AUGUST 4, 2022

Hello, everyone!

The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) is launching a scholarship and fellowship program with the Sundance Institute to invest over $400,000 in AAPI filmmakers.

Together, with donations from Panda Express and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Sundance and TAAF have chosen six artists to participate in a fellowship which includes a $20,000 unrestricted grant for each to fund their projects. An additional six emerging artists will also receive TAAF/Sundance scholarships to receive a Creator+ Sundance Collab membership to access Master Classes, participate in exclusive networking and community-building events, and receive guidance from their Sundance Collab Advisors on their projects.

This year’s recipients include Vera Brunner-Sung, Desdemona Chiang, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Tadashi Nakamura, Neo Sora, Sean Wang, Georgia Fu, Leomax (Ziyuan) He, Jenna Lam, Simi Prasad, Norbert Shieh and Nicole Solis-Sison. 

Spotlight 💡

Previously in our newsletter, we covered a California tea shop that makes an extra effort to connect with Asian tea farmers. Today, we’re spotlighting Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni American who journeys between the U.S. and Yemen to revitalize the coffee trade.

For Alkhanshali, while he navigated the civil war at the time, he also made efforts to go to the Port of Mokha to sell coffee. Last week, he expressed interest in starting a nonprofit organization, the Mokha Institute, to help Yemeni coffee farmers, 75% of whom are women.

For the first time this year, the organization will run the National Yemen Coffee Auction, which chose 28 coffees out of 161 collections to be open to roasters worldwide.

Race in America 🌎

In Oakland, California, seven Asian businesses in Little Saigon were robbed.

On Monday, business owners were shocked to find their stores ransacked and horrified at the lengths these thieves went to. The robbers were clad in hoodies and gloves, carrying tools to drill into the roof and break in. The group came in and out of the stores multiple times throughout the night to gather materials and break into the money machines at the local laundromat, International Coin Laundry.

According to owner Nolan Wong, this is the second break-in this year, and the thieves made out with $5,000 after attempting to break the machine for 30 minutes. Two stores down, Simon Liu’s restaurant experienced a similar incident that night, with money stolen from the register and a break-in through the roof. Continuous robberies within the area have taken a toll on local business owners who are trying to keep prices down and services affordable.

In Dallas, Texas, the State Board of Education is reviewing standards for their new elective course in Asian American studies.

This stand-alone course will encompass curricula that focuses on Asian American figures, history and culture to teach students in social studies courses about the community. With Texas passing ethnic studies for Mexican Americans and Black Americans in recent bills, as well as an Indigenous ethnic studies course under review, advocates are pushing for a similar class to include the Asian community. 

This year, drafts of the course curriculum are being posted and lessons range from the immigration history of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and South Asian immigrants, the Vietnam war and its effects on migration, to the theory and explanation of the “model minority myth and the perpetual foreigner idea.” Currently, because the Asian American course has not had a test run in Texan districts, board members are exploring how best to approve the class standards.

In Other Asian News 🗞

In the U.K., Asian Muslim creatives are also receiving grants and well-deserved support in the film industry. 

Pakistani actor Mehwish Hayat, who plays Aisha in the Disney Plus series “Ms. Marvel,” and Indian American creative Lena Khan, director of “Never Have I Ever,” are inaugural grant recipients of the U.K. Muslim Foundation (UKMF). The charity is dedicated to supporting and uplifting underrepresented voices, specifically Muslim creatives, in the entertainment industry on-screen and off-screen.

Saji Varda, who worked with and acted in Khan’s new movie, “The Tiger Hunter,” established the fund and is spearheading the upcoming and first Muslim Film International Festival.

According to documents recently released by the Home Office in the U.K., after WWII, many Chinese men living in Liverpool with their English wives and children were lied to and secretly deported through a covert operation.

Titled under the files “Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen,” the documents are part of the internal investigation of the local Liverpool government. Despite initial denials from the Home Office of “coerced” deportation, now the Office and the Labor Party express great regret in this discriminatory policy that tore families apart.

The racially-motivated campaign took place in 1944-45, after Chinese men answered the call to serve in the British merchant navy for the Battle of the Atlantic. Then, they were rounded up into the cargo holds of ships bound for Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, never to be heard from again. Scholars theorize that with the Chinese Civil War that quickly followed, those seafarers who may have wanted to return to the U.K. were not able to due to national conflict.
 

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Today, the first Indian woman envoy to the United Nations arrived as the permanent representative for New Dehli.

Previously India’s Ambassador to Bhutan, Ruchira Kamboj is now the Permanent Representative to the UN in New York. She was appointed in June and just began her tenure in this role. As the first Indian woman to hold the position, she tweeted an encouraging message to young girls looking at her example that yes: “We can all make it.”

Food and Art 🥘

Chisaki Iba is a sous chef at the renowned two Michelin-starred Nihonbashi Kakigaracho Sugita.

She represents one of less than 10% of women sushi chefs in Japan, a country with over 30,000 sushi restaurants. A recent report of the year’s gender gap rankings by the World Economic Forum placed Japan 116th out of 146 countries, dead last among East Asia.

There are a few factors for the lack of women working the craft of sushi. Maternity leave is not a guarantee in restaurants and many home labor duties are placed on women, making it near impossible for them to devote time to becoming a master sushi chef. Kasumi Takahashi at Ginza Sushi Aoki says, “Now I’m 39 years old, which is considered to be ‘old’ to be pregnant. Considering the timing is really difficult.” Takahashi and Iba both mention they have experienced discrimination from both their peers and customers, but they push through regardless.

Takahashi says, “When I started working in this industry, I was told, ‘forget the fact that you are a woman,’ and I thought, ‘well, do I need to think like that, really?’ I don’t want to have to act like a man to work in this industry. I want to be a unique female shokunin on my own.” 
 

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Pakistani American painter Salman Toor is taking his Pratt Institute training and affinity for mimicking Renaissance masters and drawing his own path.

His exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art showcases “cartoon-like images of his friends in contemporary settings.” Works like “Car Boys” depicts a uniformed policeman shining his flashlight into a stopped car with two young men in it. While homosexual activity is a punishable offense in Pakistan, Toor found the courage to come out to his family when he was just a teenager.

Another work of his, “9PM, the News,” is suggestive of current events but is really an intimate peek into a depressed family dinner table inspired by his own family. Toor says, “An Old Master expert from London saw it and said, ‘No—please no, you’re going modern,’ but the artists I knew were, like, ‘Now you’re talking."

What else is on our minds? 🧠
 

• Update on Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad: the gunman who was armed with an AK-47-style rifle in front of her home in Brooklyn was arrested.

• Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the director duo behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have signed a 5-year development deal with Universal.

• India's National Tiger Conservation Authority uses AI technology to identify and locate tigers that may be injured.

• In a post-Roe v. Wade-overturned world, Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected an effort to remove abortion protections from their state’s constitution.

• Google has now added the label “Asian-owned” to help businesses and merchants identify as such on Google Maps and Search.