as non-Christians need to ask for is a new normal.
Sunday night (24 November 2013) I wasn't watching the American Music Awards. I'm not a fan of people, too often women, acting like spoiled teenagers trying to get someone, anyone's attention by bad behavior. So I missed Katy Perry going geisha to promote her new single "Unconditionally."
Tuesday, I read Jeff Yang's blog entry on the matter. There where things that made me cringe and that's not just because of Katy Perry. Yang's title surely is a lift for businesses like the Scottsdale, AZ "Geisha A Go Go" which gets a good rating in Urban Spoon and even has a Facebook page.
Really, if anyone wants unconditional love, get a dog. Not a cat, not your mother. A dog. My dog always loves me even when I'm putting him on a diet. He even becomes needier. Even after people dump their dogs at the animal shelter, some really loyal dogs keep looking for their best-beloved master until their last breath.
As for your mother, if she's like mine comes with a martyr complex chained to well-practiced passive-aggressive ploys to evoke guilt and/or shame, there's nothing unconditional about that. Japanese may have a shame culture, but I get the best of both--European-centric American guilt combined with Japanese filio-piety shame. That's some very restrictive apron strings.
What boggles the mind is that men think a woman, any woman, would want to center their world around them, especially when entertaining me is part of their commercial enterprise. Yet I feel the need to correct some parts of Yang's column as well as comment on Perry's performance.
Calling Katy Perry's performance Cirque du Sayonara is a disservice to the French Canadians who have given us back the circus in a guilt-free manner. We can enjoy the circus without feeling bad about the animals. PETA won't be protesting. PETA members may even be in attendance. Now those French in France...they do have some part of the blame for America and Europe's infatuation with sexually-easy Asian women.
The original Madame Butterfly was Japanese, she was the creation of a French man (not unlike "Miss Saigon") and she wasn't a geisha. The naval officer Pierre Loti wrote a semi-autobiographical novel in 1887 called "Madame Chrysantheme." John Luther Long's short story, "Madame Butterfly" followed in 1898. The Giacomo Puccini opera premiered in 1904.
This is very different from the musical "Miss Saigon" whose protagonist is a pure prostitute and she must be saved by a man, preferably a white man. That kind of story gets filed under "white man saves the world" variant of "white man saves the girl." "Miss Saigon," was written by French man Claude-Michel Schonberg and Tunisian-born Alain Boubil and was supposedly based on the Puccini opera "Madame Butterfly."
As Yang states, "Miss Saigon" does portray white men as saving an Asian women from evil and just wimpy Asian men. All too true and from my experience, some men see themselves this way when they try to find the Asian girl of their dreams. There are men who specifically seek an Asian bride.
In all of these incarnations--Madame Butterfly and Madame Chysantheme, the Japanese woman was a disposable wife. She was treated like a prostitute--bought for temporary pleasure and convenience. She was not a geisha. I suppose men can look at foreign women, particularly non-white, as disposable wives, but that's not what a geisha is.
A geisha is an entertainer and an artisan. She has to entertain men and she usually, like all artists, needs a sponsor. Usually that involves sex. You need to have a pretty sizable bank account to have a monopoly on your favorite geisha. A good geisha is aware of the nature of commerce, her business. One wonders how well Katy Perry knows her business. Was this her ploy of getting attention? Then mission accomplished.
In her AMA performance, Perry gets on stage dressed in a kimono with long fluttering sleeves that suggest a young girl, typically one that has never married. Her eyebrows don't have that accent grave and aigu upward slant that I detailed in my (dia)critical essay but if you check out the performers around her, their make up took up that Fu Manchu makeup folly. The costume includes white tabi socks, but has a Mandarin collar (that's Chinese in case you're knowledge of geography and ethnicity is limited. She has the slit skirt that is typical of China or Vietnam. So the costume designer has crossed the kimono with the cheongsam (qipao) and Perry walks as if she's in an Vietnamese ao dai which would conceivably be split up to her waist.
Having worn all three, a slit makes it easier to walk but Perry needed lessons on walking with a slit skirt. Slit skirts don't go well with tabi socks. Ao dai and cheongsam usually have pants under them. Remember Asian women were wearing pants before it was proper for American and European women. Japanese women also wore pants (monpe) at times for things such as farm work. You can't, after all, work in a kimono.
If you don't know how to walk in a kimono, you will give onlookers some unfortunate crotch shots. I'm not sure who to blame for the backup dancers providing crotch shots in the Perry performance. Performer? Costume designer? Choreographer? If you need help on the kimono walk, I suggest watching onnagata in kabuki. That's how I learned. The traditional feminine walk of a kimono-wearing Japanese woman is distinctive and it takes practice.
Perry's performance suggests she is in Japan. The background of red torii gates and bonsai trees with the gigantic Hokusai-esque wave on fans are suggest Japan. Her performance included five-petaled confetti which I suppose were meant to be cherry blossoms, except cherry blossoms are not usually orange or yellow. In poetry, cherry blossoms represented samurai and the brevity of their lives. In general, cherry blossoms symbolize something ephemeral. Red torii gates also have a place in love stories and a different kind of foxy ladies than we'd talk about in America.
Her pre-show Instagram shows her with her hands pressed together in a salutation that is probably more Thai than Japanese. Although should you be visiting a temple or shrine, hands pressed together as in prayer can be seen in Japan. I don't think Perry's kimono/cheongsam pose is about prayer. She seems more like she's making that stereotypical "ah so" greeting.
The geisha has specific dress codes as did courtesans (a different category in pre-Meiji Japan). Hollywood wouldn't know that considering the travesty that was the 2005 blockbuster movie, "Memoirs of a Geisha." If the book was a betrayal of a real geisha by the author Arthur Golden (it was the subject of a lawsuit), then the movie was a betrayal of American-Japanese relationships by falling back and supporting old stereotypes, including that World War II tradition of having Chinese actors portray the main Japanese characters (Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh portrayed the main female roles to Japanese actor Ken Watanabe's portrayal of the protagonist's true love).
What was the problem? Japanese actors weren't Japanese enough? The Steven Spielberg produced film was directed by Rob Marshall and the dance in the movie had almost nothing to do with Japan or the geisha culture.
The geisha certainly does capture the imagination of American men but the definition that Americans have of the geisha says more about Americans and their prejudices than it says about Japan. The Merriam Webster doesn't define a her as compliant. That's our connotation.
Somehow the American stereotype of the geisha makes Japanese women seem more compliant--even among Asian women. Yet why do Americans and Europeans insist on seeing Asian women as compliant sexual objects when they have and do have women of courage and strength. Is this a remnant of old imperialism, the Orientalism that the late Edward Said wrote about?
The retired geisha who Golden used for information wasn't exactly compliant. She, Mineko Iwasaki of Kyoto, sued Arthur Golden and his publisher Alfred A. Knopf over the 1997 book. Iwasaki then wrote "Geisha of Gion," her autobiography that was published in 2002.
The geisha don't represent Japanese women. They are only a small segment of the Japanese population just as the samurai class was. When we think of the United Kingdom, we have the formidable Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. However, when Americans and Europeans think of the first novelist in the world (Murasaki Shikibu) or the courageous woman warrior Tomoe Gozen, concubine of Minamoto no Yoshinaka or the crafty and politically astute Masako Hojo?
As for geishas, have movie-goers forgotten that 1976 Japanese-French production "In the Realm of the Senses"? "In the Realm of the Senses" is based on a real case where a Japanese woman. Sada Abe, sliced off the penis of her lover, Kichizo Ishida. According to her sister, the real Sada Abe did want to become a geisha, but only worked briefly as an apprentice before becoming a legally licensed prostitute. This penis-slicing was pre-Bobbitt, occurring in 1936. She also took his testicles. American Lorena Bobbitt maimed her then-husband John Wayne Bobbitt in 1993.
Japanese women aren't all geisha and even geisha aren't compliant, even when confronting a man or even a white man. Having a geisha require money, more than you'd need for a prostitute.
Is what Katy Perry did racist? If her costume was food, we might see it as a creative fusion unless it was done out of ignorance, then it would be mishmash Orientalism. Yellowface has continued to be acceptable in movies as we saw in "The Last Airbender" or "Cloud Atlas." Then we also has a whitewashing of history where East Asians and especially East Asian Americans are whitewashed out of history--major (e.g. the movie "Emperor") and minor (e.g. the movie "21"). Not much has changed since Mickey Rooney was Mr. Yuniyoshi in the 1961 "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Perry's performance was an update of old-style Orientalism that rolled up East Asia into one confused image of the compliant woman. Just because other women have done it doesn't make it okay.
If you want unconditional love, you can always buy it. Try the local animal shelter or a reputable breeder and you can find a dog (try a beta or an omega and not an alpha dog) who can provide you with unconditional love. Yes, I would have preferred seeing a dog (and not a bitch of the human kind) at the AMA performance and it would have been perfect symmetry against Miley Cyrus' cat.
If you want unconditional love, don't look for it in Japan or East Asia. Don't look for it in my cousins who were born and raised in Japan. The women in Japan and Asia are human beings not disposable paper dolls and they have the same faults and weaknesses, virtues and strengths as women everywhere.
"Unconditionally"
Oh no, did I get too close?
Oh, did I almost see what's really on the inside?
All your insecurities
All the dirty laundry
Never made me blink one time
Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
There is no fear now
Let go and just be free
I will love you unconditionally
Come just as you are to me
Don't need apologies
Know that you are worthy
I'll take your bad days with your good
Walk through the storm I would
I do it all because I love you, I love you
Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
There is no fear now
Let go and just be free
I will love you unconditionally
So open up your heart and just let it begin
Open up your heart and just let it begin
Open up your heart and just let it begin
Open up your heart
Acceptance is the key to be
To be truly free
Will you do the same for me?
Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
And there is no fear now
Let go and just be free
'Cause I will love you unconditionally (oh yeah)
I will love you (unconditionally)
I will love you
I will love you unconditionally
We have fun at the Long Beach Comic and Horror convention. The car show was free. Besides this batmobile, we saw the Back to the Future DeLorean, Magnum PI's Ferraris, the Ninja Turtle van and the Jurassic Park vehicle.
This is at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, 23-24 November 2013. Sunday, it goes until 5 p.m.
After walking around the Long Beach Comic and Horror Convention, we took a short 15-minute walk to Kabob Curry. Not an inspired name, but after looking at the brochures, Ian thought a lamb pizza would be worth trying.
The place serves Halal meat if that concerns you. We ordered mango lassi ($2.99), sweet lassi (yogurt with sugar and rosewater for $2.50), #38 lamb pizza ($7.99) and #30 palak paneer ($6.99 a la carte). We also added an order of garlic naan ($2.50).
Both lassi were not particularly sweet or thick. Who doesn't love garlic naan? The lamb pizza was thick with cheese, most likely cheddar and Monterey jack. The result was gooey and completely overshadowed the few chunks of lamb. The pizza also included some very anemic looking tomatoes (too pallid to be called red or green) and red onions. The base of the pizza is naan.
The palek paneer was better, but very, very spicy.
This is a casual restaurant and they played Indian music throughout (modern Bollywood I'm guessing).
The service is good, not great. The lassi came to the table with a bit of stick liquid dripping down the side. A good wait person would have wiped that with a damp cloth before or after. I didn't it myself.
Although we mentioned the 10 percent discount and they didn't argue, when the bill came, we didn't have a discount taken from our bill.
They weren't particularly busy. There was only one other customer there and he waited for his friend and then ordered just as we were leaving.
We'd be willing to give Kabob Curry another try, perhaps for those naan rolls.
Overall, I'd give it a three-star rating. ***
Kabob Curry
108 W. 3rd Street (between 3rd and Pine)
Long Beach, CA 90802
(562) 49-KABOB (42262)
www.KabobCurry.com
Sundays-Thursday, 11 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The problem with black men and taxi cabs has also been explored in the tap-musical "Bring in 'da, Noise Bring in 'da Funk" with another Glover. Savion. In Danny Glover's case, five yellow taxi cabs passed him by while he, his college student daughter and her roommate tried to wave them down in New York. Glover was born and lived in San Francisco at the time.
There is more than black and white to the cab situation. As we made our way to the airport in a cab, our cab driver, an Armenian man with a heavy accent, told us how black women had tried to cheat him. The man had been a cab driver for over two decades and had most recently driven director Woody Allen and his former stepdaughter now wife Soon Yi Previn Allen.
The cab driver mentioned that he didn't want to be racist, but in his experience, it had always been black people, particularly women, who tried to cheat him or bully him out of his hard-earned dollars. In one instance, the woman caught the cab and then claimed she just needed to go inside the house to fetch the cash. When the woman did not return, he went knocking on the door. She threatened to call the cops. He told her to go right ahead.
In the second instance, he related how he had been waiting for a long time at a casino when a black woman came and told him he owed her money. He owed her change and she threatened to call the police. The police did come and he calmly told them to check his hood or his engine. If the woman's claim had been true, his hood and engine would be hot. However, since he had been parked and no record could be found through his dispatcher, his hood was cool.
So while we left Los Angeles feeling sorry for cab drivers, the cab drivers in Buenos Aires left us feeling hostile. In our small group, we often took taxis. One would go with the two German-speaking Swiss women. The other with us, two East Asian ethnics. In all cases, except once, the cab driver we took charged us more--even when we were with the Spanish-speaking guide. We would leave first and arrive last. In one particularly offensive case, our cab left first, but he kept surging ahead and then getting behind the cab carrying the other two people. He could hardly be lost because we were going to a very central ara. He stopped at the traffic light to talk with the other cab driver then went back to his zigzagging, meandering strategy.
There was another cab ride when my heart just dropped because I knew we were being taken off the route on side roads, but with the language barrier it was hard to express my doubt. Further, the German-speaking white women weren't having the same problem--with or without the Spanish-speaking guide.
The last cab we took, we looked up the route on Google maps and checked the mileage of the alternative routes and gave instructions by the shortest route. I spoke to the cab driver in Spanish and spoke to my husband in Japanese, a language I was pretty sure most cab drivers wouldn't understand.
As a result, I have no sympathy for the cab drivers of Buenos Aires. I know that the same thing could easily happen to me in New York, but over the span of ten days to have only one cab driver be honest and give us a good fare, one that was better than the cab with the women, is highly suspicious.
In Los Angeles, I know the roads and how much it should cost to get to LAX so it's hard to know if that sort of racism exists here. I'd warn all East Asian Americans and East Asians to be wary of cab drivers in Buenos Aires--more so than white people. In many cases if it's relatively safe, I'd rather walk.
I was recently struck by an article in "The New Yorker" titled "Images Spark Racism Debate in Thailand." The author, Newley Purnell, states "In Thailand, which is largely ethnically homogenous, many see racism as a Western issue—something for multicultural societies like those in the U.S. or the U.K. to debate. " Further it noted that in 2010 "non-Thais grew to nearly five percent of the population." Purnell actually begins the article with an American--an African American from Atlanta, Georgia, but why should the Thai be listening to Americans on the topic of racial sensitivity? What do Americans know about racism? What do Americans know about Thailand? The images in question involve a model turning black after eating a Dunkin' Donuts. Presumably, Dunkin' Donuts wants you to eat donuts so turning black is a good thing, but it wasn't so good in the eyes of others. The ad campaign was considered racist.
I thought the protest and at article leading with a comment by a person from Atlanta were a curious way of talking about Thailand because I have been to Thailand. Thailand is 75 percent ethnic Thais. Yet just what does that mean? There are also Thai Chinese who are about 14 percent of the population and smaller groups such as the Khmer, the Mon, Vietnamese, Hmong, Mein and Karen make up the remaining 11 percent. Then there are the foreigners from Europe, North America and India. Comparing that to Japan, I learned that Japan counts people depending upon their nationality so that while 98.5 percent of the population is listed as Japanese, this style of census taking doesn't break down multiethnic members of the population. Further, the statistics don't differentiate between the multiethnic society that originally make up Japan--the Ainu, the darker-skinned "Polynesian-type" Jomon versus the lighter-skinned Continental Yayoi type. Then comparing Thailand to a European nation such as the United Kingdom, we can see that Thailand is more diverse than the United Kingdom because as of 2011, 87.1 percent of the population was listed as white (excluding Irish Traveller/Gypsy). Asian or Asian British are 7 percent of the population and black or black British are 3 percent of the population with British mixed being 2 percent. Thailand is more diverse than the United Kingdom although since history has divided the country by Catholic versus Protestant, that might be another issue. The United Kingdom is 71.6 percent Christian and 15.5 percent agnostic or atheist. In Japan, 96 to 84 percent of the Japanese are considered Buddhist/Shinto according to Wikipedia. In Thailand, 97 percent of the people are Theravada Buddhist with Muslims being 10 percent. Christians and Hindus make up less than 5 percent of the population of Thailand. Muslims only make up 2.7 percent of the United Kingdom population. In the United States, about 76 percent of the population is Christian (51 percent Protestant and 24 percent Roman Catholic). Only 1.7 percent is Jewish and 0.6 percent Muslim. The USA is 72 percent white and 13 percent African American and 5 percent Asian American. So in Thailand, Muslims make up a larger percentage of the population than they do in the United Kingdom or the United States. These statistics would seem to indicate that Thailand is more diverse than the United States or the United Kingdom in terms of ethnic groups and the homogeneity of Japan can also be questioned. So I don't feel that explaining the lack of perceived sensitivity to black or African American issues can be blamed on the relative homogeneity of Thailand and I think other explanations should be used for Japan as well. Perhaps, it is rather a matter of Americans feeling they can somehow tell another country how it should act, particularly a country that is predominately non-white? One could suggest that this is a matter of African Americans unwittingly taking on the mantle of the "White Man's Burden" as outlined by Rudyard Kipling or distasteful remnants of Manifest Destiny. When I was in Thailand a few decades ago, I saw black people there. They were NOT African Americans from places such as Atlanta, Georgia. Rather, they were Asians, people from India. It might be more important to see how Asian Indians feel the ads in question. The article notes that nearly five percent of the population is non-Thai and that some of these are "low-wage migrant workers" from neighboring countries, but they are not African Americans from Georgia. So this article is mixing up race and race identity. What an American thinks is probably less important than what a dark-skinned person from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh or Malaysia thinks. And one then has to wonder why we as Americans haven't taken a serious look at the Dutch and their long tradition of black face, Zwarte Piet? In 2001, Time magazine carried an article that criticized the Japanese, including toy and gift manufacturer Sanrio for its black Sambo toys. Apparently in 2001 and even now, Dutch Swarte Piet toys are okay and not worthy of an official protest of any kind. The same year, jam and marmalade maker Robertson's retired its character Golly. It seems, however, that the original tale of "Little Black Sambo" is largely a problem for Americans. Now the story goes under other names such as "The Story of Little Babaji," "Sam and the Tigers," "The Boy and the Tigers" (with the boy renamed Little Rajani). In Japan, the boy has become a little black puppy. Just what do African Americans know about racism if Sambo under another name is not protest worthy. And then, just what do African Americans know about blackness in Asia?
Get on down to Little Tokyo today for the third annual Los Angeles International Tea Festival at the Japanese American National Museum.
Go beyond Lipton and find out how fine tea can be even better than fine wine and can be matched to lovely things like chocolate and fine cheeses. Those two workshops include tastings are require an extra fee on top of the $15 admission charge to the festival.
Other presentations are included in the entry fee. For Sunday, there are talks on tea and health, Zen and tea, how to open a tea room and vendor presentations (Glenburn Tea Estate, Waterfall Teas, Chado Tea Room, Global Organic Teas, ZenSeu Teas, 1001 Plateaus, Sencha Naturals, Tea Gallerie and Timolino).
Early birds can pay $100 for a Tea Sommelier (Apprentice Level) certification course from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. The rest of the festival runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Just walk around from vendor to vendor and you can taste different teas and learn more about tea and even tea-related cuisine. Tea, teapots and other accessories and books on tea are also available for purchase.
Anytime is high time for tea so head on out to the Tea Fest.
I haven't paid attention to the Miss America contest for a decade or two, not since I've stopped being entranced by Barbie dolls and high heels. Yesterday, suddenly I got another slap on the face. A Chinese American friend and the beloved George Takei commented on the incredible explosion of racism toward the first Indian American Miss America: New York's Nina Davuluri.
I guess I was just thankful that people didn't assume Davuluri was Native American. Davuluri is dark-skinned and has dark hair. Davuluri's parents are Telugu and born in India. Davuluri was born in New York. She's American as any white person, but much more culturally aware of her heritage than most. She watches Telugu movies and learned Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam dance.
Her aims are not scholarships to finish her bachelor's degree. She has already graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Brain Behavior and Cognitive Science.
I've complained about whitewashing because in America it seems hard for Asian Americans to play Asians or even Asian Americans. Maybe people don't know what real Asians and real Asian Americans look like.
Check out the Buzzfeed collection of racist tweets. Ironically, some people like Jessica Ayres claims they are not racist, but "this is America." Yes Jessica. This is America where an Asian American has a hard time finding work playing an Asian or an Asian American, but really, we are Americans in this America. Some Asians came over with the first settlers (e.g. Armenians).
Armenia straddles that questionable territory called Eurasia and can be considered European, Asian or both. India and Armenia do have a history. Armenians have been present in India since the time of Alexander the Great. The Telugu people are numerous enough that the language is the second most spoken in India--the first being Hindi (not English).
Telugu designates an ethnic group, but not a religious group. That means the Telugu are not necessarily Hindu, Christian, Buddhist or Jainist. And why would being a member of any of three non-Christian religions or Islam make any person less American?
This IS America. Specifically, this is the United States of America and we do have people of all races beyond black and white. What does being an ethnic India, a Telugu, have to do with 9/11? Is this a problem of selective learning or are these people a product of a poor educational system that doesn't teach people what Islam is and where Arabs live.
Arabs have been in America since the 15th Century. They came with the Spanish explorers. While it is unknown when the first Muslims came to America, it could have been as early as the Spanish explorers or Islam could have come with the slaves that were kidnapped from Africa and brought to North America. Being Arab and Muslim
We do have a black president serving his second term. We haven't had a white woman and we will probably have to wait until we do before we can see an America that might accept an ethnic Asian, particularly one who cannot pass as Caucasian or WASP, for that office.
The first recorded Asians in North America were Chinese and Filipinos in Mexico in the 1600s. Filipinos jumped ship in 1763 and entered Louisiana. The first Asian Indians were in the U.S. in 1790. How long do Asian Americans have to wait for acceptance. How long to Arabs and Muslims have to wait until they, too, can be seen as American?
Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America in 1984, but had to resign after nude photographs of her were published in Penthouse. Since then seven black women have worn the crown.
Who thought the Miss America pageant would be a sign of progress? Certainly not Gloria Steinem.
Will it take seven Asian American Miss America's until Asian Americans are American as apple pie?
Yamadaya gives good food with fast service. Do you love pork? Then this small ramen shop just North of the 405 on Crenshaw in Torrance will have you in pork eater's heaven.
When you think ramen noodles, if you just think about instant, you need an education. At Yamadaya, they give you choices. You can have either thin noodles or thick. Then you must choose from three broth flavors: tonkotsu, tonkotsu kotteri, tonkotsu shoyu. All three are tonkotsu style. What is tonkotsu? Tonkotsu is rich pork-flavored broth, so thick that you might think the broth has cream or milk in it. Kotteri uses Yamadaya’s special black garlic oil. Tonkotsu shoyu style is a Tokyo-style soy sauce-flavored ramen with black sesame paste and nori.
Overall the ramen is great. The eggs are not completely hard boiled, with the yolk just a little soft in the middle. We call it perfection. If you have a dish with nori (dried seaweed), use it like a spice: Take a small bit of it with your ramen to add a sea salt flavor to it.
The tonkotsu kotteri ramen with chashu ($10.45) is a good place to start. You can also try the kakuni ramen ($10.95) which has two slices of pork belly. Ian feels the best slices of pork come from the belly. Each large piece is perfectly balanced between lean and fat meat. Yes, fat. You have to like fat to appreciate Asian pork.
Paigu ramen ($10.95) is a side of deep fried pork loin. The batter is crispier than their tonkatsu. Not as fatty as other pork dishes, it still has full rich porky flavor.
Tsukumen
The tsuku men ($9.95) gives you hot and cold: cold noodles with a side of hot fish-flavored broth. The fish flavor is light and the broth includes small chunks of pork.
Then there's tonkatsu ($5.95) which for us is one of the better tonkatsu around; the tonkatsu is neither greasy nor oily. Notice this is tonkAtsu and not tonkOtsu.
For a few dollars more you can make any ramen dish a combo. That gives you a choice of either four piece gyoza or karaage and a choice of chashu bowl, kim chee fried rice, or a curry bowl. The gyoza is cooked so that the outside is nice and crispy with the top steamed. The stuffing, however, is outclassed by the ramen. The karaage is fried dark meat chicken that isn't too greasy. The chashu bowl has a generous portion of their tasty pork over rice. Sure it's a simple dish but when done this well, it is a real winner. As for the kim chee fried rice, the kim chee could have been cut smaller but the result was good.
Kimchee rice.
Like many smaller Asian restaurants, Yamadaya is cash only. While some of the dishes are a little bit pricier than others the shop is student-friendly. Show a student ID and get either free extra noodles (normally $1.45) or a bowl of white rice. You can also request garlic with a garlic press for free if you find your ramen needing a little more punch and you aren't going to do a face-to-face with a non-garlic eating friend anytime soon.
Ramen fans, if you didn't get out to Torrance yesterday, you can still get out today, but start early. You might have to skip church or go to a late service (if you're Christian) because the wait in lines on Saturday were long, even if you got there when the festival opened at 10 a.m. The first Los Angeles Ramen Yokocho Fest has sure attracted fans, perhaps many in hopes of tasting not one, but two (actually four) variations of the very hot foodie trend--the ramen burger.
Kitakata Ramen was just as advertised.
Just two weeks ago on a certain Saturday, Torrance's Mitsuwa had people lined up down the block for one of the 500 ramen burgers produced as a special one-day only offering. My sources tell me that the wait was three hours. Really! Do you have three hours to wait for a burger?
At the Torrance Cultural Arts Center (3330 Civic Center Drive) in Torrance 90503, two restaurants have brought ramen burgers: Jidaiya who claims to have the original recipe and Ikemen. The lines for each are long. The Ramen Yokocho is all about lines.
First you wait in a line to get in. The entry is free; the food is not. You have to buy food tickets. That's the next line. One person was told the tickets were good only for that day. Another was told that you could use them on Sunday. There's a little confusion going on to say the least.
You had separate tickets for ramen ($8) and soda or water (bring your own) and ice cream ($3). There is also shave ice, but why would you go to a ramen festival to buy shave ice? Especially when Torrance also has Get Shaved?! The tickets are non-refundable--even if the people aren't there.
Get in line for the tickets and send a friend to the longest line which is likely to be Kitakata Ramen Bannai. This shop was the most organized and gave you the best deal. The pork slices were tender and the noodles wonderfully springy. The bamboo shoots were not canned. They were firm and crispy. We wish there had been a hard-boiled egg, but that's just wishful thinking. You might find this ramen salty, but that's also part of the preparation of the pork. The Kitakata line has someone with a sign marking the end. Other shops soon followed suit, but not soon enough.
Local Hayatemaru was a win.
Another short line was for the Torrance-based Hayatemaru which served a seafood ramen that came with two complete shellfish swimming in a tonkotsu (creamy pork bone broth). This was tasty and I'd definitely give them a visit outside of the festival.
The shortest lines on Saturday were for the Los Angeles Hannosuke which served Edomae Tendon (that's tempura donburi) and the Tsujita LA Artisan Noodle high-end nigiri sushi. The shortest line with the longest wait was the ice cream line. (the Irvine-based Maeda-en). The tent didn't open until about 1 p.m. The ladies waiting there even went to ask for a refund, but were forced to wait and wait and wait.
I'm not a fan of beef burgers, so I went on the reviews of fellow line standers. The Jidaiya burger was hard to eat. It came with a small piece of pork, a dipping sauce and a lot of mayonnaise. I could see the mayo oozing out of the sides of the burger as the person standing in the Kitakata line next to me tried to take a bite.
The line for the Ikemen was slow and Ikemen offered three different ramen burgers with a real beef patty. If you liked beef, this was the one I'd recommend. You could see them making the ramen patties and grilling the beef burgers. They had yellow tape to prevent people from going into unsafe areas, but with the crowds, children and people who just couldn't leave their small dogs at home (pets are not permitted but you know how some small dog owners are), the scene looked like a disaster waiting to happen.
A major disappointment that won no one over was the supposed "best of Honolulu" award-winning ramen shop. The lines were filled with people grumbling about Gomaichi. First, the photo shows something that you aren't getting. You aren't getting a bowl of wet soup. You're getting a dry soup with what appears to be processed lunch-slice ham (and not the good stuff that you'd get at Whole Foods, Bristol Farms or some other high end place). There's a few leaves of spinach and lettuce, but not even in the o-shitashi form. Ian believes that some odd disaster befell this place, but still there are so many saves that could have been better and inexpensive (like real o-shitashi and goma seeds). The ramen was good and springy with dried cheese. It was a wafu (Japanese-style) spaghetti made with ramen (which is classified as a Chinese noodle).
We arrived at 10:30 a.m. and left after 1 p.m. Ian might give it another try this morning, but go early. By 10:30 a.m. the parking lot was full and the lines were already long. People will line up for a ramen, but there needs to be better over all planning to keep the flow of this festival better. The Los Angeles Ramen Yokocho Fest is sponsored by the Ramen Yokocho Association, Japan Up!, Shirakiku, Morinaga, Maeda-en Ito En and China Times Printing, Inc.
There is also a display of the history of Weekly LALALA, a raffle drawing, and an art exhibition.
