21 Apr
during my diseased days
(monoracial love: a disease waiting for formal classification)
my white girlfriend’s white grandmother asked
“what do your people celebrate?”
as if a holiday could mean something other
other than quickly dated fashions
(afros will never come back)
and unintentional oversights
(dish doer doesn’t mean disowned)
and moments of happiness
even if over cigarettes
holidays mean pictures…
20 Apr
Have you ever seen a clip episode of your favorite show? You know the episodes where you’ve waited the entire week, and instead of the cinematic adventures you’re expecting, you get the highlights of what happened over the season or the entire series. It’s a bit of a let down because your expectations are so high, but you know you’re going to be more anxious to watch next week’s episode when the story starts rolling again. That’s what Hawaiians in Los Angeles is; it’s that clip episode that highlights what has happened before to get you anxious to hear about what’s going to happen next.
20 Apr
Rereading Chapter two of Hawaiians in Los Angeles is interesting because of my attempts at creating a story arc; one that parallels chapter one but also adds to the continuing story. To do that, it mirrors chapter one by showing different individuals and families making their way to the continent following business and success. These families meet and foster relationships with each other.
18 Apr
It’s here! Lessa and I got our contributor copies of Hawaiians in Los Angeles, far and away the greatest book on the history of Hawaiians in Los Angeles or at least the most recent. Copies go on sale May 14th. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are taking preorders. We are taking requests and will be selling at various events in Los Angeles.
15 Apr
When I started “dating” Lessa, she went to Europe for a month and left me with “Hawaiian Like Me” as the first track on a mixed cd full of mixed messages—I was dating; she was not. In her absence, she told me “it’s a warning to say aloha because you’ll never find another Hawaiian like me.” Aloha is a spell, and if you hear it, run.
14 Apr
To help promote the soon-to-be released Hawaiians in Los Angeles book, and to help it cross genres beyond photography and history, I’m writing a series of poems about the pictures in the book as well as life being married to a Native Hawaiian while not being Hawaiian myself, which, if you know Lessa, is something she’s really excited about. The reading will be at Exhibit A 555 Pine Avenue Long Beach, CA 90802 from 7pm-9.
20 Feb
Specifically, I just finished rereading the introduction and the first chapter. The introduction is either one of the more complex works I’ve ever written or the most confusing. In two pages, I cover the modern history of Hawaii from creation myth to ideology to its history of colonization and informal segregation. There is a paragraph or two that are really high concept, but with Lessa’s help, the whole remains approachable.
The first chapter is both informative and emotional. It explains why Hawaiians came here and how they fostered relationships, but what I am personally drawn to is the bittersweet moments of those early family gatherings where parents and grandparents had to make touch decisions to stay in Hawaii or follow their children. My intent was to keep the information and emotion balanced so that the reader, when inclined, would have their heartstrings tugged by the tragedy of familial distance or, with no personal stakes in the situation, insight into a much overlooked segment of American history while reinforcing the hope and promise that the Native Hawaiians felt in coming to Los Angeles.
I hope the distance between concept and execution is not as far or daunting as it traditionally is.
20 Feb
By Robert T. Gonzalez
Feb 20, 2012 7:10 AM
4,358 
9
Close to 1,500 years ago, indians living in what is now Quito, Ecuador buried their most revered dead in 16-meter-deep tombs. An ancient alcoholic beverage was commonly included in these burial vaults. Now, by examining the clay vessels used to ferment and store this brew, a team of South American researchers has managed to not only recover the microbes the indians used to ferment the ancient beverage, they’ve actually revived them…and they’re unlike any species they’ve ever seen.
Between 200 and 800 AD, indian settlements thrived along the shores of a large, marshy lake that today is covered by Quito International Airport. When building crews first began surveying the area for the airport’s construction, they discovered a number of gaping ancient tombs, similar to the one pictured up top. Each tomb was about 16 meters deep, contained roughly 20 carefully prepared bodies (recreated in this image), and was filled with clay pots — some of which were used to ferment an alcoholic beverage known as chicha.It was the fermentation vessels that attracted Javier Carvajal Barriga, a yeast biologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito. According to Scientific American:
Under the sterile conditions of his laboratory, [Carvajal] scratched away the surface layers from inside the fermentation vessels hoping to collect yeast trapped deep in the pottery’s pores. Using a special method that he devised to humidify the desiccated cells, repair their damaged membranes, and jump-start their arrested metabolisms, he coaxed a community of yeasts, which had lain dormant in the entombed vessels since A.D. 680, back to life.
Carvajal and his team resurrected a number of different yeast strains, but not a one was saccharomyces cerivisiae — the yeast used in contemporary fermentation techniques. In fact, two of the strains were a new species entirely, and beonged to the genus Candida, many species of which are known to cause skin and vaginal infections. Carvajal’s team named the new species C. theae, meaning “tea.”
The decision to name the species “tea” would wind up being strangely appropriate. In 2010, on the other side of the globe from the researchers in South America, two cases of bottled tea were discovered to be clouded with contamination. When Taiwanese yeast taxonomist Ching-Fu Lee compared the genes of the yeast contaminating the tea with that of Carvajal’s recently discovered C. theae, he found that the two strains matched. Lee, of course, contacted Carvajal immediately and the two collaborated to publish the paper that appears in the latest issue of International Journal of Food Microbiology.
So how could a long-lost yeast strain show up simultaneously on opposite ends of the world? “I don’t think this is a beverage-related yeast, I think it is a human-related yeast,” explains Carvajal. “We know now that there were contacts between Polynesians and South American peoples. [Polynesians] departed from Taiwan 6,000 years ago.”
“We are using yeasts to track human migration and contacts. That is part of what we call ‘microbiological archaeology.’”
The researchers’ findings are published in the February issue of the International Journal of Food Microbiology.
Read more about the resurrected yeast (including a recipe for homemade chicha) over on SciAm.
Photos by R. Doublas Fields via SciAm
18 Feb
At Boingboing.net, there is an article of a grandfather arrested for kidnapping because he looked suspicious as he was walking his grandfather home. The grandfather is white. The granddaughter is obviously some white but to outward appearances black. The police said they were responding to a kidnapping call. I must say I’m not surprised by this, after all the dirty looks that my mom got with me and my older brothers and our brown skin compared to her white skin.
Hypodescent or the one-drop rule is a carryover from Jim Crow. Even during slavery, we knew that black experience, like everyone else’s, is nuanced and no one overarching word can ever do it justice. After the civil war, America faced a large nuanced population that it didn’t want, so it denigrated it into one word black. We can see this still happening today when we call the president black or when we fail to see the difference between Asians and Asian Americans, between Chinese and Japanese, between Mexican and Puerto Rican. These experiences are different and should be recognized as such, but here, in the America we live in, we can conceive that someone’s experience is as complicated as our own.
Our educations are wrong because we keep saying how much we should celebrate differences; however, celebrating difference makes us concentrate on difference, and this is the problem. Sure we’re different, everyone has their own personalities and tastes, so do we ever get along? We get along by recognizing similarities, which is the answer to our problems. Recognize each other as people first as a grandfather and granddaughter walking down the street together. Then it isn’t about how different they are, it’s about how familiar they seem.
11 Feb
On Salon, Andrew Leonard’s “Jeremy Lin’s social media fast break examines the explosion of Jeremy Lin, the current starting point guard for the New York Knicks, as an example of how ridiculous our fast-paced social media news is and how all in we get for such crazes. Leonard, however, missed the significance Lin’s presence has in the NBA: Lin is an Asian American. Instead of the genetically obvious examples of Asianess in the NBA like Yao Ming or What’s his first name Li, Lin is home grown and unfortunately single handedly represents an entire community that is continually under or unrepresented.
The internet is exploding with Lin fans or with “Linsanity,” but not for the same reasons as Tim Tebow. Tebow’s popularity comes at a time when politicians across the country and at a variety of levels are using the white community’s uneasiness at the growing minority population as a reason to unify. Tebow’s Christian ethic and charisma are focal points where good, old fashioned Americans can say “he’s one of ours, and he’s successful in a world/game filled with theirs.” In a way, Lin as a symbol is the same and opposite from Tebow. he is the same because he, like Tebow, is a unifying figure for all the Asian American boys out there who only see kung fu fighters with thick accents on TV, who pick up a basketball early on in life because it is an American game you can play cheaply and by yourself–it’s from Canada, but nobody cares about that. However, Lin also represents a community that plays directly into the fears of Tebow mania (it shouldn’t, but it does). Lin becomes more ammunition to show that America isn’t what it used to be.
Leonard isn’t wrong in examining social media fads, but he misses the point of WHY this fad exists in the first place. Lin’s popularity exists because there is a huge absence of Asian Americans in sports and media, so Asian Americans have to grab onto whatever we can.
Queequeg's Mark
lessalibrarian
